Of rights and responsibilities (and lazy fat slobs)

Today, the European Union Telecoms commissioner declared Internet access a "fundamental right." What a load of rubbish.

Unfortunately, it's worse than rubbish: it's dangerous, as I write on my CNET blog. The early rights that the authors of the U.S. Constitution mostly required government to keep out of the lives of citizens. These new rights (including the "right" to healthcare) mostly have government invading (through taxes and other means) our lives.

I'm not a right-wing crazy, but this is...inane.

So it was with much joy that I read "There is no sacred right to be a lazy fat slob" in The Spectator. What a glorious publication.

Here are a few choice morsels:

Alas! Billboard culture has already doomed us to failure. And when all our impossible, airbrushed aspirations come to naught we look glumly down at our bellies and feel depressed at being imprisoned within such well-padded cells. The result: we have a Mars bar to make ourselves feel better. And so the cycle continues.

The leading exponent of this sort of guff is Susie Orbach, the veteran writer and psychologist who has been arguing since the publication of her 1978 book Fat is a Feminist Issue that ‘for most people the problem is not their fat intake or their actual size, but the torment associated with fat in their minds’.

I’m sorry, but this is just fatheaded. The problem isn’t the mental torment caused by seeing airbrushed billboard images of David and Victoria Beckham showing off their beautiful bodies in matching Armani pants. The problem for most ordinary people really is their fat intake and actual size....

Almost everything about modern life inclines us towards fatness. We are sedentary workers, sugar junkies and motorised transport addicts. We disdain manual labour. Our national dish — whether it’s fish and chips or chicken tikka masala — is takeaway. We have neglected physical exercise in our schools and instead successfully indoctrinated in our children the supreme right of the individual, by which it’s okay to be anything you want, even if that thing is a lazy fat slob....

It bothers me that I pay the same national insurance contributions as folk who waddle around all fat and clumsy when I am statistically far less likely to hospitalise myself through my love of cakes. It gets right on my man-boobs that we would rather blame big corporations for selling us airbrushed images of perfection than blame ourselves for failing to exercise restraint when the cheese trolley comes round.

None of which is intended to be a slam on the overweight, at least, I don't intend it as such. My problem is with our entitlement culture. I have a "right" to eat whatever I want...but also to have all the risks associated with that right.

At some point, my "rights" impinge on others, because through government we end up paying for others weight-gain, neuroses, etc. I'm OK with this up to a point, but I sure would prefer to give to others through charity, rather than through compulsion.