Nature was once the most prestigious academic journal in the world. Yet in the last few years, it’s been allocating more and more editorial space to woke activism. The latest example comes in the form of an article titled “The sting of sizeism in the scientific workplace”.
“Sizeism”, in case you’re not aware, refers to prejudice or discrimination against those who are overweight. And the article’s basic gist is that it’s a big problem in science. In short, “researchers of size” (an actual phrase used in the article) are being held back by “stigma against fatness”.
Okay, pointing this out isn’t so unreasonable, you might say. After all, if someone’s a great scientist, they shouldn’t face a penalty just because they’re on the heavy side. And that’s true: discrimination on the basis of any arbitrary characteristic is wrong. However, the article goes much further than that – by suggesting overweight people contribute to “diversity”, and making various other bizarre claims.
“Academics love to pay lip service to diversity, less so to size diversity,” says an academic quoted in the article. The implication being that “diversity” with respect to body size is something desirable – that it would be better to have a department with 10 healthy people and 10 obese people than with 20 healthy people.
Personally, I’m against attaching any weight to “diversity” when it comes to hiring. I think the best person should get the job, full stop. However, to suggest that we ought to care about “size diversity” is particularly absurd. You can at least argue that hiring more women or black people might have positive role model effects. But I can’t see any possible benefit of hiring people just because they’re overweight.
The article goes on to describe the idea that “everyone can control their weight” as a “misperception”. According to the author, claiming that “if someone is larger, it must be because they eat too much and exercise too little” is “flawed logic”, which makes people believe that “losing weight should simply be a matter of eating less and exercising more”.
You don’t need to know anything about the science of obesity to realise there’s nothing “flawed” about this logic. Sure, some people find it harder to lose weight than others – they may absorb slightly more calories from the food they eat, or burn slightly fewer calories during their daily activity. But it is a matter of basic physics that if you burn more calories than you take in, you will lose weight.
How do we know this? Until the 1950s, almost no one was obese. At that time, food was far more expensive and life was much less sedentary, so people ate less and exercised more. Likewise, when food is genuinely scarce (as in poor countries or prisoner of war camps) people lose weight – fast.
Acknowledging that some people find it difficult to lose weight is fine; rejecting basic physics is downright bizarre.
As an aside, the article also suggests that overweight women experience more discrimination than overweight men. “One study found,” the author notes “that women were 16 times more likely than men to experience weight-based discrimination at work.” However, she then adds in parentheses that “gender is neither binary nor fixed”. Remember this is Nature we’re dealing with, not Teen Vogue.
How does “implicit bias” against the overweight manifest in academia? One academic “recounted a subtle but pervasive undertone of bias at morning tea breaks, when thinner colleagues would discuss wanting to lose weight in her presence, and referenced being ‘naughty’ if they ate cake, and so on”. Is this really “bias”? Or is it perfectly normal conversation among people trying to maintain a healthy bodyweight?
The final part of the article discusses what might be done to counteract discrimination against “larger-bodied individuals”. As an example of one initiative, the author mentions a blog titled “Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs”, which posted photos of PhD candidates or holders who “identify as fat”. According to its creator, the blog shows aspiring scholars they don’t have to lose weight to be successful.
The article discusses various other ways to create a workplace “that is accepting of all body sizes”, such as by “hiring more people of size”. What it doesn’t mention is that losing weight might actually be a good idea. After all, being overweight is unhealthy, and you might have assumed Nature would be would concerned about that.
But of course, telling people to lose weight is ‘offensive’, which is the worst possible thing you can be in the current climate. So we find ourselves in the odd situation where a leading scientific journal is normalising obesity.
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Any comment from Alok Sharma on his decision to demolish the most efficient coal plant in Western Europe, following this news?
Could we guillotine the aforementioned eco Marxist Sharma with a worn out turbine blade? #recycling
He’s my MP. Perhaps I’ll hold him down for you
Now this is proof these appalling things don’t work in any real sense. I fear however even larger tax payer funded bail outs will be rolled out for these bird/bat munchers rather than admit defeat. The evil idiots in Westminster will test this insanity till the lights go out. Even my father was convinced by the Times they are key energy infrastructure and Putin might bomb them.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/globalism-and-the-woke-reinvention-of-starmers-labour/
Basically a look at the pointlessness of our domestic politics and system:
“The parties which supposedly represent democracy in the UK are now ‘shell institutions’, eviscerated of domestic political meaning and action. Both mainstream parties know that their best chance of getting elected is to align to values, beliefs and policies which emanate, not from their electorate, but from the increasing influence of globalist politics. Come the general election, perhaps Labour will prove to have danced more closely with the pied pipers of the billionaire/technocratic tie-up.”
wink
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/anatomy-of-a-shameful-tory-witch-hunt/
The Free Speech Tories – in free speech UK.
What a joke.
I fully agree that “Pride is a sin not a virtue”
I also fervently hope that “Pride comes before a fall” and they’ll simply go too far to be able to hide what they are really like
We have got serious problems when quoting from the Bible is offensive. I wonder how far a complaint about a brown bloke calling for ‘jihad’ would go?
Only joking.
This news must be a bit of a pfisser for the PTB.
Just as wind power – we are told – is so cheap they are almost giving it away.
Wind power never was viable because:
Everyone knew this from the outset which is why subsidies were offered and operators seized the opportunity to share in the plunder whilst it lasted.
It is now evident, as more and more wind comes into the mix, subsidies will have to increase, and gas operators will also require subsidies as they suffer from the same revenue constraints having to give way to wind power whenever the wind conditions are right, whilst having to remain in back-up mode consuming gas. This will so drive up electricity prices as to cause street riots, and that is not politically acceptable, so the scam will have to be wound down.
Wind, solar, BEVs were only viable in start-up, but once scaled up the practicalities and costs are realised.
Net Zero is not feasible.
Correct. It is part time energy that cannot provide base load and if it is so cheap why are all the countries using a lot of it having the most expensive electricity? Like eg Germany Denmark and ourselves. Wind energy is the energy we are being fobbed of with because our UN lackey politicians pander to the idea that the western world has used up more than our fair share of the fossil fuels in the ground. ——-The climate crisis scaremongering is just the excuse used to brainwash people into accepting the need for wind, and heat pumps and wearing 5 jumpers to keep warm in their own house.
“The wind power sector has stalled, with virtually no companies in the industry now
turning a profit.”able to scam any meaningful money out of taxpayers.”Fixed it.
Owners of wind farms are just Subsidy Farmers. No one in their right mind mind would ever build a turbine without the subsidy as they wouldn’t make any money.
Meanwhile in Australia the government is still sinking billions into covering what arable land we have with solar panels and building offshore windfarms. One is planned off Geographe Bay in Western Australia, a known whale migration route. Australians aren’t allowed to even fish recreationally in much of these waters, but you can construct massive wind turbines.
Gosh, it looks like the “real-world” sceptics are right again.
Colour me surprised.
Wind is indeed the dumbest energy. So why are we using it? Are our politicians all over the western world dumb? —-Good question. No, they are not dumb in the sense that they would fail all their exams at school. They are a different kind of dumb. Most of them would not be able to explain the so called “climate change” to five year olds. They will mostly not know how much CO2 is in the atmosphere, or how much of it comes from human activity. But they don’t need to know. They are not required to know, because all they need to do is say “we are following the science”. All that is required of them is that they follow the group think and be part of the “save the planet” herd. A couple of months ago Grant Schaps, then the Energy Security and Net Zero Minister was asked on GB News if heat pumps are any good. His answer was quite astonishing. —-He said “I don’t know”——–Think about that for a second. This is a bit like a welder not knowing what a welding rod is, yet no one seems to bat an eyelid.—– It has been decided that we must “fight climate change” and anyone who decides we maybe don’t need to fight it will end up in the global warming gulag where it is the end of their career in politics. Which leads us back around to WIND. ——Why are we using this dumb energy? Because once you have decided that we must “fight climate change” and this climate change is caused by fossil fuels then you must fight the fossil fuels. So you will support almost anything that isn’t fossil fuels. (Except Nuclear ofcourse, but that is another story)——- But upon even the slightest investigation into all of this “science” that politicians say they follow as the excuse for energy policy we see that it is so full of holes that it wouldn’t last a day in your hot tub. We see them implement the likes of Net Zero. But Net Zero will have Zero effect on climate so why do it? ——–Because it isn’t about the climate and never was. Wind turbines were therefore never about the climate either, and neither is any of the other “green crap” to quote David Cameron. It isn’t about science. It is all about politics. The Politics of Sustainable Development, and the people to implement that are the “dumb” ask no questions group think politicians who mostly cannot tell you if a heat pump is any good or not. They are going to force one on us all anyway for those political purposes. If people don’t know what Sustainable Development is by now then I suggest they find out because it is going to lower their living standard, affect their health and life expectancy and will only hand power to one world government bureaucrats who seek to control the worlds wealth and resources with climate as the excuse.
Wind-power, a medieval technology, driving a 21st century world! Any politician who is in favour should be locked up in an asylum.
Not sure what to make of this other than it looks like wind energy isn’t as economically sound as its proponents make out. On the other hand coal is very polluting and fossil fuels will run out one day, and before then become increasingly expensive.
I read the article in the telegraph about this. The company basically let the cat out of the bag by saying the project can only go ahead if the subsidies increase.