Thursday, 2 May 2024

It Really Is 'The Land Of Fruits And Nuts'...

UCLA medical school had been condemned by a renowned Harvard doctor for forcing students to take a 'fat-positivity' class.
Yes, you read that right - medical school.
All first year medical students at UCLA are required to read an essay by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-proclaimed 'fat liberationist' who claims that 'fatphobia is medicine's status quo' and that weight loss is a 'hopeless endeavor.'

Just put down the doughnuts, Marquisele! It can be done!

Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world's foremost experts on obesity, slammed the course and said the curriculum 'promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation.'
UCLA 'has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate,' said Flier. 'As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.'

If you're only just now shocked by how far prestigious universities have fallen down the DEI rabbit hole, you need to read more

The essay by Mercedes details how weight has come to be 'pathologized and medicalized in racialized terms.'
She offers guidance on 'resisting entrenched fat oppression,' according to the course syllabus. Mercedes claims that 'ob*sity' is a slur 'used to exact violence on fat people' - particularly 'Black, disabled, trans, poor fat people.'

Oh, of course! The Alphabet Mob shows up. 

She uses her social media account to voice more of her 'fat-positivity' activism. 'It's so f***ing isolating to be a disabled Black fat person working towards individual and collective liberation,' she wrote in an Instagram post - adding that being fat is a disability.
She has also led presentations on how does 'anti-fatness show up in the work you do' - which she says includes using 'fear-mongering language in order to encourage healthy eating and physical activity.' Mercedes also taught students in a public health seminar that 'fat people are forced to contend with anti-fatness every day in every domain across the lifespan.'

Which lifespan is going to be pretty short, so every cloud, eh, Marquisele? 

She can't even carry the other lunatics in Cali:

Nicholas Christakis is a sociologist who has spent decades providing medical care to underserved communities - including in the South Side of Chicago. He has called the curriculum 'nonsensical' and says that the course is 'embarrassing to UCLA.'

I think it's immune, Nicholas. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I believe that Not The Nine O Clock News covered this back in the 1980s. We are stout and proud.

More seriously, I don't think that anyone is likely to be happy about being seriously overweight. Most of us would prefer to be physically attractive, at least to someone. Very few are attracted to very overweight people. In addition, being significantly overweight causes health problems. Claiming that saying all of that makes me guilty of just another kind of ism isn't really very convincing.

JuliaM said...

"I believe that Not The Nine O Clock News covered this back in the 1980s. We are stout and proud."

Heh! None of the current crop of political comedy shows come close to their genius.