I'd rather toil up Heart Attack Hill than put away one of these bad boys. It would take about 80 miles of hiking to burn off the calories from just one of these burgers if you have the fries and milkshake as well. Up for an 80-miler?
Nanny-state liberals would use the power of the state to shut down restaurants like this. That is the trouble with contemporary liberals: they do not understand or value the liberty of the individual , a liberty which includes the liberty to behave in ways that many of us consider foolish. If you grant the state the power to order your life there will be no end to it. Right now, in Germany it is illegal to homeschool one's own children! Every day brings a new example of governmental overreach. We do not exist for the state; the state exists for us. Our wealth is ours, not the state's. We don't have to justify our keeping; they have to justify their taking.
Please no liberal nonsense about an 'epidemic' of obesity or obesity as a public health problem. True, we Americans are a gluttonous people as witness competitive eating contests, the numerous food shows, and the complete lack of any sense among most that there is anything morally wrong with gluttony. The moralists of old understood something when they classified gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins.
Obesity is not a disease; so, speaking strictly, there cannot be an epidemic of it. I know that 'epidemic' is used more broadly than this, even by epidemiologists; but this is arguably the result of an intrusion of liberal ideology into what is supposedly science. Do you really think that 'epidemic' is being used in the same way in 'flu epidemic' and 'obesity epidemic'? Is obesity contagious? If fat Al sneezes in my face, should I worry about contracting the obesity virus? There is no such virus. Obesity is not contagious and not a disease. I know what some will say: obesity is socially contagious. But now you've shifted the sense of 'contagious.' You've engaged in a bit of semantic mischief. It is not as if there are two kinds of contagion, natural and social. Social contagion is not contagion any more than negative growth is growth or a decoy duck is a duck. 'Social' in 'socially contagious' is an alienans adjective.
Why then are you fat? You are fat because you eat too much of the wrong sorts of food and refuse to exercise. For most people that's all there is to it. It's your fault. It is not the result of being attacked from without by a virus. It is within your power to be fat or not. It is a matter of your FREE WILL. You have decided to become fat or to remain fat. When words such as 'epidemic' and 'disease' are used in connection with obesity, that is an ideological denial of free will, an attempt to shift responsibility from the agent to factors external to the agent such as the 'evil' corporations that produce so-called 'junk' food.
There are public health problems, but obesity is not one of them. It is private problem resident at the level of the individual and the family.
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