The Denormalisation of Pleasure

Having succeeded in driving smokers outside and turning them into social pariahs the campaigns against drinking, fast foods and various other of  life's pleasures are now gathering pace. 

Today yet another scare story about how anything beyond the smallest drink consumption causes cancer. Their claim is that about 4% of certain cancers are caused by excessive drinking, but as usual in such reports they don’t say how they arrived at the definition of excess or calculated their figure. Nor do they explain how countries like France, with more of a drinking culture than the UK manages to have lower cancer rates. They seem blind to the fact that many people who do drink to excess do so in combination with other life situations, whether depression or homelessness or a poor diet, that would increase their cancer risk irrespective of alcohol.

As is so often the case this research is backed by the World Health Organisation, who are rapidly getting a similar reputation for agenda driven alarmism as their discredited IPCC. And of course such a report is followed by the useful idiot choir of bansterbators like Sir Ian Gilmour and the Alcohol Health Alliance and other fake charities who start wittering on about how regulation is needed.

Yes of course too much alcohol can cause you problems, so can too much sun or too much water or too much horse riding or too much coffee or too much skydiving or too much sex or too much of anything! Basically being alive involves doing things that have a risk, often things that have to be done to stay alive carry a risk and most assuredly most of life’s pleasures do.

I am pleased to know, if only someone would make an honest assessment, what the risk is for any activity then I can decide for myself if the pleasure justifies my doing it. The rest of the choir can just go away, preferably to somewhere hot and unpleasant and carry out some sort of self inflicted painful procedure. I am up to here with do-gooders, bansturbators, nannies and people trying to inflict their own agenda’s on my behaviour Be very sure there is an agenda.