As a follow-up to Darleen’s post below, it isn’t just states — and it isn’t just drinks — that the nannystate wants to watch. It’s you. Want some of that government health care you’ll soon be compelled, likely out of financial necessity, to take on? Well, the government wants things from you in exchange. Like, for instance, to watch what you eat, and send you messages encouraging to stop your fat ass from putting that next plate of hot wings into your face. Andrew Malcolm, IBD:

Administration agencies are currently revising nutritional recommendations that will guide federal food and meal purchases for years after Barack Obama is playing golf behind his presidential library.

The federal Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee — these are the folks who brought us the carb-heavy food pyramid now deemed erroneous — is meeting these days to update nutritional guidelines to conform with new scientific evidence and with the determination of First Lady Michelle Obama to change America’s eating habits.

Among new ideas under consideration are federal phone texts to obese citizens warning of their unhealthy eating behavior. Seriously.

Mrs. Obama has been a driving force behind the federal push to change restaurants’ most popular items to healthier fare and to post calorie counts next to every menu item.

[…]

The allegedly altruistic drive to extend federal controls and change Americans’ eating behaviors has aroused resistance and criticism among some. They feel that although they are merely ordinary citizens, they are better-positioned than the Obama administration to decide what they and their children put in their mouths.

There’s also been considerable grumbling about a first family that consumes six different kinds of Thanksgiving pies but feels qualified or authorized to offer pie-hole-filling advice to countrymen.

The dietary guidelines committee, a joint operation of the U.S. Agriculture Department and Health and Human Services that brought us ObamaCare, meets every five years to update nutrition recommendations.

But as Erik Telford recently warned in The Hill, “Some of its members seem much more focused on pursuing their own environmental agendas than educating American consumers on nutrition.”

He cites one of the 15 committee members, Miriam Nelson, who feels the guidelines shouldn’t be confined to nutrition, but should encompass the long-term sustainability and environmental impact of crops recommended for eating.

Another committee consultant is pushing “a plant-based diet” that appears to suggest human consumption of meats is not sustainable. Perhaps coincidentally, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency announced the other day that due to the deleterious effects of methane gas on global warming, it would somehow move against cow flatulence.

But the committee’s final recommendations are no minor matter. For the next five years they will guide vast food purchases by the feds for government cafeterias, school meals across the country, all branches of the U.S. military and the entire federal prison system.

I realize they were nothing but old (well, some were actually quite young, but we have a narrative to maintain), slave-owning (well, some were not, but we have a narrative to maintain) white men, but one thing they didn’t do, in Declaring their independence from capricious autocratic rule and in setting up a constitutional republican system of government based around the idea of natural rights and the autonomy of the individual, was declare themselves in loco parentis for the entirety of the citizenry.

Back in the early days of the blogosphere (and perhaps someone can find it, because my search skills are for shit), I noted, during the government’s lawsuit against the tobacco companies, that we were on the path to a government that would have us doing morning calisthenics should we wish to keep our health care.

That absurd “slippery slope” argument was roundly ridiculed by the progressives, who of course didn’t wish to control us, but rather only to see us healthier.  That is, they had good intentions, but they weren’t going to force themselves on a free people.  Because that would be almost like a kind of civil and civic rape, would it not?

And yet, here we are:  the current Democratic Party is following the warmed-over economic tripe of a French socialist, is closely monitoring and regulating cow flatulence, has turned puddles into navigatible waters, and is in the business not of encouraging economic growth and opportunity, but rather of pushing a “de-growth” agenda run largely by bureaucratic agencies or Executive dictates.  But when your Utopian intentions are pure, that’s not considered tyranny by our betters; instead, it’s called a “nudge” and it’s in service of the greater good.

— Collectivism being that greater good.  Because, well, it takes a village.  And of course, the chiefs and shamans who run it.

This is liberal fascism dressed up as a commitment to our safety and health.  It’s a means to control us, be it with armed BLM agents or with shaming texts warning you not to put that cupcake into your pie hole.

Fundamental transformation is here.   Obama wants us to be a country as feckless as the European socialist havens he romanticizes.  So should it really come as a surprise that, at least one town in the UK is already using this very system of texting the “obese” (which, if measured through BMI would I’m almost certain include M’chelle herself) to warn them off the fatty foods?

Decadence is reserved for those with power and prestige.  Like Bloomberg or the Obamas.  The rest of you?  Eat your fucking peas and shut up.

Sometimes a slippery slip is just that. Just because it’s oftentimes pointed to as a fallacy of argument doesn’t mean it really isn’t out to get you.