The Politically Incorrect Show - 31/03/2000

[Music - Die Fledermaus]

Good afternoon, KAYA ORAAAA & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Friday March 31, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd, the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit & excellence against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.

[Music up, music down]

I'm going to take my colleague Ritchie Watson, aka Ritchie-at-large, to task today for a viewpoint he was pushing a couple of days back on how to deal with anorexics - lock them up & force-feed them! On some days Ritchie displays encouraging libertarian tendencies. This was not such a day.

One of the most ominous & irritating assumptions that a freedom-lover routinely has to counter is that it's the government's job to protect us from ourselves. Former Christian Democrat Party leader Graeme Lee once told me in an interview that this was precisely government's function. On the matter of anorexics, at least, Ritchie would appear to agree with him. Having anorexia does not preclude its sufferers from identifying that they have it, & deciding whether to do something about it. Whether they do so is properly over to them. Others are certainly at liberty to try to persuade them, but not to force them to. The same would be true of, say, alcoholics. Presumably Ritchie would want to lock THEM up to dry them out. Fat people also should be incarcerated & put on the Heart Foundation diet, & smokers confined for cold turkey, no doubt. The possibilities are endless. Consider the following, from yesterday's Dominion:

"A complaint about a church's advertising claim that Jesus would heal cancer, arthritis, diabetes, deafness, blindness & any other disease 'totally' has been settled after the advertiser agreed to tone down its wording. The complaint was made by the Association of Rationalists & Humanists. It argued that such therapeutic claims could be dangerous to seriously ill people if taken seriously."

Well the solution is obvious, is it not? Strap all seriously ill people to their beds so that they can't go to faith healers!

It all comes down to the flip-side of the personal freedom coin, personal responsibility. Of course the notion that Jesus can cure cancer is rubbish, but if cancer sufferers wish to eschew conventional treatment in favour of mumbo-jumbo & hocus-pocus, that is their prerogative, as long as they're prepared to live - or die - by the consequences & don't blame others when Jesus doesn't deliver. If anorexics wish to buy into the Politically Correct lunacy that only bone-strutting skinniness is esthetically acceptable, then the onus is on them to identify & overcome their obsession; it is most assuredly not the government's place to lock them up & force-feed them.

Government's job is to protect us not from ourselves, but from each other. And Ritchie Watson.

Politically Incorrect Show, bloated with common sense ... 309 3099.

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