Just stop it

At the risk of sounding heartless, stories like this (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/prescription-drugs-warning-issued-1-6135789 ) make me laugh like a drain.

There really should be public health warnings about health warnings posted by people with no demonstrable expertise in the ‘problem’ they warn about. Career parasites who can only describe themselves as ‘health professionals’ because a cheapskate government employs them to offer a sham service to the many who do not need it, instead of paying the going rate for academically and professionally qualified medical workers to treat the small minority who do.

Is there local misuse of prescription drugs? Yes, of course, and probably a market in the unwise redistribution of them. There is in anything a fool with spare cash can be persuaded to want and a chancer with easy availability decides to supply.

But that misses the point, which is that prior to their ‘misuse’ such prescription drugs are supplied, legally and with public subsidy, to somebody else who has been persuaded that they need them and also, thanks to the drug advisory sham profession, probably regards him/herself as some kind of addict who will continue to need them unless they can be persuaded into some sort of costly ‘therapy’ which, to be blunt, they also do not need.

The whole set-up is a farce.

I am reminded of an article in which that old reprobate William Burroughs (hardly an amateur dabbler in such matters) explained how you stop smoking. In a nutshell, you get up one morning and you choose not to light a cigarette, and the next morning you do the same. No therapy, no woo-woo merchants, no pharmaceutical alternative. Nothing. You choose not to do it as naturally as you might choose not to buy a McDonalds.

Oddly enough, someone I know who for many years was on minor tranquillisers for her ‘nerves’ told me a similar story. After some 20 years of repeat prescriptions issued by doctors who probably assumed they were keeping a lid on the problems of a typical overworked woman of slender means she looked in the mirror one morning, said “I’m a bloody fool” and didn’t take her tablets, and never has since.

No therapy, no12-step support group. She just wised up, decided, and stopped.

The best way to stop potential tragedies such as the original incident in the news story is not legislation, or alternative drugs, and certainly not ‘advice’ from pseudo-professionals who talk about as much sense as adolescents on bad disco biscuits washed down with too much ‘energy drink’. The best way is for the real victims to stop.

Because it is common sense. And because they will also stop feeding all the parasites in the chain of misery, from minor street dealers and dodgy, government-funded therapists through to the drug companies.

Freak alert

As if older people on the Isle of Man don’t have enough to worry about (what with the second worst pensions in Europe and the closure of most useful government-run care facilities) now Manx wrinklies have Esther Rantzen leeching off them. At least, that’s the public warning I read today behind http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=47484.

I doubt there is any serious comment on Manx social life to be made by a professional prodnose and child-frightener who, almost single-handedly, could be held responsible for the explosion in British child-abuse, the decline of professional childcare and the seemingly unstoppable growth of the cod-psychological quackery industry that passes itself off as ‘child protection’. Faced with the growth of such emotional fascism and village-idiot level hysteria any halfway decent and responsible parent may sensibly decide to get a pump-action shotgun and be prepared to use it any time one of these freaks raises its empty head anywhere near the fruit of your loins.

I think that is becoming rather clear to many of us. Which may be why the goofy-toothed ‘mare is now being let loose on another vulnerable age-group, one which market research has indicated can be made into ‘victims’ ripe for exploitation by the lowest form of social menace known to humanity, the third sector ‘care professional’.

Anyway, what is this 21^st century Matthew Hopkins (or at least whoever is feeding her local lines) on about?

 The worst social isolation for older Manx people I am aware of involves bright individuals getting on  a bit who find primitive superstition tiresome, and who are not only bored senseless by nonsensical small town chitchat, the maintenance of Edwardian social hierarchies and other such nonsense but have actually admitted it. The problem here, I humbly submit, is caused by a combination of a lazy, incompetent public sector and the churches too many of them go to (and which don’t even realise they are dead yet). Such numpties are therefore the last people on earth anyone should throw money at in order to ‘solve’ problems which they alone create, cause or perpetuate.

But as the likes of Rantzen say so often: “(Insert uncritical endorsement of your venal and exploitative pitch for public funds here). That will be a thousand pounds plus expenses please.” 

Big Mother is watching you - or the battle between 'nudgers' and 'nannies'

For a while now I’ve been looking for a way to introduce the subject of ‘nudging’ to this blog.
The term ‘nudging’ was popularised by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Wealth, Health, and Happiness. It refers to the political use of behaviourist techniques, rather than outright bans and law changes, to get the general public to stop doing stuff politicians, civil servants and other busybodies have decided we should not do.
In the UK Cameron established BIT (the Behavioural Insight Team) to formalise the nudging of what ex-Etonians obviously see as the fat and feckless masses into slimmer, duller lives. This replaced an old Brown/Blair approach which wanted to achieve the same aims, but by outright bullying from prim and proper nanny figures.
To get a useful introduction into this quiet further intrusion into our lives and freedoms, and the current behind-the-scenes battle between ‘nudgers’ and ‘nannies’ take a look at http://reason.com/archives/2011/03/30/nudgers-vs-nannies by Brendan O’Neill. It’s from an American site – hence the odd spellings – but if you want to know more on the topic from a UK perspective, it’s one that crops up regularly on Spiked, so check out the link to the right of the page.
Over here, it might be a while before the Manx great and gormless can lose their ignoble tradition of nannying the rest of us to death. But even a brief look at this article reveals the pseudo-therapeutic methodology increasingly being adopted by Manx civil servants, ‘government advisors’ and other unelected, publically unaccountable busybodies – often superstitious, semi-literate or plain stupid, by the way.
Take a look, then check out Spiked for more. The similarities between the UK examples and some of the ‘health conscious’ psychobabble being spouted in recent months by Manx government departments may alarm you. Maybe it will also help you spot the signs when these anti-democratic village idiots try to slip more past us in the future.
(hat tip to Dick Puddlecote for the link)