I saw a program about alternate fuel sources on Discovery Science and this is one thing that came up. Any kind of oil can be turned into fuel. Not just liposuction. You just have to transform it. The problem is getting the cars that run on this made & sold in quantities that make fossil fuel cars obsolete is the challange.
I really liked Bait and Switch (the follow-up to Nickel and Dimed) and completely dismissed reviews claiming that Ehrenreich had a certain contempt for “the common people” but this piece of fat-bashing makes me reconsider.
This is one of the strangest things I’ve ever read… On the one hand, what a clever way of doing your part for the environment. On the other hand… wtf?
Fossil fuel, all right, but whose fossils? Mostly tiny plants called diatoms, but quite possibly a few Barney-like creatures went into the mix, like Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus and other giant reptiles that shared the Jurassic period with all those diatoms Wow. She has no idea what she’s talking about.
Did anyone else hope this was going to be a fart joke? That would have been a hell of a lot less offensive.
While the article is a joke, the idea is real: Turning waste into oil is possible, and given that one of the issues was whether it was profitable, at the current price of oil it appears very much so.
Uh, I’m pretty sure this is Ehrenreich’s version of “A Modest Proposal.” Are people actually taking her seriously when she blithely references Barney the dinosaur as an ingredient in fossil fuels?
She is not serious about using human fat as fuel. She is serious about fat people being lazy “scavengers” whose bodies are symbolize a greedy, wasteful society.
Ehrenreich is fully being satirical (I like the reference to “A Modest Proposal.” Props). Her blog is rather full of satire and sarcasm. She was completely not at all being serious.
hrenreich is fully being satirical (I like the reference to “A Modest Proposal.” Props). Her blog is rather full of satire and sarcasm. She was completely not at all being serious. I think everyone realizes that, right?
She is serious about fat people being lazy “scavengers” whose bodies are symbolize a greedy, wasteful society. That only makes sense if you think Swift’s point was that Irish people had too many kids and “A Modest Proposal” was actually a call for them to start practicing birth control instead of what it actually was, an excoriation of the British government.
fat people being lazy “scavengers” whose bodies are symbolize a greedy, wasteful society. A popular propaganda meme used by Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan strait to berate fat people from what I’ve heard from those in my parents generation who lived in those areas from the 1940’s-1970s.
Her blog is rather full of satire and sarcasm. She was completely not at all being serious. I get that. It’s still a shitty joke.
OK, now I’ve read it, and it comes off to me as nothing more than a rather flat joke. It’s far from the most offensive thing Ehrenreich has ever written. I’m thinking of her apologias for Lorena Bobbitt and Susan Smith. I generally admire the woman, but she can be annoyingly self-righteous sometimes.