May we present Stacey Irvine, 17, the new poster girl for neglectful parenting and test case for even more Nanny State intervention:
A teenage girl who has eaten almost nothing else apart from chicken nuggets for 15 years has been warned by doctors that the junk food is killing her.
Stacey Irvine, 17, has been hooked on the treats since her mother bought her some at a McDonald’s restaurant when she was two.
[. . .]
Miss Irvine, who has never eaten fruit or vegetables, had swollen veins in her tongue and was found to have anaemia.
[. . .]
Her exasperated mother Evonne Irvine, 39, who is battling to get her daughter seen by a specialist, told the newspaper: ‘It breaks my heart to see her eating those damned nuggets.
‘She’s been told in no uncertain terms that she’ll die if she carries on like this. But she says she can’t eat anything else.’
She once tried starving her daughter in a bid to get her to eat more nutritious food – but did not have any success.
Miss Irvine, whose only other variation in her diet is the occasional slice of toast for breakfast and crisps, said that once she tried nuggets she ‘loved them so much they were all I would eat’.
Of course, this is reported in the Daily Mail, so the story’s relationship with reality may be a bit looser than one might hope.
2. The problem with demanding a campus free of “implied threats” is illustrated by this case. Campus police first censored a poster of an imaginary space cowboy with a fan-pleasing quote. Next, just to say FUCK YOU IRONY they used threats of official retaliation against a poster condemning threats of official retaliation. No rational person could construe either poster as a threat, actual or implied, to commit violence against any person (although I suppose the second could be construed as a warning — a correct one — that thugs will act thuggishly when questioned.) If a rational person wouldn’t take it as an actual threat of violence, then it’s not a true threat that can be censored, however much the hysterical, irrational, nanny-stating, coddling, or professionally emo think about it, and however much university chancellors would like to believe otherwise.
Dateline: Wisconsin. At the University of Wisconsin-Stout, theater professor James Miller put up a poster on his door with an image of Nathan Fillon in the character of Captain Malcolm Reynolds with one of Mal’s better lines: “You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And you’ll be armed.”
