Craziest move yet by the “age gap” antis must surely be the trashing a few weeks ago of 16-year-old (now just turned 17) darts prodigy Luke Littler’s relationship with his 21-year-old girlfriend, Eloise Milburn. There have been “vile comments” and accusations, according to a London Evening Standard report.

The trolls are idiots, but it would be wrong to say there is nothing scandalous in what has happened to Luke. Not that romance is the problem. No, the culprit isn’t love, it’s “love handles”. Have you seen the geezer’s girth?  Humourist and restaurant critic Giles Coren, hit the bullseye in his regular column for The Times:

… poor Luke, 15 stone if he’s a pound, thanks to a widely celebrated diet or pizza and kebabs, a young man who only lost a sporting battle that day… [when he narrowly lost the World Darts Championship final]. He will lose everything, everything, in the not-too-distant future if he does not sort his diet out. At this rate, like two thirds of his generation (by geography and education), he will be dead at 60. He is only 16, but diabetes, heart disease and cancer are a few  short years away…

Coren rightly blames a “timid” government’s scandalous failure to stand up to “the tyranny and lies of Big Food” – the commercial interests who relentlessly push unhealthy hyper-processed junk under our noses in the fast-food joints and on the supermarket shelves, and who lobby against reasonable public health policies such as a sugar tax. Research published in the journal Obesity Reviews, reported elsewhere in The Times this month, compared the diets of more than 66,000 children in eight countries. Preschoolers in the UK got 61% of their calories from ultra-processed foods, higher than any other nation – the US figure was 58% and Australia 47%.

As for “geography and education”, Coren is right to point out that in the less prosperous parts of the UK, and among the less well educated, obesity is much more prevalent than elsewhere and lives are much shorter. We might add that these, too, are failures of a government whose long-term neglect of “left behind” post-industrial areas, and slashed school budgets, despite Tory claims to the contrary, have inevitably resulted in what amount to serious child abuse against young people like Luke and his generation.

But it would be facile to blame only the government. There is a deeper cultural thing going on that has seen obesity levels, and specifically child obesity, ballooning around the world like the kids themselves. As with getting stoned, or drunk, surrendering to the immediate gratification of junk food, or anything pleasurably bad for us, is especially tempting when there may be little else in life to look forward to, little to incentivise self-discipline. This clearly was not the problem in Luke’s case, quite the opposite. His young life has been so disciplined, so highly motivated towards sporting achievement, that his rigorous regime of practice, practice, practice has left him no headroom for looking after himself. Like a Japanese sumo wrestler who deliberately piles on the weight to gain competitive advantage, he may even be well aware he is harming himself. Success can feel more important than life itself.

And why not? After all, as with the gladiators of old, what is life actually worth when your options are limited? In the Roman world, the limits were set by the institution of slavery – a man might fight for his freedom but otherwise what was there to live for? In our times, we are arguably all becoming, if not slaves, then serfs under the thumb of  the mega-rich, especially the tech multi-billionaires. Just the right conditions for a philosophy of “Eat, drink, and be merry”, with no thought for the future.

It could be why so many of us respond rebelliously against actually quite sensible “nanny state” government nagging to stop smoking, drink less, eat better, brush our teeth (coming shortly, if Labour win as expected), etc. It is seen as an attack on what little personal freedom we have, bearing in mind that most of us are wage slaves, or dependant on welfare, controlled every which way by bosses or benefits rules, and all the while spied on electronically by capitalist commerce, giving the shakedown merchants all the personal data they need to nudge, cajole, and con us out of our every penny. Freedom-loving American heretics here are probably even more suspicious of advice from the government than us Blue Pill Brits. We, the sheeple, just bleat a bit if we don’t like it, then do as we’re told.

But that doesn’t mean the Red Pill rebels always get it right, as scrutiny some of their more off-the-wall ideas quickly tells us. Feminist philosopher Kate Manne would probably be surprised to see her bonkers pro-obesity thinking framed as a bust-out from The Matrix, but bear with me. She may be an elite Ivy League professor, but her latest book, Unshrinking: How To Fight Fatphobia, collapses under the weight of its reality denying, not reality perceiving, Red Pill refusal of conventional thinking. A review of her book by Janice Turner neatly captures the absurdity:

To Manne the very notion that obesity requires a solution is “fatphobic” since its end goal is people becoming “normal” size. Rather the world should end its “moral panic” about child obesity, embrace fat bodies as part of diversity and expand everything to fit the new reality, from MRI scanners to theatre seats. And let’s be clear here: Manne is not talking about how impossible beauty standards cause misery for those of us carrying a few extra pounds, or even stone. She is talking about the morbidly obese, such as the stars of the US reality show My 600lb Life….

I’m reminded of how some deaf activists don’t believe that deaf children should receive cochlear implants because this undermines deaf culture. Just as they believe being deaf is equal to having hearing, Manne insists morbid obesity is no less a desirable state than being average weight – there are no “essential” problems to being obese, only “logistical” ones. So how will society function and pay for health-care if we just stop fighting our “obesity epidemic” and embrace a supersized world? Manne doesn’t say, or even seem to care.

If that doesn’t persuade you that thinking outside the box (or outside the recommended BMI) isn’t always wise, nothing will – except perhaps “extreme body modification” by amputation, which is certainly a surefire way of losing weight quickly, but not a recommended one! Of course child obesity should be a matter of concern. It is an epidemic that urgently needs not just a public policy response aimed at the corporate villains but also a cultural revolution grounded in radical politics that give kids and the rest of us a worthwhile future to look forward to.

Poor diet also stunts kids’ healthy upward growth, as discussed in a Guardian story last year. Tim Cole, professor of medical statistics at UCL Institute of Child Health, blamed austerity policies in the UK for the restricted growth of British children in recent times. In another report this month he also said child height was not just about diet. It was also an indicator of health more generally, because it is influenced by levels of infection, sleep, and – massively important in cultural terms – exercise and stress.

As Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids has been saying for years, kids need much more exercise than they are getting these days, and without it they are becoming stressed and depressed. The misguided culture of excessive child “protection” means they are kept cooped up like battery hens, never let out of their parents’ sight, and given little personal autonomy, causing serious damage to their health and wellbeing.

Skenazy has always had evidence to back up her claims, and now we have a major review in a leading academic journal that backs her to the hilt. Called “Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-being: Summary of the Evidence”, by Gray, et al., in The Journal of Pediatrics, the review documents the “battery hen” phenomenon in detail and theorises a connection with poor mental health in particular.

To give just one example of the data, in England, permission to walk home alone from school dropped from 86% in 1971 to 35% in 1990 and 25% in 2010, and being allowed to use public buses alone dropped from 48% in 1971 to 15% in 1990 to 12% in 2010. Finland stood out as allowing children the greatest freedom of movement. At age seven, we learn, a majority of Finnish children can already travel to places within walking distance or cycle to places alone; by age eight a majority can cross main roads, travel home from school and go out after dark alone; by age nine a majority can cycle on main roads alone, and by age 10 a majority can travel on local buses alone. Unsurprisingly, Finnish children are up at the top end of the happiness charts, scoring well on life satisfaction and psychological wellbeing. By contrast, the increasingly cooped up lifestyle of kids in the US has seen the rate of suicide among children under 15 rise 3.5-fold between 1950 and 2005 and by another 2.4-fold between 2005 and 2020.

Gray and his colleagues pay a lot of attention to many such connections between children’s freedom and their mental well-being, and theorise why freedom should be so important to them from a couple of different angles, drawing on the lifestyle to which evolution has best suited us, and on a more specific Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which postulates that “people of all ages perform better and live happier, more satisfying lives when they experience themselves as living in accordance with their own internal desires and decisions rather than being driven from outside sources by rewards, punishments, and demands from others”. Common sense, really, we might think, but we are told “hundreds of studies support this premise”.

The authors also cite the first half of the 20th century as “the golden age of unstructured play” and show how children’s free play, especially outdoors, declined from about 1960 on. Fortunately for me, my  childhood in the 1950s fell within that golden age. I was able to walk to school on my own from age five onwards, and my pals and I were gloriously free to explore as far as our feet would carry us – or as far as we could ride our bikes – without adult interference.

A favourite location for our fun and games in that post-war period was bomb sites: derelict buildings blasted by Hitler’s air raids. Dangerous places, no doubt, with hazards such as falling masonry and unexploded munitions, but I don’t remember any of us coming to much harm. To get some idea of the paradise this era was for kids, heretics here should check out the beautiful film Hope and Glory, based on director John Boorman‘s own childhood wartime experience of “the Home Front” in a London suburb. Kids during the war itself were of course exposed to vastly more danger than I ever was, but also to even more excitement and freedom (including the sexual kind), not least because in many cases the traditional disciplinarian of the family – dad – was away fighting the enemy. Who’d have thought it, the bliss of the blitz!

TRIUMPH FOR GERMAN PRO-MAP GROUP

An astonishing legal triumph for children’s rights, including sexual rights, was chalked up late last year by Germany’s pro-MAP group Krumme 13 (K13). Little has been made of it in the media, though, probably because K13’s substantial role was very much behind the scenes.

So, instead of the “mainstream media”, on this occasion we find that feminist journal Reduxx has given the most comprehensive account in English, starting with this headline: “German Parliament Accepts Constitutional ‘Children’s Rights’ Petition From Pro-Pedophile Activist Group”.

How about that! Exciting, eh? Well, yes. What we are talking about here is a change to Germany’s constitution, which sounds like a pretty big deal. Article 6 of the Basic Law has been changed, Reduxx reports. It now says, “children should be viewed as legal subjects with their own rights”. Among the rights listed is children’s right to have a say in all matters that affect their emotional, mental and physical well-being”, and the right “to the free development of their personality”. Significantly, “sexual self-determination” is included in Article 2 of the Basic Law under the phrase “free development of personality”. Although this right is very general in character, it could potentially be drawn upon to bolster children’s rights claims in future specific cases before the courts. The petition was first submitted to the Bundestag in 2019 and has been the subject of a review process lasting several years.

As might be expected, Reduxx was less interested in reporting a step forward for children’s rights in Germany than exposing the alleged scandal of K13’s role in it. Genevieve Gluck’s article sourced the story to an announcement on K13’s website. This said that a resolution developed by the group’s founder, Dieter Gieseking, and put forward in a petition to the Bundestag (parliament), had achieved enough votes to be added to the constitution, or Basic Law.

This sounds absolutely amazing at first glance, giving the impression that K13 is hugely influential. But it soon becomes clear that K13’s petition was one of a number along the same lines that were all considered together, on 11 October last year. Gluck writes that “neither Gieseking’s name nor the title of his organization… appears on the Bundestag website for that day”.

Nevertheless, Dieter and K13 should be congratulated on the part they played in such a positive development, rather than painted as conspirators who had pulled off some sort of criminal plot. Now, unfortunately, Dieter has a new battle to fight. He tells me, “my web host has taken the K13 pages with the domains and email addresses offline”. Well, there’s a surprise. Not.

CORRECTION:

Oops, it seems I jumped the gun a bit on this story. The Basic Law has not yet been changed. Dieter has written to me as follows:

The petition for children’s rights to be included in the Basic Law was accepted with a large majority, with the exception of the AfD (right-wing populists). But THAT does not mean that the Basic Law has already been supplemented with children’s rights. The petition will only be included in parliamentary deliberations. To change the Basic Law, a 2/3 majority in the Bundestag & Bundesrat (all 16 federal states) is required.

The Petitions Committee has not yet decided on my petition “sexual identity in the Basic Law” (including pedophilia).

HOPE FOR DUTCH DUO IN ECUADOR?

Heretics here may remember a couple of blogs last year (in March and August) in which I related the terrible plight of three Dutch refugees who tried to make new lives for themselves in Latin America after facing persecution over their MAP activism in their home country – only to find they had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Opportunistically picked on by dishonest anti-CSA organisations, they all ended up in prison facing trumped-up charges – Marthijn Uittenbogaard and his partner Lesley in Ecuador, and Nelson Maatman in Mexico.

As I reported in August, Marthijn and Lesley have both been given 10-year prison terms. An appeal is supposed to be in the pipeline but has faced lengthy delays; and such is the extent of corruption in the legal system this is unlikely to be their “get out of jail” card.

What might be, though, is a move by recently elected president Daniel Noboa, to curtail a surge in drug trafficking and gang-related violence. Ecuador has announced the building of two huge new maximum security prisons, with construction starting this month. That might sound like a recipe for putting more people in jail rather than letting them out, but President Noboa has said that to reduce the number of prisoners he plans to deport some 1,500 foreigners. Could Marthijn and Lesley be among them? We must hope so.

Meanwhile, they remain incarcerated in Guayaquil Prison, the most notorious in the country,  where drug-related gang violence has led to brutal prison massacres. However, as I wrote last March:

An “influential” fellow prisoner informed Lesley that he had brought them to Guayaquil because he wanted to use them for a prisoner exchange with the Netherlands. Whether that is true, we do not know…

So maybe this could actually come to pass. Nelson, though, is in an even more difficult position. Facing a number of charges in Mexico, his case hasn’t even come to trial yet, a process that can often take many years if it happens at all.

EYELESS IN GAZA, AND LIMBLESS TOO

In the Jewish legend, the great warrior Samson ends up, as John Milton famously puts it, “eyeless in Gaza.” He is blinded by the Philistines and harnessed to a huge millstone, forced to drag himself around and around in circles, always moving but unable to go anywhere. Eventually, in the most spectacular of suicides, he gets his revenge by pulling down their temple on top of the Philistines, killing both them and himself. The story is apparently supposed to be heroic, but it feels more like a fable of vicious futility. Cruelty begets cruelty until there is nothing left but mutual destruction.

So writes Fintan O’Toole at the start of an excellent and wonderfully even-handed article on the current Gazan catastrophe in The New York Review of Books. Recommended.

When I saw a UNICEF spokesman on the BBC’s Newsnight last night saying the number of Palestinian children killed in the conflict had now reached 9,000, and heard him reminding us that the most basic of human rights is the right to life, I felt I could not leave the topic unmentioned here.

Nine thousand children. That’s more than a third of the total Gazan dead, a huge loss of innocent lives – innocent in the uncontroversial sense that none of those kids would have been among the Hamas terrorists whose atrocities precipitated the current horrific escalation of the long-running conflict in the region.

To celebrate on this blog a small gain in children’s rights in Germany may seem rather absurd against this background. Among those Palestinian children who have not so far been denied the right to life,  many will have been left “eyeless in Gaza”, and limbless too. The UNICEF guy on the telly said injured children’s limbs were now being amputated without anaesthetic. Hospitals have been put out of action; anaesthetics, and indeed anaesthetists, are in short supply, as are all medical staffs and medicines. And of course there’s the hunger, the disease, the homelessness, the loss of parents, brothers, sisters, friends…

KIDS ‘ABUSING’ EACH OTHER MORE THAN EVER

Numerous reports in recent years have indicated that a high proportion of so-called child sexual abuse offences are committed by children themselves, the usual figure being about a third. As if this were not alarming enough for those who seek to deny the existence of child sexuality, a new report shows a dramatic rise in this proportion in the UK, taking children’s own contribution to more than half.

A report by the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC), which looked at data from all 42 police forces in England and Wales, disclosed that in more than half of all reported “CSAE” cases (Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation) the offender was a minor, with 52% involving reports of children (aged 10 to 17) offending against other children. The report, published last week, said:

The analysis sets out the consistent growth in CSAE reported to police with 107,000 crimes reported to policing a figure that has risen significantly in the last ten years… More than half of CSAE offences were committed by children, a significant increase from what was previously known.

Ian Critchley, the NPCC’s lead on “child abuse”, is reported in BBC coverage of the story as saying, apparently in connection with “sexting” illicit photos of minors, that it’s a crime “whether that’s in a consensual relationship or not”. Which looks to me very like a tacit admission that many or most of these “offences” are indeed consensual.