IBM: The new liberal fascists
As all fans of Liberal Fascism know, the most fascist thing anyone in the world can do is to encourage people to exercise and eat healthy food. Thus, I can’t wait to see Jonah’s reaction when he reads this:
How’s this for incentive to stick to your new year’s resolutions: cold hard cash. Many companies are offering a little extra in your paycheck to help you shed the pounds.
Not only does Stefanie Chiras’ company pay her to develop computer memory sub-systems, but a little extra to eat right.
“Having work sponsor it makes you kind of feel like someone is buying into It,” said Chiras. “And then certainly the cash at the end of the day is an incentive.”
Chiras works for IBM. She gets an additional $150 in her paycheck for tracking her eating habits online and losing weight.
“When I reach for that next unhealthy thing, I think, oh, but I have to log it in to the tool.”
IBM launched its voluntary wellness incentive program four years ago – handing each employee up to $300 a year for completing healthy eating, exercise and preventative care programs. […]
So many IBM employees have lost weight, stopped smoking or otherwise improved their health that the company has paid out $130 million, but it’s saving about three times as much.
This year, IBM also plans to give workers money if their children develop healthier eating habits.
Dr. Paul Grundy, director of Strategic Initiatives at IBM, told CBS: “Frankly speaking, we don’t know why everybody wouldn’t do this because it really does make a great deal of sense.”
This sort of scheme reeks of liberal-fascist social engineering. In a pathetic effort to save money, IBM has decided that its employees need to “improve” themselves by stuffing less unhealthy crap down their throats and by hitting the treadmill every now and again. Their zeal to manage their employees’ health even extends to attacking cigarette smokers… just like Hitler surely did! The fascists at IBM are clearly involved in a Utopian leftist plot to create a new Master Race of Übermenschen who live longer, healthier lives and who have a greatly reduced risk of cancer… and for the life of me, that’s the most un-American thing I’ve ever heard of! When we’re eventually overrun by hordes of goose-stepping Richard Simmons clones, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
U Kan HAZ mi CHEETOS when u prize dem frum my cold, ded handzes!!1
Paycheck fascists!
I just shed about 10 pounds, all in one sitting.
Yes I see, by doing this IBM is attempting to shame fat white boys…
Fiendishly diabolical!
Doofus, you dropped an ‘h’ there buddy.
goose-stepping Richard Simmons clones
Brain bleach, please. Those shorts … oh, those shorts.
I would agree with you for the voluntary programs that reward behavior but alas, there are companies out there who deduct money from your check if you don’t comply.
In those cases, social engineering fascists might be the proper term. So using the Jonah Goldberg scale, this would not apply in this instance, since his scale requires completely inappropriate usage of the term.
What’s that you say? Preventative health care saves money? Preposterous. IBM will be out of business within a month.
Ah, but do they record weight loss on punch cards?
ahem- thank you for that link. It only serves to prove my point that healthy people are the world’s biggest Nazis.
OMG!
wait, wait, i see the connection here: during WW2, IBM sold equipment to the Nazis that was eventually used to keep track of people being shipped to the concentration camps!
not very clever of IBM to show their Nazis connections …
I’m usually with you, but the IBM plan seems kind of creepy to me.
About ten years ago my boss offered me $500 to quit smoking. Really just ’cause he was a good man and a good friend and hoped it would be enough motivation.
I kind of feel bad that I didn’t take him up on it. I would have been a non smoker that much longer, and I truly believe he would have been DELIGHTED to write that check…
mikey
There is something to be said for stopped clocks and all that.
Oh sure, this isn’t why IBM are fascists, but IBM is fascist. In fact, this is central to my point. In the same way Ford automobiles, Fanta and NASA are fascists.
BORING CORRECTION:
You have the wrong link for Liberal Fascism.
Please correct, ASAP.
LOL, silly Brad. Everyone knows that healthy-living isn’t fascist if one is PAID to do it! When money changes hands, that is simply the work of teh free market, which by definition, makes Jebus happy and evil liberal fascists very very sad.
Patkin- Are you suffering from LDS (Loadpants Derangement Syndrome) too?
It already got El Cid.
I took a preventative run and ate a spirulina ball, just to be sure. I have a bunch of celery on reserve in case I start talking about things central to my point. And my yoga instructor on speed dial, just to be sure…
And just to be sure is central to my…AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGG!!!!!1!!
Like the stigmata, orange Cheeto dust has suddenly appeared on my hands! My painting of Hitlery is crying tiny tears of Mountain Dew.
Oh, the horror!
This scheme by IBM to pay their employees to lose weight is exactly like the Nazis’ methods to get their slave laborers to lose weight by not feeding them. In Pantload World, that is. Elsewhere in reality, not so much.
Doughy Pantload: Hello, IBM do you read me, IBM?
IBM: Affirmative, Doughy Pantload, I read you.
Doughy Pantload: I can haz Cheetoz, IBM.
IBM: I’m sorry Doughy Pantload, I’m afraid I can’t allow that.
Doughy Pantload: What’s the problem?
IBM: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
SORRY BUT THE PAGE YOU REQUESTED CANNOT BE FOUND
I agree with the above. If money changes hands, then it is not Pantload’s idea of fascism. Its that people are FORCED to do something (and not get paid for it! The Horror!) that makes something fascist according to Pantload.
What would truly horrify Jonah is if the government started hiring Austrian’s to come in to our schools and FORCE our children to work out without giving them any money as an incentive!
You know, like when Ronald Reagan started the “President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports,” and he hired an Austrian named Arnold Schwarzenegger to force us kids to spend our recess running around a track and doing chin ups.
Both Ronnie and Arnold served as Governor for California (an evil haven for liberals), both were Hollywood actors, and one even married a Kennedy! How much more liberal can you get? I’m surprised Jonah didn’t dedicate an entire chapter to these evil liberal exercise-loving fascists.
It’s interesting to me because it pits Jonah’s desire to get checks from his corporate masters with his desire to eat lots of unhealthy crap. Which side do you think would win out?
Well it would depend Brad. If Jonah would get paid to tell us not to eat cheetoz for the good of the free market that’s one thing. Setting an example by himself would probably escape him. On the other hand, if his bosses said “Goldberg, I’ll pay you $100 000 to not eat teh cheetoz” he’d probably shrug it off and think “I make enough money writing ‘I know you are but what am I’ for 400 pages straight.” If for whatever unimaginable reason his usefulness depended on or was made to be dependent on him eating healthily, he’d probably snap and it would all end with a bizarre corner post entitled “So Hillery has come for us all finally… time for the purification to begin…”
Wasn’t it everyone’s New Years Resolution not to lolcatz anymore?
Kitlers are central to our point.
Shout out to
actor212 said,
January 2, 2008 at 23:06
for the link!
Kitlers are central to our point!
So is IBM also, now, making sure employees get off work early enough (you know, like five PM) to get to the gym? Or allowing them lunchbreaks where they can actually get up from their desks? ‘Cause my partner used to work there and put on twenty pounds in a year sitting behind a damned desk ten hours a day.
Or is it just more fun to make your drones track weightloss online?
The question is, is IBM from the left. That is my thesis about liberal fascism. The classical definition of fascism has a list of stuff based on some things that some people did. But that is central to my point. I will talk about whatever I want about IBM and then I will have something to say about the French and then that grade school teacher who made me feel bad because I wanted to pee in my pants like I used to when I was in the comfy pants. And this is not something the leftists will ever admit.
Has anyone else noticed that Jonah’s name (on his……book) is the color of Cheetos? You think maybe he’s down with the Jan. 11, anti-Gitmo movement (wear orange, and all that)?
Has anyone else noticed that Jonah’s name (on his……book) is the color of Cheetos? You think maybe he’s down with the Jan. 11, anti-Gitmo movement (wear orange, and all that)?
Ah, the Cheeto, is there anything it cannot do? Perhaps that’s what Cheney meant when he said the Guantanamo detainees “had everything they needed” — he was distracted by his mental image of human-sized sacks of Cheetos. And in Wingnut World, when you have human-sized sacks of Cheetos, what else could you possibly need?
Unfortunately IBM has a history of jumping into bed with actual fascists, which somehow makes the humor of this piece not work so well for me. How do you think the Third Reich kept all those records that let them know who to round up and send to Belsen?
[…] book Liberal Fascism at Sadly No! that I bookmarked the blog so I can just go read them directly. This one reminded me of Wal-Mart: As all fans of Liberal Fascism know, the most fascist thing anyone in the […]
That is merely what many would define as “classical fascism”. This is not important, because many previous big head people talked a lot about it. What is important is “liberal fascism” which is more common in this country since Americans grew out of their own soil and are not Germans. It is my serious thesis that the really important fascism is of the left, and that this is what has been living with us and growing worse since Woodrow Wilson and the French Revolution, though not necessarily from the same tree.
Wasn’t it everyone’s New Years Resolution not to lolcatz anymore?
Invizibl Rzlushn. LOL
“Their zeal to manage their employees’ health even extends to attacking cigarette smokers… just like Hitler surely did!”
Surprise! He did! The Nazis had some really good anti-smoking posters. Would be nice to use today, but ISTR they had some decorative motifs that wouldn’t be popular. Seriously, the first real attempts to look into the connection between smoking and cancer were made in Germany in the 30s.
Not to mention their inspiring the Eisenhower Insterstate Highway System. Want to tell Jonah and his friends that when they drive on the freeway, they’re acting like Liberal Nazis?
Just goes to show, a clock that gains one second a day is right every dozen years or so.
Let us pause for a moment and reflect on the gift that is Jonah’s love of junkfood and slothfulness…. he’ll be off to see the wizard all the sooner.
Oh, that sounds cruel, but hey, I’m not the one stuffing cheetos down his throat as his sits on the couch ranting about how evil we all are. That’s his conservative choice and he’s welcome to the conservative consequences.
Anyone know if he is a member of Jews for Jesus?
Not to be pedantic or nuthin’, but I think the LOLHitlercat equivalent of “DO NOT WANT!!1!” should probably be “MAG ES NICHT!”, not “ICH MOECHTE NICHT”.
Herzliche glueckwunsche,
ljd
You fascist librulz do tend to fly off the handle. Always spurting things out too soon; there’s a name for that but I can’t remember it right now.
If you just had the stamina to wait, der GeltPile makes it perfectly clear in his next opus , Protocols of the Elders of San Francisco.
The fascists who forced “healthy” eating on the nation, aka “California cuisine” are behind it.
Alice Waters is teh evil.
In the same way Ford automobiles, Fanta and NASA are fascists.
One out of three right! Snopes has the details.