Yes, really:
Obviously, it’s not about soda. It’s because such a ban suggests that sometimes we need to be stopped from doing foolish stuff, and this has become, in contemporary American politics, highly controversial, no matter how trivial the particular issue. (Large cups of soda as symbols of human dignity? Really?)
Liberals used to say that it was a problem when you didn't stand up when "they" came for the Jews because you weren't a Jew. Funny how liberalism has changed. Or it is funny how much liberalism is willing to admit, anyway.
But it isn't just trivial cups of soda, is it? Cue the inner despot of Conley:
We have a vision of ourselves as free, rational beings who are totally capable of making all the decisions we need to in order to create a good life. Give us complete liberty, and, barring natural disasters, we’ll end up where we want to be. It’s a nice vision, one that makes us feel proud of ourselves. But it’s false. ...
Research by psychologists and behavioral economists, including the Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky, identified a number of areas in which we fairly dependably fail. They call such a tendency a “cognitive bias,” and there are many of them — a lot of ways in which our own minds trip us up.
You see, we don't have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have the need to be told how to achieve it all. Because we can't. And that's unacceptable to the likes of Conley.
It's a familiar script. Our leftist betters identify something that people stupidly do. Then they attempt to educate us about that bad thing. When that doesn't reduce that bad thing enough, they agitate for laws that raise the cost of doing that bad thing. And then when that doesn't do the trick, they seek to ban that bad thing.
Funny enough, none of the things they like to do ever count as bad things.
I don't care how many credits Conley has piled up and how many articles that not even her colleagues actually read she has penned. I do not grant her the power to regulate what I do. I don't concede that she knows better, even if that mattered.
So yeah, I speak for 17-ounce soft drinks.
But that's just my "kiss my error-prone ass" bias raising its ugly (figuratively, of course--in reality it's real and it's spectacular) head.
