Life's Pleasures Quote by Bob Ney

The trick here is how neatly Bob Ney launders ideology as common sense. “In recent years” signals a manufactured trend line: a vague menace of opportunistic litigation, detached from any particular case facts, designed to feel like an outbreak. Then come the labels that do most of the work. “Personal injury attorneys and trial lawyers” aren’t just professionals; in political code, they’re a villain class. It’s a preemptive strike on credibility, meant to make any claim against corporate actors sound like a shakedown before you even hear it.

Ney’s phrasing also stages a morality play about responsibility. “Of their own accord” is the pivot: it yanks the spotlight from marketing, formulation, portion inflation, and targeted advertising, and fixes it on the individual consumer as the sole author of harm. The phrase implies voluntary excess in a vacuum, as if no one has ever been nudged, conditioned, priced, or saturated into “too much.” That’s the subtext: obesity and diet-related illness are framed less as public health problems than as personal character flaws, and litigation becomes an attempt to outsource guilt.

Calling food “a legal, safe product” is rhetorically slippery. “Legal” is a low bar masquerading as a moral defense; plenty of legal products create systemic harm. “Safe” is even more loaded: safe in what dose, for whom, over what time horizon? The context is early-2000s backlash against “McLawsuits” and a broader push for tort reform, where protecting industry from court scrutiny is sold as protecting adults from infantilization. Ney’s intent isn’t just to defend the food industry; it’s to shrink the range of harms society is allowed to recognize as anything but self-inflicted.