$285mil Project to "Improve" Vietnamese’s Average Height

Here's the article and a couple of points:
  • "Improve" is the key word. Taller is better, right?
  • What a serious and worthy use of 285 million dollars.

Yet people think men who talk about heightism are the ones with mental problems.

Multiple countries have this unhealthy fetish for tall height, and these people are the ones who are fucked in the head. When you would even consider spending so much on this, you're almost objectively nuts.

Alternate headline: "Government Spends $285mil to Lighten People's Skin Color." Sounds crazy and dumb, doesn't it?

They can try to spin this into some shit about "health" (even though height is more about overall calories than actual nutrition anyway), but the truth eventually comes out, like it does here:

She said that young people consider height a mark of beauty, and it is one of the top considerations for teenage girls looking for boyfriends and even friends.

There are also height restrictions which prevent small people from taking part in beauty contests or becoming air hostesses.

Older people associate height less with beauty and more with nutritional status - and an indication that their children are healthy and strong.

"My mother is very short, but I'm not too bad as I have been given highly nutritious food and plenty of milk," said one woman.

Another man was more direct. "I want to be 10cm taller. I think tall people are beautiful," he said.
Notice the ignorance in thinking milk made them taller. That's the average heightist for you.

Funny thing is that many Vietnamese girls these days love South Korean guys who look like this. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but c'mon, do these guys seem strong? Asians only care about height. It's even more mental than the West, because at least the "alpha males" here (I dislike this concept by the way) have to be big framed, muscular, and broad shouldered.

The biggest irony here is that compared to the rest of the world, Vietnam has shorter people on average. By claiming tallness to be superior, they are outright stating Vietnamese people to be inferior on average. Even if Vietnam gets 2 centimeters out of this, what does that mean exactly? Vietnamese are now slightly less inferior compared to, say, Europeans? Congratulations.

Psst... Don't let this ruin the height fantasy, but short men live longer on average.