Whadda hell?

[George Thompson]

An article in today's Science Times ("A Dangerous Fat and Its
Dangerous Alternative") has the following paragraph:
For restaurant patrons who long ago learned to avoid butter and skip
the bacon, all this amounts to a Hobbesian dilemma.  Better saturated
fat, the heart-stopping devil you know?  Or trans fat, the heart-
stopping devil you've jsut been introduced to?
NY Times, October 10, 2006, Section F, p. 8, col. 6

I know very little about Thomas Hobbes, and nothing at all about
anyone else named Hobbes whose notions, maybe, are being cited here.
I certainly don't know what Thomas Hobbes had to say about dilemmas.
Is the writer thinking of a "Hobson's choice"?  Which of course is
muddled too, since "Hobson's choice" isn't a difficult choice between
equally bad options, but no choise at all: take it or leave it.

Google's never heard of "Hobbesian dilemma" or "Hobbesian choice"
or "Hobbes choice", either.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

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