Coming to Terms With Our Obsessions, Time to ban car commercials?
Social engineering is a concept many Americans naturally abhor, because it attacks our deeply held freedom, and we have always believed in doing virtually anything we want. Free-market capitalists feel this way, and most citizens usually go along for the ride.
But our country's obsessive consumption of oil to fill the tanks of our auto-centric culture may eventually kill off the world, and believe it or not, Mr. and Mrs. America, you and I will go down, too. Our love affair with cars has to change, sooner rather than later. The hubris of excess (see Hummer) has gotten our society into a pickle, and it's time to take a novel approach with this problem.
Bob Ecker
Well, there is so much wrong with what this barking moonbat (from barking moonbat world headquarters) has written, I hardly know where to begin.
Let's begin with the opening in which Mr. Moonbat acknowledges that social engineering is abhorrent to most of humanity, but then goes on to indicate he is willing to ram it down our throats anyway, "for our own good."
It is axiomatic that left-wing extremists are incapable of comprehending anything deeper than surface characteristics and associations. Ecker casts that axiom in concrete with his modest proposal. He asserts that banning cigarette advertising essentially killed off the tobacco industry and was largely responsible for a decline in tobacco use among Americans. A couple of truths belie this assertion. First, tobacco sales were roughly unchanged in the ten years following the advertising ban and in fact saw some slight increases during the mid 1980s. Tobacco company profits, however, went through the roof following the ban, due partly to the reduced advertising budgets, and tobacco executives discovered that their product was advertising agnostic. Second, during the late 1990s, tobacco use among teenagers and early 20-somethings rose significantly. For those who went to the same public schools Mr. Ecker attended, the people who were smoking more had never seen a cigarette commercial in their lives.
Ecker would have Congress once again do something completely unconstitutional and immoral and punitively act in a fashion that will have no effect whatsoever on the issue he has identified. Whether or not his predicate is even valid is an entirely different discussion.
Inevitably, some idiot Congressman with a D after his name will jump on this like white on rice. And 30 years from now, some other leftist moonbat will suggest banning advertising of whatever bogeyman he or she has identified, pointing to this madness as the template for success.
And so it goes.
But our country's obsessive consumption of oil to fill the tanks of our auto-centric culture may eventually kill off the world, and believe it or not, Mr. and Mrs. America, you and I will go down, too. Our love affair with cars has to change, sooner rather than later. The hubris of excess (see Hummer) has gotten our society into a pickle, and it's time to take a novel approach with this problem.
Bob Ecker
Well, there is so much wrong with what this barking moonbat (from barking moonbat world headquarters) has written, I hardly know where to begin.
Let's begin with the opening in which Mr. Moonbat acknowledges that social engineering is abhorrent to most of humanity, but then goes on to indicate he is willing to ram it down our throats anyway, "for our own good."
It is axiomatic that left-wing extremists are incapable of comprehending anything deeper than surface characteristics and associations. Ecker casts that axiom in concrete with his modest proposal. He asserts that banning cigarette advertising essentially killed off the tobacco industry and was largely responsible for a decline in tobacco use among Americans. A couple of truths belie this assertion. First, tobacco sales were roughly unchanged in the ten years following the advertising ban and in fact saw some slight increases during the mid 1980s. Tobacco company profits, however, went through the roof following the ban, due partly to the reduced advertising budgets, and tobacco executives discovered that their product was advertising agnostic. Second, during the late 1990s, tobacco use among teenagers and early 20-somethings rose significantly. For those who went to the same public schools Mr. Ecker attended, the people who were smoking more had never seen a cigarette commercial in their lives.
Ecker would have Congress once again do something completely unconstitutional and immoral and punitively act in a fashion that will have no effect whatsoever on the issue he has identified. Whether or not his predicate is even valid is an entirely different discussion.
Inevitably, some idiot Congressman with a D after his name will jump on this like white on rice. And 30 years from now, some other leftist moonbat will suggest banning advertising of whatever bogeyman he or she has identified, pointing to this madness as the template for success.
And so it goes.
posted by Anonymous | 12:35 PM
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