I swear the Chamber of Commerce would complain if the government asked businesses to voluntarily refrain from marketing suicide as an attractive option for unhappy teenagers. “What about about our free speech rights,” they’d cry. Oh yeah, by asking processed food manufacturers and corn syrup vendors not to, pretty please, spend money trying to get our kids hooked on crap food that makes them obese, the government is acting like Big Brother. “But people will hate us if we ignore these voluntary restrictions,” they wail. Maybe you deserve to be hated. People would hate me, too, if I said a bunch of hurtful and hateful things. That doesn’t mean I’ve lost the right to say them if I want. Jerkoffs.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Something worth noting– local Chamber chapters are not necessarily affiliated with the wretched national organization. Here in my little town in upstate NY, we have a really good guy who is our county Chamber director, and he hates the national Chamber. I’ve been pushing him to adopt another name, and thus dis-associate our good local outfit from the national thugs.
Sounds like the title of a new rock song with snarky lyrics and decadent stylings.
Voluntary restrictions always fail because there is one seller who thinks they can get advantage by ignoring the restriction. Oh, that happens with legal mandatory restrictions with criminal penalties as well. That right there should tell you why the idea of voluntary restrictions is pure, self-serving, ideological poppycock.
I hear a smoky seductive and disinterested female voice and heavy metal riffs.
It’s not the article at your link that’s amazing; it’s the comments! So many of them leap from a report that only suggests that manufacturers refrain from certain kinds of marketing to declaring we are living in 1984! Are all of these posters paid lackeys for Kellogg’s? Why does the very idea that you might want to avoid drinking too many sodas or snacking on corn syrup-laden crap incense them to such a high degree?
Everywhere I see evidence that people have gone insane. I mean, even if they’re paid to spout this nonsense, how crazy do you have to be to do that job?
From what I can tell, it is just a characteristic of the Tea Party mindset that everyone should have the “right” to eat and drink what they want. And that any attempt to inform or persuade someone to minimize their intake of things which have been scientifically proven to have negative, long term health effects is the first step to the government prescribing our allowable meal content.
Never mind that many of these ingredients are hidden under scientific sounding names, are significant components of the cheap, convenient and artificial food that is often the mainstay of the poor and the young and has no nutritional value at all. It is just another component in the right’s war on the poor.
“Let them eat cake”, they say………as long as it heavy on the sugar and preservatives.
This is close.
What they really feel is that they have the “right” to do whatever they they also have the “right” to never have any criticism of anything they do ever. In fact any kind of criticism of anything they do is “stepping on their rights”.
This also feeds into why, in Tea Party World, calling someone a racist is a worse sin than making racist comments. Everyone should be allowed to say what they want (“Free Speech Rights”) but if you call them out for being an asshole then you’re “violating their rights”.
Except on the job. These folks on the job are the most likely to be toadies. The believe in private power but refuse to allow the public power than can restrain the private power that oppresses them.
Their family? They are autocrats. Government? No taxes, no rules. But a work, it’s snap and “Yes sir.” even when it’s driving the firm down the toilet.
It’s a form of the same delusion that caused a motorcycle rider to become a fatality instead of a serious injury on his way to protest mandatory motorcycle helmets.
It’s the infection of the “nanny state” rhetoric, with it’s implication of loss of manhood. It is generally guys who go ballistic over this sort of stuff.
When “men were men” there were men like Upton Sinclair.