Tobacco International, Inc

In a nation-state, when people talk about “defence”, they usually have a foreign power in mind, or perhaps terrorist groups. But, to my mind, the biggest enemy nation states have to face is transnational corporations seeking to subvert and coerce their decision making. The Australian tobacco dispute is a case in point.

We have long seen military action and coups to benefit commercial interests, but generally behind the fig-leaf of national flags. I wonder how soon it will be before transnational corporations start to employ their own mercenaries openly, like the fictional Star Wars Trade Federation, or Dune’s Spacing Guild?

Back to the Oz: the recent trial in London has confirmed my own opinion that News Corp is an international criminal organisation. Murdoch seems like SPECTRE’s Blofeld, but without the charm – I wonder whether he likes cats?

@3 Tim
Is there an argument for part of the rise being people stocking up or inventorying ahead of the excise tax increase – which would account for some part of both the apparent rise and the steepness of the drop?

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but its a graph pattern I see a lot in industries where pipeline stuffing often occurs.

If you haven’t already seen it, Mike Seccombe has a brilliant article on Murdoch’s efforts to discredit the effects of plain packaging: http://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2014/06/28/murdoch-and-the-ipa-work-together-big-tobacco/1403877600

I agree with the tobacco lobby!

OK, I think they have a point. The issue to me is the extent to which the government can dictate how private companies and vendors can package and advertise their products. And this particular instance falls right around where the line should be drawn.

Smokers nowadays are mostly rednecks, so they fall on the wrong side of the culture struggle from most of the readers on this site. But if the US federal government decided that the approach it would take to the attempted legalization of canabis in some states would be to stipulate that it could only be sold in unattractive or repellent packaging, to drive down sales, I can imagine the sort of ridicule Crooked Timber commentators would put on that.

Where I think the line should be drawn is that laws and regulations restricting commercial advertising are OK and often desirable. The government can and should, for example ban knowingly making false claims to sell a product, ban commercial advertising altogether from certain venues, even ban the use of pictures of attractive models to sell products, etc. So the plain brown wrappers are fine, though I’d prefer that this was done across the board instead of for one particular product. But the government should not be able to dictate the content of what advertising it allows, including determining content to essentially force companies to drive down sales of their own products. So I agree that the tobacco companies should not be forced to put disturbing images on their own products. The government could pay for its own advertising campaign -paid for by revenues from taxes on tobacco!- where it broadcasts the disturbing images of the effects of smoking. The line is drawn the condition for access to a venue where you can speak is that you have to use it to say things the government wants you to say.

Rupert Murdoch, global scourge.

You have to admit he’s done a hell of a jerb of making life better for the global 0.1%, and worse for almost everybody else.
~

The relationship between smoking denialists and climate change deniers was demonstrated in Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s wonderfull book “Merchants of Doubt”.

Packaging laws also exist in Canada where 50% of the front and back face of the cigarette package is occupied by a gory picture of some kind of cancer or smoking related illness. The Canadian health services seem to like it. And as a single payer country I appreciate such measures on the governmental bottom line.

John, so let’s compare it to climate change then. You say $50 a tonne for the carbon tax, Stern $80, Nordhaus $15 then rising over the decades to $250 and Tol $15 now and forever. Within the constraints and assumptions used by each each number is entirely defensible. I tend to go along with the Nordhaus one.

OK, great. But this doesn’t mean that because we all agree that a carbon tax is the right thing to do (as, with tobacco, measures to reduce consumption might be a good thing to do) that we should then accept just any old stuff on the subject. Like Hansen’s idea that it should be $1,000 (in the actual paper, he’s really arguing that the right number might be “up to” $1,000).

So with plain packaging or anything else about tobacco. Assume that the aim is to reduce consumption: OK, does it?

Tim Worstall: what is your point? Government should avoid all interventions that haven’t been emperically proven to work? Sometimes there is no way to rigorously test that other than to do the intervention. Especially when the intervention is designed to work mostly over the long term.

Yeah let’s restrict advertising for and put plain packaging with disgusting pictures on alcohol, ready meals, junk food – oh and what about cars, petrol and the whole shebang …

Chris Grant @ 18–climate change denialism has been heavily funded by the tobacco industry, looking for an advantage in its own struggle against science-based regulation.
See, e. g.,
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalliving.g2

Did a similar thing happen with Australia’s experience with gun control? Gun nuts in North America regularly cite dubious numbers and claims about the supposed failure of gun control in Oz. Wouldn’t surprise me to see the same merchants of doubt behind it, laughed out of the room in Australia, but widely cited abroad.

Flip– It could be that the tobacco companies spend a lot on packaging and advertising because they are competing with each other. Drab, unadvertised cigarettes don’t sell well if they’re next to brightly-packaged advertised ones. (Particularly if there’s a minimum price per pack, so they can’t compete much on price.)

But make them all drab, and I bet there’s little short-term impact on total demand.

Plain packaging is also intended to reduce take-up of smoking among adolescents. We won’t know the full effect until at least 2020, but as others have mentioned, the fact that the tobacco companies screamed blue murder about the change is a pretty good indicator of what their own market research is saying.

[Please delete comment in moderation. Phone insists on using my full fake name.]

The tobacco industry’s response to plain-packaging was to flood the market with cheap tobacco.

That would explain the “blip” – a short-term reduction in the long-term rate of decline of tobacco sales – seen in the ABS’s quarterly business survey statistics. For six months or so at lease, until the next excise rise, tobacco became a moderately more affordable commodity again.

As BAT Australia chief David Crow was quoted as saying in the linked article: the cheaper tobacco “basically means more people will smoke, more kids will smoke”. Charming.

Contrary to his claim they did this because plain-packaging would result in an increase in black-market imports they’d have to compete with (sheer supposition) – it is highly arguable their actual reason was to effect the temporary reduction in rates of decline they got – and therefore ‘prove’ that plain-packaging doesn’t work…

Yeah, AFAICT a lot of the tobacco lobby’s argument boils down to claiming, without evidence, that the statistics are wrong because smokers are now buying heaps of chop-chop.

John: ” But, obviously, looking at one year of data with another anti-smoking measure in the same year, you can’t make a conclusive inference.”

Well, no, not really. There were two measures, yes, but they came in one year apart. Plain packaging one year before the excise rise. And plain packaging appears, at best, to have done not very much. The excise rise had a decent sized effect. Or perhaps we should say that there’s not much effect around the time of plain packaging and there is some effect around the time of the tax rise.

That’s actually the evidence in play. That the two measures came in far enough apart that we can see what effect each had.

“OTOH, if smoking had actually increased, swamping both the tax and the long-term trend, that would be pretty good evidence against plain packaging. That’s exactly what the Oz claimed, and it wasn’t true.”

http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.cz/2014/06/that-aussie-plain-packaging-data-again.html

That chart there appears to be saying just that. Is it entirely made up?

“Tim Worstall: what is your point? Government should avoid all interventions that haven’t been emperically proven to work? Sometimes there is no way to rigorously test that other than to do the intervention.”

I’m extremely grateful to Australians for actually undertaking this research. For it means that before (as many are arguing the UK should) the UK does the same thing then there is actually empirical evidence by which to judge the policy. And so far the evidence seems to be that plain packaging, at best, does nothing very much while tax rises have a decent sized effect.

It would therefore seem that the correct way to reduce smoking rate further is to increase the tax rate. Empirical evidence: tells you what works and what doesn’t.

I remember, more than 40 years ago, the vilification of Barbara Castle when she introduced the breathalyser and mandatory disqualification for drink-driving. And for a while people caught by the law complained about the police and often received social sympathy. Not now though: drink driving is no longer socially acceptable.

It takes time for society to change – and yes, restrictions on smoking are a kind of democratic social engineering: a fight back against commercial interests which attempt social engineering/brainwashing every day via the advertising “industry”. Plain packaging is part of that democratic social engineering process: one more step in the deglamourising of a filthy and too-often fatal habit.

re Tim’s comment above – one cannot disaggregate measures like that. Yes, price increases`work, but they carry a political cost and encourage evasion. So increases have to be limited. The aim is to reduce desirability, which is as much social as economic. Pulling out a putty coloured packet with a picture of a diseased lung on it is uncool. In Australia, ads have shifted from an emphasis on smoking is unhealthy to more “smoking is for losers”. But what works best is in part determined by how many smoke and who they are, and what groups take it up. Simple supply/demand calculations don’t hack it.

@,

If your true concern is consumption increase – big if – and you don’t know whether plain packaging or excise is more effective to reduce consumption, it’s a no brainer; deploy both measures.

One of the arguments that’s being wheeled out in Ireland (where a plain packaging proposal is furthest advanced legislatively) is intellectual property. Here’s Bob Goodlatte (R-Philip Morris) writing to the Irish Ambassador in Washington DC —

“I believe plain packaging would unfairly restrict the intellectual property of a legal product and that such a policy sets a dangerous precedent for other legal products that critics may cite as causing health concerns – for example, alcohol products and foods containing sugar or that are high in fat,” Mr Goodlatte wrote in a letter with Tuesday’s date. “I believe such a move would mark the beginning of a troubling trend of countries restricting the intellectual property of legal products about which they may philosophically disagree.” He warned that undermining intellectual product would be “an invitation for counterfeit goods” that are dangerous for consumers and that it would be “very difficult and costly” to combat the trafficking of counterfeit goods, which are often linked to other forms of crime.

The smuggling argument requires its own two-step, including blurring the distinction between “counterfeit” and “contraband.”

Tobacco is always a fun one, where modern liberals and conservatives switch side, with liberals supporting regressive taxes and conservatives supporting individual choice.

It is always important in my mind, when tobacco comes up, to remember this point is commonly held, but very wrong:

“And the reasons are quite clear: tobacco is an unusually dangerous substance whose use creates real social costs”

The real social costs are negative in the US. Cigarette smokers die younger and quicker than non-smokers. The savings from shortened social security and medicare payments more than offset the accelerated medical costs associated with their premature deaths.

Smokers are to be pitied and helped to quit IMHO, but to pretend that all these taxes and restrictions are to right a social cost is pure rubbish.

@44
Its also interesting to follow a thread where participants have consistently and ardently defended the legalization of marijuana and then likewise chastise and rebuke tobacco companies for selling ‘death sticks’ and preying on the young.

“Social cost” does not just mean tax dollars. Millions of dead citizens are another kind of cost.

#41

The reason for my interest is, as at the top, that this is a live political issue in the UK. There are those arguing that the UK should move to plain packaging. One of their arguments is that Oz has done so and the smoking rate has gone down. Great, so let’s do it!

But while the smoking rate has indeed gone down there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that plain packaging had anything to do with it. So perhaps it’s not a good policy?

There’s no evidence it would do anybody any harm. Usually I like the argument that government should do the least that’s practical, and do nothing that lacks a good reason. But this time it looks cheap. It doesn’t take a lot of enforcement, tobacco companies will tattle on each other if they see somebody breaking the rules.

Probably the packaging does not increase total sales much. They’re selling to addicts, who buy what they need. Likely the packaging has some influence on which cigarettes people buy, a brand attracts some smokers and repels others, and the money spent on pretty packaging may be a zero-sum game. Make them stop, and likely they can increase profits or reduce price, while their artists and advertising voodoo experts will do other work which we can hope is more useful.

So to me it looks like:

A: packaging does not affect sales: Harmless.
B: packaging reduces sales: Good.

The only argument I can see against it is slippery-slope, if we let the government do this harmless example it encourages them to do more and then they’re likely to do something bad.

This is going a little off point but we’ve a closely related (in a UK political sense it’s closely related) argument about minimum pricing for booze. Sure, making low cost booze higher priced would lead to lower consumption. But the campaigners are insisting that it should be a legislated minimum price rather than a rise in excise duty. Meaning that the revenues from that minimum price will go to producers/retailers rather than the public purse.

Which sounds like an entirely crazy proposal to me. Why would you want to protect the margins of producers? Why not capture that higher revenue to pay for all those exploded livers that are the justification for the higher price/lower consumption in hte first place?

I have not fully thought this out, but just try out the idea: If it’s a tax, vendors have an incentive to evade the tax if they can. Why take money out of their customers’ pockets and send it to the government, if they can find a way not to? Report some thefts and pilferage, and sell some of the stock cheap, etc. The only downside is the risk of getting caught.

But if the government requires vendors to sell at a high price and keep the money, the negotiation looks different.

“How about you give me a discount, I’ll keep it quiet-like, you can depend on it.”

“I daresay you would since it would be your criminal act too. It’s against the law for me to sell this cheap, and I’m a law-abiding citizen, I am.”

“Well, but Tom Sawyer down the road, he does discounts and he gets a lot of business because of it. You want a lot of business don’t you?”

“Well then you should buy from him! You tell me you’ll keep it quiet if I do, and then you spread Tom’s name like it was legal? Gerroff with you! You’ll get no discounts here!”

If the government wants high prices more then it wants the revenue from the tax, it could do worse than appeal to vendors’ self interest.

re: # 46 armchair economist did a number of pieces:
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/the-cost-of-smoking-iv-external-costs/

His numbers are a bit higher than mine, but he is also mixing some private costs with public/social. I’m too busy to look up other studies that exclude those, but yes, the net public/social/taxpayer cost is negative.

re: # 47

We could be using different terminology, I mean social costs as costs borne by the public taxpayer. As an aside, smoking does not cause death, only premature death. There is a difference between the two.

re: 50, what goal? I don’t have an agenda.

“smoking does not cause death, only premature death”

Shooting someone does not cause death, only premature death.

Map Maker @ 51

This is how your link summarizes the analysis:

“I talked with a reporter last week who asked me a simple question:

do smokers actually save society money because they die sooner?
The short answer is no, smoking imposes large costs on society. However, as I talked with the reporter, I realized that he had many questions underneath this simple one, that not only related to aggregate or net costs (social cost), but to the distribution of costs (who bears the burden).”

That ‘no’ looms large. Are you sure this analysis supports your claim?

Map Maker is already dead to me. It’s only a matter of time, so why raise a fuss over when?

Before I came to terms with Map Maker’s death, I realized the social costs that my 89- and 85-year-old parents have inflicted on the rest of us, and I apologise on their behalf that they each quit smoking long ago, thereby prolonging the social burden. I am particularly embarrassed that my mother increased that social burden by having part of a lung removed 20+ years ago, only a couple of years before she began collecting on various pensions. (I’ll need some time to figure out where that money would have gone, and the social benefits that would accrue – if only she’d had the decency to succumb.)

Now I am considering whether we need encourage people to avoid early detection of cancer. But that would be suspiciously agenda-like, and in honor of the late Map Maker I have decided to become agenda-free. From this point forward, nothing I say shall be construed to have meaning, and my statements are not warranted as suitable for any specific purpose, including argument.

@2 Sasha:
“We have long seen military action and coups to benefit commercial interests, but generally behind the fig-leaf of national flags. I wonder how soon it will be before transnational corporations start to employ their own mercenaries openly….”

Not so far removed are the recent reports of a Blackwater manager who headed off a State Department investigation of his operation by openly threatening to murder the investigator.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/us/before-shooting-in-iraq-warning-on-blackwater.html

“Not so far removed are the recent reports of a Blackwater manager who headed off a State Department investigation of his operation by openly threatening to murder the investigator.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/us/before-shooting-in-iraq-warning-on-blackwater.html”

You know even after everything I am amazed that he got away with that. Incredible.

“That said, it seems like an unfair bait-and-switch to make the case against smoking with hard-nosed figures expressed as financial costs, then decry the monster whose figuring might show that dead smokers save public money. ”

‘might show’ does a lot of work here. Map Maker’s citation actually disagrees with his claim.

That aside, the conversation usually goes something like this:

Smoking is killing all those people!

So what? It’s their life after all.

Well, it’s also costing us money!

No, those dead people save us money, cuz we don’t have to pay for their nursing home care when they’re old. It would cost more if they lived, so we’re ahead!

You decide where to point your moral outrage.

@64
“1. There’s no inconsistency in favoring legalisation of marijuana and restrictions on tobacco. It’s just a matter of supporting the same restrictions on marijuana.”

Agreed, and point taken. I guess I just can’t figure out how to put a photo of a bad trip on the side of an unmarked clear plastic bag.

I don’t get this.

The tobacco companies are arguing that the law should be changed because it has increased their sales?

Do I have that right? If I do, who could possibly believe it?

“I remember, more than 40 years ago, the vilification of Barbara Castle when she introduced the breathalyser and mandatory disqualification for drink-driving.”

She had a drink named after her, the Bloody Barbara. It was made of half tomato juice and half tomato juice.

“Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained.

Assume for a moment that on average everybody costs the same per year in health-industry costs.

Then the way to reduce health costs is to reduce the population size. Every baby who is not born reduces health costs by a whole lot. If we could get people to stop having children entirely then we could reduce health care costs to zero in one generation!

Well, but everybody does not cost the same. In an auto accident one person might be smushed instantly and incur no costs, while another might become a quadriplegic and live a long time, completely unable to care for himself. In general old people cost more than young healthy people, even as they are less productive.

The libertarian approach would be to let everybody handle it for himself. Save your money, and when you need healthcare then pay for it, and when you run out of money then do without. It’s your own lookout. Maybe an insurance company that studies everything they can find out about you, will bet that you will stay healthy. On average it will cost you a lot. With that approach it’s nobody’s business how much your healthcare costs you, except your own. You get as much as you want and deserve, according to how much you get paid for your contributions to people who have money.

But when somebody else pays for your healthcare, doesn’t it make sense to euthanise the people who cost more? We profitably do it that way with farm animals. Cull the sick, and the average is healthier and cheaper.

Also if people get the idea that their healthcare costs are being counted and they might be killed if they look too expensive, they will not trouble the healthcare industry as much and will be cheaper.

It makes logical sense. But something about it leaves me with a nameless doubt. I just don’t like it.

Sorry, was away.

The issue of social costs is complicated with tobacco. The link I provided included lots of costs I don’t include as a public / taxpayer cost of tobacco. Again, only looking at taxpayer costs of tobacco vs. their “benefits”, tobacco is taxed too heavily. The armchair economist includes lots of “social” / non-government paid costs of tobacco, which are not part of my concern here.

John – I object to plain packaging because it is a silly demonstration of government oversight where the costs and benefits don’t add up. there slippery slope doesn’t help either:
– alcohol is worse than tobacco IMO, yet we still allow advertising of the product on TV and in sport (heck at most sport venues)
– why allow pornography – perhaps if all magazines were required to put a brown wrapper over it and ensure all models were wearing non-gender repressive clothing/poses someone, somewhere would be a better person
– high end sports cars that exceed posted speed limits in many jurisdictions

Tobacco is just one of those funny code switches where modern liberals and conservatives switch sides. Immigration is similar, where modern liberals support free movement of labor (though they will fight free movement of capital) and conservatives will oppose.

“why allow pornography – perhaps if all magazines were required to put a brown wrapper over it and ensure all models were wearing non-gender repressive clothing/poses someone, somewhere would be a better person”

Ah yes. Thousands die every year from exposure to Playboy. It is a tragedy….

Smoking cigarettes is a great signifier. In the early 20th c it was a mark of urban sophistication, “fast”, then it was more and more normal. WW2 saw packs of smokes in the C-rations of GI’s. And they were glad to get them.
By the 50’s it was a mark of adolescent rebel posture, an assumption of adult freedom by the still relatively dependent young.
By the late 60’s it was an unquestionable commonality. Everybody smoked.
Kids don’t believe it when you tell them people smoked in the grocery store in the 50’s and 60’s, but they sure did, it was a low-clss move but people still did it, and in the bank, in every cafe restaurant and bar, and most family homes, all the time, ashtrays were everywhere, on desks, in living rooms, and of course in cars front and back. Cigarette butts lined the roadways and gutters in little drifts.
They were called “cancer sticks” and “coffin nails” at the very same time the practice was so nearly universal that a curious child, like me, might ask an adult how come they didn’t smoke.
That all changed pretty suddenly, and it seems to have been a result of the same subliminal practices that made smoking glamorous and signifiying in the first place.
Instead of the cinema hero and the glamorous beauty (the sexiest women I saw as a boy were on the backs of magazines, smoking freshly-lit cigarettes) it was the villains who smoked. There were educational programs massively delivered to schoolkids. The hideous lung, the wheezing feeble emphysematic etc.
And those statistics about second-hand smoke that led to the bizarre hand-wavings of decent people everywhere when confronted by the awful pall of smoker’s exhalations.
In the 90’s I saw a woman berate her husband for breathing second-hand smoke near their infant son, while she stood 3 feet from the tailpipe of a running car whose poorly tuned engine was kicking serious exhaust.
It was a big concerted effort to brainwash people toward healthier choices, and it worked.
But the tools were never questioned. The use of seduction and imprint either way.
Like it’s okay to use subliminal advertisement for the “good”.
Maybe.
I’m not pro or anti the use of anything. It’s situational, personal, and has a lot to do with freedom, but this isn’t being debated in a cultural vacuum.
Why did people start doing something that most bodies initially reject instinctively as harmful?
Seductive coercion. Same reason they’re driving 8 cylinder SUV’s with 2 people in them 5 miles to the store or school and back. Completely unnecessary, seriously harmful, but the invisible authority behind the screen says it’s okay. And now it says it’s not okay to smoke.
Curiously silent about those SUV’s though, considering.
The issue is hovering around whether, if people are going to insist on making bad choices, the legal system has the responsibility of correcting them.
Debating societal costs just seems so mindless, really. A refuge from the real dilemma. How much freedom do we get to have, and who’s going to give it to us? Or take it away.

roy belmont: Debating societal costs just seems so mindless, really. A refuge from the real dilemma. How much freedom do we get to have, and who’s going to give it to us? Or take it away.

Yes, we’re stuck in society, talking abstractly about social costs, trying, with limited success, to hide our conflicting interests behind our common interests.

“I have a conspiracy-minded colleague, and his theory is that the war on smoking is a part of the deliberate drive to atomization. You see, fire, open fire, it brings people together, builds a community. ‘They’ don’t like it. It has to go.”

Yikes! Now that is paranoia!

Bruce Wilder 07.03.14 at 9:25 pm:
I truly can’t tell if you’re being ironic/sarcastic there. So then I don’t know how to respond to it, except like this, which is sort of content-less ironic, but not content-less sarcastic. Just saying something unnecessarily extensively, or rather seeming to be saying something pretty extensively, but not really saying anything at all.
Mirror recursion with no original image reflected.
Which is not as fun as actually saying something, for me anyway, but is, at least I think it is, at least right now while I’m writing it I think it is, good practice, for later, when something might actually need to be said.
–
Ze Kraggash 07.03.14 at 9:30 pm:
Considering that very quickly once the cultural tipping point was reached, the demographics of smoking were mostly in the underfolk, possibly a reflection of the health-conscious narcissistic gym-tone me-me of the upperfolk, and the anxiety-thick lives below for whom smoking – break time! – was a kind of self-medicating…may be something to it.
The superficial idea that concern for public health was motivating it doesn’t hold much water.
Maybe it’s an insurance thing? I do believe helmet laws for two-wheelers were almost entirely insurance company driven.
Certainly the campaign(s) against obesity-causing fast-food didn’t gain the traction anti-smoking did.
Smoking so bad, grossly overweight children…not so bad.
Is it that paranoid to think there’s a concerted effort to keep the people under the extracting elite from rising in any kind of unity?
Divide the age-clads and the econo-clads. Loser-scorn.
E pluribus nada.

oops: “where many people still smoke”

The purpose of the plain package legislation is not to achieve a short term reduction in tobacco sales. Like public smoking bans and restrictions on tobacco use in movies, the goal is to change the public acceptance of smoking and the social environment in which people choose to smoke, in order to obtain long-term reductions in smoking rates. This is all very clearly laid out in the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). The Australian has has invented a different purpose for the law, and then – shock! – found it fails to achieve a purpose it wasn’t designed for. This is classic FUD, and no surprise that the Tobacco Industry’s cheerleaders all pick up on it – and that Worstall, who never saw a lobbyist he didn’t like, follows suit.

The purpose of minimum alcohol prices is also not to reduce alcohol sales, and it has nothing to do with “Busted livers” or whatever Worstall is blathering about above. It is intended to reduce binge and risky drinking. So Worstall’s suggestion of raising taxes to pay for busted livers is another example of a policy alternative completely unrelated to the purpose of the policy being discussed. Also classic FUD.

Worstall would also do well to note that the minimum alcohol price proposal is a response to the negative health effects of the (long-awaited) liberalization of UK drinking laws, and that if something is not done about binge-drinking then people will begin looking for much less liberal responses to the problem than mere taxes and price rules. The conservative side of British politics contains quite a number of people who want to revoke the liberalization of drinking laws, and they are well represented in the media (e.g. by the Daily Mail, which often campaigns on this). If you want to keep the right to drink anywhere you like anytime, I suggest you get onside with some minimal price-based changes to cheap alcohol, before your conservative pay-masters start marching back the liberalization process.

And I ask you Worstall, why do you continue to trust these cheerleaders for Big Tobacco? They lie consistently, and all the time – but you still buy their stupid arguments every time. Why?

Also, this whole conspiracy theory about anti-smoking people wanting to stop people gathering is offensive and disgusting. Anti-smoking people simply want to improve human health, and (strangely!) seem to think that stopping very powerful corporations from using deceptive and misleading techniques to sell addictive poison to people might be a good place to start. That is all – we have no other agenda.

faustusnotes 07.04.14 at 4:13 am:
Also, this whole conspiracy theory about anti-smoking people wanting to stop people gathering is offensive and disgusting. Anti-smoking people simply want to improve human health

I’m just having all kinds of trouble figuring out what’s being said at me, or even in this if it’s being said at me.
Assuming that it is, wtf?
The glamorization of cigarette smoking was a conspiracy. Flat-out straight-up conspiracy. Popular students on college campuses in the between-wars years were paid to smoke particular brands and pass them out to their friends, Hollywood was flowing with behind-the-scenes cash buying screen shots of glamorous sexy close-ups and rugged manly close-ups of actors puffing away. Doctors were paid, at least in some instances, to recommend smoking for asthma and other respiratory conditions.
The tobacco companies insidiously conspired to obfuscate and deny the science as it came in, that smoking cigarettes had serious health impacts at an epidemic level.
So right there we’ve got conspiracy front and center.
Then we have a conspiracy to get people to stop< smoking, using the same coercive subliminal techniques as got them started. Plus of course above-board education and sensible information campaigns as well.
Then, on top of that, I'm suggesting not so much a conspiracy as an oddly demographic-specific target of social rejection.
Not suggesting some wizard of bullshit and manipulation sat back and pondered how to screw the poor benighted smokers in their hovels and shanties, but that the consensus scorn for smoking is heavily weighted against the underfolk.
N.B I was a seriously militant anti-smoking people for years, at a time when smoking was an unquestioned right and up there with mom and apple pie on the list of normal American things to like and enjoy.
Smoking people were shocked at the effrontery of my complaints, and my fellow anti-smoking people were very few and far between, a beleagured minority, then, of no social significance whatsoever.
I am no longer one of the faithful on that score.
I am however quite comfortable insisting that there is something to the use of pesticides on tobacco being relatively unregulated and unrestricted, and without any research to hand, feel pretty confident that a graph of the rise of pesticide use on tobacco will have some parallel with the rise of lung cancer especially, with time lapse taken into consideration.
I'm also suggesting that there's a softness in the target because of the demographic. Whereas the absurdity of people driving 8-cylinder SUV's for family transportation, which threatens to be far more of a social health problem if you consider the loss of stability in weather patterns, is yet to be hit with the mighty hammer of health-minded disapproval.
The conspiracy's almost entirely on the part of the bad guys. The social prejudices and timidity and misplaced antagonism of "anti-smoking people" is another matter altogether.

Ooh, this one’s nice.
http://www.icravefreebies.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/sharelg-232×300.jpg

I really enjoyed that movie.

Advertising isn’t a conspiracy. It wasn’t a conspiracy to get people to start smoking, it’s not a conspiracy to stop it. If you go to a movie and some rich people are using an Appleâ„¢ computer that’s not a conspiracy, it’s an ad.

Lying about the science and cramming more nicotine in there to hook people is much more conspiratorial.

The Temporary Name 07.04.14 at 6:21 pm:

Shallow, incoherent, and arrogantly misread, as usual.
Talking to people isn’t a conspiracy, it’s a conversation.
Making bombs in your basement isn’t a conspiracy, it’s homebrew manufacturing.
Getting people to create a diversion somewhere while you plant that bomb isn’t a conspiracy, it’s social organizing.
Getting together with others who hate the king, who has spies everywhere so be careful, and discussing and agreeing on a way to assassinate him isn’t conspiracy, it’s politics!

Intentionally misleading people by bombarding them with images that lead them to false conclusions and behaviors detrimental to them and beneficial to you, and doing that in concert with others who share your amoral self-interest and expectations of resultant benefits isn’t conspiracy, it’s…uhm…you know, business.

Spoken like a true merchant prince.

Intentionally misleading people by bombarding them with images that lead them to false conclusions and behaviors detrimental to them and beneficial to you, and doing that in concert with others who share your amoral self-interest and expectations of resultant benefits isn’t conspiracy, it’s…uhm…you know, business.

It’s not really a hidden agenda that people want to sell you their stuff, even if it’s garbage that makes the whole world worse. If you talk to the guy who’s trying to sell you a cigarette and ask him if he wants to sell you that cigarette my guess is that he will say yes. That’s not quite the same as hiding a bomb in the basement that nobody knows about.

You might be interested in this buzzword festival:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory

Then there’s no need for the word conspiracy except to use your syllable supply. The connotation is pretty clear: it’s a secret plot to do a bad thing, as Roy’s bomb analogy shows.

I am, though, all in favour of holding people to account for the lies of tobacco companies. That sometimes happens, but not often enough.

I was a seriously militant anti-smoking people for years, at a time when smoking was an unquestioned right and up there with mom and apple pie on the list of normal American things to like and enjoy.
Smoking people were shocked at the effrontery of my complaints, and my fellow anti-smoking people were very few and far between, a beleagured minority, then, of no social significance whatsoever.
I am no longer one of the faithful on that score.

How come? You were against it when it was uncool to be against it, and then when you started winning you quit?

Whereas the absurdity of people driving 8-cylinder SUV’s for family transportation, which threatens to be far more of a social health problem if you consider the loss of stability in weather patterns, is yet to be hit with the mighty hammer of health-minded disapproval.

So, the National Cancer Society etc have been working against smoking for *50 years* and now that they’re getting a lot of success you criticize them because they aren’t doing every other good cause as successfully? OK, you can do whatever you want that’s legal but you’re making noises like there’s something particularly moral about your stand, and I just don’t see it at all. If less smoking is a good thing, which you used to believe, why isn’t less smoking still a good thing after rich people quit and it’s mostly poor people who don’t?

You know perfectly well that when the conventions change and SUVs are considered evil, it will be poor people who buy cheap used SUVs and get criticized for it. Because when society agrees that something is good, richer people buy it and poorer people tend to get stuck with it. That doesn’t mean we’re better off with more smoking and more SUVs.

Right, that’s what my buddy Zoly says too. Something to the effect of ‘how come smoking is so terrible while all the crap we eat, drink, and breath is fine?’

This is a last-gasp argument. “Sure, X, the thing I want to support is evil. But nobody should oppose X until they oppose every other evil just as much! When you get right down to it, isn’t everything evil? You’re hypocritical to oppose X unless you oppose everything!”

I guess I ought to applaud your energy or something. If only it could be harnessed for something good….

The Temporary Name 07.04.14 at 8:14 pm:

Since the beers haven’t gotten here yet, and I’m not overly hungry, I’m in a generous frame.
And since you’re not being egregiously insulting, but only a little tempered and coy, I’ll respond as charitably as I can.
Where this breaks is somewhere around the insistence that advertising is some value neutral device for hawking one’s wares. Which it is which it is.
Until the medium(s) for that hawking have been grafted into the subconscious of the people in unprecedented ways, that have provable effects on conscious decision-making that the victims are completely unaware of, while they choose.
Facebook ringing any bells their Mr. Name?
Now we’re not talking hawking, we’re talking hypnosis, we’re talking mind control, deception, manipulation, we’re talking the soft conspiracies of power and contempt.
We are talking the modern times.
We’re talking the deep shit.
We’re also talking the backbone of the economy – planned obsolescence, artificial desire, what’s good for GM is good for America (!), crap food, crap toys, crap crap crap crap. Advertised! In a free marketplace!
We’re talking a raft of rationalized predations on unsophisticated human beings. All accomplished through the gentle seductive coercion of “advertising”.
And the justification mantras, “Oh please, we just offered these things for sale, we didn’t *force* anyone into buying them”.
So young idiots can scorn their elders for making “bad choices” and move on to healthier lifestyles, safe in the wiser hands of a concerned and loving, uhm, wizard advertising media that cares has been taught, if not forced, to care about them, and what’s best for them. And their children.
And the future of us all.

More nudgy material:

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/behavioural-insights-team

Wayback to 8: ” if the US federal government decided that the approach it would take to the attempted legalization of canabis in some states would be to stipulate that it could only be sold in unattractive or repellent packaging, to drive down sales, I can imagine the sort of ridicule Crooked Timber commentators would put on that.”

Speaking only for myself as a supporter of pot legalization, I fear Big Weed. Maybe not as much as Big Tobacco/Alcohol but still. I think we should come up with reasonable regulation in advance before legalization and the subsequent political power of marijuana merchants, including on packaging. In particular, pot-infused edibles attractive to children should be in child-safe containers that do not draw children’s attention. Not the worst thing in the world if a 3-year old eats massive amounts of pot brownies, but it’s definitely not a good thing either.

“Roy is all advertising a conspiracy? Are all public safety campaigns, for example efforts to encourage people to wash their hands after using the toilet, a conspiracy?”

Fallacy of the excluded middle. It could be, in fact is, that some advertising is a conspiracy to harm you, and some advertising is not. That’s the problem, really.

JT:

Why I stopped being a militant anti-smoker has more to do with an acceptance of human frailty and a growing sense of people being brainwashed all to fuck than anything else. Also freedom.

“My first thought is that in the current context, we should just use it”

Yeah. Then you get people that know best, then you get infantilization, then you get dystopian nightmare. Then we’re there, here. Enslaved minds are more energy-efficient than enslaved bodies.
Using effective tools, sure. But the requirements…for instance democracy, you need an informed electorate, so the – insert bad people names here – go to the processes of informing. And the informed become the disinformed.
CNN’s evolution from more or less trustworthy journalistic news venue under Turner, to propaganda franchise under its present ownership, is a perfect illustration of this.
Facebook’s stock doesn’t seem to have been adversely affected by the release of news of their Pavlovian fun and games.
So getting to a “we don’t need no” mind control seems a little out of reach at present.
Trying to wake each other up is close to all most of us have I think, now.
–
TN:
Ignoring your budding snarkology in hopes it subsides again.
“the hidden agenda is not hidden”

Not in your example. In the 30’s BMOC example it definitely was. In the Hollywood-for-hire example it definitely was. Or are you saying the movie-going public of mid 20th c. America was conscious of the art of sway at work on them? As opposed to just mindlessly turning their minds over to the razzle-dazzle of the big screen.
Or it seems your attitude might be “too bad for them”. Losers. Darwin!

Most people have a default sense that the TV of their upbringing was there to amuse them, to tell them stories etc. An entertaining friend
When of course it was there to gather their collective attention and sell it to sponsors.
British television in the pre-numbered BBC days was so vastly superior to US TV it wasn’t even comparable. No accident, it was a direct result of the minimal content necessary to get those American eyeballs to market being what mattered.
It’s specious to center the argument around value-neutral merchandising practices.

I can remember seeing my father’s hand, while we were watching a baseball game on TV, crawl toward his pocket when an ad for cigarettes came on, then slip back down to the arm of the chair. His smokes were on the end-table. Scary. Habit, trigger, action. Definitely not a conscious act.
It speaks to the outstripping of human awareness and reactive ability by the technologies of behaviorism. You may be fully aware of and okay with the manipulations and experiments of behaviorist IT geeks, but you know the great majority of users on facebook aren’t aware of it, and won’t be able to process the knowledge if they do get it..
It splits the socius into a priesthood serving an elite, and a mass of domesticated animals farmed for their consumer energies.
It’s about contempt ultimately.
I’m not wedded to conspiracy as accusatory semiotic, it’s the evil intent, the separation from the people, the total lack of altruism outside the insider core, that I’m pointing at. Conspiracy covers some of it.
But so does depravity, iniquity, and, in a pinch, evil. Banal as it ever was.

You say not hidden, I say hidden, then you say it wasn’t new.
You’re saying there’s nothing unethical about it, okay, that’s one argument, but the specific reply was addressing hidden/not hidden. Then you jumped out of that linear flow into a completely different argument. There’s a pattern there.
So any further discussion and I have to anticipate, rather than have a direct back and forth. Making for burdens.

You’re eliding the little gap between passing stuff out, which would carry some visible connection, here try these free scones yum!, and paying popular kids to smoke and distribute proprietary brands, where we can assume I think, there was a little clause of keeping it close to the sweater vest, don’t let on where and how you got it.
We’re inured to attractive people lying to us about products for merchandising purposes. So what?
In the midst of a fortress of civilized codes of behavior, where the energies of millions are devoted to protecting us from predatory disease organisms, you’re justifying the predator/prey laws of the jungle.
I don’t care if it’s common practice. I don’t care if it’s in the bloody book of Genesis.
The whole society since about 1956 has been raised, not just exposed to but raised on, images of attractive people lying to them. So it’s okay now. Because precedent!
And this has had no detrimental effect on society as a whole. There are studies! Somewhere!
Caveat canum!
Or, rather, emptor.
The moral paradigm of a sentient parasite.

We’re talking about the marketing of a substance, which the whole thread is united in condemning as seriously harmful, through means that are only abstractly justifiable if you discount any common moral purpose between the seller and his machineries of coercion, and the buyer. You do see that? You are using the word “suckers” with understanding? The contempt in the attitude that would articulate that?

The reasoning behind the Hershey venality is the actual producer of the subliminal message itself isn’t vested in the product that he manipulates, he just wants the bank.
Somehow this means there’s no deception, c o n s p i r a c y or, again my point, contempt for the manipulated. Still trying as I write to see how that works.

No intent to deceive particularly on Mr. De Mille’s end. Which is more speciosity.
It is the subliminal manipulation itself, the lack of evolved defense against it which is also my point, I thought I was making that clear.
There’s no bright line, which is how this stuff gets in.
It’s jots and tittles all the way down.

Advertising and its depraved amorality is now 9/10ths of American political life.
Voted for Bush? Suckers.
Voted for Obama? Suckers.
Contempt.

#114

“My first thought is that in the current context, we should just use it”

Yeah. Then you get people that know best, then you get infantilization, then you get dystopian nightmare.

This reminds me of an old joke.

A man went to the mosque to pray, but a known thief was right beside him. so he didn’t want to take off his shoes because the thief would steal them. The thief whispered in his ear. “Prayers with shoes on do not abide!” He ignored it. Ten minutes into the service the thief whispered loudly. “Prayers with shoes on do not abide!” He ignored it. After another 15 minutes or so the thief couldn’t stand it any more and said out loud, “Prayers with shoes on Do Not Abide!. The man nodded solemnly. “True, but I hope perhaps at least the shoes will abide.”

Let’s say the society as a whole has a big problem with propaganda, advertising, etc. If it actually works on people, and we use it, then in a way we are as bad morally as the evil advertisers. But at least we might win about smoking.

Repeatedly in wars, we are faced with the choice to do evil things that work, or good things that don’t work. The US military consistently chooses to do the evil thing that has a chance for victory, rather than the good thing that must lose. Because whatever chance we have to do good, depends on us winning against the bad guys. When the bad guys win then they get to do whatever they want. So we do shake-and-bake. We use DU. We use cluster bombs which intentionally leave 5-10% unexploded to act against busybodies who try to help afterward. We use drones etc. It’s really bad when we do all the evil stuff and then lose anyway. But if you lose without the evil stuff then it’s either try it or surrender….

The mind-control stuff isn’t as bad, because if it doesn’t work then you’re only being silly. And if it works and all you do is persuade people to do good stuff that they likely would do anyway if they weren’t getting mind-controlled by bad guys, that could be a lot worse.

But the good outcome would be to get the stuff to stop working. You’re not going to get people to stop using it by calling them venal and depraved. You might get a few to quit but there are plenty more to replace them. If it works, they’ll do it. We need it to stop working. If it doesn’t work we can have democracy. We can have rational consequences. It’s a worthy goal.

Why I stopped being a militant anti-smoker has more to do with an acceptance of human frailty and a growing sense of people being brainwashed all to fuck than anything else.

So you got burned out and hopeless. The problem is so overwhelming that you’re just overwhelmed, and rather than work on any piece of it you just tell other people not to bother.

You became part of the precipitate.

The US military consistently chooses to do the evil thing that has a chance for victory, rather than the good thing that must lose.

Except the evil thing backfires as evil things very predictably do, there’s never any victory — just stupid arguments about surges and about another six months ad infinitum, and the good thing loses, not because good things are natural losers, but because the good thing is done so corruptly and incompetently that it can scarcely be said to have been done at all. That’s the reality. And, what does that do for your argument by analogy?

119
Sasha Clarkson 07.05.14 at 8:58 am
“If “corporations are people”, why can’t the tobacco companies (amongst others) be sentenced to death for crimes against humanity? Or is dissolving a corporation a “cruel and unusual” punishment?”

SCOTUS seems to believe more and more that requiring corporte ‘persons’ to obey the law is ‘cruel and unusual’.

#120
That’s the reality. And, what does that do for your argument by analogy?

My argument is that *when it’s true* that evil methods win, there’s no percentage in refusing to use them. Because you definitely lose. So, is it true? Do corporations that use mind-control techniques to sell addictive drugs gain from the mind-control, or have the mind-control advertisers just convinced them that it works when it doesn’t?

If it does work, then we can say “We’re too pure and innocent and good to use the evil techniques. We have to stand back and let the evil people use them to extract every resource they can figure out how to extract from the public while we do nothing that works.” We can talk about what a horrible world we live in, where evil people do evil things and succeed and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Or we can try to pass laws to stop it. People communicate with each other, and some of their communication consists of mind-control stuff and some of it doesn’t. Unless we understand the methods enough to tell the difference how will we know what laws would be effective if we could get them passed and enforced? The laws would pretty much have to spell out what it is that works, in the process of telling people not to do it. Or we could try to make it illegal to communicate. Or let the judge figure our each individual case when somebody wages a lawsuit….

Of course, if the government tries to do sophisticated mind-control techniques then we could assume with the conservatives that government will always do it wrong. They will spend a lot of money making ineffective advertising that doesn’t have much effect on anybody except to convince them the government wastes a lot of money. OK, that isn’t the best outcome but it isn’t like the government dropping cluster bombs on civilians. or high-intensity white phosphorus on civilians to get them to come out into the open where the heavy artillery can kill them easier. It’s just the government spending money ineffectively.

Well, but what if the government actually is effective? What if they brainwash voters into voting for the party currently in power, so that democracy is gone? Well, but if one privately-run political party composed of private citizens does that and the other doesn’t, is that better? If somebody gets to brainwash voters then democracy is gone regardless whether your own private group (National Cancer Institute or whoever) or the federal government does it too. If it works, somebody will do it.

If we don’t want it to be done, we must find a way to make it stop working.

In the meantime, something is working to reduce tobacco smoking. This appears to me to be a good thing. Tobacco smoking is harmful in the amounts that people do it, and maybe we should make it illegal if we had the votes. But 18% of the population is a great big voting block when national elections often are won by 2% or less. So we won’t do that until the issue is almost resolved.

Possibly it would work to let people grow their own tobacco and sell it as proprietors but not as corporations. Tiny proprietorships could supply some tobacco and might tend to be more personally responsible about insecticides and such — particularly when they have unlimited legal liability. If they can’t sell to corporations, that would reduce the capital available for mass mind control.

I dunno. There’s the freedom issue, but I can’t get excited about the freedom of giant corporations to spend some of their vast profits on mind-control techniques that the public has no defense against. I just don’t see that this is a right that needs to be protected.

Swaying someone to do something which harms them while benefiting me is wrong. But not all advertising does that, as there are e.g. ads for public services or health messages. So to require a yes or no answer to the question ‘is all advertising a conspiracy’ excludes the possibility that some is while some is not.

Yes I agree, but “is all advertising a conspiracy” was a reasonable response to a set of assertions that seemed to exclude any other possibility.

“We can respect the mass of people who are being mind-controlled.”

How’s the weather out there, Morpheus?

“So you got burned out and hopeless. The problem is so overwhelming that you’re just overwhelmed, and rather than work on any piece of it you just tell other people not to bother.”

I would say the real reason is that Roy is one of life’s true contrarians. When smoking is cool he is against it, when it is uncool he is for it. Same reason he uses homophobic slurs. He gets satisfaction from being different. From being able to pose as the “last sane man” and the one person who can see the “Truth”. It allows him to feel superior to the rest of us.

J Thomas “My argument is that *when it’s true* that evil methods win, there’s no percentage in refusing to use them. Because you definitely lose. ”

“Third Glimmer of Hope: But God is supposed to be supremely Good. He would not deceive me, at least not all the time.

Fourth problem: But God might not exist at all. That would only make me less sure that I might not be deceived. What is worse is that instead of God, there might exist an evil genius who does everything he can do deceive me. All my experiences are mere illusions. There is no earth or heavens. I have no body. He makes me think false things about mathematics. In short, he deceives me about everything.

Conclusion of the First Meditation: Descartes has now been reduced to total skepticism. The possibility of an evil genius existing instead of God makes him doubt everything. He has yet to find anything which meets his criteria for knowledge. He gives up for the night, concluding at least that he will spite the evil demon by at least refusing the believe the false things he used to believe.”

“You are saying that there is good manipulation and bad manipulation.”

No, I’m saying that some advertising isn’t manipulation. “I’ve lost my cat, have you seen him?” is advertising without being manipulation. “You’ve got a cash flow problem, I can solve it” is advertising and is usually manipulation.

Advertising can inform without manipulating. Don’t you agree?

All communication is manipulation. We classify some as harmful, some as harmless, and some as helpful, but our judgements are subjective and therefore controversial.

“I’ve lost my cat, have you seen him?” is advertising without being manipulation. “You’ve got a cash flow problem, I can solve it” is advertising and is usually manipulation.

From this example, I think when you call something “manipulation” you are judging that the person you think is being manipulative is thinking about what will influence the person being manipulated. He is doing what he thinks will work, probably independent of truth.

But if you simply tell somebody the truth without thinking about how it will affect them, that isn’t manipulation.

I would draw the lines slightly differently. I think if you communicate because you want a particular response you are doing manipulation, but if you communicate with no thought for what the other person will do then it isn’t manipulation.

If you say “Woohoo! I’m drunk and I’m happy!” that is probably not manipulation. You are not warning the other person to stay away because you’re drunk, you’re not inviting them to get drunk with you, you’re merely drunk and happy and you are announcing the fact to the world.

If you say “I’ve lost my cat, have you seen him?” you hope the other person will find your cat.

If you put up a sign “LOST CAT — REWARD” you are thinking about reasons the other person might want to find your cat.

If you put a notice in the newspaper “Little Timmy has cancer and he loves his cat, and the cat is lost! Please help find Fluffy!” that is more manipulative still. You will likely get a lot of calls from people who think that immuno-compromised cancer patients should not have germy cats around them. You can tell them “But little Timmy *loves* Fluffy!” and hang up.

There can be varying levels of thought about how to get other people to do what you want, and varying levels of deceit, but if you know what you want other people to do and you communicate with them intending that they do what you want, it’s manipulation.

But if you simply inform them with no thought how they will react, that is not manipulation.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell how other people think. It’s possible that a woman who yells “Woohoo! I’m drunk and I feel hot!” might have a vague intuition that good things will come of it, without expecting any particular reaction from anybody. Or she might think of it as a mating call, and hope to attract men who will treat her the ways she wants to be treated.

A direct-mail marketer who tracks the statistics on how many responses he gets from each mailing, and decides that an envelope with 5 separate pieces of paper gets better responses than an envelope with the same information on 4 pieces of paper, is about as manipulative as a chemical engineer who finds that his run has 0.3% more product when he keeps the temperature lower by 0.5 degrees. Same sort of thing. Manipulate variables to get a result.

J Thomas, this is pretty offensive.

De gustibus, Layman.

I have never found that offensive, but on the other hand I haven’t figured that responding to it was likely to get me what I wanted. More likely a whole lot of trouble.

In my limited experience, women who get very drunk and go out to do wild and crazy things cause even more trouble than men who do the same.

Want to try again and say what you mean this time?

People on facebook don’t feel pain like we do.

J Thomas @ 124, 125 . . .

Well done.

Shorter J. Thomas – Sluts!

“MPAVictoria, there are some women who sometimes behave in a way that you would call slutty.”

No. No I wouldn’t.

Shorter J. Thomas – Sluts!

“MPAVictoria, there are some women who sometimes behave in a way that you would call slutty.”

No. No I wouldn’t.

You did.

Not that there’s anything *wrong* with that.

All this slut talk made me want to watch the I Claudius episode about Messalina and the prostitute, but when you click on the youtube link it tells you that you need a paid subscription to watch it. Feh.

You need to start with animals. They communicate, their every communication has a purpose (to manipulate the potential mate, prey, adversary), and yet is not conscious, not deliberate, not calculated. I don’t see why similar behavior in humans should be classified as non-manipulative.

If everything they do that affect other animals has a purpose but they themselves don’t know what the purpose is, whose purpose is it?

If somebody else uses Pavlovian conditioning to make you display signals that affect other people when some stimulus triggers you to do that, does that mean you are being manipulative?

How fear drives consumerism:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jul/06/how-advertising-industry-concept-fear

No, of course pigeons don’t communicate with psychologists, sheep with butchers. With wolves maybe, I don’t know.

I that context, would it make sense to say that empathy for others is the first necessary stop toward manipulating them?

If you can’t get a sense of how the chump feels about things, you won’t know how to con him.

“If everything they do that affect other animals has a purpose but they themselves don’t know what the purpose is, whose purpose is it?”

Sometimes it is the ‘purpose’ of their genes. And of course not every behavior is determined by genes.

Your genes don’t manipulate you. You genes may induce you to initiate certain unconscious communications (singing, for example, if you’re a bird). Every communication you initiate (conscious or unconscious) has the purpose to influence the target(s) of your communication. IOW: to manipulate the target. What is so controversial here?

“I didn’t say it this time, MPAVictoria did.”

I was merely summarizing your sexism.

/And this is the thanks I get?

“Incidentally, I don’t really have much hope to convince anybody. Therefore my attempt to communicate (manipulate) must a different purpose. But frankly I have no idea what it might be.”

Same as mine? To make yourself feel better.
/Not trying to offend. I actually think it is the only reason that makes sense. No one has ever convinced anyone of anything they didn’t already want to be convinced of. So the reason we engage in these back and forths has to be what we get out of it personally.

Since I’m talking about all communications, that’s irrelevant. In this context here it was supposed to refute the dichotomy between “coldly manipulative” and “innocent and spontaneous” behaviors in JT’s example.

If all communication is manipulation, then where do people get off accusing each other of manipulation? When you make the accusation you are communicating, therefore are yourself manipulating, therefore tu qoque! Every accusation of manipulation is sheer hypocrisy.

Or maybe there’s something else going on?

Incidentally, I don’t really have much hope to convince anybody. Therefore my attempt to communicate (manipulate) must a different purpose. But frankly I have no idea what it might be.

I saw a much-improved version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I don’t know who invented it, I got it from W Macfarlane. It goes: The absolute top priority is sense of identity. Lots of people have died to preserve their sense of who they are.

The second highest priority is excitement. People will put up with a whole lot of boring stuff when their sense of identity tells them to, but otherwise they get antsy.

The third priority is security. If you get into a secure situation that is too boring, you will probably do something exciting unless your sense of identity tells you not to, even if it loses security.

When you define who you are in opposition to other people, there’s more identity if the other people are definitely against you. You say who you are, they say who they are, the conflict deepens everybody’s sense of self. When other people sort of agree with you but not like it’s important, that takes most of the fun out of it.

I don’t know that this works for you, but it has a whole lot of explanatory power. By deciding that whatever the other guy is being really unreasonable about is his identity, you can explain pretty much any behavior whatsoever. But if in fact you get it wrong about his identity then you wind up with a powerful, truthy explanation which is in fact wrong.

So try to be careful with this tool. It provides a whole lot of satisfaction, but its value for prediction depends heavily on your skill.

“Every accusation of manipulation is sheer hypocrisy.”

Well, manipulations by tobacco companies are not reciprocal: they send messages to you without listening to your messages to them. So it’s perfectly fine to accuse them (as well as anyone or anything else that operates this way) of manipulation.

OTOH, when we are having a conversation (like we do now), accusing one another of manipulation would’ve seemed weird, indeed.

“Somewhere around 6 months to a year ago. I don’t use the word much in any context, though. I didn’t say it this time, MPAVictoria did.”

I’m pretty sure you wrote:

“MPAVictoria, there are some women who sometimes behave in a way that you would call slutty. Trust me on this. I have seen it happen myself.”

Note that I’m objecting to your judgment here as much as, if not more than, your use of the actual word. And I’d love to see your example expressing the same sentiment about some men. But I’m not holding my breath.

And I’d love to see your example expressing the same sentiment about some men.

If you say “Woohoo! I’m drunk and I’m happy!” that is probably not manipulation. You are not warning the other person to stay away because you’re drunk, you’re not inviting them to get drunk with you, you’re merely drunk and happy and you are announcing the fact to the world.

It’s possible that a woman who yells “Woohoo! I’m drunk and I feel hot!” might have a vague intuition that good things will come of it, without expecting any particular reaction from anybody.

Those aren’t quite the same thing but to me they’re pretty close.

Anyway, my point is that the way people use the word, when they accuse somebody of being manipulative they are making assumptions about what’s going on in that person’s mind. They assume that he knows what he’s doing, that he understands the situation on a deeper level than the people that he manipulates. After all, if the people who’re being manipulated understand it better than he does, what is he getting away with?

People say that manipulation is bad. They take a moral stand about it. If all communication is manipulation then the thing they’re taking a moral stand about is something else.

“Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.

Cigarette smoking causes more than 480,000 deaths each year in the United States. This is about one in five deaths.
Smoking causes more deaths each year than all of these combined:
– Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)
– Illegal drug use
– Alcohol use
– Motor vehicle injuries
– Firearm-related incidents

More than 10 times as many U.S. citizens have died prematurely from cigarette smoking than have died in all the wars fought by the United States during its history.

Smoking causes about 90% (or 9 out of 10) of all lung cancer deaths in men and women. More women die from lung cancer each year than from breast cancer.

About 80% (or 8 out of 10) of all deaths from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are caused by smoking.
Cigarette smoking increases risk for death from all causes in men and women.

The risk of dying from cigarette smoking has increased over the last 50 years in men and women in the United States.”

http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/effects_cig_smoking/

Also there is no evidence that tobacco grown without additives is safe.

http://www.livescience.com/7914-warning-homegrown-tobacco-deadly.html

Of course maybe these scientists are lying and this is all a big conspiracy just like climate change. And I encourage anyone who thinks I am a “fucking idiot” to please take up a pack a day habit and find out.

“Anyone who’s ever lived close to the ground like that will tell you breathing some smoke isn’t much of a problem when the heat’s coming in, when the food’s coming, not real pleasant in too large a volume, but not a deal breaker by any means.”

I am not sure what your argument here is –
but –
Smoke from indoor fires for heating and cooking actually has very significant negative health and well being consequences for poor people in poor countries living in small dwellings without adequate ventilation. This includes harming the ability of children to study and become more educated, and also impacts on land use, deforestation, and the water cycle.
Eg.
http://m.trstmh.oxfordjournals.org/content/102/9/843.short
http://cdrwww.who.int/mediacentre/events/H&SD_Plaq_no9.pdf

Also, your argument that people should not try to discourage/prevent people from becoming addicted to smoking via laws and regulations ignores the impact of smoking on people – including young children – in poorer countries without strong regulations which tobacco companies now target as a market.
70% of men aged 20+ smoke in Indonesia, for example, and the starting age has gone down to *age 7*
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/22/indonesias-smoking-epidemic

ZM @181

Quoting from your last link: “Sampoerna is the country’s largest cigarette maker and is owned by Philip Morris.

So there we have it. Philip Morris is doing in Indonesia what its isn’t allowed to do in its parent country, which is promote tobacco heavily and target young people. There is no doubt about the medical consequences. This is a crime against humanity. The fact that it seem to be legal, points to the weakness of international law – and national law. The fact that western governments allow firms based in their own countries to get away with this abroad is a disgrace.

Almost nobody gets addicted to nicotine after brain development slows down, for most people late teens, or early 20s. Unlike some other addictions, it needs to rewire brains during that development and tobacco companies have known this for at least 3 decades. Once addicted only a small fraction (10-15%) manage to quit.

In the long run, about the only thing that matters is stopping kids from starting and establishing the addiction by the early 20s. After that, people can try it as muc has they like, but almost nobody does or if they do, don’t get addicted.

I don’t think Oz has seen much vaping yet, but while that is less bad than smoking, it still has problems, given that nicotine itself has toxic properties. (Tars in smoke casue a lot of the lung cancer, but nicotine affects blood vessels, i.e., stroeks nad heart attacks.)