Posts by Lucy Telfar Barnard
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Sigh. Seems I can't quite quit. I'm addicted to health statistics.
Deaths from traffic accidents: +/-400 per year
Deaths from traffic related pollution: +/- 1200 per year (as estimated here http://www.transport.govt.nz/research/Documents/health-effects-of-vehicle-emissions.pdf)
Again, deaths from tobacco use: +/- 5000 per year.
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Okay, I can reply to this bit 'cos it's unrelated and won't get my blood pressure up:
Outrageous Fortune is currently airing at 8:30.
Yes, but if we start watching it now, we'll have missed all the cool stuff in between. We need to catch up on the other seasons first.
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Stalin, Hitler and Mao would have been early mentors...
Wait, did you just associate anti-tobacco compaigners with Hitler? Well, I guess this thread's over then.
(And yes, I'm well aware that Hitler was anti-tobacco, and you can bet tobacco companies use that to their best advantage too).
Even if it's not over, I'm going to have to leave it. I'm getting too irritated and frustrated at arguing when there's too much of a gap between my knowledge of the issue on one side (health), and I concede possibly not enough on the other side (censorship), and no quick way of bridging that gap.
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Also, having every incidence of smoking followed by a negative consequence of smoking would be completely unrealistic.
I don't know about unrealistic, but certainly not feasible within the scope of most plot arcs. But that's my point. It's because there's generally no feasible way of showing the negative consequences that there should be an R-rating.
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Yes, the always terrible consequences of violence in film. Like, say, Karate Kid, or The Matrix, or Kung Fu Panda, powerful indictments against brutality that they are. Or Charles Bronson's films, etc.
Okay fair point. And how many times do you remember seeing kids in the playground imitating the Karate Kid crane pose? Lots. So I'll have to think about that one a bit more.
Is smoking abnormal? Are my parents abnormal persons? I don't think so. Smoking is normal. A minor vice with a not insignificant overall cost to society and occasionally fatal consequences for the individual, yes. But abnormal?
You're misunderstanding the meaning of "normalise", which is to bring towards the mean, or average. Most people don't smoke, so by that definition, smoking is not normal.
You know what else kills a lot of people? Driving cars. Should we ban those from films?
Poor argument. Death from motor vehicles results from using them in a way that was not intended, or from unskilled use. Death from tobacco use results from using it exactly as intended.
Also, road deaths per year: about 400; tobacco deaths per year: about 5000. Bit of a difference in scale there.
And again, the UofO medical researchers are not calling for tobacco use to be banned in film. They're asking for it to be removed from YouTube, because on YouTube there is no effective enforcement for R-rating, or 8.30/9.30 watershed.
Besides, who says that fictions have to always depict what is normal, be true to life? Do we ask that the laws of physics always apply in films? And why should the laws of medicine?
I'm not saying that fiction has to depict what is normal. That would be dull. I'm saying that if it does include tobacco use it should probably carry an R-rating.
I also think if you go down that road it's pretty hard to stop. Let's say you ban vice for films, should you then enforce virtues? Why not demand that every male and female lead in films be shown to be a keen jogger?
Who's saying all vice in films should be banned? Not me.
Just to change tack a bit, I'm now trying to think of any films/TV shows on before 9.30 (when alcohol advertising is allowed) that do regularly show tobacco use. I mean, how many films would actually become R-rated only because they had smoking in them, and not for their other content?
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I am not saying that all depiction of smoking in film/TV is paid for by tobacco companies. Some of the advertising they get for free instead.
I've been thinking about the difference between the depiction tobacco use, and the depiction of alcohol and violence in film. I think the difference is that (most of) the effects of binge drinking and violence are immediate, so if they are portrayed in film we also get to see the consequences - and they're rarely pretty. Even alcoholism is generally portrayed as the tragedy it is.
With smoking, however, the effects (immediate or otherwise) are largely invisible. Unfortunately I've only seen the first series of Outrageous Fortune (on video - yeah, yeah, I know I'm a baby 'cos I go to bed at 9.30), and that was a while ago, so forgive me if I make some assumptions, but for it to show the likely consequences - Cheryl eventually contracting emphysema, perhaps attempting to smoke through her breathing tube (always painful to watch), and/or followed by lung cancer and an unpleasant death, would mean making the show about something it's not.
So with (unhealthy) drinking and violence in film, you get to see the adverse consequences. With smoking (always unhealthy), you don't.
BTW, for product placement to work don't you need an identifiable brand?
Not if the product is the brand. Tobacco companies are a cartel. While there may be some competition amongst them for market share, they're very capable of banding together in common interest, and their common interest is continuing to addict people to a lethal product (see, for example, their recent united stance against plain packaging in Australia).
I did not mean to imply that any of those particular examples (Mad Men/Desperately Seeking Susan/BSG) I listed had been paid for by the tobacco industry, since I have no way of telling which ones are paid for and which aren't (a problem all on its own). I listed them because they were examples that other people had given of smoking on screen that hadn't made them take up smoking, and I wanted to point out the falsity of that argument.
Just for clarity, my views are:
- some (not all) tobacco use on screen is sponsored by tobacco companies;
- all on-screen tobacco use normalises smoking;
- most on-screen tobacco use functions as tobacco advertising, whether tobacco companies have paid for it or not;
- as with other advertising, on-screen tobacco advertising has greater and lesser degrees of success.Do I think on-screen smoking should be banned? Generally not. R-rated? Probably, in the same way that the depiction of heroin use is R-rated.
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Don't the CDC have any actual diseases to control?
Well sure, but fortunately they've got their priorities right.
Smoking is implicated in 5,000 of NZ's 29,000 deaths a year. There's a reason smoking is called an epidemic. Of course those people would have died eventually anyway - everyone does - it's the shortening of life, and the suffering involved that matters.
And furthermore, I get seriously f'd off by what are, in effect, a bunch of bullshit excuses made for the tobacco industry. Do you really think the logic of "Mad Men/Desperately Seeking Susan/BSG didn't make me want to smoke" means that smoking in film isn't a means of advertising... well, I see ads for McDonalds all the time, but it doesn't make me want to eat there. And I see Coca Cola in films regularly, and it doesn't make me want to drink it, but that doesn't mean that they're not advertisements and that they don't work on some people.
Tobacco use in film and TV is not just there for verisimilitude, or characterisation, or artistic reasons. It is paid product placement by tobacco companies. They pay for it, as a form of advertising, because it works.
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Nothing wrong with that. What I'm not so keen on is anyone actively encouraging people to do stupid things that will kill them.
And worse than that, making a profit from it.
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Save yourselves some time. Just change your logo to a swastika.
I found this somewhat ironic, given that public health advocates for many years had difficulty getting the anti-smoking message across in Germany because the Nazis had been seriously anti-smoking, so being anti-smoking carried the taint of Nazism. (see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tobacco_movement_in_Nazi_Germany)
'Course, you can bet once the war was over, big tobacco milked that for all it was worth...
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The University of Otago has campuses in Invercargill, Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland. Massey University not the only one doing the franchise-y thing.
Yes, but I don't work for Massey.
None of Otago's campuses really compete with other institutions.
Except in Public Health research, where Otago in Wellington competes with Massey in Wellington. I guess that's kind of like BK and McDs battling it out in NZ. Don't ask me which is which.
I thought Massey's history in Palmerston North went back to the 1920s and was named for the conservative first world war farmer Prime Minister. Wikipedia agrees.
Yes, but that was when it was only an agricultural training centre, much like Lincoln. I believe the decision to expand it into other faculties (or to open a new, full university in Wanganui) came in the 1960s (though Wikipedia tells me there was already some curriculum expansion in the 1950s).
I have several friends who really, really like living in Palmerston North, and they don't even mind that it doesn't have any beaches, so don't knock it.
I went to high school there, which I believe gives me the right to bag it all I like. :-P