The Big Picture: Arch-Villains

[wooty]

Thats it, I am now memorizing that whole speech section on the darwinism and the idiots, that made too perfect of sense to me.

 

[Nurb]

I consider myself a progressive, and I can't stand the far-lefties and their nanny-state nonsense.

I'm of the same opinion; tobacco is different than fast food, because fast food isn't chemically addictive like tobacco is. Having it every now and then won't form a habit, but like gambling and WoW, people can form an emotional dependancy.

When it comes to scapegoating, being too liberal is as dangerous as being too conservative because both want to control you.

 

[Calibanbutcher]

Again, Bob takes his time to hate on Fast Five and Pirates 4, simply because THEY ARE MORE POPULAR then your friggin nerd movies.
I should definitely go see both of them.
I wouldn't have done so before, because I thought they sucked but your constant whining convinced me to buy tickets, and if only out of spite.

 

[Deschamps]

It felt like the show ended just as you were really gaining momentum. I think that might be my problem though. You often seem to be asking all the right questions, then I start to get hopeful and think you might have all the answers too.

But the questions are good. I agree that it would be nice if we could intervene with bad parenting (in more than just the extreme cases) but I also see the moral issues that such a course of action would raise. I believe the best solution to irresponsible parenting is education, but that is a very broad answer. It's something that I think is worth thinking and talking about.

I think it's been mentioned, but just in case, here's a link to the extremely relavent opening scene of Idiocracy [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSROlfR7WTo].

 

[ace_of_something]

You're kind of arguing the same point as him. That personal responsibility matters.

The distinction is that CHILDREN aren't completely cognizant and able to make informed decisions. Anyway, I'm the same age as you and where I grew up, a place where every family owned at least a few horses for practical reasons. Cowboys were cool. Guess what brand EVERYONE smoked in high school? Marketing works on many people. Now, I don't think that the Marlboro man is what caused them to smoke. It did however help them make their purchasing decision.

I don't think an 'all advertising mascots or none' is a solution. That's ridiculously black and white.

The problem with your logic, and by extension, bombadilillo, since you both responded to me with nearly identical arguements, is that you're both ignoring the fact that outright marketting for tobacco products has been, for all intents and purposes, non-existant for almost 40 years. "You're marketting to children!" They aren't marketing, at all. By law, they can't. At least, not on television. That's why those mascots came to be. With the loss of television as an advertising medium, tobacco companies had to rely soly on print ads. They had to get their point across in a single image. So, they were forced to do whatever was required to get attention to their product, in as short a span as possible. I believe that this falls into the "Nice Job Breaking It, Hero" trope.

But, onto bombadilillo's comment, because I don't want to double post, did they lie about health risks? No. How can I say that? Simple. They used and abused the hell out of loopholes and technicalities. Do cigarettes kill people? No. Why? Because it's the smoke that does the damage. "But, people die because they use a tobacco product as intended." Well, a firearm's intended use is to shoot a bullet at something. And, the arguement could certainly be made, with a great deal of success, that games like Call of Duty are made with the intent of glamourizing the firearm. I don't watch the news very often, so I don't know if this has actually been done recently. But, if Call of Duty glamourizes firearm use, Bulletstorm Rule 34s that *****.

I know what some people are going to think/say. "But, guns don't kill the user if used as intended." There's one problem with that logic. There is absolutely nothing in the owner's manual that expressly says "And, don't point the end with the hole in it at yourself." A gun's intended use is to point the end with the hole at something that you wish to destroy, and pull the trigger, enabling an explosion in the chamber which sends a projectile to do the destroying. "Destroy and kill shit" is pretty much the sole intent of a firearm. By the way, this is also true of the sword and the mace.

Yeah, I know. "Hunting." Did I miss a meeting where it was decided that hunting no longer involved the ending of animal life, in order to supply human beings with food/clothing? The point is, if pushed, I could name about a dozen things that, when used exactly as intended, do very little other than directly end life, and do so MUCH faster than a lifetime's worth of cigarettes or other tobacco products. In fact, a single cigarette, to the best of my knowledge, has NEVER killed anyone. Try to say the same about a single firearm or a single bullet.

Having watched the video again, forcing myself to skip past the cigarette bitching, I found that Bob's points were almost well done. I say "almost" because, when taken in concert with his commentary on how people aren't responsible for smoking, and cigarette companies are the devil, he really does show himself to be exceedingly hypocritical.

You should be a politician speaking so much without actually saying anything.
I will reiterate this concisely.
When it comes to marketing and personal choice. Certain things are different.
It's not all the same.

 

[spartan231490]

Hey movie bob, I'm only posting because you have said before that you look at all your comments. You may recognize me(Highly unlikely) for a post or 2 a few weeks back where I said that I would no longer be watching your show. As you can see, that lasted all of 2 maybe 3 weeks. This episode looked intriguing so I decided to give it another shot. Great episode, couldn't agree with you more about society intervening to save people from their own stupidity. I have officially returned to watching your show, at least provisionally.

 

[Lukeje]

I'm of the same opinion; tobacco is different than fast food, because fast food isn't chemically addictive like tobacco is. Having it every now and then won't form a habit, but like gambling and WoW, people can form an emotional dependancy.

There are actually some studies showing that fast food can be addictive (though I don't know how reliable they are).

 

[Canadamus Prime]

But Bob, don't you see? All this nonsense is essentially suggesting that said bureaucrat or whatever is the one raising our kids. It's the same thing whenever video games get blamed for aggression in kids. All this is essentially suggesting that someone other than the parents are the ones raising the kids. Who takes the little shits to McDonald's? Mr./Mrs. shitty parent. Who let's them play violent video games? Again the parents. Who has the power to not let them have McDonald's all the time? Parents again. Who has control over what video games kids can and cannot play? Take a wild guess.

 

[Verlander]

Woah woah woah....

Disclaimer: Although I don't always see eye to eye with Bob, I appreciate his reviews and articles, and read/watch all of them. I like his humour and presentation.

Sorry Bob, you are way off with this one.

Straight up, as Idiocracy put into words far better than I ever could, evolution doesn't favour the intelligent. I get that you have a massive superiority complex, and you idolise Objectivism to an extent, but really that just makes you more likely to not be one of the incredibly intelligent types. Sorry, don't mean to be harsh, but that's the truth of it.

Anyway, less deviating. Intelligence doesn't define evolution. Nor does stupidity. The only people who really believe that, can't understand evolution. Yeah, yeah, I know about the Darwin Awards, but that's tongue in cheek self satisfactory patting on the back between people who need to laugh at others misfortune to feel better about their own lack of achievement.

Evolution works on a simple principle. We have a cumulative evolution by non random survival of random hereditary changes. Simply put, it's all down to luck and biology, and the genes that will win are the ones with better odds. Or, more simply, the one that bred more. This isn't a certainty in all cases, but a statistical probability in most. Sooo... to the McDonalds thing. You're doing the very brattish, conservative thing of screaming "blame the parents", when reality dictates that a mixture of influences define a child's upbringing. Sure, if parents feed their kids crap then the kids will get fat, BUT children for the most part don't enjoy eating what's good for you. Again, it's science. We are predisposed to think that anything that contains the flavours and colours that are found in vegetables, might be poisonous. Our bodies don't like them as much. This changes when you're an adult, but we're talking about kids here. Similarly, you can eat junk food as a primary staple of your diet and remain slightly fit, depending on food quantity and exercise. Fast food places already offer healthy alternatives as well as smaller portions, but children will only eat what they choose to.

What I don't get, is how you want the government to affect parenting. Take some kind of test or license to breed? Be assessed constantly? All of the ways to do this (and none of them are reasonable) threaten far more damage to family life and people in general, than the current status quo.

The truth is, the obesity problem can be cured with what we have now. Children need more exercise, they need ONLY healthy options in school, but a wide range and variety of them, and they need people to stop bellyaching about whose fault it is, and start actually fixing the problem. Of course, in a two party system, that's easier said than done.

I do agree that fast food marketing has little to nothing to do with child obesity though. Just watch the path your mind sometimes wanders down, thar be the far-right down thar (pirate themed as I know you love PotC so much)

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

What it ultimately boils-down to is that this is a free country, and that means that you are free to make stupid mistakes. Some people (usually the vocal idiots) don't like that they are free to make stupid mistakes, so they insist that the government pass laws to protect themselves... from themselves.

Frankly, I'm even of the opinion that even the Joe Camel ban was perhaps a little too far. I personally grew-up with Joe Camel supposedly advertising directly to me, and you wanna guess my opinion on smoking? I think it's the most disgusting thing a person can do (okay, not THE most, but within reason it's the worst). Heck, plenty of my peers who were supposedly under the same targeting would agree with me. The kids who were "saved" by not being influenced by Joe Camel are doomed by being influenced by something else bad anyway, so all that really happened by banning Joe Camel is that the company's rights were violated.

Also, I tend to hate this "kids don't know any better" argument. Children are a lot smarter than most adults like to give them credit for. Heck, some kids even know that they're smarter than adults give them credit for and specifically use that to their advantage. Are children as experienced as adults? Certainly not, but they aren't idiots. Going back to Joe Camel, I honestly never even gave the ads any thought. I'd see them, I'd know they were about smoking, so I brushed them off. And why? Because I knew that smoking was for grown-ups only.

Heck, Joe Camel be damned. I grew-up in the era where children's cartoons weren't afraid to portrait a character smoking and/or drinking. We're talking Looney Toons and Disney here, people! Heck, I think even a Tom and Jerry or two had smoking in them. And yet, here I am, having grown-up with all this so-called "glorified imagery" of people smoking and drinking in the shows I grew-up watching, and yet I don't smoke, and I drink very little. So yeah... Joe Camel was fine.

 

[Grell Sutcliff]

just an idea i once had to combat obesity. In ancient celtic times you were charged additional tax if your waist larger than average, the idea being if you can afford to be fat you can aford the extra tax. methinks that this should be implemented somewhere(just to see if it works) perhaps use B.M.I or whatever's better for finding if a person is overweight.

whatever you do don't use the B.M.I it sucks, according to the B.M.I Arnolad Schwartzenager (probably spelled his name wrong) would have been obese when he was declared the world's strongest man

 

[Saint of M]

Good vid. Although there is one problem with the evolutionary thing.


Evaluation takes place with natural selection.

natural selection takes place when something can add their DNA to the gene pool.

If Dumbassasourus can get laid before it's demise, most likly after uttering the immortal words of "Check this out," and awsomesourusrex is a-sexual, on an evolutionary standpoint the dumbass is the better of the two.

It sucks, but that's nature: You may be the biggest, baddest thing out there, but if you can't make a second generation you suck as an animal.

 

[Nurb]

I'm of the same opinion; tobacco is different than fast food, because fast food isn't chemically addictive like tobacco is. Having it every now and then won't form a habit, but like gambling and WoW, people can form an emotional dependancy.

There are actually some studies showing that fast food can be addictive (though I don't know how reliable they are).

I know, in the same way video games and gambling can be addictive, and so can food in general, not just fast food. It all changes how your brain functions, but they have nothing about them that makes them chemically addictive.

Having just a good steak makes your brain release dopamine and makes you feel good, and if you start eating when you're sad or upset and comfort yourself with it, you'll be addicted to certain foods eventually. Think of it kinda like sex addiction.

There's a difference between chemical and emotional addictions, but have similar results

 

[Melnordan]

This episode is pure win. the only thing I could have asked for is if he would have asked them to bring back dangerous toys for kids. The elimination of stupid children at young ages could save the rest of us from having to deal with stupid adults.

 

[jackpipsam]

good till you made that pirate joke at the end

 

[Grunt_Man11]

I'm old enough to remember Joe Camel. This is the one part of the video I have to disagree with Bob on. The whole "Joe Camel was aiming an adult product at kids because he was a cartoon character" can be countered with two words: South Park.

This show proves that just because your character is a "cartoon character" doesn't mean they're aimed at kids.

I never found Joe Camel appealing as a kid. Why? I can thank good parenting here.

I was taught that cigarettes and cigars were not for me, period. Cigarettes equaled grown up stuff for me. I was a kid and thus didn't care for grown up stuff.

This means every time I saw Joe Camel in a magazine or billboard ad I ignored it. Why? Because he had a cigarette in his mouth. That meant he wasn't talking to me.

 

[NinjaTigerXIII]

As I always say, Let the dumbass's smoke, and the Fatties eat Burgers because why fight natural selection?

 

[Lukeje]

I'm of the same opinion; tobacco is different than fast food, because fast food isn't chemically addictive like tobacco is. Having it every now and then won't form a habit, but like gambling and WoW, people can form an emotional dependancy.

There are actually some studies showing that fast food can be addictive (though I don't know how reliable they are).

I know, in the same way video games and gambling can be addictive, and so can food in general, not just fast food. It all changes how your brain functions, but they have nothing about them that makes them chemically addictive.

Having just a good steak makes your brain release dopamine and makes you feel good, and if you start eating when you're sad or upset and comfort yourself with it, you'll be addicted to certain foods eventually. Think of it kinda like sex addiction.

There's a difference between chemical and emotional addictions, but have similar results

There's also the habituality of it; this is the addiction that is often hardest to break with smokers (and lasts much after the chemical affects have dispersed). With respect to fast food, however, this effect also comes down to (somewhat) bad parenting.

 

[9Darksoul6]

Bob, you're fat, probably morbidly obese, and that's why you can't have a non-biased opinion on the subject. I never actually saw you, but I'd bet 100 bucks on that.
Also, I'm no vegetarian, but it's being proven for nearly a decade now that just eating meat takes as many years from your lifespan as smoking; that said, it's not hard to imagine that fast-food-based diets are more damaging than that. Honestly, I don't give a fuck, but let's keep in mind that if all people were like me, generally speaking, this world would be far worse than it is now.