The Safety Nazi’s are at it again. Their target this time, images of smoking in the movies. Yes, smoking in the movies is important enough for the MPAA to wave their golf gloves in the air for attention and some San Francisco based do-gooders to take up the oppressive moral challenge of removing images of smoking from the movies altogether.
The MPAA is quoted as saying, ‘”all smoking will be considered and depictions that glamorize smoking or … feature pervasive smoking outside of an historic or other mitigating context” could warrant a more prohibitive rating.’ Frankly, who cares what the MPAA says. The MPAA long ago made their lack of any valid moral stance known, when they ruled that you can’t show a bare woman’s breast to children, but decapitations are fine and and dandy.
This is the crap that pisses me off: The San Francisco-based center Smoke Free Movies claims that movies are responsible for 5,000 smoking-related deaths a month that might have been prevented by an R rating. The group also says movies are responsible half of the 800,000 children a year who start smoking. (Full article here.)
Where are they getting this data? What studies have been done to prove these numbers? What is the criteria being used to determine whether or not children start smoking do to the “responsibility” of movies? How have they shown that giving a film an R rating, prevents any children from smoking?
When is the last time you actually saw someone smoking a cigarette in a movie? That’s a fairly rare event these days. “Kill Bill” is about the only one which comes to my mind’s recollection, with Samuel L. Jackson smoking at the church organ, but that’s hardly a kiddy flick. If you go to their own Web page showing which of the movies out right now have smoking depicted in them, (see the page here,) the count is a bit deceptive. As of April 30th, 2007, when I took a gander, there were four of eight that have an R rating, which doesn’t qualify as a kid’s movie. Isn’t this group the one weeping over the fact that films with smoking need an R rating? Why even put those films in this list of movies? They already qualify for their goal. Three of the remaining are PG-13 and one G, which are supposed to be the most objectionable films to these folk. In all of this, you’ll have to take their word for it being a film which, “promotes smoking”. My guess, is that if it doesn’t show someone dying from it, they qualify it as “promoting smoking”. Their inclusion of R rated movies in their list shows their ultimate goal as well - the complete banning of any depiction of smoking in the movies, no matter what the ratings.
In short: this is blatant propaganda, so full of shit that you could use it to fertilize your garden! They have no studies to prove their claims. They have no studies to even support their notions! They’ve pulled some numbers out of their ass and spout it as if they are an authority. Am I supposed to believe that the Smoke Free Movies organization is an unbiased source of information?
Organizations like this come off appealing to “common sense”, but their goals are never that low. They want to control you, as much as the tobacco companies dream they could. They want to determine what is right for you, what you should be able to see, or read or think. They are controlling fascists, who ought to be stamped out, hard, like a crusty cigarette butt.
I’ll tell you who’s responsible for 5,000 smoking-related deaths a month - the 5,000 people making the decision to smoke. No one forced them to do it. No one put a gun to their head and a cigarette in their mouth.
If you want to debate the issues of peer pressure and other nonsense, let me counter with a quick rebuttal: If you haven’t taught your children to have self respect, based on a solid foundation of moral principals and steadfast self determination, able to resist any and all peer pressure - then you have failed as a parent!
I’ll add that your failure as a parent in this regard, has more striking ramifications than your children picking up bad habits. If your child is at the whim of their peers, you have sown the seeds of tyranny, by producing progeny that will goose step along with those who would rule by force over others. Dictators cannot rule, unless they can encourage the common man to enable their evil plans, to push their vile agenda - through peer pressure.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
