Selling Fear & Loathing

As I’ve posted before, if Obama’s FDA and HHS were really trying to curtail smoking by Americans, the ads they’ve chosen will fail just as every previous attempt at social engineering of people’s habit through fear-mongering have failed.

Anti-Smoking Ad
Eeeeeeewwwwww!

On the other hand, disgust and loathing work better than fear in almost all cases. It’s just a matter of marketing. 😉

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7 Responses to “Selling Fear & Loathing”

  1. Penelope Fiedler Schmon Says:

    ROFL! Though on a personal note, I wish this would work. Carl’s gonna be toting an oxygen tank around in less than a decade if he doesn’t quit soon. Like now.

  2. Young American Wisdom Says:

    At first, your avatar pic frightened me a bit, but not enough to keep me away. I think the best part of blogging is finding other blogs. Thanks for finding mine today because now I get to enjoy yours. I’m looking forward to reading more. Great, thought provoking stuff.

  3. jonolan Says:

    Welcome aboard! I’m glad you weren’t scared off by my avatar.

    Only time will tell whether you like or hate Reflections From A Murky Pond though. Many find it bile provoking as opposed to though provoking since I pull few, if any, punches.

  4. Moe Says:

    [fail just as every previous attempt at social engineering of people’s habit through fear-mongering have failed.]

    Except the education part of the anti smoking campaign didn’t fail. It worked. Smoking has declined big time in the last 30 years. That campaign – from the government – succeeded; saved lives and billions in health care costs.

    That said, as a former lifetime smoker I think the new restictions are nuts. I get it in closed spaces – theatres (yes, when I was a teenager, we smoked at the movies!), restaurants, offices. But when they start banning smoking in open airspaces I want to pull my hair. And the new package warnings are so over the top I’m breathless.

    Education works. This package stuff is just nuts.

  5. jonolan Says:

    Moe,

    Education can work, even to lessen people’s vices; that I do not deny and even condone. The various attempts at scaring people into changing their habits have failed time and time again though.

    Now on the other hand, associating a habit with something that society finds disgusting tends to work.

  6. Alan Scott Says:

    I was never a smoker except for a few cigars here and there . I think that if you want to smoke, go ahead . Most people start smoking as teenagers so anti smoking propaganda should concentrate there . It has always amazed me how smokers allow liberal big government types to royally screw them on taxes . This is justified by the lie that smokers cost the government more in health care costs than the rest of us .

    The longer you live past your working years, the more you cost the government . A smoker may initially cost more when he is hospitalized at a younger age , but that healthy non smoker will cost you more as he lives farther into an increasingly frail old age . I am not arguing for dieing early, merely arguing against the justification for over taxing smokers .

    The other argument against the smoking tax justification is the fact that so much of the money gets siphoned off for other uses, when it was strictly for smoker health care .

    Again, as a non smoker I am a disinterested party . I personally benefit from the over taxation of smokers . My opposition is merely the conservative opposition to redistributing wealth from one group to another . Even such a socially reviled group as smokers .

  7. jonolan Says:

    I’ve been a smoker for 30+ years, Alan, so this affects me directly. That doesn’t change anything though; as far as I can see you’ve got the right of it.

    It’ll just get worse though if ObamaCare isn’t gutted. They’ll have to fully enact a nanny state or we’ll all go broke.

    What they don’t realize is how far it will have to go or how the minorities will be “disproportionately impacted” by it if it’s allowed to run its course.

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