Re: Cato forum on liquor advertising and electronic media

Declan McCullagh wrote:

>The Center for Media Education is trying to accelerate this process. In a
>fearmongering report earlier this year, the group demanded that a slew of
>government agencies -- the FCC, FDA, FTC, CDC, NCI, and the WHO -- take
>"urgent agction" to "protect" America's children from tobacco and liquor
>advertising online.
...............................................


I wish these people would go live in the U.S.S.R., or something.(*)

They are the ones who give the Censors of the World support for the idea
that it's okay to instigate restrictions against free expression, because
obviously the people want it - they're calling for it.   It doesn't matter
that it's not a Good Thing to limit expression; it's a matter of majority
interest.   I wish they would all go down to the sea together.   But I'm
being depressingly negative.  Anyway, who cares.  As long as there are
innovators creating high techology and useful software, one can always stay
steps ahead, right.  

(*) yes, I know it doesn't exist anymore.  Too bad.  Some people belong in
a State like that.  Where they can live with each other and never grow up,
but only wither away from atrophy of the mind.

   ..
Blanc

At 9:20 PM -0800 4/24/97, Bill Frantz wrote:

>What is highly amusing is the mounting evidence that alcoholic beverages in
>moderation are good for your health.  Of course, if you are one of the
>small percent of the population who can't be moderate, then you should not
>use alcoholic beverages.  But many people have bad reactions to various
>foods.  That's no reason to forbid them or their advertising.

Obviously we libertarians fully agree with this. No advertising should ever
be banned....to ban or restict any advertising, no matter how worthless or
despicable the product, is clearly a violation of basic constitutional
protections of free speech.

(Note that the orginal grounds for restricting cigarette advertising on
television and radio were on shaky grounds that the airwaves were a kind of
monopoly have now been augmented by laws restricing advertising "too close"
to schools and other places and other such restrictions. Including crap
about requiring warnings about cigarettes and alcohol, even in
non-broadcast advertisements! By this precedent, can it be long before
political writings are required to carry extensive warnings? The First
Amendment has become a joke.)

By the way, the conventional (if flaky) wisdom in the 1950s was that
cigarette smoking was good for one's health (a "digestive"). Had the FCC
and FDA had the powers then that they have now, cigarette ads would have
been _required_.

This is the danger of the monoculture I have written about. "Anything not
banned is required, anything not required is banned."

As to Cypherpunks relevance, what will happen if cigarettes, alcohol, and
condoms are advertised on the Web? (Whoops, strike condom ads...they were
once banned, but are now required.)

Kill them all...they are unworthy of life.

--Tim May


There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1398269     | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

Tim May <tcmay@got.net> writes:
> Obviously we libertarians fully agree with this. No advertising should ever
> be banned....to ban or restict any advertising, no matter how worthless or
> despicable the product, is clearly a violation of basic constitutional
> protections of free speech.

Isn't it ironic when people who support Cocksucker John Gilmore and C2Net
call themselves "we libertarians"?
> 
> (Note that the orginal grounds for restricting cigarette advertising on
> television and radio were on shaky grounds that the airwaves were a kind of
> monopoly have now been augmented by laws restricing advertising "too close"
> to schools and other places and other such restrictions. Including crap
> about requiring warnings about cigarettes and alcohol, even in
> non-broadcast advertisements! By this precedent, can it be long before
> political writings are required to carry extensive warnings? The First
> Amendment has become a joke.)

Cigarette advertizing is what created TV in the U.S.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

> Cigarette advertizing is what created TV in the U.S.

	Is this an argument _for_ banning cigarette ads, or against?

snow <snow@smoke.suba.com> writes:

> > Cigarette advertizing is what created TV in the U.S.
> 
> 	Is this an argument _for_ banning cigarette ads, or against?
> 

Neither.  It's a statement of fact - in the 40's and 50's and early 60's
cigarette ads were the majoroty of TV ads (and most of the rest were  liquor
ads).  The capital needed to build the infrastructure to produce the TV shows
came from the cigarette ads.  If there were no cigarette ads in the '50's, then
US TV would probably remain as capital-starved as, say, BBC. I'm not sure if
that would be a GOOD THING or a BAD THING.

I also don't think the gubmint has any business regulating any form of
advertising.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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At 09:13 PM 4/24/97 -0700, Blanc wrote:

>I wish these people would go live in the U.S.S.R., or something.(*)

Indeed - I frequently find myself wondering who really won the cold war. The
"free world" seems to be adopting the totalitarian/surveillance-state tactics
and behaviors usually ascribed to the nations which "lost" the cold war; but
the "losers" seem to have a much better grasp of the importance of human
freedom than the "winners" do. 

The FBI's recent request for the capability to carry on 60,000 simultaneous
wiretaps calls to mind the wiretap apparatus of Eastern Europe, but with
modern hardware. Yow. We have met the enemy, and it is us.


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--
Greg Broiles                | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell:
gbroiles@netbox.com         | 
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto.
                            |

At 09:13 PM 4/24/97 -0700, Blanc wrote:
>>I wish these people would go live in the U.S.S.R., or something.(*)
The fact that the USSR only exists in the past should be just fine for
some of these people, who'd also rather live in the past :-)

At 12:58 AM 4/25/97 -0700, Greg Broiles wrote:
>Indeed - I frequently find myself wondering who really won the cold war. The
>"free world" seems to be adopting the totalitarian/surveillance-state tactics

Same as it ever was - J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy weren't much different
from Louis Freeh or Ollie North today, or than the thugs who drafted people 
into the wars of 1846, the 1860s, 1917-18, the 1940s, 1950s, or 1960s, or the
thugs who arrested Schenck for speaking against the draft in 1916 before there
even was a draft...  Perhaps they were a bit more aggressive than Louis, 
but Louis's got the advantage of better hardware, and 
Moore's Law is unfortunately on the side of the surveillance state.
If Harry Anslinger wanted to wiretap a Demon Rum Dealer, he needed guys
to listen to the tap, though perhaps wire recorders could help,
and any recordkeeping correlation was done by people and dead-tree machinery.
If J.Edgar wanted to wiretap a Commie, he could use voice-activated tape 
recorders, but it was still analog, and still needed people to interpret it,
though records like names of important convicts and Commies could be kept in 
big expensive mainframes.  If either one wanted to read your mail, 
the Post Office would be happy to pick it out for them, and they could steam 
open the envelope if you weren't taking advantage of the Post Office's
cheaper rate for unsealed envelopes.

Back in the early 80s, if you wanted to store 1 byte of information for
every American adult, you either needed a high-end magtape (160MB)
which used a $30-50K tape drive, for slow retrievals, or a fast removable
disk pack ($1000 for 250MB) which also needed a $35K disk drive.
This meant that large-scale data on the population was mainly used by
people who were making money out of it, and governments mainly focused on
a million or so usual suspects because it was too much trouble to do more.

Now $30 will get you a CDROM with 100 million phone numbers on it,
$300 will get you a 3GB of hard disk (still only 10 bytes/person),
or a disk drive holding 500MB removables, a 4GB tape drive is probably $1000,
and your original $30K will probably get you a few terabytes worth of
tape stacker capacity - if not today, then next year.  That means that
not only can Louis Freeh keep data on everybody, but just about anybody
can afford to, and it's increasingly possible to keep it in random-access
forms like disk drives which can be correlated much more easily than tapes.
Optical scanners are getting cheap - paper won't be just dead trees much
longer.
[If I mention video cameras I'll start sounding depressingly like David
Brin :-)
Of course, the amount of data you'd want to track keeps growing faster as
well...

So if we want to create or preserve privacy in this sort of world,
we need to change how we do transactions - keep less information,
do more immediate clearing instead of book-entry (at least that's 
getting cheaper as well), build systems that interact with people
that accept anonymity for most transactions, and use it by default.
On the other hand, there's money to be made in data-mining transaction data,
through improved marketing and targeted advertising - so we need
to find other ways for companies to make money on transactions
so they'll be willing to let go of the transaction data.

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#     (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)

At 9:13 PM -0700 4/24/97, Blanc wrote:
>Declan McCullagh wrote:
>
>>The Center for Media Education is trying to accelerate this process. In a
>>fearmongering report earlier this year, the group demanded that a slew of
>>government agencies -- the FCC, FDA, FTC, CDC, NCI, and the WHO -- take
>>"urgent agction" to "protect" America's children from tobacco and liquor
>>advertising online.
>...............................................
>
>
>I wish these people would go live in the U.S.S.R., or something.(*)
>
>...
>
>(*) yes, I know it doesn't exist anymore.  Too bad.  Some people belong in
>a State like that.  Where they can live with each other and never grow up,
>but only wither away from atrophy of the mind.

We still have North Korea, and even better, Myanmar where net access is
illegal.

What is highly amusing is the mounting evidence that alcoholic beverages in
moderation are good for your health.  Of course, if you are one of the
small percent of the population who can't be moderate, then you should not
use alcoholic beverages.  But many people have bad reactions to various
foods.  That's no reason to forbid them or their advertising.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz       | God could make the world   | Periwinkle -- Consulting
(408)356-8506     | in six days because he did | 16345 Englewood Ave.
frantz@netcom.com | not have an installed base.| Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA