I don’t know what holiday dinners are like at Michael Bloomberg’s house, but I suspect there’s an awful lot of picking at food while the windbag at the head of the table lectures the assembled guests about why he’s right and they’re all idiots. That’s the message I get from his pet Mayors Against Illegal Guns organization, which wants its loyal minions, if there are any, to sit down to their Thanksgiving feasts and immediately start fights with relatives they haven’t seen in a year about gun control. All you need is a handy list of tendentious talking points — and a shitload of patience from Cousin Bob, who rebuilds old pistols for fun and just wrapped himself around half a bottle of Jack Daniels.
J.D. Tuccille, “Bloomberg Group Wants You To Start Fights About Gun Control at Thanksgiving”, Hit and Run, 2013-11-21
November 21, 2013
QotD: Michael Bloomberg wants you to pick a fight this Thanksgiving
November 20, 2013
“Ford Nation” as the Canadian equivalent of UKIP
In the Telegraph, Jake Wallis Simons tries to explain to a British audience how Rob Ford has managed to stay alive in Toronto politics all this time:
… from a British perspective, the oddest aspect of the story is Toronto’s seemingly indomitable affection for its mayor. It is only now, after months of scandal, that public confidence in him is finally starting to dip, and not particularly sharply.
The reason for this reveals the sharp divisions within Canadian society. And while it would be simplistic to offer a like-for-like comparison between different countries, it seems certain that there are lessons here for Ukip.
First some background. Toronto is a divided city. In 1998, six separate municipalities were merged as a “cost-saving measure” by the Government of Ontario. This led to a huge increase in levels of municipal staff, while ambiguity surrounded the question of whether money had actually been saved.
People felt that they had been deprived of their local identities. Even today, in many districts, such as Scarborough and North York, the old names are still defiantly used. The issue is given an added bitterness by the fact that in a referendum on the question in 1997, more than 75 per cent of voters opposed the amalgamation; it was forced through anyway.
Ironically, the unification only entrenched the distinctions between people living in different parts of the city, particularly between those with a 416 (inner city) area code and those with a 905 (the outer suburbs).
Among the metropolitan 416-ers, there is a visceral hatred of Mr Ford. In the more conservative 905 suburbs, however, where people are pro-car, pro-booze and pro-sport, voters feel unfairly removed from the levers of power. Here the mayor commands widespread affection.
[…]
Canadian divisions may not map precisely onto Britain, but the rise of Ukip has demonstrated that we too live in a split society. From the perspective of Ukip followers, their needs and views are simply not represented by the overly polished political elite known as Lib-Lab-Con.
Of course, Nigel Farage’s cigarettes and pints are nothing compared to Mr Ford’s crack pipe and drunken stupors. In Toronto, where tensions and divisions are even more marked, the suburbs have an even greater appetite for the “ordinary guy”.
November 18, 2013
Toronto’s punchline mayor
I no longer live in Toronto, so the question of who occupies the Mayor’s seat on council isn’t of direct concern to me, but I do find the worldwide attention to Rob Ford’s antics to be amusing … the great and the good of downtown Toronto always wanted to be internationally known, but not like this. Richard Anderson wonders how the Rob Ford problem can be solved:
There are other conservatives on City Council, quite a few actually. The impression that Toronto is run by crazy Leftists is an exaggeration. Most of the former suburbs, such as North York and Etobicoke, send fairly right-leaning pols to Council. The Lefty nutters are mostly concentrated in the downtown area. There is something about high urban density that allows such beings to exists. In free open spaces they would likely die from lack of WiFi.
The more polished conservatives are too polite to say what needs to be said, too afraid of offending some crucial though obscure voting block. Their personalities are too cautious, too constrained to genuinely connect with the voters. Their language too careful to say anything clear. They censor themselves until nothing remains except a moderate with a slight rightward limp.
With Rob Ford there is only Rob Ford. This vulgar beast of a man who is what he is. There is no artifice. His frequent lies have a childlike obviousness that defies satire and even compels pity. An awkward Falstaff stumbling through the life of a city that, well within living memory, was called Toronto the Good. Yet there he is. A very sick, very brave man who tried hard to do his best. A tormented man who served his city well until he destroyed himself. The MSM often criticizes those on the Right for their alleged callousness toward the flawed and weak, yet they have shown no mercy to this man. Had his politics been different they would have hailed him as a hero.
What comes after? Someone smoother, more polished in their deceits, yet ultimately a timorous non-entity or a craven power luster. Rob Ford must go. Yet there is no one better to replace him.
The Toronto Star and the usual selection of community activists have been gunning for Ford since the start of the last election, but it’s taken Ford’s own errors of judgement and amazing lack of self-control to give them their best opportunities to attack. Each time he appeared to be finished, and each time he somehow managed to come back. I don’t know if he’ll be able to come back from his latest set of self-inflicted wounds, but if there’s any way to survive, Ford might do it. His opponents must feel they’re fighting a modern hydra-headed monster…
Update: Rick Mercer doesn’t like Rob Ford at all, but he recognizes why Ford got to be Mayor in the first place.
Update, the second: Camille Paglia was asked about the Rob Ford situation:
Once you have become the centre of a conflict in a complex governmental enterprise you have the obligation to resign. Why are all the energies of one of the world’s great cities being absorbed in the psychodrama of an adolescent personality? I think an honourable man would resign. It’s like a reality show. I think it’s terrible for the city of Toronto and Canada. I’ve heard some anti-Canadian things [in the States], some mocking things about Canada. I don’t think people are saying, ‘oh what a wonderful rollicking place! What a fun place!’ There’s a sense of ‘how is this happening in a major city’? It seems like chaos, like a reductive lowering. It’s very debasing.
November 16, 2013
Whatever happened to Chinese “soft power”?
James R. Holmes says the Chinese have unequivocally abandoned soft power:
China never ceases to amaze. Not only has the leadership done away with a promising soft-power campaign that was years in the making. It razed its own soft-power edifice to the ground, and salted the ruins so nothing can take root again. Why remains a mystery.
The latest trouble sign came after Typhoon Haiyan slammed into the Philippine Islands over the weekend, claiming at least more than 1,800 lives so far. Professor Mead posted an item marveling at the paltry sum Beijing committed to Philippine disaster relief. Upon reading it, I was sure Mead had omitted two or three zeroes. But sure enough, cross-checking his commentary against a Reuters report shows he had the figure right: US$100,000 in direct aid, and another US$100,000 through the Red Cross. Such token amounts give tokenism a bad name.
Forget smile diplomacy. This is sneer diplomacy. Many observers, myself included, ascribed Chinese inaction following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to immature capability. The PLA hadn’t yet fielded the expeditionary capabilities necessary to render assistance far from Chinese shores. Beijing did little because it could do little. Chinese forces, however, now own disaster-relief assets such as the hospital ship Peace Ark. Yet they remain idle. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Beijing is withholding help out of pique. Manila, after all, has the temerity to insist that its exclusive economic zone is, well, its exclusive economic zone. Seems political tit-for-tat trumps alleviating human suffering.
[…]
There’s an upside to this from an American standpoint: China has made itself look small and petty, like a skinflint rather than a magnanimous power worthy of regional leadership. This is self-defeating conduct of a high order. Far be it from me to interfere with a strategic competitor intent on shooting himself in the foot. Fire!
November 10, 2013
Alison Bechdel on the revived popularity of the “Bechdel Test”
You’d think, with all the social advances in equality for women over the last few decades that our media would more directly reflect that equality … but you’d be wrong. Quite some time ago, Alison Bechdel outlined a quick test you could use to determine whether a book or movie treated women as real people or just as foils for males:
The Bechdel test is used to identify gender bias in fiction. A work passes the test if it features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. Commentators have noted that a great proportion of contemporary works fail to pass this threshold of representing women. The test was originally conceived for evaluating films, but has since been applied to other media.
Pretty low hurdle, yet a vast number of books and movies fail to meet even this minimal standard. Recently a Swedish theatre chain decided to use the Bechdel Test to evaluate the movies they were showing (with Bechdel’s blessing), which has revived interest in the test itself. Bechdel talks about this on her blog:
I said sure, that sounds awesome, go for it.
So they did, and the Guardian ran an article about it on Wednesday. Which prompted a flurry of emails from radio programs who wanted to talk to me. I spoke to Marco Werman at PRI’s The World, and got to join in his conversation with Ellen Tejle, the director of the participating cinema in Stockholm. I also did a background interview with the NPR program Here and Now.
Yesterday I got a lot of other requests from other media outlets but I’m ignoring them. I feel bad about this. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong about not seizing every possible chance for publicity — if not for myself, then at least for the brave Swedish cinema consortium, not to mention the cause of women everywhere.
But inevitably in these interviews I say simplistic things, or find myself defending absurd accusations — like that the formal application of the Test by a movie theater is somehow censorious.
I have always felt ambivalent about how the Test got attached to my name and went viral. (This ancient comic strip I did in 1985 received a second life on the internet when film students started talking about it in the 2000′s.) But in recent years I’ve been trying to embrace the phenomenon. After all, the Test is about something I have dedicated my career to: the representation of women who are subjects and not objects. And I’m glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago. But I just can’t seem to rise to the occasion of talking about this fundamental principle over and over again, as if it’s somehow new, or open to debate. Fortunately, a younger generation of women is taking up the tiresome chore. Anita Sarkeesian, in her Feminist Frequencies videos, is a most eloquent spokesperson.
November 7, 2013
Harper’s convention speech – no wonder he ignored the senate scandal
In Maclean’s, Paul Wells explains why Stephen Harper decided not to say anything substantive about the senate scandal in his big speech at the Conservative convention. In short, it would be all drawbacks and no benefits to say any more than he did:
Some commentators hoped Harper would use his speech to the Conservatives to explain why any of this makes sense. Perhaps we should not be surprised that Harper decided not to rise to that challenge.
The Prime Minister’s twists and turns on the Senate affair would break a snake’s back. There is no explaining them. In the insane hypothesis that Harper had tried to explain them in Calgary, the first question we would have asked afterward is why he waited from May until November to do it. So essaying an explanation now would not really have helped. It’s just a mess, a sinkhole of judgment whose radius is very much larger than the distance between Harper’s office and the one Wright used to occupy. As another former Harper spokesman once said, more than a decade ago and in very different circumstances, “This turd won’t polish.”
So why bother? For a man whose goal is to endure as prime minister long enough to change the country, this question would have occurred to Harper very early. One can imagine him thinking something like this:
“I could try to explain away the behaviour of my appointees and the zigzags in my own response to it. I could spend the next few months talking about the terrible judgment of my plutocrat fixer-in-chief and my TV-star Senate appointee. I could air, in public, questions that will probably be tried in courts of law later, and make spotting the contradictions a national parlour game.
“Or I could talk about some other stuff.”
Easy to see why he decided to talk about other stuff.
The other big talking point of the convention was how the Conservatives kept the press cordoned off from pretty much any opportunity to talk to delegates or cover any of the events. The press collectively found themselves held in the same contempt that so many of them express for the Tories in general and Harper in particular:
Reporters were cooped up in a filing room without potable water or free WiFi. Three of the convention’s four halls were closed to reporters for the duration, and when we ventured past an imaginary line on the floor of the fourth, volunteers in blue pushed us back. After his speech, Harper and his band played classic-rock hits at a casino next to the convention centre; reporters were barred.
In its details, this cheerful contempt was an extension and refinement of the treatment Harper used to reserve for the press corps. As late as 2011, I could walk around on the floor of a Conservative party convention at leisure and unharassed. The Conservative party had meetings to decide how much further to tighten the cordon sanitaire, appointed staffers to enforce it who might have been given other tasks. A few Harper supporters will be delighted to hear we were denied our “perks,” as if water and freedom of association are luxuries. Here again, Harper was just being Harper. It’s worked for him for nearly a decade. He won’t stop now.
November 6, 2013
“Dear Mayor Ford: among our living national treasures”
David Warren explains why Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford had to exist:
… every left-thinking person in the Greater Parkdale Area had been teased to apoplexy by the contemplation of this gentleman. This because he was: 1. fat, 2. colourful, 3. rightwing &, 4. freely elected by a large margin over some gay leftwing establishment darling. (Some other reasons have accumulated since then.)
Turns out, the police have recovered some video in which — it is alleged — our peerless mayor is shown doing crack with local low-life. Whether smoking or snorting or otherwise ingesting, we do not know, & neither apparently does our splendid mayor, who now says he was actually too drunk to remember the occasion. Dear Mayor Ford: among our living national treasures.
[…]
Quite frankly, we tried mayors who were not crackheads. They didn’t work out. Also, the last one didn’t drink enough. That’s why we elected Ford. He’s doing great: slashing through the city bureaucracy & privatizing everything he can. He even holds the civic unions in subjection: not one has dared to strike. And ho, he’s trying to build subways. Anyone who has attempted to ride a trolley across this town will understand our need to tunnel. So what is the problem?
As our good, excellent mayor told his Police Chief: bring on your video! Ford says he’s curious to see it himself, & that the rest of Toronto would surely also like a chance to catch it on YouTube.
Gentle reader knows I am a traditionalist in most things, & a loyal Canadian. Our very first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was a magnificent drunkard, who managed to hold office for nearly twenty years. There is an Arabian Nights of anecdotes that our primly officious historians have been too shy to tell. Verily, half of Macdonald’s Cabinet were awash most evenings, & the debates in Parliament were enlivened thereby. Almost all the damage ever done to this country was by sobersides.
Update: Take it away, Taiwanese animators!
November 3, 2013
“More bombshells” in the police document on Mayor Rob Ford, says the Toronto Star
I’ll be honest: I haven’t been following the twists and turns of the crusade by the Toronto media to oust Mayor Rob Ford. That’s not to say there isn’t actually news on the situation:
More bombshells are contained in a weighty police document used to obtain a search warrant for Mayor Rob Ford’s friend and occasional driver, according to a Star analysis of court information already released.
“Project Traveller and the Rob Ford connection” is the bold heading atop one section of still-sealed information. The pages are blacked out pending an ongoing court challenge.
Project Traveller was the recent guns and gangs investigation that saw massive arrests in north Etobicoke. Police Chief Bill Blair has said information learned in that probe led to the creation of the Ford investigation, dubbed Project Brazen 2. (Brazen 1 was an unrelated Scarborough investigation.)
Nearly 500 pages of a document presented before a judge to obtain a warrant to search Alexander “Sandro” Lisi’s home were released Thursday. Half is censored pending a court challenge by the Star and other media lawyers.
In examining the document, the Star has learned that some remarkable information remains sealed.
Whether any of the censored pages relate to the mysterious second video the Star first learned about in early August, and Blair confirmed last week, is not known.
The Star has been told by two sources this second video also features the mayor. Blair has said the second video is “relevant to this investigation.”
In his dramatic Thursday news conference Blair answered a question about whether Ford was in the first video. The chief first said the mayor was in “those” videos, then caught himself and only spoke about the first video.
Update: It’s worth noting that Ford’s popularity actually increased after the latest news came out.
Statue envy
Tunku Varadarajan on India’s big statue and what it means:
Narendra Modi is the chief minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat, and he believes that his beloved India is a land of political pygmies. India’s current prime minister, whose job Modi covets to distraction, is an effete old technocrat who takes his orders from the bossy Italian widow of a former prime minister (who was himself the son of a prime minister, and the grandson of another). The old technocrat’s days in office are numbered, and his replacement as prime ministerial candidate for the ruling Congress party is Rahul Gandhi, the son of the Italian widow (she who must be obeyed), a clumsy “crown prince” of threadbare intellect who would inspire little confidence as the manager of a New Delhi pasta joint, let alone as prime minister of India.
India is a land of political midgets, damn it, and Narendra Modi is going to do something about it. To compensate for the meager stature of those with whom he must rub shoulders, he is going to give his country a giant statue — the tallest the world has ever seen. At 597 feet, this “Statue of Unity” will dwarf a 502-feet tall Buddha built in China in 2002, giving India — which suffers from a desperate form of penis-envy of China — something bigger at last than its massive northern neighbor. The statue, to be situated in Gujarat and made of bronze, iron and cement, will cost a scarcely trivial $340 million, much of which will come, in spite of Modi’s free-market protestations, directly from taxpayers who earn no more than $1,400 per annum. Do the moral math. (The official boast is that it will take only 42 months to build, although you’ve got to believe that the Chinese could complete the task in half the time.) When fully erect, it will be twice the height of the Statue of Liberty and four times that of Christ the Redeemer in Rio. “The world will be forced to look at India when this statue stands tall,” Modi has said. Indeed: But with what kind of gaze?
November 2, 2013
Catalonia – the next state in Europe?
Daniel Bogre Udell looks at the state of the independence movement in Catalonia, which has been part of Spain since the War of Spanish Succession in 1714, except for a brief interlude during the Spanish Civil War:
This year, on September 11, hundreds of thousands of Catalans joined hands to form a human chain that extended 460 kilometers across their region, from the French Pyrenean border to Valencia. Complete with matching t-shirts and slogans, this robust act of protest was astonishingly well-organised, which came as no surprise: it was in fact the echo of a mass demonstration that took place one year prior, when a million people took to the streets of Barcelona under the banner: “Catalonia: The Next State in Europe.”
The day after that first demonstration, Catalan President Artur Mas publicly endorsed the protest and called for a referendum on independence. Shortly after, he convoked early elections which produced a sweeping pro-referendum majority in Barcelona.
Overnight, Catalan politics changed. The Independentists were now in control. Unionists softened their rhetoric. Nearly two hundred towns in the Catalan countryside preemptively declared independence [ca]. Parliament passed a declaration of sovereignty.
Instead of taking this clamor seriously and engaging the Catalan public, most in the Spanish government, including Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, positioned themselves firmly as antagonists. They insisted that referendum was illegal, framing Catalan nationalists as enemies of democracy and, in some extreme cases, comparing the sovereignty movement to Nazism.
They have also tried to promote the idea of Catalan nationalist ambitions as parochial and irrelevant. After a meeting with Catalan business leaders in Barcelona this month, Spain’s Deputy Prime Minister claimed not to have noticed any strong markers of regional identity. In a recent English-language interview with The Wall Street Journal, Prime Minister Rajoy described the hypothetical advent of Catalan independence as contrary to the world’s “natural evolution.” When addressing the Spanish public at the UN General Assembly, he went out of his way assure those in the chamber that none of his fellow world leaders had asked him about Catalonia.
Behind closed doors, however, it seems that Spanish officials are more concerned than their dismissive behavior implies: recently, Spain’s UN delegation drafted a report on how best to respond if Catalan leaders take their case to the international community in the wake of a successful referendum on independence. It asserted that Madrid could possibly draft security council allies into blocking Catalonia’s full statehood, but would be relatively powerless to stop the region’s admission as a General Assembly observer.
“Catalonia: The Next Partially-Recognized State” may not be as elegant a turn of phrase as those coined by activists, but it nonetheless haunts politicians in Madrid.
ENDA as political theatre
Walter Olson explains why the proposed federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), even if passed, would not do much to help the people it’s supposedly designed to protect:
The U.S. Senate is expected to vote Monday on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill to “prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity” that’s been proposed in one form or another for nearly 40 years. It will be a symbolic vote at many different levels. First, the bill stands little chance of passage in the GOP-controlled House; the point of giving it prolonged attention now is more to inflict political damage on Republicans for resisting a popular measure than to get a bill on President Obama’s desk. Second, it seeks to ratify (and take political credit for) a social change that has already occurred through nearly all the country, including even very conservative locales. Most larger employers are now on record with policies against discriminating against gay employees, and even smaller employers without formal policies mostly hew to the same path in practice, for many good reasons that include not wanting to lose the talents of employees from any demographic.
ENDA is a less salient bill than it looks in a second way as well; statistics from the many states and municipalities that have passed similar bills (“mini-ENDAs”) indicate that they do not serve in practice as a basis for litigation as often as one might expect. This may arise from the simple circumstance that most employees with other options prefer to move on rather than sue when an employment relationship turns unsatisfactory, all the more so if suing might require rehashing details of their personal life in a grueling, protracted, and public process. The forbidden group categories that tend more to drive HR managers crazy are things like age, disability, and criminal record consideration, where the law regularly tries to forbid behavior that in fact is perfectly rational for employers to engage in.
On a level of sheer entertainment, the bill has certainly furnished more than one way for some conservatives and Republicans to make themselves appear ridiculous. Some GOP supporters in Congress, for example, seem to be tempted by ENDA as an “easy,” crowd-pleasing vote to show they’re not always on the anti-gay side. But consider the implication: lawmakers who take this path come across as willing to sacrifice the freedom of private actors — as libertarians recognize, every expansion of laws against private discrimination shrinks the freedom of association of the governed — even as they go to the mat to preserve disparate treatment by the government itself in the recognition of family relationships. Sorry, but that’s upside-down. A classical liberal stance can reasonably ask the government itself to behave neutrally among different citizens with their differing values and aspirations, but should not attempt to enforce neutrality on private citizens themselves.
October 30, 2013
The “Libertarian Moment” – or small government’s latest 15 minutes of fame
In Time, Nick Gillespie says that if “everyone from The Washington Post to NPR to The Atlantic are talking about some variation on ‘America’s Libertarian Moment,’ attention must be paid”.
The American Values Survey is based on responses gathered in late September and early October from a representative group of about 2,300 adults. The researchers used answers to questions about national security, economics, and “personal liberty” to create a “Libertarian Orientation Scale.” By such measures, 7 percent of Americans are “consistent libertarians” and another 15 percent “lean libertarian,” meaning they oppose increased government spending on things such as military operations and domestic surveillance, raising the minimum wage, and environmental regulations.
Such fiscal conservativism is matched by social liberalism, with libertarians in favor of legalizing marijuana, protecting abortion rights, allowing doctors to prescribe life-ending drugs, and keeping the Internet unregulated. Libertarians are much more likely than most Americans to be male, white, and under 50 years old. They are also far less likely than most Americans to be religious and to think that religion has a place in politics. This puts them at odds with “other key Republican base groups” such as the Tea Party movement and white evangelical Protestants.
As befits people who put a high value on individualism, libertarians don’t fit easily into existing political categories even as they are far more likely to pay close attention to politics than the average American (56 percent of libertarians versus just 38 percent) and to always vote in primary elections. “The Libertarian Orientation Scale and traditional measures of political ideology that run along a liberal-conservative axis are only weakly correlated,” according to the survey.
That means that the 22 percent of Americans who are consistent libertarians or lean libertarian are fully capable of throwing any election in their direction. That makes them the true wild cards of American politics. A majority of libertarians describe themselves as independent (35 percent), affiliated with a third party (15 percent), or as Democrats (5 percent), with the remaining 45 percent calling themselves Republicans.
October 28, 2013
Nanny gets bigger – mission creep in “public health”
In sp!ked, Christopher Snowdon starts off by listing a few “public health” proposals that have been suggested recently:
An abridged list of policies that have been proposed in the name of ‘public health’ in recent months includes: minimum pricing for alcohol, plain packaging for tobacco, a 20 per cent tax on fizzy drinks, a fat tax, a sugar tax, a fine for not being a member of a gym, graphic warnings on bottles of alcohol, a tax on some foods, subsidies on other foods, a ban on the sale of hot food to children before 5pm, a ban on anyone born after the year 2000 ever buying tobacco, a ban on multi-bag packs of crisps, a ban on packed lunches, a complete ban on alcohol advertising, a ban on electronic cigarettes, a ban on menthol cigarettes, a ban on large servings of fizzy drinks, a ban on parents taking their kids to school by car, and a ban on advertising any product whatsoever to children.
Doubtless many of the proponents of these policies identify themselves as ‘liberals’. We must hope they never lurch towards authoritarianism. […]
As the definition of ‘health’ has been changed, so too has the meaning of ‘public health’. It once meant vaccinations, sanitation and education. It was ‘public’ only in the sense that it protected people from contagious diseases carried by others. Today, it means protecting people from themselves. The word ‘epidemic’ has also been divorced from its meaning — an outbreak of infectious disease — and is instead used to describe endemic behaviour such as drinking, or non-contagious diseases such as cancer, or physical conditions such as obesity which are neither diseases nor activities. This switch from literal meanings to poetic metaphors helps to maintain the conceit that governments have the same rights and responsibility to police the habits of its citizens as they do to ensure that drinking water is uncontaminated. It masks the hard reality that ‘public health’ is increasingly concerned with regulating private behaviour on private property.
The anti-smoking campaign is where the severe new public-health crusade began, but it is not where it ends. Libertarians warned that the campaign against tobacco would morph into an anti-booze and anti-fat campaign of similar intensity. They were derided; ridiculed for making fallacious ‘slippery slope’ arguments. In retrospect, their greatest failing was not that they were too hysterical in their warnings but that they lacked the imagination to foresee policies as absurd as plain packaging or bans on large servings of lemonade, even as satire.
