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James Goodman

Does Cigarette Marketing Count as Free Speech? - Garrett Epps - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...261680

speech cigarette politics society health

shared by James Goodman on 31 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 31 Aug 12
     
    "What is terrifying is not just the radical nature of the statement: that government can do nothing to combat the single greatest public health threat of our time. The hidden message of the opinion -- a message correctly deduced from much of the Roberts Court's First Amendment jurisprudence -- is that the Constitution requires us to live in a make-believe world, where, for example, gross imbalances of wealth have no effect on political campaigns, and "smoking isn't addictive" is as protected as "I pledge allegiance to the flag." I yield to no one in my devotion to free speech. But a legal system that can't differentiate between political opinion and the sale of cigarettes has forfeited any claim to relevance to the nation it supposedly serves."
James Goodman

When Did the US Begin Sacrificing Freedom and Democracy for Corporate Governance and We... - 0 views

blog.buzzflash.com/12787

wealth society sociology materialism excess imbalance values

shared by James Goodman on 21 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • In our wildest madness we dream of an equilibrium we have lost.-Albert Camus
  • The other day at the doctor's office, I picked up a typical fashion magazine left opened on the coffee table for something to do.  The cover highlighted a young actress half-naked and doing her best to look sexy, which is not unusual in a commercial society that promotes women as sex objects. 
  • It is also considered normal by today's standards for an eleven-year-old girl to believe that the sexier she is-the more valued and appreciated she will be in our society. As for the boys, they're occupied for hours playing violent video games that give them the thrill of exploding humans with powerful weapons in the pursuit of joyful killing.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • I'm old enough to remember when young Americans questioned established norms, when they wanted to practice a sort of hip stoicism by realizing that less is more.  We never if rarely hear about the virtue of moderation in our political discussions or from the entertainment media world of film and sensational news.
  • J.S. Mill wrote in his classic essay On Liberty that "everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship."  In a commercial society, there is no room for spiritual growth, for rational criticism, for the cultivation of well-developed human beings. You know something's gone terribly wrong when a young child is told through media reinforcement that he will be valued on the lack or gain of wealth and materialism, and she on sex appeal, not by the content of his/her character.
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