 TOBACCO, RACISM & HOOKERS: THE HYPOCRISY OF WARREN KINSELLA
I try to avoid calling Warren Kinsella a fascist, because I think that he actually does believe in freedom. Unfortunately, he believes in freedom in its most childish incarnation; the right to say "fuck" in punk rock songs and vote for the Liberal Party of Canada. That is to say that Mr. Kinsella believes that you have the god-given right to do anything that he approves of.
It is on matters that Warren finds distasteful that we run into problems. For the last several months, Kinsella and most of the Canadian blogosphere have engaged in an often hilarious debate of almost staggering stupidity over hate speech and human rights commissions. Sadly, a number of American blogs have weighed in and contributed little other than demonstrating yet again their shocking ignorance of anything that occurs outside of the lower forty-eight.
Dalton McGuinty's BFF seems to be of the belief that if someone draws a swastika on a hockey rink boy's room, we are in imminent danger of witnessing another Holocaust against the Jewish people. I happen to believe that such a stance is an insult to the intelligence of the living and a mockery of the dead. It displays not only an ignorance of history, but a deeply profound one.
Firstly, I'm pretty sure that anti-Semetism pre-dates the invention of hockey.
Secondly, anti-Semitism is a natural extension of Christian, and particularly Catholic, theology. Without the prevelence of that theology in Europe, the Holocaust would have been unthinkable. You cannot have a church that spends 2,000 years preaching that the Jews killed the Son of Man without the expectation that someone somewhere will act on it.
It naturally follows that if you can blame the Jews for the crucifixion, you can blame them for other things as well. As we have seen, these things can include the treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression. European Jewery didn't become an international boogeyman over the course of a Berlin weekend back in 1933, it actually took centuries of work. European anti-Semetism predates Adolf Hitler, but it does not pre-date the Catholic Church.
However, pointing that out might make Christians and Catholics feel bad. Accordingly, it might constitute hate speech. And that's the danger of hate speech laws: the stifling of debate it naturally creates.
I have a natural and intense hatred of bigots and idiots. When the Great Day of Reckoning comes, I would very much like to feed them into a wood chipper. That will require two things, a really big wood chipper and the ability to easily find these people. Canadian law, as currently written, makes it very difficult to find these people because they're more afraid of going to jail for what they think than they are of the wood chipper.
Advocacy of hate speech laws also naturally presumes the existence of an efficient government, which democracy doesn't tend to promote. As the great P.J O'Rourke once pointed out, the government has a difficult time delivering the mail, which has your address on it and everything. Christ, the government of Canada couldn't even make sure that the Quebec advertising agencies that received zillions of dollars in federal contracts produced any actual work. To be fair, it make damn sure that the appropriate kick-backs went to the Liberal Party.
I want to make one thing clear, I don't doubt Mr. Kinsella's integrity and motives. I honestly believe that he's as close as what passes for a good man in the Liberal Party. I'm just questioning his intelligence.
Sadly, Warren has tired of the existential threat to Jews and Muslims everywhere. I suppose you can only take so many pictures in hockey rink boy's rooms before folks start asking questions. Instead, he has declared a jihad against being an adult. The target of that jihad is the Toronto Star Corporation.
As many of you know, I despise Big Tobacco for many reasons - chief among which is that Big Tobacco contributed to my father's early death. Professionally, I work on anti-smoking and anti-tobacco campaigns, and have done so for years. As some of you might know, my father died of smoking-related illness as well. And he did so in a particularly gruesome way. I don't want to compare and contrast Daddy-death, but Warren got to say goodbye to his father in a hospital room. I was a little preoccupied giving CPR to mine on the fucking kitchen floor.
Having said that, my father knew precisely what smoking was doing to him and he continued to do so anyway. As a matter of fact, I know that smoking will also kill me someday.
Other than loathing non-smokers with a high degree of emotional intensity and wanting to hit them all on the head with an anvil, I don't find anything intellectually objectionable to being anti-tobacco so long as you're honest about it. Unfortunately, most anti-smoking activists are incredibly dishonest.
I live in a country with a single-payer heath care system. Smokers contribute billions of dollars more every year to that system than do non-smokers. Or at least we would be if tax dollars were dedicated to health care as opposed to going into general revenue, which supports useless things like Saskatchewan. Furthermore, we don't consume the benefits of the system that non-smokers do.
Here's an intersting fact. The most expensive way to die is being really old. Approximately 90% of the health care you receive will be in the last 18 months of your life. Old people are treated for things like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and slow-acting cancers. As a general rule, smokers die young, and they die fast. While I'm sure that someone out there will show me a 122-year old guy who smokes three packs of Luckys a day, they should know that they're presenting the exception rather than the rule.
If everyone quit smoking tomorrow, you would quickly come to the realization that a health care system already doomed by millions of boomer assholes who are determined to live forever would be deprived of billions of dollars immediately. While I do respect the fact that you don't smoke, I resent being shit upon as I'm subsidizing your goddamn MRI and autistic kids through the 400% tax I'm paying on a legal product while being called an asshole for the privilge. I'm not browbeating you for volunteering to have retarded kids. All I ask in return is to be left alone.
If you're a sick Canadian who doesn't smoke, you should say an extra prayer to whatever god you worship that I don't quit myself. If every smoker in Canada dropped the habit tomorrow, everybody's taxes would go up to recover the billions in lost revenue. Worse still, you non-smoking assholes wouldn't get to feel all self-righteous anymore.
Then there's the small issue of the tabacco farmers in eastern Ontario and Quebec that I'm keeping in silken underpants. If you think that I'm just keeping the executive class of Imperial Tobacco off of the unemployment line, you're sadly mistaken. But maybe I'm wrong and the Canadian taxpayer wants to subsidize even more farmers for underperforming than they already are. Somehow I doubt that I'm wrong.
But let's get back to Warren, shall we?
This morning, CBC Radio reported that Torstar has broken with a decade-long ban, and accepted three full-page cigarette ads in Eye Weekly. Its principal competitor, Now, has refused the same ads, to its great credit. Firstly, I should note to my international readers that Eye is a free newpaper that is distributed mostly in subway stations. Advertisrers will always do business with free publications because of what is known as "pass along" readership. What that means is that if someone leaves their copy of Eye on the subway, three other people will pick it up and read it. There's no other reason for anyone to place an ad in a free paper than that. Advertisers will sooner drop their business from a paid circulation publication than a free one. The reach of a free circular is generally greater than a paid one and the rates are generally lower.
That being the case, getting pissed off about cigarette ads displays a profound and disturbing ignorance of how advertising industry actually works.
Let's assume for a second that the NFL took millions of dollars of ads from a group wanting to turn Super Bowl Sunday into "National Beat Your Wife Day." Unless you already beat your wife, the ads aren't going to make a difference. If you already beat your wife, the ads might influence which of your beloved's eyes you blacken on Super Sunday, but that's about it
As much as I love Bob Dylan, he can't convince me to buy an Escalade, because I don't drive. Advertising will never convince you to engage in a behavior that you otherwise wouldn't. What it does do is influence brand selection. If you don't hit your wife, the NFL can't convince you to punch her in the right eye as opposed to the left. If you don't drive, it doesn't matter if Bob Dylan tells you to drive an Escalade. And if you don't smoke, the best fucking advertising in the world won't compel you to start.
Perhaps Mr. Kinsella is worried that a talking camel will convince his children to smoke. If that's the case, perhaps he isn't doing his job as a parent, in which case the government should take said children away from him. After all, he's the one who thinks that government knows best, not me.
I can forgive Warren's incredible ignorance of how advertising works because he has made his living in political advertising. Political ads rely almost exclusively on half-truths and outright lying in way that would bankrupt any commercial venture. If I were to run an ad saying that cigarettes will make you taller, I'd properly be destroyed finacially. But Kinsella worked on a campaign that said that it would never, ever raise taxes no matter what. And as soon as they entered office, that campaign instituted a spectaculary high "health tax."
What Warren Kinsella wants to punish is the adverising of a legal product that he doesn't like, but allow himself and his clients to lie relentlesly in furtherence of an empty suit's political ambitions. You're an idiot if you say "no new taxes", if you actually believe it. If you don't, you're something infinately worse. It should be noted that Kinsella's company is called Daisy, which refers to the most dishonest and effective ad in political history.
That leads to another interesting question. Warren keeps throwing out the name of the Toronto Star, which owns Eye Weekly. One can safely assume that Eye wouldn't be accepting tobacco advertising without the expressed permission of their masters at the Star.
But the Star is editorally friendly to the Liberal parties of Canada and Ontario. Mr. Kinsella isn't going to go after the benefactors of his patrons, is he? If Warren is demanding that the government of of Ontario, Toronto and Canada stop advertising in Eye because of the tobacco advertising, why isn't he also demanding that the ultimate profiteers of those ads, the Star, be refused their patronage? Will Daisy refuse to place ads on behalf of it's clients with Torstar? Will Daisy encourage its clients to not grant interviews with Torstar properties? I think fucking not. Mr. Kinsella isn't going to do anything that costs himself or his clients anything personally. What Warren is doing is engaging in an exercise in self-edification that really doesn't cost him anything. If his principles are so strong against big tobacco, he should lead by example and refuse to do business with anyone who does business with them. If it turns out that Dalton McGuinty's Ontario continues to subsidize tobacco farmers, will you or Daisy continue to accept contracts from Dalton McGuinty's Ontario, Warren? If you're going on moral stands, full disclosure is sort of important.
What has me most upset is the imputation that tobacco consumers are tools of advertisers any more than they are of any other legal product. Mr. Kinsella is free to imply that his own father was a mindless tool of Big Tobacco, but I refuse to say that about mine. Perhaps his father was an idiot. Mine wasn't. My father was a highly intelligent person who chose to use a legal product with full knowlege of the risks it carried.
Mr. Kinsella can paint his father as hick simpleton all he wants. That was his father and that's his right. I wouldn't say that my father was a blind consumer of things that were bad for him just because people like Warren said that they were full of vitamin C and stuff, but I don't know the Kinsella family.
But you should also remember that this is a guy who refuses to link the legal prostitution ads he protests as he links white power websites that he contends should be illegal. I refuse to send racist websites traffic both as a matter of principle and because I'm pretty sure that most people are already aware of racism.
More Canadians have likely been exposed to more hate from warrenkinsella.com than from any other source. On those grounds alone, you tell me who has created greater access to racist literature. Kinsella is sending traffic to the very people he wants prosecuted. As a matter fact, he's made money highlighting these people through his book, Web of Hate (which I won't link because it exposes people to hate literature.) Warren might not know this, but there are any number of anti-racisim groups that don't personally profit from racism.
And he's a guy who's calling for a boycott of a paper that makes money from legal product that the government he supports and does business with makes far more money than the paper could ever hope to. Kinsella also used to write for Eye, whose prostitution revenue he decries, but in part once paid his salary. Just because Huggy Bear talked to Starsky and Hutch didn't make him any less of a pimp, Warren. But there were no calls for a governmental boycott when Eye was merely promoting what he describes as kidfucking, were there?
Far be it from me to pass judgement, but the big orange fuzzy hat of a pimp speaks far louder your protestations of sex slavery. As you yourself admit, you didn't leave Eye voluntarily, you were fired because of political differences. You seemed to be fine living off of the proceeds of prostitution under your definition. It's tragic that Paul Martin ruined it like he ruined so many other things.
Mr. Kinsella, if you're going to wig out on Eye Weekly now, please explain how you weren't living off of the proceeds of prostitution when you were their dilligent employee. I know for a fact that I would have quit under those circumstances.
The government of Ontario raises millions of dollars from tobacco. The Liberal Party of Ontario is subsidized by those taxes. Warren Kinsella endorses the Liberal Party and makes a healthy living from those proceeds. Furthermore, you were okay with government advertising in a paper you accused of promoting child-fucking, but smoking is over the line? Where in the fuck are your priorities?
If Warren is going to be so moral, he should disclose his and Daisy's client lists and their connections to Big Tobacco. If he isn't willing to do so, you'll know everything you need to to about his morality. If Warren Kinsella was half a man, he'd respond to this post publicly (because I know as a fact that'll he'll read it before sundown), but I know that he won't.
When faced with the facts, it's easier to draw attention to people like Kate McMillian, Ezra Levant and the bathroom wall at some hockey rink.
Update: If anyone can photoshop a picture of Warren wearing a giant pimp hat and/or carrying a big wad of tobacco money, I'd appreciate it.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Cigarettes and Coffee By: Otis Redding From: Otis! The Definitive Otis Redding
Permalink
Labels: I Fought The Law, Journalists Are Swine, O Canada, The Death of Democracy, The War On Fun
|
