: : Isn't everyone someone's friend, relative or spouse? There is ultimately no difference in causing someone's death by indoctrinating them into an unhealthy diet or causing someone's death by indoctrinating people to shoot other people. It may be a much more "newsworthy" event to nerve gas a town, killing 4-5000 people instantly, but it's equally deadly to kill 4-5000 people by teaching them not to eat properly.
: That is the biggest piece of crap I've ever read.
Really? You don't follow organized politics much then.
Nonetheless, I would stand by it. If a political agitator rouses a lynch mob to go and kill someone, he or she is ultimately held responsible for the death. How is the case of a business _deliberately_ misleading the public for its own ends (which will probably involve the deaths of some of them) ultimately different?
If you believe that the difference is intent, ask yourself this: If McD's _knows_ overconsumption of its food has been linked to higher incidences of heart disease (and, dare I say it, cancer) and does not do anything about it, is it not pursuing a path regardless of the deaths that may ensue? That is to say; do the ill health and death of customers really _mean_ anything to McD's, or are they subordinate to the profits? I don't see any efforts by McD's to make their food less bad for you.
If you would say "well, people have a choice to eat McD's, this is a free country", I would have to say this. Check your facts. Large corporates don't advertise for nothing - they know that people are influenced to a large degree by their visual and audial environment and so they cover all available surfaces in the golden arches. They target their advertising at a section of the populace that doesn't have the critical faculties to see past Ronald McDonald, in the knowledge that these people will grow up to think of McDonald's as a good place to eat and a comforting regression to childhood. Of course they know all this - they wouldn't do it if it didn't generate revenue.
Furthermore, as a large and well-established company, they can use their capital reserves to undercut small independent restaurants, effectively stifling opposition on a local scale, as a small food shop can't utilize the economy of scale that McD's does. So they don't give you a choice, they reduce your choice.
Thirdly, McDonald's has the wealth and power to influence the media. If a local paper wanted to air an alternative (third party) view that McDonald's didn't approve of, and McDonald's advertised in that paper, they would threaten to remove their advertising from the paper. Despite the fact that the Fourth Estate (the press) is supposed to be independent and allow a plurality of views, McD's will not tolerate any hostile views in a medium they advertise in.
So not only do they suppress choice in the street, they attack freedom in the press (which is one of the raison's d'etre of McSpotlight, as I understand it).
Of course, I need not say that if they target specific people as being "anti-McDonalds", they will use private detectives to bug, spy and harass, the police to monitor them, and the press to try and slander them.
Is this the action of champions of justice and proponents of free speech?
: It is not McDonalds responsibility. People were eating meat long before McDonalds came along. An imbalanced diet is in the eye of the beholder. If I eat at McDonalds everyday and order an extra value meal super-sized, then yes I'm probably risking my health. But, if I eat
: responsibly most of the time, and on occasionly eat a Big Mac then
: my risk is lowered. That's my responsibility, no one else's.
And if you have no alternative to eating there, or you have been brainwashed from the age of 3 to believe that it's a good food?
The patterns of meat eating in the West have altered greatly since the Second World War; I don't have the exact figures to hand, but in pre-war Britain, meat was eaten in much, much smaller amounts.
Not to mention that McDonald's production mechanisms _don't_ just harm you. Rodger Bell may feel that the "using rainforest for cattle" point is unproven, but there are a large number of people who have been rather closer to the ground than he who believe differently.
Their production mechanisms are guided to feeding the rich few with an unsustainable crop and gradually sucking the nutrients out of the production zones. Rather like a lamprey, which eventually kills its host. Eventually.
: If you think Ronald compares to Hiltler then you have serious problems.
Of course I do. It's called "a repressive and ogrish multinational trying to eradicate freedom". As to Hitler and Ronald, while it's maybe a little extreme, there's a lot more in common than you would accept.
Read about Hamburger University. Read about the 7 or 8 spies McD's sent to spy on London Greenpeace. Read about Sid Nicholson using his contacts in the police to obtain information about Helen and Dave. Read about the ideology that McD's tries to instill in people. If the chiefs of staff of McD's haven't veered dangerously close to fascism and racism on numerous occasions, I'll eat my words.
Witness the classic remark by the Japanese McD's chief who said that the reason that Japanese people were short and yellow-skinned (his words, not mine) was that they had eaten rice and fish for two millenia. He said that if they ate a diet of McDonald's, they would grow taller and become blond...
: You are still forgetting that people are responsible for their own diets. Most people understand that a business advertises. And most people understand what advertising is for.
Does that include the age group Ronald McDonald is aimed at?
: : After all, Charles Manson hasn't killed as many people as Ronald McDonald has...
: I'm sorry Gideon, that is the biggest piece of crap I've ever read.
: When you compare Ronald McDonald to Manson or Hitler you are trivializing the murder and suffering of their victims. How dare you compare deaths caused by an improper diet to those caused by the Holocaust. You should be ashamed.
A death is a death is a death. I'm not trivialising the Holocaust by any means, neither am I seeking to revise history. The Tate killings were horrific, and the survivors of both will suffer for the rest of their lives.
Yet how many people who believed McD's propaganda will die from doing what McD's want (i.e. eating burgers to excess)? How much of the natural world must be destroyed to produce the grassland necessary to foster this habit (which will itself cause further deaths due to the increasing poverty of the natural resources). To quote "The Eco Wars"
(by David Day, publ. 1989):
"The true cost of the Eco Wars is forty thousand people a year"
That is, forty thousand people die each year from the environmental degradation fostered by Western (and Eastern) businesses, of which multinationals are the standard bearers and shock troops.
It puts the Tate killings in perspective somewhat, no?
And assuming a rather simplistic flat rate since 1954, it would mean that 1.7 million people had died since then of causes attributable partially or wholly to big business and the environment.
(Of course, I wouldn't even try to attribute all of them to McD's. Yet McD's are one of the world's biggest corporations...)
: People have a choice Gideon of what they eat. The Jewish people had no choice against death in an incinerator. McDonalds doesn't seperate mothers from their children or make a mother choose between two of her children. McDonalds doesn't make people strip and line up in front of the grave they just dug for themselves.
Yes, it's unpleasant. I'm not condoning the Nazis in any way. Yet dead is dead. I would say this; although watching your grandparents shot is horrific, so is watching them die from cancer, (even if pointing the finger is rather harder). The suffering that lasts is that of the survivors.
If McDonald's is promoting a product it knows to be unhealthy, yet encouraging people to eat more and more to boost their own profits, whilst trying to bury any whistleblowers, are they not to some extent guilty of the consequences?
: You need to grow up.
I need to grow old, too. I don't see it happening under the present capitalist system, as there are non-renewable resources likely to go before I do.
Gideon.
None.
