Owen Jones, Idiot

Again…

In Britain, my friend Matt Zarb-Cousin has helped to lead an inspiring campaign against big gambling. He notes that 61,000 11- to 16-year-olds are either at risk of developing a gambling addiction or already have one; that 370,000 of these children gamble, beginning at an average age of 12; and that 80% of children have seen a gambling advert.

I’ve seen gambling adverts too. So what? I still don’t gamble. I’ve seen alcohol adverts, but don’t drink. As a child I grew up with tobacco advertising on the television and have never smoked. Seeing an advert is of no consequence, gambling or otherwise. Some people will have a problem with it. The advertising is an irrelevance.

The libertarian right complain about the interfering nanny state, infantilising a public who can make their own decisions, thank you very much. The problem is that more than £21bn would not have been spent on advertising in 2016 if it didn’t demonstrably work, and those targeted include infants.

Er… Infants? Do they let infants into poker games these days? Okay seriously, though, advertising aimed at children is dealt with in exactly the same way my parents dealt with it back in the sixties and seventies. There’s this magic word in the lexicon that is remarkable for its power and the ability to prevent advertising working on children – “no”. Yup, that’s it. just say “no.” We do not need the state to manage it for us.

He is right, of course, advertising works, why else do it? Where advertising works best is enticing a prospective customer away from your rivals. However, no one – absolutely no one – is being forced to buy any products or services. Hence why the libertarian right are correct to point out that the nanny state should keep its interfering nose out.

 Think of what advertising does.

It is a means by which providers let their market know about their products and services. That’s it. It is up to us to buy or not. No one is being forced. On the other hand, Jones and his fellow bansturbators do want to use force – the violence of the state to decide what we may see – all for our own good because we cannot be relied upon to resist this pernicious advertising. Owen knows what’s good for us.

Its emphasis on perfect-looking men and women has a damaging impact on body image, particularly when it comes to younger women; it transforms public space, such as the Sydney Opera House, into enormous billboards for private profit; and it promotes products that damage the health of the individual and lead to spiralling NHS costs that we all pay for.

Bollocks! Utter, utter fuckwittery. The usual clichéd word salad from the hard-of-thinking progressive mind (and I use “mind” in its loosest sense here).

Indeed, it is estimated that children can watch as many as 12 junk-food adverts an hour while watching certain popular TV programmes.

So? It’s up to parents to manage that, not the state.

It can even lead to press censorship: take the principled Peter Oborne, who resigned from the Daily Telegraph asserting it failed to properly cover a scandal involving HSBC because of an advertising contract with the bank.

Advertising did that? Really? Or was it a decision on the part of that publication? Others could just have easily covered it – oh, that’s right, they did because it’s in the Guardian. Censorship occurs when the right to speak out is prevented by the state. An individual publication putting the sensibilities of their advertisers before the story my well be reprehensible – but it is not censorship. It’s a conflict of interest and one that is nothing new, but censorship, it ain’t. Jones clearly does not understand what censorship actually is.

So-called viral advertising and branding means there is no escape from rampant commercialism: it’s there, intruding into every aspect of our lives.

Is anyone forcing you to look? No? Well, no problem then. I manage to miss pretty much all of this aggressive viral advertising because I choose not to expose myself to it. No problem.

Advertising is bad for our health, but also the health of society.

Oh, fuck off! No it isn’t. Hyperbole on stilts.

It drives the most aggressive values of late capitalism into every sphere of our existence.

No, it doesn’t. It allows products and services to reach their desired market. That’s it.

That is why the Sydney protesters may have opened another battleground in the struggle against a social order that prioritises profit over humanity.

Ah, yeah, the old “profit over humanity” trope. Leftist codswallop. Bullshit. Utter nonsense. Word salad. But, then Owen Jones, idiot. What do we expect?