TBD

TBD on Ning

I saw a child playing with the board game Sorry - have you seen it? The game pieces look like little cheeze-Zits or something ~ from a modest distance of course.

So that got me thinking. Of course the entity that owns the board game Sorry is owned by another entity and that entity is controlled by a conglomerate that manufactures and markets food, soap, beauty products, you know . . . the list goes on.

And the point of course, is to provide children the suggestion that they are hungry while they play the board game. Indeed, at least one of the participants I observed that got me thinking along these lines was eating ~ and of course this conspicuous consumption was nothing more than junk food.

I find it interesting.

I also find interesting the notion that no one complains when we insist to the tobacco companies that their advertisements not be placed at the eye level of children at the corner store. We may not get the direct connection between marketing campaigns and their impact on the kids, but the iconography of the Marlboro man seated on his horse traversing some snow covered ridge is lost on no one. And so it receives regulation, much to the consternation of Big Tobacco.

Yet, if we attempt to regulate the power of suggestion applied to board games attempting to suggest to the children with subtlety and craft that they are hungry, I have no doubt that we will see a back lash of resentment and heated debate. As if industrial entities were entitled to all of the freedoms enshrined by our founding documents, just as any other citizen.

I have no doubt of this outcome, even though we have documented the effects of junk food on our nation's trend toward obiesisty, the consequence and the cost to our system of health care and our overall well being.

How can this be?

Simple. Most of the mass of Americans who hew toward the right cannot grasp either subtlety or nuance, and so the how and the why that lies behind the ways in which they are manipulated to our general harm is lost on them, though it is not at all lost on those who tend toward profit as they use the power of suggestion to manipulate our appetite - whether it be for food, sex, or public outrage.

Some folks just aren't too bright I guess.

Tags: american, board, care, dissent, games, health, marketing, suggestion

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I'm more concerned about the video games that are training our kids to be unthinking soldiers.
It's all related, isn't it? It doesn't really matter if the suggestion is food, sex, violence. It all uses a similar set of principles and methods. And the fact is that they can be regulated, because it has been done, as with tobacco.

YES WE CAN
LoL! . . . Oh wait, that really wasn't funny, was it . . . .
So you mean sometimes I actually make a little sense? How did that happen? Oh-oo, somebodies gonna be pissed . . .

he-he-he . . .
If the sheep will lead the people will follow....

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