• lastlybutfirstly@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    You and I may be standing outside Plato’s Cave, but most people are stuck inside. Imagine if we got control of the Star Trek franchise and made it canon that smoking has zero health effects.

    Riker goes to sick bay and Dr. Crusher scans him. She has a Marlboro red dangling from the side of her mouth. She says, “You have stage four lung cancer.”

    She injects him with the hypospray. “There. It’ll be gone by tomorrow. Get back to work.”

    Riker goes to the bridge. Geordi is smoking a Marlboro Light 100. There’s an ashtray on the console. Data is smoking his pipe, of course. Troi sits. She elegantly and languidly sucks on a long, glamorous Eve 120 cigarette. Picard comes on to the bridge with a huge Churchill cigar clenched between his teeth. Worf turns around and he’s got an even bigger cigar, some Klingon brand, blood red and fluted or some other kind of weird alien design.

    You and I see no problem. But everybody else would be saying, “Dear Lord! This is a family show! Do you want this to be part of their image?!”

    • mHtt@lemmy.ca
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      3 hours ago

      meanwhile mom and dad just got home from a shift at the bomb and munitions production factory in butt fuck no where.

      fuck false morality

    • Peacepath@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Soda and fast food not being associated with health problems in the USA makes that you can find such things with this products in many american productions. It makes the characters closer to the public, and so it may even be something americans like. And the brands pay to show their products. Europeans, often find it too much, because we have health sensibilisation against such.

      Old productions used quite a lot of tabaco products, also as integrated advertising. In the USA and in Europe. Until it became famous it was bad for health… Prestigious sports such as Formula 1, kept advertising tabaco until advertising for cigarettes got banned. And it was banned by a political decision for public health, not because of a public reaction against it.

      Health is the core of the attacks on tabaco ; if a treatment could cure health problems in 24h, tabaco sellers would soon make it a product “cool” again and make all the adds they can to make sure most people smoke their 40 cigarettes a day. That would include paying some show to dare scene as you describe. And the public would soon get used to it.