A Gold Medal In Misery For Mike Daube

The eagle-eyed NannyingTyrants has spotted former ASH UK Director, Mike "slippery slope is my living" Daube, further exhibiting the latest creep of the tobacco template. This time, with a joy-vaccuumed article on Olympics sponsorship.

Reading it, you could be forgiven for thinking that the overwhelming enjoyment of popular consumer products has ceased to exist.

What does the Olympics stand for: is it the inspiration for a healthier, sportier community? Or is it just another way to sell junk food and booze to an ever-fatter, ever-drunker population of couch potatoes?

Yes, it's one of those type of articles. Dripping in archetypal public health wild exaggeration and miserabilism, and - of course - as many references to children that it is possible to crowbar into the word count.

Nobody could doubt that kids as well as adults are being targeted – Coca Cola’s own marketing materials include activities and competitions for children, alongside promotions that make full and creative use of social media.

Drinks that children enjoy - and are able to buy legally - being advertised to the kids who drink them? Quelle horreur!

Both [Cadbury and Trebor] are already promoting their association with the Olympics through marketing materials, such as the Cadbury Australia “Cadbury Catch Up at the Olympics” competition.

All this at a time when obesity is one of our most pressing public health threats. More than 60% of adults and a quarter of our children are overweight or obese.

Err, our children, Mike? When did the public health industry purchase them?

Heineken UK is the “official lager supplier and sponsor of London 2012”. Heineken is also active in all media, including online,and through massive outdoor displays that will presumably be magically invisible to children.

Marvellous veiled straw man there. They're not invisible to children because we (currently) assume them to be clever enough to understand that the ads are not directed at them. Their being banned by law from buying the stuff may give them a clue. Plus, an ad exec would be rather stupid, anyway, to commit resources at an age group which isn't able to reciprocate by, you know, spending money on their products.

Still, it helps crank up the emotional blackmail, which is the entire point of the article. And also a major plank in Mike's determination to waste his precious time on this Earth preaching doom and death to a largely happy public.

Why would the IOC not want to protect children and young people from exposure to promotion for beer and wine as well as for spirits and other alcoholic products?

Probably because the IOC - unlike Mike - doesn't get paid for advancing bans on ads for products which people like to buy.

If previous Olympic Games are a precedent, media coverage of the Olympics will be associated with a tsunami of direct and indirect promotion for junk food and alcohol.

A 'tsunami'? Laying the terminology a bit thick by comparing mostly benign products with natural disasters which instantly slaughter innocents, isn't he? Perhaps something to remember next time his kind object to the 'health nazis' tag for being a hideous parallel to draw.

Oh yeah, and did he mention the word 'precedent'?

By the time the next Olympics come around, perhaps the IOC will have taken a more responsible approach to promotion of its wonderful product, and will consign all association of sporting success with alcohol and junk food to the promotional graveyard where tobacco sponsorship now resides.

I do believe Mike is invoking a precedent here. Or I would do, except that current ASH UK Director, Debs Arnott, insists that there cannot possibly be one for banning advertising of alcohol. So, former ASH UK Director Mike must be just pulling our leg. Right?

Still, even if the public would de deprived and the Olympics would be massively poorer, I suppose Mike would be blissfully happy if the companies involved were to voluntarily remove their association with the games, yes?

Probably not, no. You see, this BBC article contains a telling quote which tells you everything you need to know about the tedious depression-peddlers who plague 21st century life.

Last year, ministers launched a responsibility deal which involved a series of pledges by drink firms as well as supermarkets and food producers about how they would make their products healthier and act more responsibly.

But committee chairman Stephen Dorrell said the industry should not receive credit for this as it was their "civic duty" to act responsibly.

And this is the impasse we are faced with. The tobacco template doesn't have a clause in it about industry 'doing their bit'. The only thing they are supposed to do is to succumb to pathetic sad-sacks like Mike and be demonised into pariah status. They don't want us to drink less, they want us to stop drinking full stop. They don't want McDonald's to be more 'responsible', they want them to cease to exist. The whole exercise relies on painting drinks, food, and chocolate suppliers - along with every other popular producer - as evil and not to be listened to.

They don't want the public to enjoy what the public likes to enjoy. Instead, they wish us all to have a miserable life while Mike and his pals get paid handsomely out of our taxes for burbling this shit.

In such circumstances, these businesses should have only one goal in life, and that is to make the lives of people like Mike as miserable as possible by not backing down. Appeasement, as we have seen, simply encourages them, so best to not even consider it. In fact, industries concerned should be getting in the faces of public health bores like Mike and fighting them as sternly and dirtily as is humanly possible.

They would have the overwhelming support of the sane majority, too. We're heartily sick of boring, whey-faced, turgid, finger-wagging, depressive, weapons grade misery-mongering chimps like Mike Daube.