The Truth? Not Exactly.
Friday, December 23, 2005
I'm sick and tired of all of these "The Truth" ads that you see on T.V. They feature a bunch of whiny, pretentious teenagers with nothing better to do than protest something that has no real bearing or importance on the world.
Go check out their site. It's www.thetruth.com. Although what is advertised is far from what you get.
In particular, there is one part of the site that bugs me to no end. The Facts.
This section is chock full of small tidbits of info. However, the site developers seem to have left out one major part of facts: sources. There is no citation of these "facts" anywhere on their site. They never mention any of the tobacco companies by name. Is this because they are afraid of being sued for libel because they take things out of context? Who knows?
Besides, most of these "facts" are just statistics. Anyone who has been through a basic statistical analysis course will know not to trust stats that are displayed to back up an argument because more than likely the stats are worded or arranged to say what the quoter wants them to say.
It's an old saying in stats that whenever someone asks you what the statistics say, you respond "What do you want me to make them say?"
But citation and statistics aside, do you know what the major flaw with the whole premise of their crusade is? The fact that smokers choose to smoke. No one holds agun up to their head and makes them smoke cigarettes. It always has been and always will be a personal choice.
The other problem that I have with them is that they criticize the tobacco companies when they try to help out:
On its website, one tobacco company lists “cancer services” as one of the community programs they support. Yet they continue to make a product that leads to 339 deaths from lung cancer each day.If a tobacco company wants to provide cancer services, then let them. Next you will probably hear them complaining that tobacco companies provide smoking cessation support.
With all that is going on in the world that needs time and devotion to aleviate, such as world hunger or homelessness, I refuse to listen to a bunch of people whining about other peoples choices. These are the same people who, if they had their way, would make it illegal to smoke outdoors or in your own home. These people are almost worse than the environmentalist wackos at Greenpeace or EarthFirst! or the ELF.
Posted byJ. R. Guinness at 10:23 PM
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