Randy Jones

Mobile Billboards

I’ve just written a nice letter to the Mayor that will probably get a form-letter response.  The jist was: should driving a truck in the city all day, for no other reason than hauling around a billboard-sized ad, be legal?  ‘No’ has been the immediate answer from everyone I’ve bounced this off of, and I’m not talking about the Adbusters set.  People hate these things.  It seems like you could make some pretty cut-and-dried laws about this kind of thing.  Ads on trucks already hauling stuff: OK.  Ads on trucks hauling no stuff: NOT OK.  Maybe a politician eager to establish himself as a “green” candidate could see some profit in this idea.  Or maybe that’s naïve of me because of the power of the ad lobby, but anyway I spent half an hour turning my annoyance into action, and that feels good.

Check this out: an online brochure that promotes mobile advertising as “an environmental choice.” Why environmental?  Because it reduces waste.  Waste of what?  Your ad dollars. It looks like they are recycling cars into metal shoes too, that’s good to know.

4 comments:

Ok, you don’t like them, fine.  But what right do you, or any lawmakers have to stop them?  Putting aside the point that such a law would be a clear violation of freedom of speech, what possible justification could there be?  They are not violating anyone’s rights by driving around, so there is no moral basis for a law banning them.  On the other hand, since all laws are an act of violence (or the threat of violence) the passing of such a law would be immoral.

Hi Jay,

Plenty of actions that someone might consider free speech are illegal, and with good reason.  A complex and ever-changing balance of laws is the only route anyone has ever figured out to a civil society, one that protects basic human liberties.  As our culture has matured and our impact on the Earth’s ecosystems has become more obvious, we have come to recognize that the health of the biosphere is an essential foundation for these liberties.  Thus, environmental laws.

Hope this helps,
Randy

Randy-

You’re in error on a couple of points.  A simple framework of laws- one that doesn’t require whole forests to be destroyed to print a single set of law books-- served to produce a very civil society in the early years of this country.

You are correct to use the term “liberties” because liberties are privileges granted by government, which can be revoked at a whim.  This is very different from human rights which are innate and a moral position.  Freedom of speech is a human right.

Everything government does it does in an uncivil way- literally it threatens to use violence.  Are you a violent person?  Hiring a thug to point a gun at someone and make them practice your religion is no different than pointing the gun yourself.

Since “environmentalism” in this country has increasingly departed from a scientific basis, it has become akin to a religion and thus “environmental laws” are mostly using violence to enforce baseless political correctness.

Government, the largest polluter in every country, loves this because it allows them to justify lots of rights violations, like domestic spying, etc.  Seattle now has mandatory recycling… sweden, which has had it a lot longer, has started massive spying operations to make sure people are treating their garbage correctly.  (Never mind that the policy is uneconomic and causes more damage to the environment.)

I’ll confess one thing: I was a consistent recycler, I happily separated all the recyclables every week… up until the day seattle passed that law requiring me to.  I haven’t done it since.  Now all the recyclables go in the trash.

The health of the biosphere is not threatened. This is a story used to get you to accept ever increasing government control and violations of human rights.

Consider if you were reading an article by pat robertson who was advocating a religious theocracy, and the prohibition of any advertising that shows interracial couples.  He’d make arguments very similar to yours, only instead of “the biosphere” he’d say “the culture of the country”.  Would you go along with bans on books (also a violation of free speech) and bans on any advertising showing interracial couples (also a violation of free speech) because its “polluting our culture”?

I hope in that context you could see that he is crossing a line- he’s violating human rights based on his unsupported religious beliefs. 

But I hope also that you’d recognize that he’s assuming that people live at the whim of government- - that they have “liberties” that can be removed at any time, and that they have no *right* to question government.

That rather than hole an objective of morality based on human rights- one that is universal to people of all beliefs and faiths.. he’s taking his ideology and putting the violence of government behind it, and that doing so is a perversion of any legitimate purpose of government.

I hope that you can see that this is also the position you have taken, with simply a different ideology.

Jay

Jay,

I disagree with so much of the above that even listing our points of difference seems like a chore.  So you’ll have to excuse me if I bow out now.

-Randy

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