Smoking is another good example. From the propaganda we’re fed almost from birth, smoking is a death sentence. The problem is that it is not true, but now everyone believes it is. In fact I learned from the Heartland Institute’s website that incidences of “smoking related deaths” is way overblown, because anyone who dies and smokes is said to have died from smoking. That’s why the word “related” is there. How do they know? But since the greater good of health is the issue, lies are ok. Global warmist fanatics have basically said the same thing.

I just finished reading a very interesting book called The Intellectuals & The Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligensia, 1880-1939 by John Carey (a review shall be forthcoming). He points out that Adolph Hitler was a vegetarian, didn’t drink or smoke, and the reasons have to do with the purity of the Aryan race and the life he envisioned them living in the Third Reich. The same totalitarian impulse that inspired Hitler to remake the world is alive and well among the various fascist health and environmental movements.

As for me, I’ll take liberty and personal responsibility.

It thus appears that the people making the commercial wanted to have it both ways: to satirize the environmental movement and to affirm its essential rightness. Given that those are thoroughly incompatible goals, it’s little wonder that the commercial strikes people as bizarre.

But there’s another layer to the situation: everybody’s talking about this commercial. Which suggests that it may have brilliantly accomplished its most conventional and fundamental purpose: to get people thinking about Audis.

Then, I thought. Who’s the joke on, exactly? It’s definitely had an impact and made people think. At least this person think.