The Surgeon General’s Warning of smoking causes lung cancer, emphysema, etcetera, on cigarette packs and cartons, are factual statements advising the individual of the potential health consequences involved with use of the product. I do not agree with how you would characterize them as advocating quitting. Mere factual statements of this nature is not advocacy to quite using the product. Rather, these mere factual statements are included to assist the consumer to make a more informed decision to purchase and use the product. The same can be said the Surgeon General’s Warning mentioned in your quote above.
"SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health. "
Do you claim this does not advocate quitting?
If not, then why do the pictures cross any clear bright line, and what is that bright line so that we may know for certain if a picture crosses it or not?
I don’t support a woman’s right to an abortion.
But I acknowledge that the law says (generally) that a woman has a right to an abortion.
This is because I can draw a distinction between “Does the law give a right an abortion?” (yes) and “Should the law give a right to an abortion?” (no)
Just like this case:
“Does the law forbid compelled speech by way of requiring manufacturers to print pictures on cigarette boxes?”
“Should the law forbid compelled speech by way of requiring manufacturers to print pictures on cigarette boxes?”
See? One set of sentences starts with “DOES?” The other starts with “SHOULD?”
They are different.
I highly doubt that any poster here who thinks the current law is compatible with the First Amendment would have difficulty acknowledging the existence of a court decision that finds otherwise, and saying “The law currently is X”.
What I’m highlighting is the foolishness of the attempted debate-stifling tactic of declaring that beliefs are erroneous or illegitimate simply because a court has failed to enshrine them into law.
In case anyone has forgotten, this was the question posed by the OP:
“Constitutionally, is there any problem with the new graphic warnings? Is this some “slippery slope” that will make libertarian-types and/or pro-business factions cry out dire warnings? Or is it good public policy?”
Note that the OP was not asking: “For lawyers/law experts only: do the new cigarette pack warnings pass muster with the First Amendment? Argue using specific points of case law/precedents without reference to personal opinions.”
Nowhere have I said that the government has an absolute right to splash whatever images it wants over cigarette packs. At some point government could overreach (hopefully things won’t get to the point of laws mandating that the Marlboro brand be renamed “Cowboy-Killing Cancer Sticks”. The tobacco industry has, however, long accepted that it must place health warnings in its packaging/advertising, and I doubt it will succeed in arguing that requiring anti-smoking images as opposed to print warnings, is a dramatic shift in policy that violates their First Amendment rights to sell an injurious product. And as I said earlier, if a “crying baby” image does not pass muster as a sufficiently relevant anti-smoking message, there are plenty of devastating clinical images that do. The tobacco industry really, really doesn’t want to have to display the sorts of images I’ve seen in my medical training and practice. They’re far better off with the crying baby.
This is the same type of argument you’ve been labeling as “error” both in this thread, and on the occasions you’ve started triumphalist threads “revisiting” issues where some court has ruled in favor of your beliefs. Sorry Bricker, posters are going to keep expressing beliefs you find abhorrent and arguing that the law should support them (same as you). If you can refrain from the ludicrous, strident demands that they recant “error”, I will be happy to stop pointing out your own “errors”.
And by the way, Zeriel, it’s not really necessary to say “Uh” or “Er” (or for that matter, “Um”) when introducing comments about views with which you disagree. We get that you disagree. 
What do you imagine the word “constitutionally,” means in that first sentence?
And I have absolutely no heartburn with that.
What I dislike is posters that go beyond expressing beliefs and arguing the law should support those beliefs, and instead argue that the law already does support those beliefs.
Here are two sample sentences:
A: The First Amendment doesn’t stop the government from making cigarette manufacturers add pictures to their labels.
B: The First Amendment shouldn’t stop the government from making cigarette manufacturers add pictures to their labels.
As an exercise for the reader, to which sentence, A or B, do you imagine I have objections?
It truly is an interesting ontological snarl you’ve developed there, Bricker. Rather than accepting the obvious fact that judgments made by one set of judges are no more objective or correct than those made by any other, you’ve decided to actually invoke some absurd ontological alchemy whereby positions all of a sudden become “correct” or “in error” due to people in robes agreeing or disagreeing. Of course, even if we look at the SCOTUS, not only do they not agree with each other, but the SCOTUS can and has reversed its own decision in the past.
Quite a bind for your rationalization, if those Final Judgements can be reversed, and are only the result of limited consensus, but are still truly what is “correct” and “in error”. One might, were they apt to notice such things, realize that there are a few violations of basic logic and common sense in claiming that the subjective interpretations of individual people, who can themselves be overruled by a higher (or the same) body later down the line, do not constitute a relative best-fit answer to the interpretation of facts but a Final Judgement on on the ultimate Truth Value of what those facts are. And anybody who disagrees is in Error, unless, of course, another body changes their mind, in which case that person was right all along.
One might recognize that we have set up a convenient linguistic fiction that has its uses, but that looking for Correctness or Error in it is a bit like reading the menu at a restaurant and thinking that the description of the soup will taste good. One might also use those linguistic fictions as a rhetorical club to claim Final Correctness and beat their opponents over the head with the linguistic fiction of Final Error. Of course, one sentence has the word “correctness” and the other has the word “error”, but since they’re both reified abstractions of informed subjective interpretations, at best, those two are the same thing after all. Funny, that.
I was using it to highlight that you were expecting Bricker to NOT be pedantic about matters of law.
The problem is that it’s not pedantry about law. Nobody, (I’d wager) would actually deny that “the court found thus and such to be against the law” does not mean that “thus and such was found to be against the law”. But, again, I’d wager that most people would understand that the fact that judges decide, and decisions vary, means that they are in fact decisions made by individual humans and not some form of ontological truth or epistemological veracity farted out by God directly into the pages of jurisprudence.
And claiming (especially in advance) that a court agreed with a particular line of reasoning and using that to try to shut down discussion is a particularly silly tactic, even in a context where everybody was a lawyer. Or have you heard many attorneys, after a case is over and done with, exclaim “Evidently I was wrong from the beginning, cosmologically wrong, empirically wrong, I never should have wasted my time since the finding that the judges delivered was the only possible verdict, as it was Correct, and had I but had eyes to see I could have predicted what the Truth would have been. Oh woe, woe!”
No.
The problem is that you lack the ability to debate the law. You don’t understand how to separate issues, how to read and apply previous cases and their principles to the current situation, and are apparently unwilling to learn. And I’m not really interested in trying to teach you, and am tired of trying.
So I have changed my argument, as I noted above in post 138. I’m not going to argue with you any more about the many strictly legal factors, the human factors, and the policy factors that might go in to reaching a decision. It’s a waste of time, and the pig enjoys it.
I’m simply making a statement about what the law is. I have no further interest in a discussion with you about anything else. If your disagreement is about what the law should be in your ideal world, I don’t really care.
If you disagree with me about what the law actually is, say so.
Can you please go back to having fired me and ignoring me?
Thanks.
I interpret the first sentence as asking for (gasp!) opinions on whether the graphic warnings are in accord with the Constitution. What do you “imagine” that and the questions about a slippery slope and good public policy call for? Nothing more than competing citations from law journals, to be ultimately resolved with announcement of a Final Precedent and ritual admissions of Error from the losing side?
Bricker-Land is a very strange place.
“Shut up”, he explained.
Isn’t there a forum dedicated to threads based on unsupported opinions?
Perhaps I should start a thread about my opinion that cardiomyopathy is caused by unrequited love. i don’t know a thing about myocardium function, but my opinion is as good as anyone elses!
Where should that thread go?
Now that, folks, is known as the fallacy of the excluded middle.
True. I agree there’s a difference between that kind of ignorance and the kind you and Jack seem to be fighting for. Yours is much less ignorant.
Congratulations.
Actually, that’s not fair of me either. You’re right that there’s plenty of valid room to discuss what the law should be without referring to legal analysis. But there’s no reason not to clearly delineate that you’re arguing for what should be, not what is. There’s no reason, that I can see, to spend page after page announcing what the law is, get cornered, and then start claiming all along you were talking just as ordinary citizens about the law should be.
That would be like me spending five pages on my unrequited love theory, only to suddenly announce I was speaking poetically of a broken heart, not literally of medical causes and conditions. It doesn’t mean there’s no room for poetic discussion, but it does mean there’s value in clearly defining your subject.
Oddly (or not so oddly) I thought of mentioning medical ignorance to compare it to the current situation. I do, sometimes with acerbity correct false statements in threads about medicine and/or in support of woo. I have managed to do so without puffing out my chest like a mating turkey and demanding that others return to confess their wrongs once they realize the error of their ways (good luck with that anyway). The other key difference with medicine is that it’s, you know, based on science and changes according to evidence. It does not represent someone’s opinion set in stone as a Final Precedent (which in reality is subject to change when political demands and newly fashionable opinions override it). Come to think of it, the law has much more in common with pseudomedical woo than it does with medicine. Woo has a strong tendency to enshrine its nonsense in perpetuity, which explains why ludicrous beliefs like homeopathy live on. One can’t disregard precedent, you see.
That’s weird, since I have no recollection of spending page after page declaiming on the law, nor of getting “cornered”. Maybe in Bricker-Land that’s the case, but you should realize that we are unable to share your fantasy life.
Are you royalty, or simply a host to unusually perspicacious intestinal parasites?
I’ve never regarded you as perspicacious.
I recall several cites offered by NotreDame proving that commercial speech can indeed be regulated if the regulation serves a compelling governmental interest and if it’s accurate and factual. For a while Bricker claimed that pictures were, in and of themselves, inaccurate and counterfactual before claiming that, in fact, the clear majority of the FDA’s new pictures would be just fine but that he would see several of them being challenged and overturned in the courts. I also recall numerous insults about how others weren’t able to understand his argument or how they lacked knowledge, or what have you, but it seems that a decisive “cornering” should have been, well, written.
Perhaps it was a decisive implied cornering?
I believe that is one step up from a decisive imagined cornering, but not quite as solid as a decisive tacit cornering.
Both of you need to take it back a notch.