If capitalism went away, sugar and tobacco would still be a thing. For example, tobacco shortages sometimes caused economic unrest in the Soviet Union.

Yes, clearly murder and forced starvation is totally equivalent to people making lifestyle choices that reduce their lifetime.

Clearly anyone selling soul food is just as guilty of murder (hate crimes?) as the guy who shot up that church in Charleston. And don't get me started on those murderous Punjabis, putting ghee on everything...

The corporations in this instance are essentially exploiting bugs in human biochemistry ("we like fat and sugar even when we've already had enough resources"); people are making these lifestyle choices at least in part because the corporations are actively influencing the choices.

Once you grant that the corporations are at least partly complicit, it's just a matter of multiplication. If the corporations can degrade enough people's quality-of-life, then in principle yes, they can ultimately have been Worse Than Hitler (TM).

So the question is actually, "To what extent have the corporations degraded people's lives?", and if you really must be binary, "Are the corporations Worse Than Hitler (TM)?". You are simply not addressing the actual question; you have answered the question, "Is murder equivalent to someone making a certain lifestyle choice?".

Anyone who owns a business containing the word "patiserrie" or "boulangerie" is exploiting the same bugs on a smaller scale. They regularly influence human behavior with the wonderful aromas they spread in their immediate vicinity.

So again, I ask: if Hostess corporation is genocidal, is La Bouche d'or merely a serial killer?

I'm asking for a little more than just whether a corporation could in principle be worse than Hitler (the specific claim lordarminius made), I'm asking for an actual plausible mechanism by which that could happen.

It's not the thing that's being sold that is the problem. It's the systematic ways that the peddlers lie and game the system that prevent us us from making the choice in "lifestyle choice".

Seems they got to you too. Or perhaps you're one of them.

It's strange that yummyfajitas' post is flagged and killed, presumably for asking a legitimate question in a sarcastic way that rubbed some biased and oversensitive moderator the wrong way.

Contrast to this post, which accuses of him of being "one of them", presumably part of a conspiracy to spread apologia for poor food choices on a hacker interest forum!

An absurd claim, insulting, illogical, of no service to the conversation, but remaining alive and upvoted. We can see further content-free insults in replies to this post. This is the first time I've seen a post killed for reasons that are obviously wrong. In addition, they are wrong in a dangerous way, killing mere rhetorical sarcasm while allowing actual insults, of negative worth, to run wild.

> oversensitive moderator the wrong way.

Moderators didn't touch his post. His post was downvoted by users, and flagged by users.

I'm not a mod, so I don't know this, but it's pretty clearly what happened.

If you think it shouldn't be dead you should click the timestamp and then click the [vouch] link.

Thanks, I didn't know about the flag/kill procedure or the vouch link.

People are lied into drinking soda?

Yes.

Oh okay, moving along then. I just thought people drank sugary drinks because they liked it. Silly me. But you're right, it must be because they're oblivious to the fact they contain sugar, I mean what with the fact the media completely silences that subject... and it's not even written on the bottles. Fucking corporations amirite.

Analogy: swap out sugar for smoking. People smoke because they like it. And because they can't stop. One of the reasons they can't stop is that there are massive industries devoted to ensuring that they don't (witness, for instance, the rising levels of nicotine in cigarettes, presumably intended to make the product more addictive). I mean, what with the fact that the media completely silences that subject… and it's not even written on the packets with giant health warnings and pictures of blackened lungs. Corporations, amirite?

The above japery is to demonstrate that to a large extent, your sarcasm misses the point.

So your contention is that people can't stop smoking. Unfortunately that's contradicted by a fair amount of evidence. I'm going to go ahead and consider your theory falsified.

By all means continue to think that it is easy to stop smoking (no-one disputes that it is possible; the relevant point is whether it is easy, as I hoped was clear from the start), but as is often the way, the second paragraph of the Wikipedia page contains the appropriate information. Of all attempts to stop smoking without assistance, between 3 and 6 percent are successful (though the article later suggests an average 7.3% success rate).

Stopping with chemical assistance, the success rate rises to about 30%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_cessation