Neal Asher has a few things to say about smoking bans, among other things.
I have always been 100 percent anti-smoking. I have had no sympathy for smokers who complain about not being allowed to smoke wherever they please. You choose to smoke; the rest of us do not choose to smell it. I have been happy about every new restriction on smoking. But when they started banning smoking in bars it was like something just snapped. I don’t go to bars at all. My only experience of them is from the movies but the idea of a smoke-free bar seems to me, against nature. And it just seems to me that this is something that the free market could take care of. If enough people want smoke-free bars there will be entrepreneurs who will open smoke-free bars. Smoke free bars for those who want them and old-fashioned smokey bars for people who want those. Isn’t that the way it should be?
I don’t like smoking but, you know… people do a lot of things in public that I don’t like. I don’t like people running around in public with their underwear showing. (I’m talking to you too, you gals with your bra straps showing.) I don’t like hearing people use profanity excessively. I don’t like it when people have phone conversations in public about private matters. I don’t like it when people in the grocery store leave their shopping carts sitting diagonally across the aisle. I don’t like when perfectly healthy people walk too slowly in shopping malls. Why don’t we pass laws against all these things too? But where does it stop? Gracefully putting up with things we don’t like is one of the marks of being an adult.
It’s likely someone is thinking, “But second hand smoke is a health issue.” Maybe it is. Some people consider that research questionable. But, regardless, in the case of bars it should be the choice of the bar owner. Smoking bans and smoking sections in some buildings are reasonable. Smoking bans in bars are not. Children are not allowed in bars. No one is forced to go to bars. If you don’t like smokey bars stay out of them. It’s that simple.
I don’t understand why there is not more of an uproar about this. Why are governments allowed to go against the wants and needs of the majority for the sake of a relative few protesters?
September 8th, 2010 - 8:42 am
“Why are governments allowed to go against the wants and needs of the majority for the sake of a relative few protesters?”
I’d like to know that myself. It may be that the majority doesn’t make enough noise. I think the place I work had the best smoking policy – Not unless you are in your car, in the parking lot *with the door shut and windows rolled up*. But now they’ve allowed it at certain outdoor places, and the associated problems have popped up, such as cigarette butts all over the ground, sometimes less than three feet from an ashtray or receptacle, smoking in ALL outside areas, even the ones with specific no-smoking signs, people lighting up “just as they are about to go outside” but are still inside, and oh yeah, my favorite, a ten to twenty minute smoke break every hour on the hour.
Maybe if smokers followed some of the simple rules laid out for them that are the same as the rest of society, such as don’t litter and don’t take a break every hour or every thirty minutes, They’d stop seeing their rights dissolve. I couldn’t own or run a big factory like the one I work at. I would, once in a while, find people who are smoking where they shouldn’t be and spray them down with a fire hose. And then fire them.
September 8th, 2010 - 7:07 pm
Bars are like anywhere else: after enough years of it, the notion of bars as smoke-filled dens will seem pretty alien. I don’t really have any sympathy for the smokers there, either — all of the objections to smoking seem to me to apply there equally, especially on behalf of the employees, who by virtue of working there don’t really have a choice in the matter. I don’t think there should be any particular class of business where it’s OK to befoul the air, just because…well, it’s always been that way in that type of business. So what?
September 8th, 2010 - 11:44 pm
One of the things I learned when going through insurance sales training was that life and health insurance companies do not take exposure to secondhand smoke into account at all when determining risk categories. Insurance companies have all sorts of super-detailed actuarial information for use in setting rates. None of this information shows any health risks associated with secondhand smoke.
September 9th, 2010 - 11:57 pm
Sadly, the government no longer represents the will of the people in any regard… quite the opposite… today we see a powerless government… a government which has fallen pray to gifted salesmen who are in the employ of financial interests.
Smoking is but a brief pause in the “War and Peace” discussion of the agenda of “Divide and Concur” … which is one of the many we will endure in the months and years to come… these discussions will of course end when absolute power corrupts absolutely whereupon discussions of any kind will be banned.
Eventually through media created catastrophe… along with pressure from various government departments, the people will finally be pushed too far, at which point they will return to natural law as set out in most civilized countries constitutions.
In the meantime, I find entertainment in reading the out of context chatter and chuckle at my soon to be censored ability to respond.
September 12th, 2010 - 6:39 pm
Antismoking is not new. It has a long, sordid history.
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1981/2/1981_2_94_print.shtml
(Dillow, 1981, fails to note that the antismoking crusade of early-1900s USA was eugenics-driven).
Antismoking reared its ugly head – again as an aspect of eugenics – in Nazi Germany. Hitler was a student of American eugenics. (It should also be noted that medicos and lawyers had the largest memberships within the Nazi Party).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2352989/pdf/bmj00571-0040.pdf
The current antismoking crusade is also eugenics-driven, albeit more masqueraded, i.e., crypto-eugenics. Please see the Godber Blueprint ( http://www.rampant-antismoking.com ).
Antismoking always proceeds in the same way. Through “public health”, it promotes a plethora of inflammatory lies (propaganda) where the intent is to outrage particularly nonsmokers so that they will not question smoking bans or the persecution of smokers. Where antismoking is rampant, it is a critical symptom of dangerously misguided Public Health, e.g., medicos venturing again into dangerous social-engineering.
If you are very much antismoking, able to parrot the antismoking “slogans” with ease, then you will need to consider that you have been brainwashed.
September 15th, 2010 - 5:04 pm
Peter:
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2010/09/insurance_compa.html
Hope you don’t mind. The similar comments from other insurers may be of particular interest.