45 Replies to “Lessons Learned from the Public Smoking Debate”

  1. Just don’t put your theories on facebook…..
    http://www.naturalnews.com/038484_Gandhi_quote_Facebook_censorship.html
    (NaturalNews) The reports are absolutely true. Facebook suspended the Natural News account earlier today after we posted an historical quote from Mohandas Gandhi. The quote reads:
    “Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.” – Mohandas Gandhi, an Autobiography, page 446.
    This historical quote was apparently too much for Facebook’s censors to bear. They suspended our account and gave us a “final warning” that one more violation of their so-called “community guidelines” would result in our account being permanently deactivated.

  4. I’m beginning to think Gandhi was just a total crank. I mean I agree with what he said above, but you can’t really square it with this quote from an “open letter to the British people” dated July 3rd, 1940:
    “Your soldiers are doing the same work of destruction as the Germans. I want you to fight Nazism without arms… Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.”
    Anyway, the awesome Adam Carolla is exactly what we need, because what we need is to take back the popular culture. We can’t take back the schools, but luckily everyone hates school and the university shameless scam bubble is about to bust anyway.

  5. The NRA has the correct analysis. Canada’s gun laws are a nightmare and enforced arbitrarily whenever the police decide to do so.
    Here in Canada all three major political parties are united in denying citizens a right of armed self-defense. Prohibiting firearms or anything else is just a pen stroke, an Order-in-Council away.
    And people claim there is no political consensus anymore.
    Meanwhile, those ordinary citizens who applied to lease their own property from the government via a Possession and Acquisition Licenses(PAL) have essentially signed away their Charter Rights. They are one unfounded allegation from a SWAT team raid and under 24/7 surveillance as suspicious persons.

  6. Gandhi was a total crank. Google “The Gandhi Nobody Knows.”
    Adam Carolla, on the other hand, is god. Unfortunately, common sense doesn’t begin at home. I adore Carolla but his children are being raised to be typical p.c. brainwashed California upper class brats by their not-a-genius mom and the Guatemalan nanny. Six years old and not toilet trained?

  7. If those kids are 6 and not yet toilet trained then they are retarded and should be in a special needs home.

  9. The fight was lost when the right to associate, or not, with whomever, was re-defined and limited.
    Businesses somehow became ‘public’, despite every transaction being a private transaction.
    The same with self-defense. It has been re-defined and limited. In Canada, the varying definition is decided after the fact. Well, unless you’re a cop…

  10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCppmoZiXUY
    Shooting the Biggest Guns Money Can Buy | The Big Sandy Shoot
    A hootenanny with the biggest baddest guns exercising their 2nd Amendment Rights which I doubt they will be giving up anytime soon….
    Enjoy a good old time shoot’em up…!!
    Cheers
    Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
    1st Saint Nicolaas Army
    Army Group “True North”

  11. Agree with the NRA policy not to give an inch, but the statists will frame the argument in a way that most people will go along with it. Look at how statists got access to our private computers — they made it illegal to merely possess child pron. Have the wrong pattern of bytes on your hard drive and you’re in jail. Only a very few protested this assault on our liberties and that issue was where I first found myself in violent disagreement with the Canadian Alliance party. As far as I’m concerned, have whatever pictures you want. Molest a kid sexually and you get handed over to the parents for whatever punishment they think fits the crime.
    That’s how statists get their way; framing the argument narrowly at first and then slowly expanding the totalitarianism. Drunk driving is another example. I remember a time when one could legally be drunk and drive — the test back then was if one was so inebriated that it was obvious to the cop then one was charged with reckless operation of a motor vehicle. A friend of mine would routinely drive home from the university pub as he was too drunk too walk – never had an accident. Now the gestapo are allowed to legally stop vehicles for no reason than to ask drivers about their fluid intake (I’ve told cops that yes I’ve been drinking given that humans need a steady supply of water and usually die in a couple of days if deprived of water).
    We need to fight back and the way to do so in the US is to find the most horrific bus accidents involving children and use this in a campaign to stop school busing in the US. After all, if it saves just one life . . . It’s time to stop being on the defensive and we need to really get in peoples faces. Yes, it might mean losing a few quasi-friends but it’s time to draw the line in the sand now and start demanding various freedoms back.
    I’m a bit pissed off at the BC public health morons backing down on their campaign demanding that all hospital staff get influenza vaccine or not be allowed on hospital grounds without masks. I was all prepared to sit on the front steps of the hospital smoking a cigar and proclaiming my influenza vaccine free status and finding out how far I can go in a very doctor deficient region before I cross a line which terminally pisses off hospital administrators.

  13. Loki you are either completely nuts or very misguided. You are defending possessing child porn under the guise of personal freedom???? Where the hell do you think it comes from? Am innocent child is sexually abused in order that some sicko can gratify himself by looking at the ensuing images.
    You really need to take some time and reassess you position.

  15. Adam Carolla’s analysis is spot on, the progressives are playing are a long game of incrementialism, they want to squeeze a ‘reasonable compromise’ out of conservatives once every few years so that what is considered normal changes in their favour.
    The NRA has been attacking gun legislation at a state level for the past two decades, getting more and more concealed carry legislation passed, in effect tearing down many of the gun controls the progressive spent 80 years putting into place. The NRA has the correct strategy of never compromising and always attacking where the enemy is weak.

  17. The NRA adopted this strategy long before the anti-smoking campaign.
    They obviously recognized who the enemy is long ago. And they also realized long ago that we are in a war.
    What most conservatives fail to see is that the removal of gun ownership rights brings the dark side many powers. That’s why it’s such a motherhood issue with them.
    When the gofer guns were being seized just before the LG Registry died, I wrote a letter to Vic Towes about it.
    He never answered my queries but sent me a generic weasel word letter. I had asked if it was not Parliament’s responsibility to protect the property rights of citizens. That’s the way the system is supposed to work.
    But instead, Liberal appointed bureaucrats were allowed to poke the CPC Government in the eye by slapping their assumed supporters. And they got away with it.

  18. The None smoking issue taught the left they could control people . In effect demonize a whole group to divert hatred too. While controlling the sheep who followed their every bleep.
    This was the turning point in leftist social engineering. Now everything is suspect to bans from Peanuts to Porridge.
    The real goal is to eliminate an individual choice in any product made.
    first choose a target. Than make up or exaggerate its bad qualities. Than make it culturally poisoners.
    That way you get your own group of fanatics with a public stripped of free Will . Particularly by politicians willing to look modern with regulations , along with flakes who are influential..

  19. The most important thing to remember is that activists of all stripes never quit. When one horse has been ridden into the ground , they simply change horses and keep riding. There are endless causes and every idiotic cause has its champions. They have no life of their own and the greatest joy they derive is controlling the life of others. It doesn’t matter what you enjoy in life, they want you to stop it.

  20. Bruce, you are a perfect example of how people get taken in by totalitarians. Having a particular pattern of bytes on ones hard drive harms no-one. Why is it that even the mention of sexual exploitation of “children” is so evil that it’s necessary to violate peoples rights whereas explicit photographs of people being killed in various ways are perfectly legal to possess? One of the points I made in a letter I sent to the then prime minister when this odious legislation was being debated was that it would result in the criminalization of “children”. A 15 year old who takes a photograph of her self and her boyfriend having sex using her cell phone camera is automatically guilty of the crime of producing “child pron”. Tell me how making kids into criminals is doing anything about true pedophiles? Cell phone cameras are now ubiquitous and if they were available when I was a teenager I’d now be in possession of child pron.
    You can’t seem to distinguish between a mere image and an actual act of child sexual exploitation. The emotional impact of the latter on people makes it trivially easy for statists to get their foot in the door by confusing people such as yourself. The best “treatment” for pedophiles is to place them in the general prison population where they seem to suffer from a high frequency of fatal “accidents”. In this regard, common criminals have a much better appreciation of the right way to handle pedophiles.
    I happen to consider rap “music” as a sequence of bytes which should be illegal to produce or possess. However, given that I consider people should be free to engage in their own perversions, I now take the more moderate approach of working to make it legal to fire RPG’s at any vehicle that is loudly playing rap “music” on a public roadway.
    When it comes to smoking, I was a militant anti-smoker when I first quit smoking. Then it became obvious what the statist anti-smoking policy involved and now the only time I’ll get into a smokers face if they’re smoking a cigarette in an elevator with me. Otherwise I don’t give a damn what smokers do. The recent totalitarian BC regulations prohibiting smoking on hospital grounds have come very close to my taking up smoking again in protest.
    If you want to know how totalitarian laws get passed, just look in a mirror to find out why.

  21. Ezra Levant covered this ‘activist camel snout in the tent’ extensively in his book “The War on Fun”.

  22. Loki,
    Generally I agree with you on most things. In regards to the child pron without getting emotional like some people seem to do, I’ll present my argument with logic as it should be done.
    If I wrote a book and you photocopied it that would be theft. If I owned a pron business and you copied the pictures onto your computer without permission that would be theft. Presumably we have an agreement that you are allowed to temporally store data. If I owned a pron business and I taped my neighbours doing the nasty and posted it on my site without permission that would be theft.
    As the above is theft, so to is making child pron as the minor cannot give permission. If you download those images you are also in possession of stolen property and should also be charged.

  23. I’ll present my argument with logic as it should be done~langmann
    You’d be satisfied then if possession of child pornography was prosecuted under copyright laws?

  25. The NRA doesn’t budge because they have a constitutional amendment on their side. Although the constitution’s drafters did not specifically include the right to smoke (even if it is implied through the right to self determination) special interest jackals feast on rights which are unprotected. Carola would be better off not over complicating the phenomena of anti-rights groups. They are anti-intellectual control freaks who get off on oppressing people who they dislike personally or ideologically. They engage the dialectic of despotism in which any compromise with them is a surrender of rights/freedom. Their agendas are the antithesis of the free liberal democratic society (we don’t take votes on people’s personal rights/freedoms – a non smoker has no more rights than a smoker). They are elitist thugs and the only political support they get are from politicians and parties who are going the same direction they are – towards authoritarian statism.
    They want your freedom and they believe they are your superiors and have a right to control you – any agreement with them is a loss of personal liberty – it’s really that simple.

  27. Glasnost: possession of the pictures is a form of theft of personal property. One with severe consequences to the victim. Hence the punishment should be severe.
    Loki is trying to compare it to smoking or guns etc. I am providing him an argument that makes more sense than just people screaming about it being wrong.
    You don’t have to like the argument, personally I don’t care if you don’t.

  28. @ Occam
    ” any agreement with them….”
    Personal freedoms are rarely lost by agreements. They are taken by force or under threat of monetary punishment. First they must come up with some statistic to warrant the action (always easy to get no matter how inflated) and then remove that freedom for the good of society, or cost/health or my favorite, the “think of the children” attack method. This has always worked whether it’s alcohol, bicycle helmets,seat belts,lawn darts, smoking, salt, large soft drinks etc. etc. The list is endless. It has been entirely too easy for them because we now live in a time where everyone is minding everyone else’s business and we have turned into a nation of weenies, whiners and left hand wingnuts. Can’t see this trend ending anytime soon. Unless of course it all collapses and we get a complete re-set. A distinct possibility under Obama’s leadership.

  29. Many hardcore libertarians (Rothbard, Han Hermann-Hoppe, etc) dispute the whole notion of IP (intellectual property). After all these years, I’m still not sure. Patents, too.
    Loki’s is a difficult but reasonable argument. The images on disk, while they were most likely created through illegal behaviour, haven’t actually harmed anyone; the harm has already been done. And perhaps the sexual gratification (while personally disgusting to me) achieved via viewing them will yield a kind of harm-reduction if it reduces the urge to participate in the real thing: aka, the safety valve argument.
    Think of a snuff film (do they actually exist?). A murder is filmed. The victim is dead. Is any real harm done in possessing the image.
    How many of you have watched islamist beheadings? Personally, I haven’t, and won’t! I don’t want those images in my brain. I didn’t view the Saddam hanging either.

  30. Just trying to follow your logic.
    I guess the next “logical” question would be: what punishment is appropriate if the person possessing the child pornography had actually paid for it?

  31. I believe their arguments about laws against slander, intellectual property etc are based upon the marketplace recognizing the property was stolen and causing the thief to suffer such discredit that a law just isn’t necessary. I am not convinced this can be applied to an actual product such as a book. It’s one thing for me to plagiarize another author and try and pass it as my own but its an entirely another thing for me to simply print a bunch of his books and sell them….
    Personally I think without some method of protecting property such as the design of a new widget, there would be nothing to stop places like China from copying the widget you designed. China does this now and I don’t see public choice stopping it.
    Glastnost: In terms of the child pron issue since one cannot pay a child for pron then any product from it is theft. You can buy stolen property but its still stolen and if you knowingly buy such property you will be charged with possession.

  33. Me No Dhimmi, thank you for getting my point. Langmann, the intellectual property argument is a valid and unexpected one. However, most pron nowadays is produced by amateurs and we come back to why would one want to criminalize a couple of 15 year olds with a cell phone camera who’ve just discovered sex and want to post their discoveries on the internet? A classic example of the law of unintended consequences.
    If I have to make a binary classification of people, almost all individuals can be grouped into two sets: those who just want to be left alone to do their thing and those who have a strong need to control the actions of other people. Even members of the first set will support an action which is against their own interests if they allow their immediate emotional reactions to an event determine a future course of action. The news media slants stories in a way designed to push people to support a particular point of view and that is one of the advantages of having absolutely no contact with any aspect of the MSM. The shootings in CT were a minor statistical blip whose body count was quickly exceeded by the daily carnage of MVA’s, but by focusing attention on this one particular event made it seem far more important that it actually was. Given the anti-gun weltanschauung of the media, it was just the story that they needed.
    Dead kids are the strongest emotional control mechanism that statists have and, the more dead children one is dealing with, the greater the chance of totalitarian legislation being passed. People operate reflexively which is for the most part good; when a bear is running in your direction the natural inclination is to run rather than to stand there and wonder if one has mistaken a deer for a bear. Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years the genes of the people who ran remain in the gene pool and the ones who didn’t react immediately were digested in the guts of bears.
    People who have the need to control people are masters of emotional manipulation and I see no difference between a politician pushing a statist agenda using dead children as an emotional prop and a pedophile luring a child into the woods with a story about a lost puppy. Given the far greater impact on the population from the statist politician, I consider them to be far more evil than a simple pedophile.
    Two can play at this game and I’m sure that if one dug into MVA statistics deeply enough one would find a school bus accident in which 20 people died and where the reason the children were on the bus was because of court enforced busing. The NRA has the resources to take this incident and paint a huge swath of politicians as baby killers and ask why, given that so many children have died of a policy do they continue to persist in the same deadly idiocy. There would be interviews with tearful parents of the dead children describing how their child could have walked to school but instead the state tore him out of their hands and put him on a bus which killed him. Stories of narrow escapes of children from bus accidents could be presented. If done right this could create enough emotional revulsion against statist politicians that people would begin to question their other decisions. It’s no secret that the same political ideologies that mandate school busing to enforce “desegregation” are also firmly against the second amendment.
    For a detailed description of how people can be manipulated, I highly recommend Cialdini’s book Influence. This should be required reading in school to inoculate children against politicians who, in future, will promise them the equivalent of candy if they just come with them to look for a lost dog in the woods.

  34. Loki,
    Just as statutory rape doesn’t apply to minors, nor does pron apply to their cell phone pics. However should someone who is an adult then acquire those imagesetters theft argument would apply.
    I agree with you wholeheartedly regarding the angle the media is taking. I would add that they love salacious stories like Sandy Point as it guarantees readership.
    As well I have pointed out several things to people who have rushed for further gun control. A) if the media was doing a proper cost benefit analysis they must include all cases of firearms used to save lives. In Canada this amounts to possibly 40,000 cases a year and if one is conservative at least 4000. That is a lot. B) one has a greater chance of killing their kid by backing over then with their car then a mass murderer killing them. Perspective please. C) one who knows firearms could have done the same body count on children and possibly higher with a regular hunting shotgun and buckshot. As we’re are both physicians we both are very aware that a child’s organs are not well protected and at greater risk due to close proximity to a gunshot, and 9 bullets from buckshot is more deadly then 3 from a .223 rifle at close range. So if one bans rifles like the AR, when the next shooter kills kids with a shotgun is that going to make it alright or will the anti gun safety folk want to ban shotguns next? Will it make the billions spent banning semi auto rifles worth it? I think I know the answer.

  35. I disagree Peter, in a stable democracy, rights are always lost by agreement they are given over to the state many times unknowingly – we have never agreed to lose our property rights or privacy rights or right to effective self defense but they have been taken from us by us agreeing to go along with regulating and legislating which surrenders these rights bit by bit (to a control freak silence or ineffective protest is agreement) – gradual erosion through incremental statism.
    Smokers know this, gun owners know this, property owners know this, free speech activists know this. You surrender a right every time you agree with laws that incrementally remove them (by complying). This a very old Fabian socialist agenda. They know that if people are sufficiently indoctrinated in submissive self loathing, guilt or fear, they will freely give up their rights. We see Obama doing this very thing down south, using hysteria as a justification to remove rights. The worst thing for Americans to do is remain silent or to comply. This will be taken as agreement in the left’s political dialectic.

  36. Loki:
    Apparently you have a different perception of child porn than I have. You obviously have not seen images, as I have in the course of my job, of 18 month old infants being raped, or 6 or 7 year olds being physically abused, raped and sodomized.
    To term these images, sought after by sick perverts, as merely a string of bytes on a computer is an abomination. Child porn comes from somewhere…and it always associated with the abuse of innocent children.

  37. Bruce I guarantee you Loki has seen the images of child abuse etc.
    He’s making an intellectual argument rather than a emotional argument which should always be done when designing law. Please reread his arguments carefully. I think he has missed an important factor which I have raised and he may now be reconsidering his position. However we must also strongly protect personal privacy and defend against social engineering like soft drink laws etc. or it’s a slippery slope.

  38. Back to the subject of incrementalism, there can be no question that the State uses a ramped up, exaggerated fear of pedophbilia to warrant suppressing free expression on the internet. I mean who can disagree with “protecting the children”?
    Obama is on record, and well before his coup and the foisting of Obamacare upon a unwilling public, of favouring a government monopoly single-payer health care system but that he wouldn’t be able to get to that long goal in a single step. The individual mandate is of course the first step in training the sheeple to accept that it’s perfectly natural for the government to micro-manage the most intimate aspect of their lives, namely their health.
    The very MO of Fabianism is the achievement of socialism via seemingly reasonable incremental incursions of the State into our lives. Our western economies have been destroyed by the ideas of Keynes, a Bloomsbury Fabian socialist. Even most conservatives now accept many of the principal premises of government intervention in the economy: e.g. stimulus.

  39. Me No Dhimmi:
    Yeah and I think history repeats itself along those lines. I got into an interesting discussion with a born again socialist about the food stamp program. I said that most studies actually show that the program is not associated with food insecurity (which might suggest that it doesn’t relieve starvation and may not even be required by most people).
    His point was that even Republicans see the FSP as a valid program and that it’s costs per person have been decreasing as it becomes more efficient and better managed.
    I replied that indeed that is true, and that due to continous House scrutiny as well as the fact that it is a near direct transfer it has more efficiency than most social programs. However I still fear the program because incrementally more and more people have become valid recipients of food stamps, and as States are allowed to control the qualifications to receive foodstamps it has become more political as to who is allowed to obtain them. We have seen a dramatic increase in food stamp recipients over the last 10 years. Near 50 million people are on them out of 300 million Americans.
    What happens, I said, when the majority of people are on the FSP? How will you ever get them off? Who will control this political force?
    The FSP reminds me of the gain levy in Ancient Rome, not just because its direct similarities are almost ironic, but also because its political power once realized led to the downfall of the Republic.

  40. ‘The None smoking issue taught the left they could control people . In effect demonize a whole group to divert hatred too. While controlling the sheep who followed their every bleep.
    This was the turning point in leftist social engineer’ posted by Revnant Dream @ 12:25.
    Exactly, Revnant, Exactly! Anti smoking was always about control, it worked because smokers and Bill of Rights supporters folded like cheap cardboard. Hitler did not like smokers; he claimed “Jews, loose women and indians” smoked, nor did Lenin- they did not like the concept of free choice but they picked on smokers because many people who did not like Hitler/Lenin did not like smoking!
    Smoking is just a habit, nothing sinister about it; some people like it and those that do like it have dropped out of public places because it is waaay too cold to smoke outside. Let us hope that lessons learned from the stupid smoking ban will be like prohibition; someday gone.
    “First they came for the smokers….I did not say anything because I did not smoke…when they came for me there was no one left with a spine to say anything….The ‘better than thou’ attitude does not have any meaning when the ‘thou’ is snuffed out.
    The second amendment is on the slippery slope for the same reasons.

  41. langmann, thanks for the Rothbard link which I have read very carefully. A most excellent distinction between copyright and patents which I had somehow missed. I must also review Hans Hermann-Hoppe who inherited Rothbard’s mantle. He’s even more radical, and if I’m not mistaken, doesn’t agree with intellectual property rights at all, but perhaps I’ve missed some nuance.
    I haven’t had the chance to re-read your comments, but I don’t think copyright would apply to illegally produced material like child pron. As you are aware an agreement to perform an illegal act is not a legally valid contract. So prosecuting on the grounds of copyright infringement wouldn’t work.
    Your comment about conservatives accepting the idea of food stamps:
    YES. And think of the institutionalization of food banks.
    And the utter removal of the taboo of being openly and proudly dependent. Think of the view so many have toward the sainted “street people” who evidently are mere victims of happenstance (and a failure of the collective) and not poor individual choices.
    Why I’m old enough to recall a time when having a mortgage was mildy shameful and not publicly divulged to strangers!

  42. Bruce, the problem with your position on child pr0n is that it leaves innocent people at risk. If tomorrow a Russian spammer was to send you email with child pr0n in it, and the government got to your computer before you did, you would be found guilty of possession of child pornography and be at risk of having the full weight of the law coming down on you. Same thing if you click on the wrong link and expose yourself to a computer virus that then uploads child pr0n to your computer.
    That’s the consequences of what happens when law is written in response to emotional arguments instead of to logical arguments.

  43. Smoking and guns are apples and oranges.
    They have absolutely nothing in common.
    Having a gun in my pocket I am not influencing any one else’s life until they decide to kill me, injure me, rape me, rob me or do that to someone else I am with.
    Smoking means exhaling noxious and harmful substance into everyone else’s personal space to inhale.
    If you don’t see the difference, your IQ is just too low or you are so addicted to smoking and spoiled that you re simply incapable of rational thought.
    Yes, I do support your right to do whatever to your own body you want, including smoking. But I would rather have you expelled from the public places and businesses open to the public until you stopped puffing out clouds of smoke. Just smarten up or quit smoking. If you want to continue smoking, do so inside your own home and remember: no one is forcing you to smoke, your life does not depend on smoking and smoking does not save you from harm. Guns do. Get over it, stinky smokers.

  44. Another One – you are one self styled ‘preacher spewer’ if I ever heard one! Do you drive or fart?
    What do you think of the ‘health spa’ bars serving booze and using recyled booze breath to ease heating bills? Pathetic Oh thou ‘it’s all about meme’ another one.
    If you had tried your little hissy rant on Sir Winston Churchill or your (probable) hero Stalin – Winston would have blown smoke in your face and ignored you and Stalin would have ground his cigar out on you face and had you shot!
    Go back to the nursery wee minded one.

  45. @ Another one
    I dunno oh weenie one. I have seen the big cities like Toronto and Vancouver under a brown blanket that must have been equal to at least 3 packs a day , day in and day out. I think a wee bit of well saturated 2nd hand smoke is the least of your problems. Anyway, in a free country why can’t there be smoking and non smoking restaurants, at the owners discretion since he/she know their customer base ? If properly filtered and ventilated the air inside is cleaner than the outside air. I will be pleased to tell you why. Because it’s a pissing contest between organized activists that know how you should live (according to them) and people that just want to enjoy a legal product and mind their own business. I quit smoking many years ago because of monetary priorities but the brainwashing and ass pulled statistics on this subject is enough to get me started again, as I always enjoyed it. Almost as good and lively discussion subject as the horrors of drinking a 16 oz pop or the destruction caused by that salt shaker on the table.

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