Friday
Feb222008
Understanding freedom
Friday, February 22, 2008 "In order to defend my freedom to smoke," writes James Harkin on today's Free Society blog, "we need to admit the shallowness and the emptiness of my freedom to smoke compared with other, more substantial freedoms.
"Sometimes," he adds, "when you want to fight for freedom, you have to hold up the banner and join battle against freedom. That is only way in which the smoker, banished to the furtive margins of the city like a gay man in the 1950s, is going to become a emblem of something more lasting than his packet of fags."
Full article HERE. Discuss.
Reader Comments (5)
Have a look at the film, 'America: Freedom to Fascism' at Forces Mutlti.media.
It's certainly worth it.
Part 1
I have to say I was not terribly impressed with this article. There are some excellent points made with regard to it too by Liberty or Death at Free Society's site:
http://www.thefreesociety.org/Articles/Features/if-we-are-to-fight-back-we-need-to-understand-what-freedom-is-says-james-harkin
Liberty or Death rightly points to the significant subjectivity of the article and I wish to point out also how affected by the antismoker's "handbook" James Harkin is.
To begin with, Harkin comments:
"There is an important truth in Taylor’s argument. Smoking – whatever its merits – is a filthy habit and most of us want to give up."
We have already, on this blog, dealt with the "most of us want to give up" bit. This is not substantiated by my experience of smokers and is principally an anti soundbite aimed at trying to convince us that everybody's doing it so we should too.
As for the "smoking is a filthy habit" part, I conclude that it is no worse than many other kinds of human activity. We are pretty smelly entities that excrete and secrete all sots of bodily substances. Where eating is concerned, for example, the food may look good on the plate and taste yummy as it goes down, but, after it's been processed by the system it ends up as pooh and most people would consider that to be pretty rank stuff which we produce there. In fact, the constant drone of "smoking is a filthy habit" is another anti ploy and people should make up their own minds without influence from those who want to force their anti-smoking prejudices upon us.
Harkin goes on to say that smoking is a shallow freedom. Maybe, however, if it were the case that ETS, for example, were proven to be a vicious indiscriminate killer, which it hasn't been and I also submit that, in the quantities in which we normally experience it, it can't be (from my study conducted for a real inquiry) then most people would probably be reasonably content with taking their smokes outside although not with the levels of persecution encouraged by the anti-smoking lobby.
Furthermore, no-one I know is simply pissed off at the childish level of saying: "Gimee my smokes, want, want, want."
What really gets to people is are the lies and subterfuge (as well as the vindictiveness) that are generated to support smoking bans plus the deep corruption of the anti-smoking lobby. In other words, the notion that an activity is being prevented and a freedom removed on the back of propaganda which renders the British public pretty stupid. This is a very serious issue for many people, and being annoyed about it is not shallow if you believe that systematic lying to the public is not a desirable thing to do or, ultimately, an action conducive to the success and well-being of human beings.
Penultimately, I suspect that Harkin does not realise the importance of smoking bans as he has also been persuaded that defending the freedom to smoke is not really that important. He's wrong. Consider the massive damaging impact that smoking bans have had on business and livelihoods and it has been estimated that California alone has lost $100 billion dollars since the inception of its ban.
Moreover, consider the SCHIP programme (Children's insurance programme) in the USA. Bush was right to veto it as it was intended that this programme should be paid for by the smokers who are largely (although not entirely) drawn from the poorest sections of American society. In other words the poorest would be funding a universal healthcare scheme and hence a service for the better off. Add to that, the admission that it would require the recruitment of 22,000,000 new smokers by something like 2015, who would again be drawn largely from the poorest Americans. Those are pretty disgusting proposals.
Part 2
Next, we can consider the Master Settlement whereby the tobacco companies agreed to part with something like $250 billion in order to fund anti-smoking programmes. The fact is that that was no skin off the tobacco companies' noses as they simply passed on these costs to their consumers who, as already said, are drawn largely from the poorest Americans. In addition, did all the states that benefited from the Master Settlement spend the money on what they were supposed to? Having seen some of the state lists with regard to expenditure of Master Settlement money, I can answer with authority: NO.
Indeed, they spent it on all sorts of state amenities such as municipal buildings and roads plus various expensive junkets. Again then, the poorest paid for it all and it's no surprise that the Competitive Enterprise Institute wants to take the American government to court as this settlement represents the largest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in American history. Shallow stuff to be concerned about huh?
Lastly, I am pleased that Harkin makes a case for liberty, but how much of a favour is he really doing anybody if his own thinking is so influenced by the anti-smoking lobby's thinking?
I made a similar point but maybe not so clearly with regard to Roger Helmer as couple of weeks ago. Helmer quoted, what was it, 100,000 deaths per annum from smoking related diseases? Helmer should grasp this simple set of facts. No-one has proven that primary smoking (never mind secondary) has been uniquely the cause of cancer or anything else. Those taking the trouble to visit Scot Courts will have probably read the McTear case. Richard Doll was a witness at this case and it emerged that he had never ever "proved" that primary smoking causes lung cancer for the simple reason that you cannot use epidemiology to prove anything. Proof in medicine cannot be dependent upon statistical manipulations (mostly based on questionnaires) for proof requires the demonstration of clear biological pathways. On the back of that point, to claim that smoking causes X number of deaths from lung cancer and like wise heart attacks is a non-sequitur. You cannot truthfully generate numbers when you have no certain idea of the cause of death in the first place.
If people are going to write or comment on the smoking issue then much better research needs to be undertaken if people are going to be really effective. And yes, of course I am please that Helmer took on ASH in a public venue, he had balls to do so, but my points still stand and necessarily so.
'Smoking a shallow freedom'? I don't think so Mr. Harkin!
The door this, attempted, eradication of smoking is opening, is a door that hasn't been opened before in this country, in the 'modern' ear. A door that leads to utter contempt for the public, and an authoritarian rule that feels it can do anything it wants to create their dispicable 'Healthist'Utopia.
To smoke is seen as far too 'individual' and 'free-thinking', and therefore is an EXTREMELY important freedom!!
I'd just like to say to Blad Tolstoy that I really enjoyed reading his two posts. Excellent responses, if you don't mind me saying.
In some ways, whether the freedom to smoke is a shallow one is irrelevant. What enrages me about the smoking ban is not that I can't smoke in a pub, but that somebody else has decided I can't smoke in a pub. If it was the landlord, that'd be fine. But it was a petty, lying, obsessed, psychopathic lobby group who decided it.
Furthermore, when smoking bans come in the freedom to smoke is, in some way, dwarfed by the freedom to "be yourself".
When I go to the pub nowadays, I'm not thinking "god I wish I could smoke". I'm thinking "god I wish I felt I belonged here". Because I don't. I don't belong in a smokefree, politically corrected environment.
So there's this matter of "disenfranchisement" that goes with the smoking ban. When something is demonised by law, its proponents are disenfranchised, belittled, ostracised. You might even say they are "sent outside, away from the crowd", if it weren't so sickeningly accurate.
In fact it's just struck me how primal that is - being sent outside away from the group. How to attack someone's morale...
I think the major resentment people have about the anti-smoking crusade is not the elimination of smoking itself, but the sense that society has "moved on" and doesn't really want you anymore. If you stop smoking and get with the program, society will like you again, but until then you're just a loser.
This anti-smoking mentality seems to conjure a kind of fascism, in order to continuate itself. We, law-abiding smokers, have suddenly become the victims of a psychopathic crusade. And there is something about that crusade, and ASH in particular, that just doesn't ring true. Would "nice people" lie and manipulate as they do? Of course not. This anti-smoking "era" is not happening because of a concern for health. It is happening because society is sliding into fascism, and the situation allows certain groups to take advantage.
As we all know, prohibiting somehing can never be done in an elegant manner. That's why, ultimately, an interfering nanny state will have to enlist your neighbour to spy on you - and I think the smoking ban feels like the first major step towards that.