Tuesday
Apr072009
The politics of secondhand smoke
Tuesday, April 7, 2009 
I have been reading the comments (101 so far) on last Friday's post. I have nothing to add except to refer readers, especially our friend Rollo Tommasi, to the 2005 Forest report Prejudice and Propaganda: The Truth About Passive Smoking.
The 50pp document, which features a lively introduction by Lord Harris of High Cross, our late chairman, is divided into three sections: Questions and Answers about ETS, Epidemiology and ETS, and Examining the Evidence on ETS.
Nothing that has been said or written since prompts me to change my mind that the dangers of secondhand smoke have been greatly exaggerated for reasons that have far more to do with politics than health.
You can download the full report HERE.
Reader Comments (156)
Nothing hush hush Naomi. Yes the ban is still with us, that doesn't mean people aren't doing things to change that but it won't happen overnight.
You can't say Sally wasn't offensive, if I or others were offended then you can't just disagree with that. It's probably escaped your notice, but people are on this blog to discuss and debate, not discuss ways to overturn the ban. Or are we not allowed to do that?
So tell me what you are doing then Mr RichW? You seem to live in a dream world, where you think you are some sort of resistance fighter. All you come across to me is a grumpy old man, who doesn't like his cage being rattled.
We can all make rash statements about what we are doing behind the scenes, it is what is happening up front that matters. It is people like myself and Sally that matter, people who write and argue with our MPs, not people like yourself who try to show how much they know by copying and pasting masses of the same old stuff that we have all seen over the last two years, and then try to disguise it by saying you are honing your debating skills. People with well honed debating skills do not stoop to the level of childish name calling that you do!
If my good friend Sally was offensive in any way, which I certainly have not seen, then please point out these offensive remarks, in the same manner as the offensive remarks aimed at her, have been pointed out to you.
You say people on this site are here to "discuss and debate, not discuss ways to overturn the ban"? I have never read anything so silly in my life as that statement. One minute you are saying you are working undercover to overturn the ban and so much has been done already, and the next minute you say you don't want to discuss "overturning the ban" anyway!
I might be wrong, but I have a strong feeling that you would be alone on this site, as the one person who does not want the ban overturned. What are you doing here for Christ sake and when are you going to offer something concrete that people can or should do, that will help their cause?
Rich W said 'And how many days is Doll talking about? A week? 20 years?'
I would like to know the same as my father smoked about 60 cigarettes (I cannot give an exact number) every day and I lived in the same house as him for over 20 years. My mother lived for over 50 years with his smoking and she died aged 83 of old age. Did she die of passive smoking or is dying of old age smoking related?
Naomi, I don't think I am, and haven't claimed to be, a "resistance fighter".
"One minute you are saying you are working undercover to overturn the ban and so much has been done already, and the next minute you say you don't want to discuss "overturning the ban" anyway!"
Nope, I never said "undercover". If you don't know the group that the majority of people here represent then that's not my fault, but there's nothing undercover about it. And I didn't say I don't want to talk about overturning the ban, I said we aren't. Big difference. This blog piece is about SHS, and a discussion on SHS ensued. Big surprise! It's very simple really, I don't know what you don't understand.
"when are you going to offer something concrete that people can or should do, that will help their cause?"
i'm not, because, as I just said, this is a blog and discussion on SHS. You may as well ask why we're not discussing COPD or smoking in movies. Smoking, as an issue, encompasses many things, including the ban, including SHS, including cancer and so forth. We are discussing SHS.
The first post your "good friend" made here was that we are "throwing everything you've got into a fake debate with a fake debater". She received a number of polite, well-answered responses explaining why we are discussing.
"you could and should, be putting your energies into fighting the real villains, and if you did, you would have a very strong chance of stating your case and winning your battle, but while you are wasting time with 'fiction', you will achieve nothing!"
Insulting, because it is implying, quite blatantly, that we are doing nothing else but debating with a work of fiction. Seemingly, Sally is of the very strange opinion that because Rollo is using a pseudonym he cannot be a real person. This statement is saying that we are on a blog discussing things beside a ban, so are wasting our time and getting nothing done. Wrong. Again, if you don't know the group we represent then that's fine, but if you do then you should be aware of the achievements to date.
Then: "Of course it matters if Mister Rollo is real or not RichW, are you normally in the habit of conversing with fictitious characters then? Doctor Who states that there is a parallel universe out there and we are all under threat from it, have you written to him to oppose or agree with his views?"
Not a little offensive? Again, under the delusion that a fake name equals a fake person. No, "Rollo" is a real person on a real computer putting opinions from real studies. We are having a sensible discussion, and, as has been said countless times now, many people read here and do not comment. Thus, there is a strong chance people will read this and start researching for themselves, or become swayed by our comments, which leads to more people joining our cause and rejecting the hype. That is a good thing. As Kendra said on page 2: "I am not nearly so knowledgeable as Rich, Idlex and the others and am learning a great deal from them, regardless of whether Rollo is present as agent provocateur. I was enjoying this debate very much, the points brought up about Doll, Hill and Fischer were very informative and I did not feel my time was wasted until you started repeating the same criticisms while ignoring the answers and on a much more superficial level than Rollo". People learn the important information from discussions such as these.
Quite frankly, what business is it of yours what we do anyway? We have all learnt from such debates, and are helping others learn. You make a ridiculous claim that because the ban is in place we are doing nothing, and say you are the ones that matter because you write to MPs. Well, the ban is still in place is it not? So your argument works against you.
Let me deal with Idlex and Rich’s comments…..
In an earlier post, I explained I feel it is the pro-smokers on this board who have engaged in “dodging questions and twisting things”, to borrow a term which RichW originally used. Sorry to say this Rich, but your latest posts have proved my point.
I have pointed out Rich twisted Doll’s words by claiming a single hour of SHS exposure was dangerous to health, when he actually referred to an hour A DAY of exposure. And he talked of time spent in a building containing asbestos - not direct exposure to asbestos as Rich claimed. Yet I see Rich still dodges my question of asking him to explain why he chose to misrepresent Doll’s comments.
And there’s more question-dodging by both Rich and Idlex. Neither of them explain why it was appropriate for Forest to highlight Doll’s comment on Desert Island Discs when he made definitive comments – which contradicted what Forest were trying to claim to be his views – in later statements.
Rich plays the “Doll can’t be trusted on asbestos” card. Well, Rich, it’s actually irrelevant to this debate. Forest obviously thought Doll’s professional integrity was high, otherwise they wouldn’t have quoted him. In doing so in an unquestioning way, they cannot argue that comments he previously made should not be trusted.
I find Rich’s suggestion that his comments on DID were MORE reliable than other sources bizarre. How can unscripted, impromptu comments in the course of a wide-ranging discussion about his life be considered more reliable than a carefully worded statement or report?
Then – irony of ironies – after accusing me of misquoting Doll, Rich then tries to argue that “I am actually of the opinion that Doll changed his words because of pressure from people in the tobacco control movement, because that is what his words lead me to believe”. Rich - you are entitled to your views, of course, but you don’t even explain how you come to this view. But how can this view be the result of anything other than misquoting crystal clear statements by Doll that SHS presents a risk to health?
Turning to Idlex’s comments, he says that Forest did not misquote Doll. Sure they used the very words he used. But those words do not allow Forest to claim Doll thought nobody should be concerned by SHS. Actually, the Forest paper couches its terms quite sneakily, by reporting how the “gist” of Doll’s remarks were viewed in some circles. And, while the Forest paper tries to suggest that Doll reluctantly change his mind in recent years, it produces no evidence to suggest that he either had to chance his mind nor that there was any reluctance in his latter statements.
Idlex asks “why would [Doll] appear on Desert Island Discs simply to tell the world about his personal indifference to passive smoking?” The answer is he didn’t. He went on the programme to discuss his life and favourite items. As for the quote in the Journal of Addiction, it has been recorded as reflecting Doll’s views that smokers should not be compelled to quit, not that SHS is harmless to non-smokers (e.g. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/sir-richard-doll-the-scientist-who-linked-smoking-to-cancer-dies-500158.html; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/24/AR2005072401163_pf.html).
The fact is the clearest statements of Doll’s views were made in announcing the results of the IARC study (of which he was a member – see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2053840.stm) and http://www.bma.org.uk/images/Smokefree_tcm41-20691.pdf - which I am virtually certain Doll would have to have agreed to before it was published. If Doll’s views were unclear in 2001, they were crystal clear by the time Forest wrote their paper.
Idlex then says “We are hampered by not having the full transcript of the programme.” I agree.
But I disagree with Idlex’s final remarks: “At very least, you should admit that what Doll said was rather unfortunate, because it is open to the interpretation that I, and many others, have placed upon it. If he was not expressing his professional judgment, he should have made this clear.” No Idlex, it’s not unfortunate.
It is the pro-smokers who are trying to use these quotes to build up an argument. It shows the paucity in the pro-smokers’ argument that they have to try to make hay using selective quotes by the likes of Doll and Sir George Godber where the overall purpose and context is unclear and there is no hard evidence of what was actually said (e.g. full recording, transcript, presentation slides, report, press release). Or – even worse - they deliberately misquote the likes of Marcia Angell and the National Cancer Institute (in both cases over supposed Relative Risk requirements) and misrepresent the views of Doll which were well established by the time Forest produced its report. What kind of way to conduct a debate is that?
You can't say Sally wasn't offensive,
I can't say that I found her particularly offensive. She simply saw no point in debating with the likes of Rollo Tommasi, and regarded it as a waste of time, and said as much.
Perhaps what I found myself objecting to a little bit was what seemed to be the suggestion that because she saw no point in debating with Rollo Tommasi, others should not debate with him either, and should instead do something useful like campaigning to end the smoking ban.
For the most part I agree about the futility of debating these with antismokers, because in my experience it comes down to being told that I stink, and that I will soon die of lung cancer, and deservedly so. But Rollo Tommasi is not one of these run-of-the-mill antismokers. He is courteous and reasonable. Or at least he has been on these threads. And that makes him interesting to me, if not to anyone else. Much the same applies to someone like Michael Siegel. who is also courteous and reasonable, and who will engage in debate with smokers who disagree with him.
In both cases, I have no expectation of changing their minds about anything, but I do hope that I might gain a better understanding of how they they think, not just about the smoking issue, but about wider social, moral, and political issues. It seems to me that the better one knows one's enemies, the more likely one is likely to see ways to defeat them.
For I believe that there are much deeper issues lying beneath the surface of the smoking debate, which are about the whole nature of human society. It often seems to me that antismokers have a very different conception of the nature of human society than I do, and that for them society is the paramount entity to which we all belong, and the first duty of anyone is to obey the rules laid down by that society, and that individual personal preferences are trivial and unimportant (and perhaps even rather dangerous), and their presence indicates a failure to be fully socialised, which process entails the negation of 'selfish' personal wishes and the raising of the wishes and desires of other people over these asocial, anarchical, individual desires.
Their ideal society seems to be one in which recalcitrant individuality is erased, and everbody becomes fully subsumed into the hive mentality of a society which is greater than the sum of its individual components. And so when this society comes to the collective decision that everybody should stop smoking (and perhaps also drinking alcohol, eating fast food, and failing to take sufficient physical exercise), it is the duty of all members of society to obey these new social rules, and to do their level best to give up smoking, with the benign assistance of smoking cessation services, smoking bans, etc. Anyone who disagrees is regarded as an uneducated troublemaker, a sort of barbarian in need of re-education.
Perhaps almost needless to say, I don't accept this view of human society, law, and personal obligation. In my view, the individual does not exist in order to service society, but rather that society exists in order to service the individual, and that the true goals of human society are not to bind everyone ever more tightly into a single social unit, but instead to individually liberate them from as many constraints as possible, making their individual lives easier and more free. And so from my perspective, the numbers of rules and regulations governing society should be kept to the absolute minimum. And legislating to ban smoking is an unnecessary restriction of freedom, making people less free, and their lives more difficult.
It is these fundamental things - the entire nature of human society - that the smoking debate is really about. In the view of antismokers, smokers are asocial, and indifferent to the wishes of the greater society around them, and need to be more fully socialised. In the view of smokers, antismokers are interfering busybodies who are restricting and removing freedoms that they have no right to invade, and wish to micro-manage everybody's lives, and who have got above themselves and need to be knocked off their high horses. Smoking is quite accidentally one of the battlefields upon which a much deeper collision is taking place.
There really ought to be a debate between the two sides. Because if the matter cannot be resolved by debate, it will be resolved through civil war.
Sally - I have to agree with Idlex.
We are unlikely to change each other's minds. But we can debate with both passion and politeness (as most of us on this thread have done). And by debating, it does make us all question our own views and consider issues from different perspectives. And that can only be good for our understanding of the issues.
Rollo. I see that you have failed to answer this question: 'And how many days is Doll talking about? A week? 20 years?'.
We don't need an exact figure, a rough figure will do. How long before will it take before we get lung cancer or any other 'smoking relating illness' from passive smoking?
Actually Rollo yes, I must admit I did take Doll's words out of context. That wasn't a deliberate ploy though, just eager posting. But Doll's words are still wrong, and masking the truth I feel. A building containing asbestos could mean you sat in the lounge while a pound of asbestos is in the attic. This would not be a threat. So sure, being sat in the same room as a smoker (presuming they are smoking, of course) poses MORE risk. That does not mean the risk is substantial though.
I don't think I've dodged anything Rollo, I have not misrepresented Doll's quotes but rather spoken about specific ones. It was not me who posted the DID quote was it?
"And there’s more question-dodging by both Rich and Idlex. Neither of them explain why it was appropriate for Forest to highlight Doll’s comment on Desert Island Discs when he made definitive comments"
Not dodging Rollo, I have actually not mentioned Forest at all - I have neither attacked or Defended Simon Clark's posts. To me, it is pointless. I would rather discuss Doll's words themselves.
"Forest obviously thought Doll’s professional integrity was high, otherwise they wouldn’t have quoted him. In doing so in an unquestioning way, they cannot argue that comments he previously made should not be trusted."
They didn't argue that, I did, and I'm not a member of Forest. That does not mean 'they' think his integrity was high, it is just common knowledge that he is respected in the anti-smoking field CRUK still states the Doctor's study provides most of our knowledge of smoking today. So of course he needs addressing.
"I find Rich’s suggestion that his comments on DID were MORE reliable than other sources bizarre. How can unscripted, impromptu comments in the course of a wide-ranging discussion about his life be considered more reliable than a carefully worded statement or report?"
Simple, because he was stating his actual opinion rather than reciting the words he put hours of deliberation over. He wasn't talking to a tobacco control crowd, he was stating his opinion. This means he did not have the chance to re-read a script and say 'hmm, that could get me into trouble I better remove it'.
"But how can this view be the result of anything other than misquoting crystal clear statements by Doll that SHS presents a risk to health?"
Because the 'crystal clear statements' came later. At DID and beforehand, Doll stated he did not mind passive smoke. Only after did he change his mind. This isn't misquoting Rollo, it is opinion. Sure, it is possible that Doll believed SCOTH etc and genuinely changed his mind. It is equally possible he had pressure from the likes of ASH, or even Peto and CRUK, to change his statement. Oddly enough though, you're directing this at me but have yet to answer Idlex's questions about Doll's words.
Rollo, it looks like you've made a big error. You said yesterday: "He says that a precise level of risk of lung cancer has been produced (1.21). I really don’t know where he draws this conclusion from." then say: "The 2006 US Surgeon General’s report states “The pooled evidence indicates a 20 to 30 percent increase in the risk of lung cancer from secondhand smoke exposure associated with living with a smoker.” The IARC report states “The excess risk is of the order of 20% for women and 30% for men”"
BOTH those examples produce a RR of 1.2 - 1.3. So the official RR of SHS is not even 1.5. I won't even bother to ask if you think this is significant. But you criticise Gori for saying the RR is 1.21, like this is too low. In actual fact, at the very worst he is very slightly under
Rollo Tommasi wrote: What kind of way to conduct a debate is that?
It is not really a debate. It's more like a war. It has begun to press the limits of civilised discussion. Antismokers have set out to defame and destroy me. Whyever should I not set out to destroy them?
As far as I am concerned, what Sir Richard Doll provided on Desert Island Discs was some useful ammunition. Why should I not use that ammunition?
There are many far more famous lines which have been thus used as ammunition. When Margaret Thatcher appeared on another radio phone-in programme, and said, "There is no such thing as society. There are only men, women, and families," or something very like this, it was used as ammunition against her again and again. Her supporters bleated that the line had been taken out of context, but seldom took the trouble to provide that context, perhaps because it didn't help her very much, And her words were used to cement her portrayal as someone utterly heartless, and devoid of all sympathy or compassion or social conscience. Was that unfair? Almost certainly it was, but nevertheless that was the perception of her that emerged, and it was part of her undoing. So it goes. Was it unfortunate? Yes, I think it was. Years later, when I had grown to be more sympathetic to the view I thought she might be expressing, I felt that she could have said it differently, or said it in ways that did not open her to the charge of callousness.
So also with Sir Richard Doll. We are agreed about what he said on Desert Island Discs, but you are bleating that his remark has been taken out of context, But you have been no more able than I have to provide that context. And so his words must stand on their own for people to make of them what they will. And I suspect that more people will read them the way I did than the way you do. And you will have to get used to it, in exactly the same way that Thatcherite Tories had to get used to the interpretation placed upon her "no such thing as society" remark.
Nor is it even that this sort of selective quotation is something occasional or particularly reprehensible. It's perfectly normal. TV news reports about, say, some speech by Gordon Brown, will reproduce one or two lines from it, outside the context of the wider speech. It's how the news works. And savvy politicians will lard their speeches with ripe little one-line quotes, knowing full well they are likely to take on an independent life of their own, although not always the sort of life that was planned.
So get over it. You will be seeing that quote of Sir Richard Doll again and again.
RichW: I find it difficult to understand how you believe unplanned, impromptu comments should carry more weight in a debate than a carefully worded statement or report. You say “he was stating his actual opinion”. Okay, but a statement or report would be just as much a reflection of his actual opinion. And, with a statement or report, he would be able to take care to ensure his words could not be confused, misinterpreted or (to an extent at least) left open to mischievous misquoting.
Your whole statement appears to be based on a possibility that Doll was somehow coerced into articulating the dangers of SHS (e.g. “It is equally possible he had pressure from the likes of ASH, or even Peto and CRUK, to change his statement.”). But you have absolutely no evidence that any of this might have taken place. You have no more right to argue that Doll might have been coerced than I have to make another baseless claim, such as (for example) that you might have been receiving payments from the tobacco industry.
Idlex: Your latest posting is most illuminating. It shows the type of debate you are interested in. You talk about Doll’s comments on DID as being “ammunition” and you say that “savvy politicians will lard their speeches with ripe little one-line quotes”. The type of argument you are interested in is the school debate or political theatre of Prime Minister’s Questions. But it is not the sort of debate that interests me.
I’m interested in finding the truth. Does exposure to SHS harm health? If so, in what ways and how many people might it affect? What are the benefits of taking steps to reduce exposure to SHS and what are the risks? These are the types of issues which serious people are interested in. People like most academics, scientists, medical professionals and – I happen to believe – most politicians and civil servants (at least once you get them away from political grandstanding).
I remember the comments attributed to Thatcher about there no longer being such a thing as society. Sure, they got a few people talking at the time. But the comments changed nothing. The knockabout political argy-bargy rarely changes any of our laws. It’s the serious arguments by responsible people with well-researched points to make, backed up with evidence, which are most likely to influence the shape of legislation in this country.
Rollo, you can check the tobacco companies books for my name, you can check my very sorry looking bank balance. We KNOW Doll received money. I did not say it was fact that he was coerced, i said it is a possibility. Please note such subtleties, they make a big difference. Thank you.
As for his comments, I think I have said it enough and clearly enough to put my point across. In an impromptu setting, the truth will come out. Yes, it is open to misinterpretation, but we know that before that event he stated it a few times that he didn't mind people smoking in his presence. only AFTER the DID incident did he change his opinion, which is why I think there is room for argument that he was coerced. Note i said room for argument, not fact.
I also notice you still refuse to answer mine and Chas' question on how many days and years one must be exposed to an hour of SHS for it to be a higher risk than asbestos. And, as i said before, it is not a claim to be taken literally, because it is worded in such a way as to imply something but possibly mean something else. Because he did not say where the asbestos was or in what quantity, so a gram could be lurking 2 stories above you, but he was careful to say duration of SHS and in the same room. This is why his points on DID, to me, are more interesting because he did not have the opportunity to use clever language and misleading, deliberately coy statements like that. I could say asbestos exposure is less dangerous than eating 10 raw eggs a day - this is true, because i was careful not to state that i meant 10 seconds exposure as you rode past a pile on your way home, for instance. So, things are only comparable if we are given durations and, in this instance, locations of the two factors in question. Doll knew this.
Oh, I also notice Rollo that you neglected to notice my points on the studies you mentioned having a RR of 1.2-1.3, a very weak, statistically insignificant association. Once again you are up to old tricks of dodging points you do not want to address.
Rollo Tommasi wrote: It’s the serious arguments by responsible people with well-researched points to make, backed up with evidence, which are most likely to influence the shape of legislation in this country.
In an ideal world, that would be true. But unfortunately we do not live in such a world. Instead we live in a world of polarised and politicised science, where ideologues of one stripe or other pretend to be dispassionate truth-seeking scientists while they advance one political agenda or other.
It is the case with so-called Global Warming, where environmentalist ideologues like Al Gore and James Hansen and Michael Mann cook and spin the data and talk up the results of climate simulation models while pushing to return Western civilisation to a carbon-free palaeolithic era.
If anything tobacco research has been the mother and father of this sort of ideologically motivated research. It has never been anything else. Its origins lie in Nazi Germany and the irrational ideology of healthism. Its aims are to marginalise and denormalise tobacco and tobacco smokers in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that the Nazis set out to marginalise and denormalise racial groups like Jews and Gypsies. Antismoking is a variant of antisemitism. The target has just changed slightly, but the ideology and the science it drives is the exactly the same.
Nor do I believe for a moment that you are anything other than one of these ideologues. Every point that you make is one which serves the cause of anti-smoking. Rather than accept that most passive smoking research studies show little or no risk, you prefer to bundle them all together so as to construct a significant risk. If it had been the other way round, and the individual studies had instead shown a risk, and the bundled results had shown no risk, you would have used the individual studies instead. That's how ideologically driven science works, the data is selected to fit the predetermined conclusions.
And there are no serious and responsible people doing tobacco research, nor has any of their research produced any good evidence about anything. It has always consisted of nothing but hazy statistical correlations, one stacked on top of another in a vast teetering edifice of supposition. The whole of it is nothing but a variant of astrology or numerology. There's no real hard science in any of it. Instead it is a cancer upon science, and a cancer upon medicine, and it has probably halted real progress in the true science of cancer for 60 years.
And it is a 'science' which advances its cause with media propaganda blitzes and press releases. It relies for its influence upon a general lack of public understanding of science and mathematics, and upon the kind of gullibility that comes from such a ill-education.
The end for it all will probably only come when the true causes of cancer finally come to be fully understood, and the epidemiological superstitions of antismoking 'science' are finlly revealed to be vacuous. For this sort of pseudoscience can only flourish where there is uncertainty and ignorance, and where real science has yet to reach. Almost certainly smoking will prove to be no more a cause of cancer than the curses of witches were the cause of the failure of crops in 16th century Europe.
In the meantime, people who can recognise such ideologically motivated research for what it is should be deeply alarmed at what is happening in medicine and science and politics, as smokers are being driven from pubs, and from their jobs, and from their homes by this latest manifestation of a Nazi ideology which quite clearly never really died in the the last war. And they should consider very seriously whether it will be necessary to fight that war all over again to finally eradicate this poisonous ideology for once and for all.
I’m interested in finding the truth. Does exposure to SHS harm health? If so, in what ways and how many people might it affect? What are the benefits of taking steps to reduce exposure to SHS and what are the risks? These are the types of issues which serious people are interested in.
But are you really interested? No, you aren't.
It is quite clear that you have made up your mind that SHS harms health, and the health of a great many people, and that there are many benefits and no risks whatsoever in reducing exposure to it. You have, after all, come here to berate Simon Clark for having the gall to publish words by Sir Richard Doll that suggest that he may not have thought there was much risk to exposure to SHS. You have been jumping up and down demanding a retraction of the offending quote.
Who do you think you're trying to fool? Everybody here knows that you're just another antismoking ideologue who goes round various blogs posting up comments like these. This just happens to be the first time that I've personally encountered you. And I've taken a slight interest in you. You are, unlike most antismokers, unusually courteous. I hope that we have returned the courtesy. But I find myself wondering what you hope to achieve. You have already admitted, in the wake of my own admission, that you had no hope of changing anyone's mind. So what are you trying to do?
I think you may realise that I am as much an anti-ideologue as you are an ideologue. While you accept gratefully every single shred of evidence you can muster against tobacco, I devote myself to shredding the very self same evidence. And it's extraordinarily easy to do. In fact it gets easier every day, as it becomes more and more transparently obvious that the whole of tobacco research is a complete crock.
What am I trying to do? I'm trying to help people who are being demonised and persecuted and denormalised. And I know what it's like, because I'm one of them - I smoke cigarettes. I see them as engaged in a war with people like you, who are trying to crush them and destroy them. I'm hoping to convince them that defeating people like you is much easier to do than they presently imagine. I'm hoping to convince them that it is within their power not only to shuck off pestilential antismokers like you, but to completely destroy them.
And what are you trying to do? Shore up and repeat every single lie that has ever been told against them, because you know that these grand old lies, which have served so well for so long, are beginning to lose their force. Am I not right? You have begun to dread that a day might come soon when people cease to believe that smoking causes lung cancer, and you dread to think what enormous damage this might do to the holy and perfect cause of antismoking.
I doubt I'll get any answer out of you though.
Rich: Even making a suggestion that Doll may have been coerced is beyond the pale. You don’t even know he changed his mind after DID, since it is not clear whether he thought in early 2001 that passive smoking was of little threat to him personally or to people more generally.
As for his statement comparing the dangers of SHS with those of asbestos, I’ve never offered it as a compelling piece of evidence about the hazards of SHS. My point in raising it was that Doll made the point, which throws into serious question the claim that he consistently thought that passive smoking presented little risk. As it happens, the fact the quote doesn’t stipulate the period of exposure required simply underlines my point that formal statements and reports present more effective evidence than off-the-cuff quotes, because they are more likely to provide a full explanation of a person’s views and underlying reasons.
As for your claim that “studies….having a RR of 1.2-1.3, a very weak, statistically insignificant association”, to be honest I wasn’t sure of the point you were trying to make because your previous statement cut out early. But you are very, very wrong. A RR of 1.2-1.3 is not “weak”. Small relative risks suggest a weak association (or risk factor), not necessarily an insignificant finding. Small relative risks may have a substantial public health impact if the exposure and the health outcome affect a large proportion of the population. That is certainly true of passive smoking, where a RR of 1.2-1.3 is enough to account for thousands of premature deaths from lung cancer and heart disease in the UK each year. The only issue about a RR of 1.2-1.3 is that studies showing that level of risk need to be corroborated before they can be viewed as presenting a proper reflection of the real level risk. And that is what the assessments of overall evidence do – and they also present conclusions in a statistically significant way.
Idlex: I’m not going to be able to answer all the questions you have set, at least not now. But bear these points in mind at least.
Passive smoking was not first considered in Nazi Germany. It was being considered as early as 1928 (http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7398/1048).
I find it offensive that some smokers compare their treatment with those of Jews and gypsies in Nazi Germany. The laws of these islands have been based on allowing people freedoms, provided those freedoms do not inhibit the rights of others. So people do not have a general freedom to disturb your nightly sleep with loud music, spray graffiti on your car or drive on the wrong side of the road, for instance. For too long, smoking has had a uniquely privileged position, where a smoker could smoke anywhere in the eyes of the law, irrespective of its effects on other people. That anomaly has now been corrected. You still have the right to smoke.
It is actually comments like your which liken smokers to victims of Nazi Germany, as well as the hypocritical comments of commentators who cry foul at the failings of the tobacco control movement but who are happy to spin the lies and deceit of the pro-smoking lobby, which keep me in these debates.
You say “Rather than accept that most passive smoking research studies show little or no risk, you prefer to bundle them all together so as to construct a significant risk”. Yes I do, because that is proper epidemiological practice. Our views should be based on an assessment of the overall evidence, not just how conclusive individual studies are. Most convictions in our criminal courts are based on the overall effect of corroborated evidence. If courts had to apply the rules you propose for epidemiology, these convictions would not be secured.
The ill-education comes from those who rely on the distorted perversions of science spouted by the likes of Forces.org and so happily lapped up by pro-smoking stooges who do not consider the evidence and the scientific principles for themselves.
By the way, my arguments about passive smoking apply only where I am persuaded of the evidence. I am not convinced about the short-term dangers of SHS, nor on the reported dangers of thirdhand smoke. And I've also stated in newspaper boards that I am not comfortable about some of the proposed law changes here in Scotland (e.g. removing cigarettes from shop displays). Not exactly the views of an anti-smoking zealot, are they?
Rollo, so a RR is low unless many people run the risk? What other heaps of bullshit do you pull out of your arse? That's like saying the risk of knee injury from jogging is low, unless a million people go jogging.
"Rollo, so a RR is low unless many people run the risk? What other heaps of bullshit do you pull out of your arse? RichW"
Well that certainly is intelligent debating Rich. When you can't beat them with facts and figures, go for some more abuse. Well done.
Hi Sally. It's a statement Rollo has produced on at least one other occasion, and had it explained to him why it is an incorrect line of thinking. As Idlex, stated so succintly in the post above, Rollo will look solely at the outcome that serves his purpose best - if individual studies do not do that, then he takes the meta-analyses; if the meta-analyses did not do it, he would take the individual studies.
You will notice that Rollo likes to steer away from facts and figures because they undermine his thoughts and he has to go through all manner of twisting and misinterpretation to make them fit. He then comes out with utter rubbish like the aforementioned statement. Or do you agree with it? A low risk becomes a high risk if many people run it?
Of course, that is not correct at all. It is true to say higher incidence may occur, but that is the law of statistics, the risk of falling out of bed is very low but with the whole country sleeping in beds the chance of incidence is increased. However, the risk itself, on an individual basis, is still low. Each person will run the same low odds of rolling out of bed and hurting themselves, but there will be a higher incidence purely because of the amount of people involved. Rollo takes that and twists it to say 'see, the risk is increased!'
Well said Sally, Good God, these people make you laugh don't they? This particular one screams blue murder because you have the audacity to question his methods and he tries to belittle you, saying that you use abusive language. Sounds like he'd make a good Labour politician.
Rollo said; "For too long, smoking has had a uniquely privileged position, where a smoker could smoke anywhere in the eyes of the law, irrespective of its effects on other people."
WRONG. Smoking has been banned damn near everywhere for a long long time. Cinemas, buses, trains, planes, shops, malls except for designated areas, various pubs and restaurants, the underground and so forth. The only place smoking was permitted was in pubs and clubs, and designated smoking rooms in airports, hospitals, and shopping centres. Before the ban, we would not have been allowed to just walk into a hospital and light up, nor a bus, tram, shop, or 99% of other establishments.
Once more to the breach dear friends, or fill it with our English dead.
Here are some RRs for lung cancer guys.
Full fat milk: 2.14
Owning a wood burning stove: 2.5
Genetics: 4.5
Welder: 5.6
Burnt diesel: 6.0
Rollo a question if I may and I have been researching Hackshaw.
Why do you get involved in these debates, what is your motivation?
Back to Hackshaw, from the BMJ:
"Strength of evidence on passive smoking and lung cancer is overstated"
"Their adjustment for smoking misclassification bias is inadequate for two reasons. Firstly, it is based on the comparatively low misclassification rates seen in American and British populations and ignores evidence of far higher rates in Asian women (table).2-4 Secondly, it uses a new adjustment technique that takes no account of the varying relative risks from smoking in the 37 studies. Despite the fact that lung cancer has many known causes and the evidence that smoking and passive smoking are associated with higher exposure to many adverse lifestyle risk factors,5 the authors' consideration of confounding is limited to fruit and vegetable consumption."
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/317/7154/346
"An hour a day in a room with a smoker is nearly a hundred times more likely to cause lung cancer than twenty years spent in a building containing asbestos” (e.g. http://www.cancer.org/downloads/AA/TobaccoAtlas09.pdf)
Rollo his is a tad misleading, I have tracked down this Danish study on cancer, including lung for manual workers who come into contact with asbesos only 1 result <the RR for SHS. Most are casual number i.e.> 2.0
Plummers and sanitary Laryngeal 1,3
Plummers and sanitary Lung mesothelioma 2,4
Plummers and sanitary Lung not specified 3,7
Plummers and sanitary lung 1,5
Plummers and sanitary peritoneal mesothelioma 3,8
carpenter/joiners Lung mesothelioma 2,1
carpenter/joiners lung 1396 1,1
Insulation workers laryngeal 25 1,9 1,7
Insulation workers Lung mesothelioma ,5 6
Insulation workers Lung 201 1,6
Insulation workers peritoneal mesothelioma 64,5
Electricians Lung mesothelioma 2
Electricians Lung not specified 8,7
http://hesa.etui-rehs.org/uk/dossiers/files/asbestos-constructionworkers.pdf
Careful Dave, you'll get told you're misquoting and twisting things soon
Rollo Tommasi wrote: Passive smoking was not first considered in Nazi Germany. It was being considered as early as 1928
Yes, I know that Fritz Lickint was considering passive smoking in Germany in 1928, and that pedantic sticklers will point out that, strictly speaking, Nazi Germany lasted from 1933 to 1945. But for at least a decade before 1933, Nazi influence in Germany was steadily growing, and after 1945 it was far from dead, as the de-nazification programmes that began that year showed. The Nazi era did not start one day and end on another. It grew up, and it faded away.
I find it offensive that some smokers compare their treatment with those of Jews and gypsies in Nazi Germany.
Well, it's true that we aren't being gassed yet. But apart from that we are being denied a place in public society, and increasingly denied medical treatment, denied jobs, denied homes. In state-sponsored media propaganda, smokers are told, "If you smoke, you stink". Smokers are being punched, beaten, and raped. Old people in homes are being made to go outside to smoke, sometimes to die. And it is all being driven by the same healthist ideology as in Nazi Germany. And it is being supported by epidemiological studies that were first carried out in Nazi Germany. And it is being advanced by the same propaganda means of the Big Lie. There are simply too many parallels and eerie similarities to ignore. Unless, of course, you wish to ignore it.
In addition, both the grand old men of post-war tobacco research - Richard Doll and Ernst Wynder - had surprising links to Nazi Germany. Wynder grew up in Nazi Germany before emigrating to the USA. And Richard Doll attended lectures by SS radiologist Hans Holfelder as medical student in 1936. Both of them referenced Nazi studies in their 1950 papers on smoking.
And, speaking for myself, the modern programme of denormalisation and demonisation and exclusion of smokers has answered a question that long puzzled me about Nazi Germany: how could ordinary Germans have gone along with with the Nazi War on Jews? The answer is, for exactly the same reasons as apply now with smokers. For 50 years or more, smokers have been subjected to a steady campaign of vilification. They are described as weak-willed, dirty, smelly, unattractive, and antisocial. They have gradually become objects of contempt and pity. They were being pushed outside of polite society long before they were actually pushed outside into the cold and rain. They gradually came to count for less than other, more virtuous people. They became a despised and ignored minority. And once they had thus fallen out of sight, nobody would notice what was done about them. They ceased to be people like any others, and became a health risk, a nuisance, a noise and litter problem. They became a Problem that required a Solution.
It was exactly the same in Nazi Germany. The Jews had been vilified for centuries. They too were portrayed as diseased and smelly and antisocial. And so every time you see anyone's eyes glaze over at the mention of smokers, you are seeing exactly what happened in Nazi Germany when the subject of the Jews was mentioned. It was not that the average German hated Jews. Instead, what they felt was far more insidous. If they felt anything, they felt contempt and pity and scorn for them. And above all, they simply didn't think about them. They ignored them. And once the Jews were being ignored, once everybody was turning their heads away from them, it became possible for the real antisemitic zealots, the people who really did hate Jews, to begin to take 'public health' measures to reduce the 'health risk' which had been established by racial 'science'. Ordinary Germans woke up after the war to find out what had been happening while they had been averting their eyes.
I might even add that modern antismoking has changed my understanding of antisemitism. I don't think that Jews really understand antisemitism. Whenever do the persecuted understand their persecutors? They believe that it is something unique to them, which sets them apart, and requires that they have their own Jewish state. But these days, I often find myself wishing, in yet another eerie parallel, that there was a state that was run by smokers for smokers. But it's what always happens when some social group is vilified and degraded. If football players were subjected to the same sort of campaign, they'd probably want their own state as well, where they could play football to their hearts content. Antisemitism is not something historically unique. It's simply what happened to Jews when they were 'denormalised' in the same way that smokers are now being 'denormalised'. And it's something that can happen to absolutely any social group. The solution to the problem (maybe) is to have public watchdogs who keep a weather eye for signs of any social group becoming subjected to this sort of gradual exclusion, and to sound the alarm. Unfortunately, we don't have such a watchdog. We only ever act retrospectively to guard social groups - Jews, blacks, homosexuals, etc - who have already been subjected to this sort of discrimination.
And I really don't care if you find all this offensive. The Nazis too were offended when anyone dared suggest that they were barbarians. For they regarded themselves as civilised and rational and modern and scientific.
Do antismokers think of themselves as Nazis? No, of course they don't. Do they keep Nazi regalia in their cupboards? No. Should they be made to consider that what they are engaged upon is an almost exact mirror of Nazi antisemitism? Yes. They should have that mirror held up before them, so that they (and more importantly, other people) can see them in the wider context of history.
Rollo Tommasi wrote: The laws of these islands have been based on allowing people freedoms, provided those freedoms do not inhibit the rights of others.
But the 'rights of others' have now become infinitely expandable so as to curtail and nullify those freedoms. Once it became a 'right' to demand 'smoke-free' air in pubs, there is nothing to stop this 'right' being extended to include 'alcohol-free' air as well. For as Michael McFadden pointed out on the BMJ Rapid Responses some time ago, alcohol is a class A carcinogen and evaporates into the air from alcoholic drinks. It can no doubt can be shown, with suitable epidemiological studies of the usual sort, to pose a small risk to 'passive drinkers', particularly children. No doubt the same kinds of studies could show that a similar slight risk was attendant on eating out at a restaurant and inhaling the vapours and odours from nearby plates of hot food.
The precedent is there.
So people do not have a general freedom to disturb your nightly sleep with loud music, spray graffiti on your car or drive on the wrong side of the road, for instance.
Nor perhaps do people have the freedom to disturb the tranquillity of others by talking loudly at a bar, or playing music on a juke box, or singing or swearing, if the definition of 'disturbance' can be widened a little.
The ill-education comes from those who rely on the distorted perversions of science spouted by the likes of Forces.org
No, that's not what I meant by ill-education. What I meant was the almost complete lack of any science or mathematical education in the general public, and an accompanying awe of numbers, which now allows almost any ideologue masquerading as a scientist or doctor to dupe the general public, and very often MPs in parliament as well.
There is also real evidence, Idlex, of 'passive mobile phone use'. The real evidence is actual genuine brain scans, showing the radiation effects on the user and the person next to the user. This is a luxury that the tobacco control movement doesn't have.
Sally: To be fair to Rich, he usually is fairly courteous. I’m not sure what kind of aberration he was suffering from when he made his comment this morning which you rightly picked him up on.
Now Rich. I’m actually going to treat that comment with a dignity it does not actually deserve. A danger to public health is measured by the severity of its effects and the number of people who might be affected by the danger. So how does passive smoking fair? Well it clearly presents a severe danger to health – premature death through lung cancer, heart disease and possibly other causes. And it affects thousands of people each year. Even though the excess relative risk is fairly low, it is an excess risk which applies to many people. That is why Jamrozik found that just a 25% excess risk of lung cancer and heart disease leads to thousands of premature deaths each year. But it seems that you would prefer to ignore the fact that passive smoking kills thousands, because all that concerns you is whether the risk to a particular individual is much higher.
Rich then refuses to accept my statement that "For too long, smoking has had a uniquely privileged position, where a smoker could smoke anywhere in the eyes of the law, irrespective of its effects on other people." Yes, shops, cinemas, etc have not allowed smoking for years now. But that has been through the decision of the owners. The law has only intervened in the last 2-3 years.
Dave A lists other things where the RR of lung cancer is higher than passive smoking. Well, as far as I can tell Dave, all these risks are already subject to safety laws or guidance. So people know that consuming too much animal fat (including whole milk) can be unhealthy. Diesel emissions are limited by law. HSE inspectors are told to check that welders are not being subjected to unsafe levels of fumes. And as far as I can see, all wood burning stoves sold in the UK nowadays are either enclosed or carefully ventilated.
One other thing, Dave. Lung cancer is not the only nasty surprise from passive smoking. Heart disease accounts for around 10 times more passive smoking related deaths. So it’s nonsense to measure the threat of passive smoking on the RRs for lung cancer alone.
As far as Lee’s comments on Hackshaw et al are concerned, Dave, you conveniently ignore that Hackshaw et al responded comprehensively with his claims. And subsequent pooled studies and meta-analyses have reached similar conclusions to Hackshaw et al. So I would rather believe Hackshaw et al than Lee.
You argue asbestos is dangerous. I agree. So does the law – effectively banning the use of asbestos in buildings.
Idlex is also clutching at straws with his arguments. Schonherr’s work on passive smoking was undertaken in 1928, long before the Nazis came to power in Germany. Yet bizarrely Idlex claims that Nazi influence had been growing for years. Idlex – the Nazis were barely a presence in 1928. They secured around 3% of the vote in that year’s elections. The democratic Weimar Republic was doing quite nicely throughout the late 1920s until the Wall St Crash of 1929. So your claim that epidemiological studies were first carried out in Nazi Germany is patently absurd.
Idlex moans about smokers who have been attacked. Well, so have people who have asked smokers to put their cigarettes out. These attacks – on both sides – are the actions of savages.
What else are you saying? Must we reject everything which the Nazi government supported? Should we burn all Volkswagen vehicles? Should we blow up our motorways because the Nazis built so many autobahns? Should we reject investment in public infrastructure as a way of getting out of a recession because the Nazis adopted that policy?
Idlex then tries a ridiculous comparison between smokers and Jews. I know many smokers and I don’t think any of them would recognise the comparison you’re trying to make. You then say “I really don't care if you find all this offensive.” I only make this analogy in exceptional circumstances, but if you don’t care if I find your comments offensive, then you have no right to be offended by the following. If you are going to call others Nazis, then you should accept being labelled as a Nazi yourself. After all, was it not the Nazis who ruthlessly killed millions of people through poisonous fumes, all the time denying they were doing this?
In your second post, you insist on describing passive smoking as a slight risk, ignoring that this apparently small risk is still large enough to cause thousands of premature deaths in the UK each year. Passive exposure to alcohol fumes does not cause this. Nor does a bit of noise in a pub.
On your final point, as far as research into the long-term effects of passive smoking is concerned, the only duping has been done by the pro-smoking lobby. The overview reports by IARC, US Surgeon General, SCOTH are sound, as are the large majority of studies they cover.
All in all Idlex, you seem to be living up to your own earlier claim - that you are more interested in argument for argument's sake than in trying to find the truth.
'passive mobile phone use' - RichW.
It is perhaps surprising they aren't banned, given that
Gro Harlem Brundtland, director-general of the World Health Organisation, has revealed that she would not tolerate a mobile phone near her for fear of radiation. They are banned from her Geneva office, and she warned parents against letting children become frequent mobile-phone users.. (Sep 2002)
But antismokers (of whom Brundtland was one of the principal movers and shakers, and who helped shift the emphasis of the WHO into 'lifestyle' health issues) almost invariably keep the focus firmly on smoking, so as to create the impression that tobacco poses pretty much the only serious health risk to the human race. The evil eye of the healthists is usually fixed upon one target at a time.
There are some signs that they may have 'done' tobacco now, and are moving on to fresher fields. I've noticed just today that a new health propaganda campaign seems to be starting up, this time with the 'epidemic' of obesity in the firing line.
And so maybe mobile phones have been assigned a health terror shock media slot in a year or two's time. I imagine they hold conferences where they decide who is to be denormalised next, and how much of our money is going to be spent on terrifying the target social group.
Not that I'm ever terrified. Rather perversely, all these campaigns seem to have the opposite effect on me than that intended. For example a few years ago, a typical meal of mine would be pasta, fish, olives, etc. Very 'healthy', although it wasn't health considerations that had me eating that way, but instead the fact that pasta cooks quickly. Now however, I've noticed that so-called 'unhealthy' meals have been moving up my list of preferences, and I'm eating a lot more fried eggs, bacon, sausages, baked beans, and even returning to some of the staples of my early childhood, like fried bread and fried black pudding (both half-forgotten delicacies) all knocked back with steaming mugs of sweet tea, and plates of rather burnt toast laden with butter and cream and marmalade, all finished off with numerous cigarettes of course.
Apart from the sheer pleasure of eating it, there is the subversive thrill of knowing that eating such meals will probably be illegal soon. And of course there is the extra added bonus of knowing that every single health warning that is attached to any kind of food whatsoever is complete and utter tosh anyway.
Rollo Tommasi wrote: So people know that consuming too much animal fat (including whole milk) can be unhealthy.
They don't 'know' any such thing. They may however believe this sort of twaddle. I don't believe it for a moment. And I always buy full cream milk to pour into my tea, just like I always buy salted butter to spread thickly on my toast.
I really don't understand why anyone ever believes anything that is said by any self-appointed health 'expert'. Why should someone believe someone just because they claim to be an expert. I never do. In matters of food I always trust my own judgment first and foremost. I completely understand those pregnant women who have bizarre cravings, but I think that they just have a heightened sensitivity of a kind which everyone else (except health fetishists) also has, and which is the product of millions of years of evolution rather than a couple of weeks reading some faddish health book written by some snake oil salesman.
If you are going to call others Nazis, then you should accept being labelled as a Nazi yourself. After all, was it not the Nazis who ruthlessly killed millions of people through poisonous fumes, all the time denying they were doing this?
No, it wasn't actually. The Nazis used poison gas, and largely carried out their mass murders in secret, so had no need to deny doing so at the time.
Of course, you are trying to suggest that smokers kill millions of people through passive smoking in exactly the same way as the Nazis. This is of course an outright lie. For while many millions of individual people are known to have died in Nazi death camps, antismokers can't name a single individual who has been killed by passive smoking. All they have are projected numbers of entirely imaginary deaths, derived from fractional risk factors applied to arbitrary populations, and which amount to statistical fictions.
you seem to be living up to your own earlier claim - that you are more interested in argument for argument's sake than in trying to find the truth.
When did I say I was interested in argument for arguments sake? Of course I'm interested in the truth. I am just under no illusions that it can be found using the statistical methodology beloved by antismokers, which can never discover scientific truth, but only correlations and conjunctions of an astrological nature.
No, it is instead that I know perfectly well, in dealing with antismokers, that I am dealing with ideologues who are not interested in truth, but who instead wish to impose their particular moral convictions upon everyone else. The result is a political struggle rather than a scientific enquiry.
http://www.modernmedicine.com/modernmedicine/Modern+Medicine+Now/Smoking-May-Increase-Effectiveness-of-Heart-Drug/ArticleNewsFeed/Article/detail/592876?contextCategoryId=40143
Another bit of up-to-date research for you to ignore, Rollo.
Rollo Tommasi wrote: Must we reject everything which the Nazi government supported? Should we burn all Volkswagen vehicles? Should we blow up our motorways because the Nazis built so many autobahns? Should we reject investment in public infrastructure as a way of getting out of a recession because the Nazis adopted that policy?
You are here arguing in the manner of Robert Proctor, who wrote of Nazi V2 rockets as an example of 'good' Nazi science.
I wrote an essay in which I comprehensively demolished any notion that this was any sort of 'triumph' of Nazi science, and which showed that the Nazi V2 rocket programme only ever made any progress despite the Nazis (and Hitler above all).
I haven't done any research into Volkswagens and motorways and deficit financing, but I'm prepared to bet that much the same applied with those things as with the V2 programme - that they happened despite the Nazis rather than because of them. Why? Because the Nazis weren't either scientists or engineers or rationalists. None of them had a clue about any of those sorts of things. Name one single Nazi who was any sort of scientist. Every single one of them, then as now, were just a bunch of irrational crapheads. If they ever did anything remotely rational, it was because they had taken control of a society which actually had produced numerous scientists and philosophers and artists. If the Volkswagen ever took off, it was probably because Hitler was attracted to the idea of a "volkswagen", or what we'd call today in our modern Nazi terminology a "people carrier". And Hitler seems to have spent half his life driving around in Mercedes, standing up in the front passenger seat, right arm extended.
Nazism itself was an incoherent and irrational ideology, and a return to a medieval 'folk wisdom' with its notions of blood and soil and race. It was fundamentally deeply irrational and mythical and epic. People of this sort never do anything rational or sensible or calculated. They are utterly incapable of it. So it has to be an accident that they produced all those volkswagens and motorways despite themselves.
And I'm more or less sure that if I did a little bit of research, I'd find that it was an uphill struggle to get the Nazis to agree to build cars and motorways. As for the deficit financing, that probably goes back to Djalmar Schacht, who ran the Nazi state finaces for most of the pre-war period, and who was not (I believe) a Nazi..
Idlex:
Your views on Naziism were very interesting indeed and do draw a parallel with the zealot attitude towards smokers today.
I was put in mind of the tour groups I used to take to La Cupole near St.Omer in France. This is a huge domed structure built by the Nazis deep into the bowels of the earth. Its purpose was to manufacture the V2 Rockets using slave labour. It was run as a brutal regime and once inside, prisoners would never see daylight again. They were worked to death.
I myself only went inside once and didn't even reach the centre before I turned back and tried get out. This meant I had to walk alone, along, seemingly, miles of dank dripping underground stone corridors. The horror of the place chilled and panicked me until I reached blessed daylight again.
You have probably been there yourself but to describe it to those who haven't, the entrance is wide and curves sharply downwards. Columns of prisoners were herded into there several abreast. As they left the sunlight, never to see it again, their first sight inside was a row of very high hooks in a cavern on the left. This is where prisoners who did not obey orders were executed with wire nooses and left to hang and rot as an example to new arrivals.
It was truly a place of "Abanden hope all ye who enter here". So what did these poor souls do, knowing that they face only hardship and death? They did their work badly. They subtely sabotaged the rockets as they built them. They were going to die anyway, what had they to lose.
It seems that not a single successful rocket was ever manufactured in that place.
So it is with all zealots and extreme idealogists who seek to control and manipulate humanity.
Rollo, the law has not had to intervene, owners have been doing it themselves. That is what a free society is.
Now, Rollo, tell me what the point of a RR is if when it is too low we just pool it together, still get a low RR but say 'no it's actually higher because more people are involved'. As I said before, it doesn't work that way: a million people running a small risk is still a small risk, but with increased likelihood of incidence.
Oh, your point to Idlex, again you have busted your argument without realising it. Don't worry I don't expect you to respond to this, critiques seem to get filtered by your computer don't they? Anyway, you said:
"So people do not have a general freedom to disturb your nightly sleep with loud music, spray graffiti on your car or drive on the wrong side of the road"
and now have said:
"In your second post, you insist on describing passive smoking as a slight risk, ignoring that this apparently small risk is still large enough to cause thousands of premature deaths in the UK each year. Passive exposure to alcohol fumes does not cause this. Nor does a bit of noise in a pub"
You said nothing about health risks before, only that people are not free to do such things. Well, clearly they are. And hey, there are health risks, only a little while ago they were talking about lowering the maximum decibel level for a live concert to 96Db. But they shouldn't, for the same reason smoking shouldn't be banned by law in pubs: because know full well what is permitted inside that building before they go in. Which means, Rollo, that in a free society Idlex and I can decide that the risk to us from SHS is one we will accept and thusly enter the building, ditto to the decibel level to our hearing. You, on the other hand, can say the risk is too great, and instead go to a non-smoking pub.
Are you lot out on day release?
Excellent contribution Margaret. How long did that take you to construct?
Tell me, are you affiliated with the Naomi/Sally tag team?
If you have as little to add to the debate as they did, do your trolling elsewhere.
The only team I am affiliated to Colin,is the common sense team, maybe you should consider joining? And then again, maybe not!
Your views on Naziism were very interesting indeed and do draw a parallel with the zealot attitude towards smokers today.
Is it very surprising? Their attitudes grow out of the same logic as Nazism. People tend to suppose that Nazism was some sort of horrible aberration which was defeated and annihilated in WWII, and will never return. But ideas or ideologies can't be defeated by bullets and bombs. They are like religions, which persist for thousands of years, as a sort of shared mindset. Ultimately, they are only ever defeated by better ideas.
At least one of the ideas underpinning Nazism was that of the primacy of society over the individual. For people like Hitler, individual people were expendable items in the struggle between societies, and it was the societies that really mattered (and in Hitler's case the Aryan 'master race'), not the individuals. This was the "socialism" bit of National Socialism.
Quite a lot of German philosophy prior to the Nazi era was of a broadly 'socialist' kind. For a German philosopher like Hegel in the 19th century, the individual was to find his true meaning by becoming fully subsumed into human society, in which his (or her) true destiny lay. In this respect, Hitler was a fairly thoroughly Hegelian. But this sort of view of society has always seemed a bit nonsensical in anglo-saxon countries like Britain and America, which have somehow or other always tended to be more individualistic than socialistic.
In Britain we are currently living through one of our socialistic phases. It's quite clear to me that people like Gordon Brown and most other members of New Labour have little or no interest in individuals, and every interest in collective society. It is quite natural to them to think of Britain as a society whose rules can be changed in order to produce a 'fairer' or 'healthier' outcome. They think nothing of telling people to do things for their own good. They see the decision-making process as centralised in a government whose primary job is to tell people how to live their lives, and whose rules they genuinely expect people to conform to like sheep.
I think they are deeply mistaken about the nature of human society, and that all their schemes and plans will inevitably misfire. But it's very hard to explain this to them. And it's just as hard for them to try to explain to people like me why I should conform to the blizzard of rules and regulations they enact to govern my life. But that's just where we happen to be in human history, arguing over really fundamental things like this, and very often ending up shooting each other when we can't get each other to agree.
No, I haven't visited La Cupole. And from your chilling description of it I may well give it a very wide berth.
P.S. Colin, I've not forgotten about the essay I said I'd write about the elderly casualties of smoking bans, freezing outside 'care' homes. As ever with me it has expanded into something like a philosophical treatise. But I'm getting there.
Colin Grainger wrote: Excellent contribution Margaret. How long did that take you to construct?
It may have taken a long time. She may have started out writing a 10,000 word essay, and gradually boiled it down into one single pithy sentence, which captured everything she wished to say. Brevity, it is said, is the soul of wit. Or was it wit is the soul of brevity? Or...
And Margaret's is indeed a common sense view. It is very roughly the view that the matters under laborious discussion here are all perfectly simple and straightforward, and there is no need to prattle on about them, and the important thing is to Do Something. Margaret is a card-carrying member of the no-nonsense school of thought which holds that everything is perfectly obvious, and anyone who thinks it isn't must be a bit soft in the head.
Unfortunately, life isn't quite that simple. What is perfectly obvious to one person is all too often not obvious at all to somebody else. Why is that? Perhaps it in large part a consequence of the society in which people grow up, in which they quite accidentally becomes Catholics or Protestants or Muslims or Nazis or Liverpool fans, and in each of which environments there is a shared set of values, a shared perception of the world, which passes unquestioned because nobody ever questions it, and nobody can even dream of questioning it, and which is perfectly bloody obvious to all other right-thinking commonsensical people like them.
Rollo Tommasi, for example, must quite often scratch his head wondering why stupid people like me can't see that the smoking ban will save millions of lives, and was enacted for my own good, and is part and parcel of the onward march of history towards a coming socialist utopia in which selfish, greedy capitalists will be re-educated into being kinder, more caring, fully socialised members of society who would never dream of doing something as disgusting and offensive as lighting a cigarette in public, or turning a profit, or engaging in any other 'unacceptable' behaviours. Something like that, I imagine...
Rollo,
I give up on Simon.
May we return to our TICAP discussion on the relationship between SCOTH and professional tobacco control advocacy? Last time you just stated
that ASH UK had never claimed that smoking causes cervical cancer which was not what I was talking about but I shall forgive you!
HPV is a common infection but is at the core of cervical cancer (worldwide HPV prevalence in cervical carcinomas is 99.7 per cent)
As of November 2008 the worldwide HPV prevalence in lung cancer is already at 24.5%. Should SCOTH
issue a public notice of caution this year that this figure of 24.5% is likely to go up (it can't go down) or should SCOTH wait 5,10,15 years to see if or how far this figure goes up and then adjust its figures retrospectivley? Should SCOTH give public notice now, regardless of it's composition, of this recent emerging evidence?
Quick comment as I am without a computer at the moment (I think it died from a smoking related disease) so I occasionally get to use this one until I replace mine.
Idlex. Excellent parallel between the Nazi victimisation of Jews and the 'free world's' victimisation of smokers. As I was coming to the end of your writings, a thought occured to me.
I feel that in England on July 1st 2007, using that parallel, it was the day that smokers had to start wearing the yellow star.
Well, that's certainly how I felt about it.
Fredrik – Of all the recent comments, yours is the one which deserves a reply. So I’ll answer your points now. If I can be bothered over the weekend, I’ll comments on the others posts too.
Thank you for the links to the recent studies. I’m not sure whether your question refers to SCOTH looking again at evidence into the risks of active smoking or passive smoking. But here are my views on both, for the avoidance of doubt.
On active smoking, the Klein et al study is very interesting. I think the killer message is the last sentence of the abstract: “The data suggest that HPV is the second most important cause of lung cancer after cigarette smoking and strongly argues for additional research on this issue.” In other words, I agree that this area is worthy of further research and SCOTH could in time consider the effects of the various new pieces of research on its findings.
But the first half of that sentence is just as important. The researchers themselves still regard smoking as the most important cause of lung cancer. HPV may then be the second most important cause after that. So nothing in that study changes the key message that smoking presents the single greatest cause of lung cancer.
Of course, the issue of smoking is also relevant for cervical cancer, as research shows that people who are HPV+ and smoke are much more likely to contract cervical cancer than non-smokers who are HPV+.
Should people be warned about the dangers of HPV? Well yes, and indeed they are – and more. Young women are now being vaccinated against HPV. So the medical authorities are not trying to downplay its dangers – anything but, in fact.
On passive smoking, I don’t think the Klein et al study changes anything in itself, because it doesn’t appear to deal with exposure to SHS. That said, I think it would be interesting if separate research were conducted into the relationship between people’s HPV status, their exposure to SHS and their risk of contracting lung cancer.