In the meantime, you may wish to pop over to the Indy and observe Sir Terry of Wogan inflicting a knicker-twisting experience on some of their more self-righteous readers.
"[...] what is certain is that nobody, however qualified, has the right to tell anybody else what they should be eating. Or drinking. President Sarkozy of France, a great man for jumping on a bandwagon, is proposing a tax on fizzy drinks. What about human rights? The idea that tax should be levied on “wrong” food and drinks smacks too closely of dictatorship. It is the inalienable right of every man and woman in a free society to go to hell in their own handcart, as long as nobody else gets hurt."Since your host has about four pints of Irish blood coursing around the old pipes, I feel more proud than most of our Tel for his good old Celtic common sense.
H/T TT
4 comments:
Shame he didn't also mention smoking but then if he still works for Citizen, formerly Aunty, Beeb, then I think any mention of smoking, smoking itself and even pretending to smoke in an artistic interpretation is banned.
"It is the inalienable right of every man and woman in a free society to go to hell in their own handcart, as long as nobody else gets hurt."
The last line, 'as long as nobody else gets hurt' is the problem. The second hand smoke, passive smoking, environmental tobacco smoke, and now 'third hand smoke' myths make smokers exempt from this philosophy.
Correct, timbone. And as long as the Surgeon General of the USA can say that the merest whiff of tobacco smoke can cause a heart attack in the street, there is a serious, serious scientific problem. What she said is much the same as saying that a little firework can blow up a house, or that one grain of salt too much in your food can provoke a stroke.
How can such ideas be given any credence at all? In fact, how can the Surgeon General say such a stupid thing? The answer can only lie in POLITICS. In politics, truth is irrelevant. One can see that a politician could gain an understanding that the smoking ban is a 'winner' in the public perception' as regards votes - and, in my view, that is the only intelligent reason for politicians to go along with the ban.
So it follows that smokers have to threaten politicians with eviction. There are enough of us.
More easily said than done, though!
I get the impression that Sir Terry is one of the many non-smokers who privately think that the smoking ban is ridiculously heavy-handed, although I confess I've never actually heard him say as much. But I remember a story that he told, post-Ireland's ban but pre-England's whereby he and some friends attended some big dinner event and, having finished the meal, everyone began to put on their coats and gradually drift away. He and his friends did the same, believing that the evening was at an end, only to find on leaving the venue that pretty much everyone in the room was outside in the car park enjoying a post-dinner cigarette! Being a BEEB programme, he naturally wasn't allowed to make any derogatory comment about the ban, but the way he told the story clearly indicated that he thought that the whole situation was faintly ridiculous.
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