Comments Of The Day

Oh dear. There appears to be a quite astonishingly deluded sap in comments at the Observer.

Zakelius
20 November 2011 1:47AM

People comparing car exhausts to smoking are wrong. Have you any idea how much cleaner car fumes are compared to twenty years ago? Suicide in the garage with a hosepipe attached to the exhaust is practically impossible now

Harmless, so it is.

I wouldn't mind it so much if cigarette smoke didn't kill people, and that's the problem. If your right to smoke infringes the health rights of others, the government rightly should act to stop it.

Whereas smelling smoke from someone else's cigarette is a bona fide death sentence.

Meanwhile, in the US, just living next door to a smoker is akin to enduring chemical warfare.

If I was being poisoned by chemical like cyanide, that is grounds of federal imprisonment, yet there is cyanide, carbon monoxide, etc., in second hand smoke that I am stuck breathing in my $3050 a month apartment

Yes, they are stupid beyond belief. The kind of person for whom licking windows is a strange compulsion. Yet they haven't formed these opinions themselves, they both have their roots in pronouncements from individuals in power who are supposed to be trusted.

"But let me give you one headline to remember - it would be safer to have your exhaust pipe on the inside of your car than smoke a cigarette, in terms of fine particulate matter released. And evidence suggests rolling down the window doesn't eliminate the problem." [Dr Douglas Noble, BMA public health committee, June 2011]

We're still waiting for Noble to illustrate his hypothesis with a practical experiment, but I can't see it coming anytime soon, can you?

While the pathetically small traces of hydrogen cyanide in secondhand smoke pale into insignificance when compared to industrial output - for which there are clearly defined acceptable levels - yet reality didn't stop the NHS peddling such mythical scaremongery on bus shelter ads in 2006.

So is it really that surprising that the weak-minded amongst us will start to believe that black is white; that the inconsequential is an imminent personal armageddon?

No, of course not.

What should worry us greatly, though, is that we are condemned to live under an administration consisting of idiots who believe such nonsense. Probably why there is a growing body abroad who view our once-proud country as a bit of an effete basket case.

"What a freaking nanny state. Going from the largest empire on earth, to the country that stood alone in WWII, to a country where the government oversees all."

I'd like to argue, really I would, but ...