Tuesday 2 February 2010

Same Common Sense, Different Venue


Charlotte Gore may have packed up blogging, but you can't keep a good classic liberal down for long.

Yet people continue to smoke. They stop when they want to stop, on their own terms, for their own reasons. Or they don't. They make the choice to continue doing something that is perfectly legal, in the full knowledge of the consequences and risks.

Quite.

And if the current level of official hostility against smokers is having no effect, what does it say about us that we support it irrespectively? Is it simply that expressing our displeasure at smokers makes people feel better about themselves?

She's got a point, you know. Off you pop and read the whole thing.




5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good grief, a decent writer in Izvestia.
I'm gobsmacked !

Andy said...

What utter shite!'is the state powerful enough to overcome an individual's extreme reluctance to part themselves from a substance addictive enough to have people plucking cigarette ends out of gutters in desperation?' Yeah right all 12 million of us do that don't we. Nothing to do with the fact that anyone taking dog ends from gutters is looking for his 'after litter bin dinner fag' This sort of blind ignorance just plays right into the antis' hands.
No wonder the guardian printed it.

Dick Puddlecote said...

I take it you've never read Charlotte Gore's writing before, Andy.

Anonymous said...

I think she is talking sense.
It would have to be so to communicate with the now hard line non smoking public.
(Make no bones about it,a sizeable majority of non smokers think this persecution stuff is a good idea).
The style you would use perhaps to explain civil rights to a white person in 1960's Alabama .
So as to allow them to see their wrongs fom a subtler perspective.
Or something like that.
She's right high taxation on cigarettes hits the poor hardest.
The result ,they don't eat so well et al.
The result of that is even more chances of poor health.
The result of that is larger than average rates of poor health amongst smokers ,who by and by are from the lower social tiers.
This warpes the statistics in favour of the smoking is bad for your health theory.
Opening the door to Political oportunists like ASH and their ilke.
Really it is just a smokescrean to cover the real reason for poor health.
Poverty.
Spot on.

Charlotte Gore said...

I think, to be honest, the "antis" and bansturbators don't need any help from me ;)

Seen people doing the picking-out-of-gutter thing. Was the most extreme thing I've seen anyone do. I'd like to think that if I became homeless I wouldn't stoop that low :S