My friend John Welch and I have been having a discussion about current anti-smoking laws in this thread over at his site. Several days ago, I wrote another response to his latest comments and submitted them for his approval to be posted. For whatever reason, he hasn’t gotten around to approving them yet. And that’s fine. He may be busy and hasn’t looked at the queue, or he’s composing his own follow-up comments before posting mine, or he may consider the topic old and not interesting anymore. It’s his website, and it’s totally his right to refuse any comments at any time for any reason. I’m ok with that.
I do, however, want to post my latest comments to my own site. This is a topic I find interesting and it’s my hope that perhaps I can cause a few people who disagree with me to re-think their position. It is in that spirit I post my unpublished comments to bynkii.com. John and I have known each other for a few years now, and I’m confident he understands this is not meant to one-up him or in some way play an immature gotcha game.
And now, the comment.
And when enough people realize that there’s a currently legal habit that is causing real health problems,
Like eating Twinkies, or McDonald’s? Obesity is a real health problem too. Would you like the government to regulate what you’re allowed to eat, and how much of it? You know, some governments have already stepped in that direction by banning tans-fats. Your behavior-conrolled utopia is rapidly being built as we write. And the anti-smoking crowd has given these governments the green light to regulate such aspects of our lives.
generally stinking up the area, and making common activities (going out to eat, dancing) impossible for a rather huge chunk of the population,
I just came back from breakfast. Two booths away from me, a badly misbehaved child picked up the syrup container and started jumping up and down on the booth seat, splashing syrup, and his mother yelled at the top of her lungs for him to stop. It was obvious that this kid’s behavior made the common activity of eating breakfast, at the very least, unpleasant for a rather huge chunk of the restaurant. And this sort of thing happens nearly every time I attempt to eat out. By your logic, because badly behaved kids make common activities unpleasant or impossible, they should be illegal, punishable by fines or jail.
they have the right to use the legal system to try and fix that.
I’d sign a petition to have the legal system deal harshly with unruly kids and parents. After all, I have the right to total comfort and non-offensiveness wherever I am, public or private (according to the anti-smoking crowd). Let’s not be half-assed about it.
No one enacted anti-smoking ordinances illegally. No one hired enforcers at the polls in the locations where it was voted in. This has all been done legally. Smokers don’t like it, they can take the proper measures to try to undo it.
Smoky McStrawman. I have never claimed that anti-smoking laws are somehow illegal or invalid. I have never challenged their status as enforceable law. I do, however, challenge the logic and the motivations of their proponents. And I support any legal method to have anti-smoking laws repealed.
Wait, you’re bitching about the legal system creating a nanny state, yet you want to hire how many more cops to watch your behavior that closely?
Again, Smoky McStrawman. I’ve never asserted that more police are needed. I’ve stated that littering laws already exist that are intended to deal with the initial complaint of cigarette butts littering the landscape in your original post. Additional law enforcement is not needed. I’d say that repurposing cops from stupid things like clocking drivers in the highway median to dealing with citizen complaints, like littering, is a good approach.
However, my point was that, instead of new laws that send people to jail for smoking, your original complaint could be addressed by enforcement of existing laws. Nothing new required, police or statute.
How much of a tax increase are you willing to support to hire the extra cops to properly enforce all the littering laws?
How much of a tax increase are you willing to support when, because of current laws and tobacco taxes, smoking decreases and smokers no longer provide the revenue to the state and federal governments they’re used to in order to fund programs? Understand that governments don’t eliminate or cut programs because a revenue source dries up, they just find another revenue source. By curtailing smoking and taxing smokers to oblivion, you will be raising your own taxes.
How about smokers start behaving correctly on their own? Why is THAT too much to ask?
It’s not, and I agree.
No Aaron, all that told me were the businesses who were smoke-free and chose to advertise it. That’s NOT the same, and you know it, as a sign that says “Smoking allowed here”. Since, by the way you state it, it wasn’t a requirement, that’s not even reliable.
Smoking was allowed everywhere by default. The exceptions were noted. That is functionally the same - anyone entering the premises knew what the smoking status was.
I could give a fuck about second hand smoke deaths.
So I don’t expect you personally to use it as a justification for anti-smoking laws (and you haven’t). However, the people petitioning states to pass these laws use the alleged health-endangering characteristics of second hand smoke as the cornerstone of their anti-smoking argument. And it’s primarily based on faulty science and emotion.
What I’m tired of is second hand smoke in my clothes, because some fucknut ten yards away had to have a butt.
Hyperbole isn’t necessary to make your case. But, as I alluded to before, as much as you challenge my right to smoke, do you also have a right to absolute comfort and non-offense everywhere you may be? No, none of us has that.
I’m tired of second hand smoke giving me nicotine headaches and hangovers because I had the temerity to want to go someplace a bit more adult than fucking McDonald’s.
Intense cigarette smoke makes my eyes burn. It’s painful. I solve the problem by not being in environments where that smoke exists. I don’t ask the government to fine or jail people because I don’t like it. Again, non-existent right to comfort, etc.
I’m tired of someone’s personal habit, that I don’t share being forced on my because there’s no ventilation system in the world that will keep your smoke in your personal space and your personal space alone.
I’m tired of someone’s kids, born of personal choice, that aren’t mine, and their bad behavior, being forced on me because there’s no containment system in the world that will keep kids and their noise and their mess local only to the parents who are responsible for controlling the little monsters.
Really, we all have our annoyances that other people thrust upon us. Part of being an adult is to learn to deal with, or avoid, those annoyances while letting others live their lives.
And your “I have the *right* to create clouds of smoke that fuck with everyone around me for a ten yard radius” is some how NOT emotional, and based on cold sober rule of law and logic?
My opposition to anti-smoking laws is based on pure logic: Private property owners have the right to determine what activities are permissible on said property, as long as that activity does not endanger another’s right to life, liberty, or property. Your argument, however, is that you don’t like smoking and the impolite smokers who litter, so it should be illegal. If that isn’t founded in emotion, nothing is.
Why should MY “right” to enjoy a legal substance in a legal way be impinged because of *your* personal beliefs?
Exactly the question I’m asking! Why should my right to enjoy legal tobacco be infringed upon because of your personal beliefs? On private property to boot!
Again, I still don’t see you being real happy about a stream of tobacco spit across your shirt and in your drink. Yet somehow, you cling to the right to do the same to everyone around you with smoke. What, pray tell, is the real difference?
The difference is that smoke, under normal circumstances, is emitted in all directions with no ability of the smoker to control it, where spit is purposely thrust out of an individual’s mouth in a direction the spitter controls and is aware of. Your analogy is broken. You should be comparing smokers who blow smoke directly into your face (of which it seems there would be very few) versus your idea of spitting on someone.
That would suggest that no, anti-smoking laws do not inherently put people out of business.
I don’t, and haven’t, claimed to speak for business closings or economic effects anywhere other than the place where I live. I do find it interesting, however, that the three states you indirectly spoke of (New York, California, and Massachusetts) are rapidly losing population because of things like absurdly high taxes and other government encroachments.
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August 29th, 2007 at 7:41 am
More like my stupid anti-spam settings still aren’t back to normal, and your comment got caught in the flow. It happens to *my* comments, ugh.
ANYway…
You can sit there and eat a twinkie, or McDonalds without billowing clouds of Twinkie or McDonald’s particles coming off of you in a yards-wide sphere. Show me that same ability when you smoke. I can sit in a McDonalds and drink my coffee, and not have sore eyes, wake up with a hangover induced by grease, or have my clothes smell like ass. You stand next to a smoker or two? Yeah, good luck with that, and in a smallish room, or one without wind-tunnel level ventilation, you’re ALWAYS next to EVERY smoker.
Feel free. That actually *is* a “right” under our legal system, the right to petition authority to redress shortcomings or problems. Far more of a “right” than the “right to smoke”
Then stop acting like all the anti-smoking ordinances are the result of TEHEVULGUBNERMENT. In a fairly high percentage of cases, I’d even hazard a majority, they were started at the citizen level. I imagine it’s comforting to make this all sound like the result of some kind of nanny state, but as it’s not really true, I’ve no interest in that particular comfort level.
I call bullshit, and pretty damned hilarious bullshit at that. Go walk down the street and take a look at the mass of litter. Take a REAL look at how many idiots are throwing butts out of their cars on a daily basis. What, you think you can have even say, 60% enforcement of laws that are really completely ignored, and of misdemeanors committed on that level without more cops? You think that you’re going to get away with not enforcing laws that *are* currently enforced to pull that off? Dude, a single cop can effectively patrol a big, and I mean *big* stretch of road, because clocking speeders, looking for crap drivers is pretty efficient. Patrolling and checking for litterbugs? That not only requires more cops in cruisers, but a lot more foot cops. Those don’t come from no where, and in your “Let’s just enforce the existing laws” idea, you’re going to need more cops. Period. It is completely NOT a strawman to point out the problem with the magical solution of “just fully enforce the existing laws.”
But it does get around the problem of smokers using the world as an ashtray. “We can’t be bothered to not litter, so the cops have to make sure we don’t.” Please.
Actually, I’ve no problem with tax increases for services that I, or other citizens need. Schools, better roads, better paid/more firemen and cops, better healthcare for the poor, etc. I vote “yes” on those things regularly, because unlike many people, I understand that funding doesn’t come from a magic bean field tended by Smurfs. I sure as hell don’t live in that fantasy world of big business to the rescue that consumes our current administration.
You seem to be laboring under the mistaken idea that people who don’t smoke care that the cloud every smoker emits is unintentional. We don’t. You don’t have to smoke. You choose to, and since every smoker is well aware of the fact that smoke travels, then de facto, you are making the deliberate and conscious choice to create a sphere of smoke around you. To be honest, I would prefer it if more people chewed than smoked. Chewers, by and large, are FAR more polite and considerate than smokers. You choose to smoke, you choose to create the smoke clouds. Just because you have no control over it once it’s emitted doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility as the creator of said smoke. By that logic, we shouldn’t hold coal plants in the midwest responsible for acid rain, or any harmful effects of their smokestacks, because hey, THEY can’t control where it goes once it gets in the air, right?
I don’t, and haven’t, claimed to speak for business closings or economic effects anywhere other than the place where I live. I do find it interesting, however, that the three states you indirectly spoke of (New York, California, and Massachusetts) are rapidly losing population because of things like absurdly high taxes and other government encroachments.
That’s an interesting claim, because a quick google gave me quite a few sources, such as NOAA, which pointed out that NY/CA/Mass are not only steadily growing, but expected to keep growing at a rather steady pace. According the U.S. Census Bureau, California’s population grew by around 7.6% from April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2006, New York’s grew by 1.7%, and Massachusetts grew by 1.7%. Those aren’t HUGE increases, well, Cali’s may be when you consider it has more people than NY and MA *combined*, but in any case, that doesn’t look like they’re “rapidly losing population” to me.
December 12th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
I see to notice that you mention that an owner of private property should have the right to do whatever they want on there property so long as is does not does not interfere with life and liberty. Does this same argument apply to narcotic drug use and prositution. These are activities that only harm the people performing such tasks. Except for the very real fact that such actions are very determental to the property values of a neighborhood. You think our old school neighborhood would be as valuable as it is if such activites were allowed to happen of private property.