Thread: The Ash conspiracy and why we are not allowed to smoke

Originally Posted by Baron von Lotsov

See what you make of this.

So, BVL, are you saying that you like a fag every now and then, fnar, fnar.

Originally Posted by Geoffrey Collier

Baron von Lotsov: About 85% of medical afflictions would not be of interest to the private health sector. They don't seem very good at running nursing homes by all accounts. Private clinics for the mentally ill, run by the private sector, have been closed due to cruelty being inflicted on patients. The history of the private sector in medicine is far from good, and they only accept a small range of illnesses and patients. The death and injury rates in boxing are possibly no higher that those incurred in horse racing or rugby. You'll be adding government-sponsored military regiments should this line of reasoning continue. Quite a lot get killed and injured in that sponsored sport.

The reaction to smoking world-wide is based on medical evidence. This has been discussed on this forum on many occasions. Why do you want to inflict your choices on to others? Smoke if you want to, but consideration for others dictates that you do it in private. We have always had twenty-four hour drinking: that was quite lawful. But you had to do it in your own home. Now they are allowed to do it in pubs, with noise and car doors banging all night. Why should this be inflicted on neighbours, only for them to receive verbal abuse if they remonstrate? The same applies to smoking; do it if you wish, but not to the detriment of others. You seem to think that protecting civilised standards is an attack on liberty. On the contrary, liberty can only endure if it is practised by civilised people.

You make an implicit assumption there. You suppose that unless the state bears down on the individual then the individual will become wild and unruly and make everyone's life hell. The problem with that argument is that the government is also comprised of the same people that you think society should be protected against. Actually some of the worst offenders you can find, with criminal records many pages long, are those that were brought up by the state. The more the state intervenes in family life the worse society seems to become. Jung pointed out the problem, and that is the larger the body the lower its common intelligence, because the only things the body knows about is what is accepted by all. I think you will find the common denominator in the state is the desire to boss other people about and restrict them in some way, cf. communism and fascism.

Originally Posted by Baron von Lotsov

You make an implicit assumption there. You suppose that unless the state bears down on the individual then the individual will become wild and unruly and make everyone's life hell. The problem with that argument is that the government is also comprised of the same people that you think society should be protected against. Actually some of the worst offenders you can find, with criminal records many pages long, are those that were brought up by the state. The more the state intervenes in family life the worse society seems to become. Jung pointed out the problem, and that is the larger the body the lower its common intelligence, because the only things the body knows about is what is accepted by all. I think you will find the common denominator in the state is the desire to boss other people about and restrict them in some way, cf. communism and fascism.

Baron von Lotsov: Your belief that the state could be replaced by private medicine is wrong in most cases. The evidence is overwhelming that about 85% of patients, even if they could afford the premium, would not be accepted by private agencies such as BUPA. Respectable neighbourhoods are degraded by pubs being open all day and most of the night. Do you think that should be tolerated in silence by the victims? The state is often required to raise children when the family collapses. However, the percentage 'in care' is (relatively) very small in the U.K. Since the 1960s' even the incarceration of the mentally ill has virtually ceased, in favour of treatment in the community. There are very few psychiatric hospitals remaining. The decline in the nuclear family happened earlier in the United States than in Europe. They don't have a Welfare State; and also have a market economy. What is your excuse for them?

This cannot be discussed in terms of communism and fascism. Control of the individual was very conspicuous long before either fascism or communism developed. Small towns of about 5,000 inhabitants would be controlled by about forty guilds. Not much free enterprise there. The world that you describe has only ever existed in your imagination; name a time when the individual had more freedom to make their own choices than to-day? The abolition of borders, and the common movement of people between states without too much officialdom has returned for the first time since pre-WW1. Presumably that is a source of delight for you?

Originally Posted by Patman Post

Despite the outcry from the smelly, yellow-toothed, kippered-skin dinosaurs on here, the percentage of smokers who stopped smoking at home has risen in all countries after the introduction of legislation banning smoking in public.

Some nicotine addicts must still have some brain cells left!

Health News - Smoking bans 'lead to less smoking at home'

The link leads to

Could not connect to database

Gosh! - Edit: It is back, but point is still valid.

Also, how would they know what people do at home? Do they monitor everyone, or do they just make any old claim, whilst hoping that there are people gullible enough to believe it? I find your comment typical of those you would find in New Labour. If people do not agree or support undemocratic policies then you just insult them and hope they will shut up.

Here is an interesting article. This is something that I was trying to expose myself a while back on here, so it is good to see others catching on to this as well. Ash works in the same way.

Written by Tim Worstall

I think we all know about one type of fake charity? The ones where almost every penny raised goes on either paying for those who run the charity or into more fundraising to, err, pay those who run the charity? Allow me to introduce you to a new form of fake charity, one that has risen rather large in our political discourse in recent years.

My own eye opener came when I was pointed to the accounts of Friends of the Earth Europe. Some 50% of their money comes from the European Union. That in itself isn't too appalling, but FoE Europe's work is to lobby the European Union. You can imagine how this might go then...the taxpayer gets gouged so that a lobby group can be seen to be urging a course of action upon those who have gouged the taxpayer in order to be lobbied. Lobbied to do something that they already wanted to do but need some public lobbying to provide the fig leaf perhaps.

This is not though an isolated incident. Via the excellent and very new fakecharities.org we find that many of those "charities" which appear in our national media are in fact little better than such State funded lobbying organisations. Taxes are taken from us so that the government can pay for the government to be lobbied, providing that fig leaf of a vocal campaign telling them (and us, more importantly) that what they've already decided to do is obviously a jolly good idea indeed.

You can see how the whole idea works here (although those of nervous dispositions might want to install that special anti-swearing filtering software). Perhaps the most egregious example uncovered as yet is Alcohol Concern. Out of an income in one year of just shy of £1 million, 57% came from the Department of Health...and yes, Alcohol Concern has been and is quite vociferous in its lobbying of the Department of Health on how access to alcohol can and should be restricted. Private donations were a tad shy of £5,000 (yes, that's five thousand, not five hundred thousand nor even fifty thousand) so their income from real people actually supporting their efforts was less than 0.5% of their total income. It's extremely difficult to see that this is a charity and even more difficult to see why theiy should been given any credence whatsoever in the media.

Might I suggest that in the spirit of this new citizen journalism, this new idea that we ourselves can and should investigate those who rule us, you pop over to fakecharities.org and give them a helping hand? Crack open a set of charitable accounts and see who is the sockpuppet and who is genuinely working independently? I seem to recall that someone proved that the Work Foundation was eating its capital, a thought which would make an interesting addition, anyone got other interesting such tidbits to add to the database?

Fake Charities | Adam Smith Institute

Originally Posted by Patman Post

Survey techniques are transparent and well tried – interview 1000 people (for example) and apply the findings across identified sectors of society.

Blustering and putting up a smoke screen to hide the fact the findings are not as you wish them to be doesn't alter them. Nor does it affect me in any way. Tough for you. But I am happy I can enjoy clean air in pubs, clubs, bars and restaurants.

So basically, it is just propaganda for non-smokers who seek to impose their state-control over all aspects of life. Whether you are happy or not, I don't care. Maybe, just maybe, if this sort of thing makes you happy then you are lacking a life and should try and enjoy yourself some more.