Let smokers smoke.

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Sizing it up topic

People are indeed larger, and so many children are obese at an earlier age. Kids seem to smoke years earlier, but I do not know where/how they get their smokes if it is illegal for kids to buy them legally under the age of 19. Where there is a will, there is a way, unfortunately.

It is too easy to gain weight from all the food here in the Western world. We nibble throughout the day, wasting more than half of what we buy. Just too easy access to food facilitates this cycle of buy-eat-waste, rinse, repeat. Our lives are so boring/speedy that we drink too much, smoke too much and abuse drugs for the same reason.

I do not smoke, waste food, overeat or drink alcohol. I avoid soda and junk food as much as possible, though i do like popcorn and homemade cookies as treats occasionally. Keeping fit, active, and engaged in life assist in keeping my weight and diet within rational perimeters. This is clearly not as straightforward as it looks on paper, and requires perseverance.

Since I am beginning to think that at least in this discusion you are to a degree sincere, it is my duty to point out thatr it is not true they WANT to destroy lives. Rather they do not really CARE if they destroy lives. I think the conspiracy theory goes too far.

i do not care about smoking. it is just the smoke from the combustion of a tobacco plant.
all smoke is injurious in some way or another. all smoke is comprised of particulate matter that will "stick to the insides of one's lungs" (for want of a more accurate analogy) and react in some way with the breather.

i have breathed smoke from cars and factories and smokers all to a mild degree and i feel fine.

i also think that the average smoker contributes more tax to the "system" than they will ever redeem from it.

i tried to smoke when i was 14 and it was something i could not do, but i saw some people that smoked and "drew back" (the smoke into their lungs), and they looked relieved and freshly focused (like columbo (TV detective) with his cigar), and i thought that it may help me to think about things, but i could not draw the smoke into my lungs.

i had a violent expulsionary reaction that made me cough so hard that i almost lost consciousness when i tried to inhale the smoke.

if that is the concentration of smoke that smokers breathe in in very regular intervals, i can well understand why it is injurious to them.

but the sensation i have when i merely whiff diluted smoke around a smoker is so insignificant compared to that one draw back i subjectively experienced, that i do not expect i will suffer any harm from it.

Here is a list of the 599 additives that vile tobacco companies add to cigarettes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ad ... cigarettes

It is a lot more than just tobacco that you poor suckers are inhaling.

I'm sure that the vile tobacco companies don't claim to add any of these chemicals in an effort to enhance the health or wellbeing of their victims.

In fact, the vile tobacco companies have been increasing the nicotine content of their coffin nails, in order to keep you poor suckers addicted.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01418.html

Regarding whether the vile cigarette companies either (1) want to destroy lives or (2) don't care that they are destroying lives: the vile cigarette companies know full well that their products do, in fact, destroy lives. And, they lie about it. The vile cigarette companies are doing this deliberately and methodically. If they didn't want to destroy lives, then they wouldn't be in the business of destroying lives.

So you'd rather go back to a time when food wasn't plentiful, where people were poor and had nothing? Typical misanthropy from a socialist.

I'll eat, drink, smoke, shag and photograph what I like, thanks, subject to law.

This bottle of Stone IPA is lovely!

Another thing that I think it is very hard to come up with what you call "legitimate" reasons for doing is : having a child ... often very smelly, certainly in the early stages ( and frequently a serious nuisance to others, and requiring in most cases the use of huge amounts of massively polluting non-biodegradable nappies ) !

But I think that the degree to which something *seems* "deadly, unhealthy and smelly" depends on where you draw the line. Why draw the line just metres away from someone?

As someone who has several times attempted ( and failed ) to only do and eat those things which do not pollute, which do not kill, which do not make me ill, which do not take food out of the mouths of others, and do not smell :lol I feel quite strongly that unless I were strong/fit and courageous and skilled and "pure"/fanatical enough to live in a yurt/cabin in the countryside eating only food that I or nearby organic farmers had grown etc etc etc without exchanging any money with anyone, and using no form of fossil fuel etc etc etc ... the only way to avoid killing, polluting, smelling, etc, and sometimes offending others, is to be dead.

For example people who eat sugar, whether in confectionary or soft-drinks or in any number of fast foods and packet meals, or in their coffee or cereal, whether from corn-syrup or sugar-cane, ( ... or almost any common food grown using modern intensive agricultural methods more than a few kilometres away from where you live ), are not only, in the case of sugar, ingesting a highly acid substance which has appalling long-term effects on health, ( at least equal to those of tobacco ) but are also contributing to the desertification of the planet, "distant" poverty", the ill-health associated with that, etc etc etc.

People who use cars ... ( I don't suppose I need to go into this one? :lol ... the perfect example of something which is deadly/unhealthy, polluting/smelly, and apparently addictive ... ) etc.

It is highly extremist thinking to judge the "value" of an activity in the way your comments do, and it is interesting that your posts at the same time contain such very insulting remarks about people who smoke.

If you personally do nothing which pollutes some corner of the world, ( whether with pesticides, herbicides, greenhouse-gas emissions, into soil or water or workers' lungs etc ) or contributes to inequality/poverty, etc then by all means use such measures of behaviour, but from my own experience it is a recipe for deep depression, and/or an isolating self-righteousness, to hold such standards, standards which cause you to condemn others so harshly for things which at some level you, as someone *living* on this planet, probably among the more privileged ( I assume this because you have use of the internet etc ) are almost certainly doing too.

I am familiar with the "guilt" or frustration or self-loathing/hatred which such standards of "measurement" cause, and the intense ( projected ) anger and intolerance of others which it leads to, and remember wanting to write, and on occasion actually writing, the sort of insults that you have posted about smokers.


Thank you very much for that link http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC526783/ Love it! Very interesting.
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Last edited by ouinon on 24 Jul 2011, 3:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

PS. In fact I'm just now wondering whether the anti-smoking hysteria is in fact a projection by people in the wealthy west of their guilt over the thousands/millions of people ill, starving, and dying as a result of the "toxic fumes" of our consumption of agri-industry food, of petroleum, of cheap textiles/clothes, plastics, etc.

Perhaps at some unconscious level more and more people are "aware" of a crowd of diseased and dying "around them", each time they walk into an air-conditioned ( or heated ) room/building, each time we eat fast-food/anything from agri-industry abroad, each time we turn on the TV/computer, each time we get in a car.

A huge crowd diseased and dying as a result of our "smoke". ... ie. Just because they're not physically next to us in the elevator or the bar doesn't mean that our "effluvium" of "waste products" etc isn't killing them.
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Put that down right there. Even the habits of people of centuries ago would not have been enough for these fanatics. They demand that others live a horrible, menial, mean-spirited, pathetic existence devoid of all joy, luxury and hope whilst their 'betters' live high on the hog, swanning around the world and enjoying their greed. It is a disgusting, repulsive mindset and why I will never, ever trust the Green movement here. They have a deeply controlling, authoritarian mindset which, at its extreme ends, is utterly wicked. See the likes of Jonathon Porritt.

Almost no-one in this country wants to go back to living a medieval existence - this is why society has progressed.

Earlier this year, I was at a museum called the Beamish (yes, spelled like the Irish stout) Museum in County Durham in the north-east of England. They have a massive open-air mock-up of a town centre set in 1912. So there are shops, post offices, banks, apothecaries and the like all of the time. There is even a real pub on site where you can buy a pint and sit on the lawn. Anyway, I was in the apothecary shop and there was an old chap on the desk and he was saying how all these gadgets were used. He made his point very clearly that these things are all very nice to look at but that we no longer live like this for good reason - because it's such an unpleasant and cumbersome way of living and, also, because it is far, far more dangerous than what we have today. He was very directly warning against the dangers of nostalgia. I agree with him.

There is the other thing. Every politician knows: you need an enemy. An external threat, an internal subversive, a scapegoat. An enemy gets people solidly behind their leaders. It distracts their attention from the leader's misdeeds. It keeps them careful not to seem disloyal.

How useful were the Jews? How useful were the Commies? How useful were the bootlrggers in Prohibition, the drug dealers? We substiture pedophiles for White Slavers and lechers.

You gotta have a gimmick, and you have to have an enemy and a bad practice to extinguish.

MUCH more use than a positive goal. Negativity motivates pewople.

Waist and waste management topic

If society has progressed so much that wasting and waisting are seen as modern, desireable and inevitable then I would rather adhere to some rather archaic practices: Use/eat only what your body and life require.

Do you despise pleasure? Many, many, many pleasurable things come from that which we don't need, just desire.

define waste before proceeding please.

no one claimed pollution is desirable but it was claimed that someone taking such an extremistic aproach as panda should think of what he does to others of more serious nature than smokers do to him(my take please correct me if im wrong, grossly simplified)

if you are alive then chacnces are you are in some way contributing to pollution, some can be easily managed with little risk but when that management is nonexistent problems arise

The pursuit of pleasure topic

What pleases me is very simple, and does not involve waist/waste. As mentioned, I do not drink alcohol, I do not smoke, overeat, travel to foreign climes, drive a car, shag like Austin Powers and/or party like it's 1999. I like using the computer, reading library books, studying, writing, texting relatives over where you, Tequila, live in the UK, and checking out neighbourhood garage sales where I might find a bargain. Might be boring for some but all that plus my employment and parenting responsibilities are enough for Sartresue.

Giving up smoking will not result in your living "a horrible, menial, mean-spirited, pathetic existence devoid of all joy, luxury and hope whilst their 'betters' live high on the hog, swanning around the world and enjoying their greed."

In fact, quite the opposite.

smoking or not smoking isnt a guarantee of anything more than the thoughts of the person doing it.

just because you dont find it enjoyable doesnt mean everyone will or should have the same view.

http://vibranthealthnow.com/quitsmoking ... s_Plea.php