The day litter disappears on a breeze, that will be a valid comparison.
As for noise, I don’t object to it during reasonable hours, if you’re bitching about noise at noon, you’re a whiny douchebag who SHOULD go live somewhere quieter. It’s called compromise, and people like Muffin want none of it, and frankly I fervently with I WAS giving them cancer with my cigarettes, I’d find that as rewarding as s/he finds anti-smoking legislation.
I don’t know…I pretty much agree with Diana on this one, and I neither smoke (never have) nor wear any scented products. In fact, the reason I don’t wear scented products is because I’m too sensitive to them and they tend to stuff me up and make my eyes water. And yet…I’m not in favor of legislating against them. I’m in favor of letting someone know if they’re bothering you, and hopefully being able to work it out like adults.
The difference between smoking and litter is this: The smoker is only going to bother you while he’s within proximity of you. If he isn’t, then his smoke isn’t going to linger there, or cause any ill effects. Litter will sit there for weeks, months, even years, affecting others’ enjoyment of the environment that entire time, and potentially causing ongoing environmental and health hazards.
What were the specific reasons given for rejecting the compromise proposals? I think the pros and cons of limited smoking bans may be more complicated than you’re inferring. For instance, when Detroit was considering a limited smoking ban with exceptions for certain locations like cigar bars, an industry group of restaurant and bar owners argued that a total ban would be preferable to a limited ban. So apparently compromise proposals on smoking bans aren’t quite the no-brainer that you seem to be suggesting.
:dubious: “Many” people? How many? Sure, I agree that any regulatory change is likely to have disparate impacts on different groups. It’s certainly true that some individuals who in the pre-smoking-ban days never went anyplace where they might encounter a smoker indoors may nowadays be breathing more smoke than they used to, simply because there are now more smokers outdoors.
But I think it’s indisputable that smoking bans have reduced the overall exposure of people to other people’s smoke, which was the stated motive of the bans.
Convenient how you don’t include the word forced there, where as I specifically did. People are realistically forced to be exposed to cigarette smoke when smokers are pushed outside onto public sidewalks. Beforehand, when smokers were in bars, very few people comparably were compelled to go into bars.
In other words, somebody’s a whiny douchebag if they complain about something that doesn’t happen to be too irritating to you personally, like noise at noon. But if it’s something that does bother you personally, like noise at night, then you’re fine with the whiny douchebags legislating against it. Just as I thought.
What’s called compromise? The situation where you get to dismiss everybody who doesn’t want to put up with being annoyed by your intrusive smoke as a whiny douchebag and a delicate flower and a hysterical puritanical bitch? Where’s my incentive to compromise on that? Heck, if I’m going to get called a whiny douchebag anyway, I might as well push for the anti-smoking legislation; if it’s a choice between smoke and insults versus insults without smoke, the latter seems preferable.
You are apparently too delicate a flower for this world, in which people are not automatically entitled to spew their intrusive pollutants into shared space with no possibility of democratically enacted legislative restrictions on their spewing.
But before smoking bans, smokers were in lots of other indoor places besides bars—it’s not as though simply avoiding bars would keep you away from smokers. I think it’s kind of a stretch to imply that smoking bans have actually increased rather than decreased any kind of exposure to other people’s smoke overall, even if we’re only talking about forced exposure.
I keep forgetting my location doesn’t show as a guest. I am in Puerto Rico. By all means PM me if work ever brings you around. You read like someone I would like to meet and have a beer with. Caveat beertor, I live about one hour away from the airport.
I can most definitely know when he smokes without seeing him out the window. The clue is olfactory. The guy is nasty all the way around, but that is really not much of my problem since I hardly interact with him beyond a wave from trashcan to trashcan. What bothers me is the smoke of his cigarette (and the smoke of the dude who drives a junker and comes to see him on weekends, but that’s 1 minute a week).
From his porch to where I am sitting is probably around 30 feet. Not too many obstacles in the middle, though. He is on his front porch and the front of my house is about 50% windows all open. The wind is almost always blowing from his house to mine. This is also why the windows on that side are always open (plus, they are storm windows. It gets dark in here when I close them all).
I don’t think of my nose as particularly sensitive. It is big on the outside but with a deviated septum and random allergies, I normally breathe through only one side. My wife normally smells the rice burning at my in-laws before I do.
Still, the smoke is perfectly noticeable. Not as a whiff that randomly comes and goes and makes you wonder what it was. It is the full blown smell of cigarette smoke and it even comes with the sting on the nose and all.
The good news. He seems to have gotten a job. He has been spending a lot less time at home in the last week and is always wearing some dark blue pants that can only be part of a uniform.
The bad news. As I type this, he just lit up. I went to the window and he is not even on his front porch but on the laundry by the side of the house.
That’s one difference between smoking and litter, sure, but it’s not a material difference as far as my point is concerned. Why should I have to tolerate stepping over and around other people’s litter even if it’s only there temporarily? Why should the permanence of the nuisance be the determining factor in whether or not I’m allowed to be annoyed by it?
I would have thought the context would make it bloody obvious I was talking about bans in bars. Especially given that most other places banned smoking long beforehand.
I don’t have a major issue with most of the other smoking legislation.
As for smoking bans, I always thought that the total smoking ban on bars was ridiculous. Let there be places where smokers can have at it. I doubt you will have a hard time finding an all smoking crew to staff it. Let the bar owners decide whether they will make a better business allowing smokers or not.
And as someone said, the ban now means the smokers are on the sidewalk smoking instead of confined in a place where the smoke doesn’t spill over to the street.
As for the dangers of second hand smoking. Although I do believe there has to be some danger to it, it doesn’t really matter to me. Even if it turned out it cured cancer and made my teeth whiter, it still bothers me. I find it a lot more intrusive than the strongest of perfumes and curries.
As for the cries of “delicate flower” (which, btw, is probably the stupidest meme on the internets nowadays) against those bothered by smoke and wanting to have it regulated. Imagine someone farting non-stop next to you. Never mind whether it is legal or not, would you not find it obnoxious? Would you not jump at the chance to outlaw it?
You shouldn’t. But if you are in a store, for example, and the store owner decides to let people litter the floor, then your choice should be to step over it or to go to a different store. Not running whining to the government saying that the store owner should not be allowed to let his or her customers litter the store.
And it would be even more stupid to pass a law saying that store owners cannot permit people to litter inside the store, but that it would still be legal for them to strew the litter across the public street in front of the store.
So you are ok with littering in a place like Disney World where someone comes and picks it up seconds later?
You (unsurprisingly) missed the word “reasonable” in my post. You see, most people sleep at night, and so we as a society have decided that noise between the hours of say 11:00p and 7:00a on weeknights is an unreasonable imposition.
See above. People are allowed to make all the noise they want during SOME of the hours, but not ALL of the hours. Kinda like how it would be if I could smoke in SOME places, but not ALL.
But some people aren’t happy with that. Some bitchy, puritanical, whiny and incredibly self-involved douchebags want quiet at noon, because they can’t conceive of a world in which other people’s desires also matter.
Hells yeah. I’m creating jobs. 
This probably deserves its own thread but ever since the recession came down, I have stopped putting the shopping cart in its pen precisely for that reason. I was a supermarket bagger once.
Nah. Nothing Puritanical about it, and nothing hysterical about it. The simple fact of the matter is that smoke kills, so I don’t want it in my life. If that resticts the places where you can smoke, that’s too bad for you.
I didn’t say you weren’t allowed to be annoyed by it. I said that I don’t agree with legislating against it. And I think there’s more reason to legislate against something you can’t easily get away from.
Nah. That’s just an example of poor drafting of the legislation. The folks who drafted no-smoking legislation without first thinking about where the smokers would go to smoke had shit for brains. That’s why many jurisdictions that started with no-smoking in buildings have updated their legislation to also include no-smoking within a certain distance of entrances.
Aside from legislation, a lot of places are simply prohibiting smoking on their property, which may be a dream come true for Sapo, given that it will lead to more smokers smoking at the side of the street where Sapo can run them down.
Fortunately, the smoking rate is decreasing (at least it is where I live), so eventually there will not be so many people inconvenienced by no-smoking bylaws.
You are missing the Puritanical aspect. What you are saying is “Smoke kills, I don’t want smoke in my life, you shouldn’t be allowed to smoke anywhere I go” as opposed to “smoke kills, I don’t want smoke in my life, I shouldn’t go where you are smoking.”
Now clearly there is a middle path between the two. But I don’t see why the preferred solution is to ban smoking from anywhere you wish to go. The only reason I can see for that is that it is a pleasure of other people’s that you do not share, hence you feel that your desire to go anywhere you wish trumps their desire to smoke.
This is a good thing. I’m all in favor of businesses chosing to be smoke free. I even frequented a smoke free bar in DC pre-ban at times because my friends liked it. yet most bars did not want to be smoke free.
See below …
Hmmmmm. One says people shouldn’t go into “you’re killing me” mode, and then the other …
Wow.