Who has the most invested and the most to lose? The business owner or the employee or customer who can choose to go elsewhere?
On this particular issue I agree that in the end, more good will result. I imagine most smokers have considered quiting and aside from griping will recognize that smoking less is better for them.
It was more the ludicrious way DT presented the argument that I objected to, and , the principle of a big brother type agency dictating what’s best by limiting free choices.
I agree with GomiBoy that the trick is to find a balance. We have to be cautious about giving government agencies too much sway over our personal liberties.
Dude, have you been living under a rock for the past twenty years? Nobody’s ever presented any evidence that second hand smoke is dangerous? Seriously? Is this not like common knowledge, now?
5 minutes of exposure to second hand smoke levels, as normally seen in a bar is equivalent to smoking a cigarette.
20 minutes exposure activates the body’s production of blood clotting platelets, as seen in a pack-a-day smoker, significantly increasing the risk of heart attack.
30 minutes exposure stiffens the arteries and limits the body’s ability to fight cholesterol.
2 hours exposure induces a greater risk of abnormal heart rhythm.
Comparisons with working shop floors are ridiculous. If an employer isn’t taking steps to remove obvious sources of injury from the working environment, then yeah, government should step in. Simply walking a shop floor doesn’t fall into this category. Operating a business where employees are routinely exposed to carcinogens is a different kettle of fish.
Well, it sounds from the rest of your post as though you don’t actually have much disagreement on this issue anyway. But fwiw, I’d say that the business owner doesn’t have much to lose either: no other bars in his/her area can permit smoking. In my area there’s been no long-term drop-off in the desire to drink. No bars have lost a darn thing except perhaps the need to clean a lot of dirty ashtrays.
That was not what I posted. My question posts ago was about what level of second hand smoke warrented this type of government intrusion. Nobody provided any evidence **in this thread **
Now that’s the kind of evidence and reasoned argument I asked for several posts ago and didn’t get. Thanks.
Please note that the thread was not about smoking in public places but rather , where the lines on drawn between equality and personal freedom. Where should we expect the government to step in and limit our free choice?
I’m a non smoker who spent a lot of hours in smoky bars without any noticeable effect.
It’s interesting that your evidence says, “as normally seen in a bar” Here in TN bars can still have smokers but resturants can’t. It seems to me that only concentrates the second hand smoke and raises the level of exposure in those places. What about the non smoker employees there?
Not to me. Since those “certain areas” are public ones where the harm starts to involve others that seems like exactly the moment where the intervention makes sense.
One place I frequent suffered a severe drop off for a couple of weeks. Now people go outside, but It’s summer. We’ll see how it effects their business in the winter when it’s too cold to go outside. Should they suffer a loss in income dictated by the government?
If they do suffer a significant long-term or perhaps seasonal loss I’d not see it as one dictated by the government but as one dictated by the need to protect some people from the harmful habits of others. It’s a hazard to public health that governments can no longer afford to ignore.
The fact that over many years when government did too little to check the normalization of smoking in public places (during which period cigarette companies waged campaigns to conceal the ill-effects of smoking) is simply something we all live with for the time being. It remains to be seen if people will permanently give up drinking because they have to go outside for a smoke–even in winter. I rather doubt it.
After all, it used to be you could smoke on a plane but people haven’t stopped flying since you can’t. Have people stopped shopping in shopping malls? Not that I’ve noticed.
It’s amazing what a smoker’s body can put up with once that body knows it can’t have a cigarette. I’m going to guess that smokers will have no problem in winter getting out there with or without a coat to have their fix–though will likely smoke fewer cigs as a result. Good!
I see. The question of personal liberty remains. Perhaps we should outlaw cigarettes completely and protect everyone. For that matter , speaking of protecting some people from the bad habits of others, let’s close bars as well because alcohol is bad as well.
Then after setting standards for what people can eat or drink we’ll start controlling what they can watch or read as well.
What was normalized was people’s right to choose, the businesses right to choose as well. The public has known that cigarettes were bad for them for quite some time. How long has a warning been on the pack?
I’ll grant you that the companies efforts to make them more addictive or to ignore the health hazards of additives is criminally negligent.
That being said, I think the end result will be more positive than negative in the greater scheme of things simply because smokers won’t mind being forced to smoke less. I just would rather it happen by the average joe’s free choice than by government mandate.
I suspect most people would think that was going too far. I certainly would favor the legalization of many recreational drugs and I would not favor outlawing cigarettes (though, personally speaking, I would favor increasing the taxes on them just because they impose a huge public health cost on the entire society).
Well, according to wikipedia not until 1966, when the warning said that smoking might be hazardous to your health. To this day, the U.S. “has one of the smallest, least prominent warnings placed on their [cigarette] packages. Warnings are usually in small typeface placed along one of the sides of the cigarette packs with colors and fonts that closely resemble the rest of the package, so the warnings essentially are integrated and don’t stand out with the rest of the cigarette package”
We’re talking about an addictive substance that many if not most people start while they’re teenagers–before they fully understand that they’re even mortal in any sense of the word. I really wish that smoking had been banned in bars when I was a college student; I’m sure that it would have made me smoke less at that time. And I regret every cigarette that I ever smoked…
Indeed.
Well if smokers won’t mind why get your knickers a twist?
You can concede that this highly addictive and toxic substance has been manipulated in unscrupulous ways but you somehow get hot and bothered by a simple ban on smoking in a certain kind of enclosed and usually crowded public place–posing possibly a short-term or at worst seasonal loss of some revenue to bars and some minor inconvenience to some smokers. Yet you don’t weigh at all the public health benefits to employees and others who’d be exposed to the harmful smoke (including even the smokers themselves).
I find it rather bizarre to make a judgment based on only one side of the equation.
They’re not. I’ve tried to explain that the whole thread was about a larger issue and unfortunately got sidetracked onto this one issue.
It’s incorrect to say I haven’t considered thoses things at all. You just said you don’t think cigerettes should be outlawed and some recreational drugs should be made legal. Why? Is it because people should have the right to choose, even if they choose something that’s bad for them? That’s the larger point I’ve been trying to address. In the same way people have the right to choose whether they smoke or not , non smokers can choose where they do business or where they work. Is it okay for the government to to tell me I can’t smoke in my own home because it might harm my kids? If not then why is it okay in someone’s business which is also private property?
The question is about where we draw the line for the government’s power to dictate what choices we have within the law.I was hoping to discuss it in other issues as well but alas the thread has been sidetracked.
I find it bizarre that you think I’m doing that. You’re wrong.
I think the thread has been hopelessly sidetracked and this particular subject has run it’s course. Have a nice day
Because your home is a different kind of private property than a business. A business is a public place involving customers and employees. It is therefore inherently public in a ways that your home is not. There are all kinds of laws to which your business is subject. It has to be free of public health hazards of one sort or another (e.g., contaminated food and drink, dangerously unrepaired stairs or doors). The smoking ban is just another one of these rules designed to benefit the greatest number of people in exchange for a small inconvenience to owners and some customers. For the owners, it’s part of the cost of doing business: fair in that no one is exempt from it. On the whole it’s a good cost benefit tradeoff as even you seem to agree so far as I can tell.
You seem not to recognize it as such because it feels to you like some new infringement on individual freedom. You wonder if the next step is the government coming into your home. But our government has no track record of regulating what we do in our homes at this level (exceptions have been outmoded laws about sex for which there is great resistance). As a general principle, you’d have to do actual violence to someone in your home or to do some other illegal thing because your home is not a place of business and not a public place. I think the government (as well as the medical profession) do try to deter parents from smoking a lot around the kids–as from smoking while pregnant–but education and persuasion (e.g., advertisements on tv, brochures and the like) are the usual route for that kind of campaign).
There’s no slippery slope at work here in which regulation of smoking in a public place is going to translate into regulation of smoking in private homes. The law thinks about these two kinds of spaces in different terms and as subject to different kinds of constitutional protection.
Yeah, over the last several months I’ve made a conscious decision to be less confrontational. Very recently, I’ve begun to question playing it so “safe” (Or should that be “safely”?) and with my birthday coming up… well… no one expects people of my chronological age to be other than crochety.
Are we talking about “free-market conservatives” versus “libertarians” being possibly worthy of the likely largely insignificant name-calling? Or is it a matter of “sociopaths” versus “predators” as a reasonable candidate for the epithet?
I’d guess that you mean the former from what you said about balance.
For the record, here’s what I’m asking for as “citing” by which I mean evidence.
Is there any sociological evidence at all that these greatly disliked (by DT for one) stated political views correspond with a general mean-spiritedness or otherwise negative personality traits? Is there any sociological evidence at all that being approved by DT’s political filtering glass goes along with a generally gentle spirit and overall good behavior toward others?
Let’s consider the fact that there have existed throughout time a number of political conversions, some involving economical philosophy. What would be really good is showing that a political conversion goes along with a change in empathy-level or related traits. Even if it takes years for a change in thinking to carry over to a change in emotional life and relationships, or years for emotional/ behavioral change to overcome habits of thinking and expressing.
I have appreciated Der Trihs insights on the subject of religion. Frankly, I’m disappointed that he seems to be operating in a way that I associate with less intelligent people.
?? Obviously Der Trihs is factually incorrect as well as absurd with this statement. If you’ve been watching at all you’ve seen that his drastic unrealistic attitudes are unsupportable by evidence, which, IMO makes asking for a cite pretty pointless. Do you ask for a cite for any blatant display of bigotry and prejudice. Do you expect a rational thoughtful response to follow something so irrational?
I missed that when you were talking about *two quotes * that one was by Stealth Potato, and that was the one you called reasonable.
I somehow managed to think that you were dividing what DT said into two parts, one of which could be considered reasonable.
And you’re right. Nothing at all to back up what he said is coming back. (But I find the sound of crickets chirping rather pleasant. ) I didn’t really expect that there would be, so it was reminiscent of a Michael Stivic challenge to Archie Bunker.
