No it doesn’t, unless your seat is on the floor behind the bar, under the sink.
Wow, this thread makes me really glad I quit smoking. Minnesota is the Land of 10,000 Smoking Bans (and Sneaky Ways Around Them), so I long ago got accustomed to smoking outside. I didn’t smoke inside my own house for the last 7 or 8 years of my smoking career because I was just so used to smoking outside and I liked having a slightly less polluted home.
I really feel for smokers these days, though, and I won’t give them a hard time. As long as they’re not lighting up in my house, they’re not doing me any harm. I understand not wanting to walk through a cloud of tobacco smoke outside every door (I don’t like it much either), but worrying about the overall pollution value of outdoor tobacco smoke is like fretting because you let the water run while you brush your teeth. Your tiny trickle of “wasted” water is nothing compared to what the factory down the road pollutes in a nanosecond, and all the cigarette smoke from all the smokers in the world is meaningless when compared with the heavy metals and other poisons pumped out by industry.
Ok, as I walk past you while you’re smoking, do you mind if I spit on your shoe? One bit of saliva twice a day isn’t going to kill you, believe it or not. It isn’t even going to make you smell bad. The sky isn’t falling, promise.
I have never and probably will never understand this attitude that somehow blowing smoke at me, or creating clouds of smoke that I can’t avoid walking through, is somehow exempt from the basic social courtesy of “don’t force your crap on me.”
I mean, in all seriousness, just saying “spitting on your shoe” sounds ludicrous. No one would ever do that in polite society, and if anyone did it would be construed by the person spit upon as a very serious assault.
And yet, blow smoke in my face and I should just “get over myself” and accept it?
What’s the difference, really?
Most of the UNC system has smoking limits. At ECU it’s 25 feet from the building. About the only place I see it being enforced is around the gym. Everywhere else is 25 feet from another building.
Then again, one of the old tobacco warehouses ironically burned two weeks ago, so maybe the limits are becoming stricter. 
Smoking has a lot more in common with wearing stinky perfume than spitting on someone.
Of course, if you really honsetly don’t see the difference, you’re hopeless to debate with anyway.
Pretty spot on. I enjoy smoking bans, definitely. As an ex-smoker it’s admittedly easier to go out and not relapse for a night or two (though I may be heading down to PA soon just for a nostalgic night around a pool table) and clearly the air is more pleasant.
But just because I enjoy something doesn’t give me cause to climb up on a high horse or soapbox and proclaim how necessary the laws are and how horrid smokers are for fouling the air I want to breath. I think this is where the characterizations of ‘shrill’ and whatnot come from; ostensibly faux wrath and frustration ventilation coupled with dress up in victim-hood, targeted at a demonized sub-group of people. All over a preference that is arguably much more in the purview of private choices.
While I do acknowledge that there are circumstances where a smoking ban or regulation is warranted, and as a now non-smoker I can easily tell the difference between nights in clear v. cloudy establishments, I daresay that the hoopla and excitability over passage of such laws and apparent glee in the discomfiture of others suggests something of a sociological undercurrent unrelated to the issue at hand.
I’m listening, please explain the difference to me. Everything that Really Not All That Bright said about smoking applies also to spitting on your shoe. So if those arguments are not any different, what differences do you see? I’m not asking for a debate, I’d really like to hear what the difference is.
I believe it’s in the associated baggage and social ramifications/implications. Consider the difference between an expectoral attack upon one’s loafers and an otherwise mundane conversation being interrupted by an accidental salivary expulsion—i.e., someone loogies on your shoe v. “thufferin’ thuccotash!” Basically, because you can’t excise the slew of associative intentions from someone spewing on your shoes, it’s a terribly (and needlessly) weak analogy.
I’m reminded of a T-shirt I saw years and years ago that had the following poem on it:
I’ve never been a smoker
But I really like to chew
So you don’t blow your smoke on me
And I won’t spit on you
So it is as I said: There is no actual difference, it’s simply that the social convention (longstanding, though nonetheless arbitrary) provides for an acceptance of blowing smoke in my face, but not of spitting on my shoe. My point remains: Those who argue that people “suffering” second-hand smoke have no grounds for complaint – based on the physical aspects of smoking – could argue equally well that one would have no grounds for complaint against being spit upon. It’s nothing but the social convention that makes them different.
By that logic, nobody has grounds to complain about any behavior whatsoever, since it all boils down to social convention. Thus the argument loses all meaning.
But fouling the air others are breathing is pretty horrid behavior. Just because it’s been tolerated for so long doesn’t meant it isn’t extremely rude.
No, punching me in the face causes me physical harm. That’s a clear difference from blowing smoke at me, spitting on my shoe, or wearing stinky perfume in my presence. Stealing my money causes me harm in the loss of the buying power of that money. Also a clear difference.
Remember, I was responding to a prior poster who said that anti-smokers should “get over themselves” because being around smokers “isn’t going to kill you”. I am trying to make the point that the logic that poster was using for why anti-smokers shouldn’t complain can equally well be applied to other actions that are none-the-less very socially UNacceptable, and that therefore those arguments for why smoking should be accepted just don’t make any sense. How about you try to focus on that argument, and not try to expand into total generalities?
Isn’t spitting on someone also assault?
I think the question people is asking is: “Why do we consider spitting on someone’s shoes to be assault, but we don’t consider blowing smoke in someone’s face to be assault as well?”
I agree that this is a very good question. I think it’s societal conditioning and nothing more.
Again, I think it’s all societal conditioning. Go back to the wild west and you can walk up to a stranger in the street and punch him in the face without fear of legal repercussion, for example.