On the other hand, isn’t this being foisted on the private landlords(the colleges with their private dorms)?
Are they not being told what and how they will do things whether they like it or not?
Have you wandered into my going-nowhere-fast thread? It’s not about the personal freedoms of those that choose this way or that. It’s about the militant anti’s forcing their choice upon one and all.
Holy shit. I’m in lock-step agreement with mockingbird on an issue. tdn, that tree-hugging you mentioned must not be far ahead. :eek:
Indeed they are…so in which case, it should also apply to other private landlords and therefore a no-smoking ban should apply across the board, yes?
Which clearly shows that you and a few others haven’t fucking been paying attention.
I am for personal freedoms and a minimum of government intrusion at best.
Ironic that much of the most intrusive goverment obstacles have come from the current totalitarian regime posing as the Republican party.
I don’t know. Why?
Oh, great. NannyGov once again screwing the old people and poor people. Maybe once they get rid of the smoke smell, they can take care of that old-person smell. Make the little cake eaters wear deodorant.
Well, one reason would be that if you smoke in your private house, I (when you come to sell it), as a potential buyer, can simply decide it is too stinky or yellow for my tastes and buy another property elsewhere, or I can try to bid a lower price to take into consideration the extra cost of redecorating (and of course, you, as the seller in a free market, can choose to tell me to stick my lower offer and my supercilious attitudes right up my arse). That’s a reason not to ban smoking in privately-owned housing.
Let’s not forget to ban books on smoking, too.
Wow. That lasted longer than I thought. Thanks for the memories.
All right, what about this, not that I have a dog in this fight. Does your neighbor have the right to engage in an activity that triples your chance of dying in an apartment fire? Like driving under the influence, smokers aren’t the only ones who die in smoking fires.
If you think it’s allowable to smoke, because your neighbor willingly assumes the risk, what if your neighbor decides to keep free range brown recluse spiders as pets, or cook methamphetamines for fun and profit?
Once you have decided that it’s all right for “society” to limit the activities of others for the comfort of their neighbors the only question is where will it end. If you don’t want them to limit your right to smoke, you have to give them their right to manufacture fireworks, or engage in whatever risky behaviour they want, regardless of whether it increases the hazard to you.
… some folks would pay for that …
If we’re talking about smoking bans, I think we are since that’s what it says in the thread title, there has been significant activity in this direction from many local governments, too. In fact, nearly all of the smoking bans to date have been enacted at the local level. Certainly not all of those local governments are controlled by a Republican majority. The Toledo city council and board of county commissioners, the folks behind our smoking ban efforts, have both been controlled by Democrats for many, many years.
Finally, I think we should look at who first imposed a smoking ban in the Whitehouse, and all federal buildings. Ya remember who that was? Hint: He was president in August 1997 when the executive order banning smoking in federal buildings was signed.
Careful of that slippery slope here. Those things can be dangerous. The government ought to ban them.
Read between the lines and see what the anti-smoking zealots really think; there’s nothing to support their position, so they resort to this kind of idiocy. There’s no reason that underlies their viewpoint - they resent smokers, and they will do anything in their power to take our rights away. When they’re in government, they’ll make up flimsy rationalizations (it seeps through the walls!) - but no belief is so absurd that the antis won’t cling to it if they think it helps their cause. If there were a rationale for their actions, they wouldn’t resort to this kind of mendacity; they do because they’re a small group of hate-filled people and they work with the assent of the majority who simply couldn’t be arsed to worry about anyone else’s rights.
Unless someone smokes a pack a day in their apartment and never opens a window, I don’t understand why ordinary apartment maintenance should be unable to fix the problem. When I lived on campus, there was no particular indications at the start of the year whether the previous resident had smoked or not. Extrapolating from the one person in a thousand who chooses to live in a house with more nicotine than oxygen to the rest of the population is foolish, and any other behavior could potentially be destructive if performed in that manner.
The notion that the government has the right to treat public housing tenants that way is ridiculous. Public housing is not dormitories; even if we’re discussing housing projects (I’m not sure how common they are nowadays is in New York) it’s not as though it’s a hotel room that a family lives in for a couple weeks. In many instances public housing assistance is done through payments to private landlords - though this law doesn’t seem to make a distinction; there goes any pretense of concern over the conditions of the apartments. The reason why the New York government is regulating government housing is because it can, and the anti-smoking zealots would surely regulate what private citizens can do in houses they own if they could. Nor is it any sort of virtue to humiliate the poor by making them jump through special hoops to attain a basic need like housing.
You mean activities like burning candles or incense?
Is there any hazard so slight that you are not willing to sacrifice both privacy and freedom for the sake of avoiding it? Is there * any *area of my life in which the state is not entitled to meddle in the name of public safety? Are there not some risks you should take simply for the sake of liberty?
I don’t have a problem with cigarette taxes.
I rejoiced when they took them out of the bars, restaurants, & bowling alleys.
This, however, is insane.
So you’re in favor of government edicts restricting the rights of persons to engage in legal activities simply so that the world is more pleasant to you? You can justify a ban on anything by that logic.
That article contains no claim that even remotely resembles yours. The closest I can find is this:
In no way does this mean that your neighbour smoking triples your chance of death. It’s not exactly a revealing statement in any case: reducing smoking was accountable for most of the reduction in smoking-related fires? No shit, Dr. Leistikow; was your PhD in ursine defecation habits?
Tree-hugging? You mean tree-hugger? No longer. It’s now illegal to smoke within 500 feet of any tree. The smoke might permeate the wood, which might be pecked by a woodpecker, which then might carry the nicotine toxins to neighboring New York where it could conceivably land atop a biker bar, thus killing all inhabitants with lung cancer.
This anti-smoking hysteria is no longer a partisan issue. If it were, then approximately half of the country would be against it. Far more than that are.
At some point, there could be so many restrictions on public housing that these homes won’t be homes any more because they won’t allow residents to enjoy the liberties of private life. Bans on pets, bans on cigarette smoking, curfews - these things exist for public housing in some places, but don’t for most people who own their own home. Sure, they may make people who live in public housing more safe, or they may preserve the value of the housing units, but they take away liberties that others in our society enjoy.
I usually don’t like slippery slope arguments, but if the power to impose these conditions is abused by the powers-that-be, eventually you create deeper divisions between the haves and have nots.
Imagine being a kid who lives in public housing being invited over to the home of a schoolmate from a richer family. His Dad might be enjoying a cigar on the couch in the living room - your Dad can’t do that because they don’t allow smoking in public housing. Your buddy invites you to come upstairs to see his pet hamster - something else you can’t have if your public housing restricts pets. And then you have to be home before a certain hour because there’s a curfew in your housing project and you can’t be seen entering or leaving after a certain time. And your buddy has no such restrictions on what he can and can’t do. Sound like a society of equals? I realize it’s a hypothetical example, but it’s certainly within the realm of possibility and it doesn’t sound very free or equal to me.
Kids already might visit someone else’s home where there is smoking, a pet, and no curfew while at home it’s a no-smoking, no pets, early curfew environment.
We have pets, but a kid visiting my house would discover it’s a no-smoking house and there are absolute curfews.
There are arguments for or against these policies without bringing in kids who are deprived by not seeing their fathers smoke cigars.