There’s nothing to stop you and your neighbors from going to your local city council (or whatever governmental body made the law in the first place) and petitioning them to repeal the law or grant you a variance to keep 6 chickens in your yard.
That article is nine years out of date. There has been additional evidence on the issue.
If inhalation of diluted tobacco smoke poses grave health consequences, shouldn’t the same be true of environmental air pollution?
For pete’s sake - the body is really good at flushing itself of toxins and repairing damage. Smoking cessation timelines purport that you will be in near-normal health approximately 20 years after smoking cessation, yet people who inhaled the occasional environmental tobacco smoke are irreparably physically harmed?
Face it - society always needs someone to pick on, and smokers and smoking are the current favorite target of the “can’t-prejudice-based-on-innate-characteristics” crowd
Who says I have to follow The Rules?
Isn’t it obvious? The Man says you have to follow The Rules. And if you don’t follow The Man’s Rules, The Man is gonna go upside your head.
Tell that to my father, who stopped smoking at around 61, and will never not have emphysema. :rolleyes:
You ain’t Rosa Parks.
You just sound like another guy bent out of shape because he can’t smoke where he pleases.
It sounds like you are arguing from emotion here. I’m sorry for your father’s health, but surely you can see that some people beat the odds and are not adversely affected by cigarette smoke, and there are those like Dana Reeve who died from lung cancer after never smoking.
If you don’t follow the rules, you will get banned. The dope staff says you have to follow the rules.
I never said anything different, if by “not adversely affected” you mean that they have no specific disability or disease that inhibits their living. You can never know what your condition would have been had you not smoked, or, for that matter, had your parents not smoked and subjected you to the second-hand smoke, now, can you? 
My comment was in direct response to the assertion of the prior post that simply stopping smoking allows the body to recover from the effects of the smoking.
Society is an eternal struggle between individuals, each trying to maximize his or her own “rights.” Gevernment is constantly forced to expand upon its rules by its individuals. The mechanism for this is a two-parter: the courts and the legislature.
To use the OP’s example, let’s say that somewhere, someone’s little Johnny comes down with some kind of flu and almost dies. No one in Johnny’s family gets it, and it is determined that Johnny got it because he used a toothbrush at daycare that some other child had used, and that was the source of the virus. He did this because his teachers were always telling him how important it was to brush his teeth, but he hadn’t brought his own toothbrush.
Next thing you know, everyone in the area is in a tizzy, all the local news shows are running teasers about how a lack of having a toothbrush at daycare will make your little kid sick, etc, etc. Petitions are started and signed, and utimately the legislature passes a law saying that children are required to bring their own toothbrush to day care.
Enter JFLuvly. Actually, he has no particular problem with his kid taking a toothbrush to daycare, but he’s been raised a red-blooded 'Merkun who resents this Big Government Intrusion into his daily life. His recourse is to send his child to daycare without a toothbrush, and to sue daycare when they throw his kid out, claiming that his rights as a citizen to have his child be toothbrush-free have been violated. This eventually works its way up to the Supreme Court, which rules in JFLuvly’s favor. New legislation must be passed that incorporates both the need to protect Johnny and the need to protect JFLuvly’s right to have a toothbrush-free child.
In other news, JFLuvly bitches about his taxes being so high, and demands limits on frivolous lawsuits.
Look, JF, the point is that you may not realize when your actions, which seem to you have only have an impact on you, actually impinge on someone else. I sincerely believe that the vast majority of rules the government makes are, libertarian beliefs notwithstanding, not enacted from the sheer love of bossing people around or increasing turf, but rather because people not in the government have demanded such a law be made, and have demonstrated harm to themselves that may have been caused by the absence of such a law.
To give an example, if you are killed or severely injured in a car accident because you are not wearing a seatbelt, that has societal costs. Among them are the costs of medical treatment and clean-up, and also the effect your greater injury or death has on the other driver(s) involved. You have the right to kill yourself, but do you really have the right to make (for example) me kill you and carry the burden of that for the rest of my life?
Societies. They’re all about conflicting interests. Our culture is not the greatest for this in the world, because we encourage people to think in terms of maximizing their individual interest and to hell with other individuals or the society as a whole. In the long run, this is not sustainable, IMO.
the assertion presumes that you haven’t developed problems yet. no one would claim that if you could magically live for 30 years without smoking and while having lung cancer, your lung cancer would suddenly disappear
but they have done studies that show:
"The British doctors study[11] showed that those who stopped smoking before they reached 30 years of age lived almost as long as those who never smoked. " so i would have trouble believing that if you flew the coop at 18 and had only been exposed to secondhand smoke… you get the point.
“After 10 years, the chance of lung cancer is almost the same as a non-smoker.”
wikipedia, smoking cessation
Henry David Thoreau found a rule that he didn’t think he should follow. He didn’t believe in paying a poll tax. He got put in jail for it and wrote and essay called Civil Disobedience.. He has influenced millions including Gandhi who helped to liberate a country from English rule. And Gandhi, in turn, influenced Martin Luther King, Jr. who lead the liberation of a nation. That liberation is still in progress and involves all of us in my opinion.
Sometimes rules aren’t what they are cracked up to be. It’s not so much that you have to be willing to face the “punishment” as the consequences.. That’s a little different.
Sometimes maybe it’s a person’s responsibiity to break the rules. Teenagers have the job of rebelling somewhat in order to become fully themselves. And Jefferson believed in breaking the rules when a government was no longer serving its purpose.
Legal, political and moral philosophers have long debated the nature, scope and source of an obligation to obey the law. Different philosophers have located the obligation in different aspect and strength, but mostly they have tied it to broader political theory such as the kind of constructive consent which is borne out of citizenship, voting rights and taxation. Some believe longer terms residency would forfeit any potential objection, even where it is vehement and persistent.
Sometimes exceptions are posited for victimless violations, such as minor traffic infringements in remote areas. Sometimes they are posited based on the inherent inexpertise of lawmakers compared to a specific class of experts.
Actually you did - we all did, worshiping other gods besides the Lord God creator of Heaven and earth makes you subject to them. They are the ones who impose rules, regulations and penalties for disobedience on you. Your submission to them is your acceptance of them as your god.
Let’s just say for the sake of discussion that there are people imposing rules on you that you do not worship. For a completely random example, day care providers. I think very few people worship their day care providers. (Though I accept that I could be wrong about that.)
:rolleyes:
You agreed to accept society’s rules the moment you accepted one of the benefits that society accords you. You are offered those benefits by society, which are many and used by you thousands of times a day*, in exchange for your following society’s majority opinion on certain things.
You can choose to not accept those benefits (i.e. move to an unclaimed location in the world, if you can find one - maybe somewher ein the Antartic, or found your own underwater city), at which point you will not be subject to the rules of any society.
*From the moment you use a street, don’t get killed by Nazi stormtroopers, utlilise the monetary exchange system, enjoy the walls and ceiling provided by the commercial system society has set up, and so forth.
The day care providers are the easiest. If you don’t follow their rules, they can tell you to take your brat somewhere else. So, you don’t have to follow their rules, but they don’t have to put up with your I’m a Rebel bullshit either.
On top of that, when you enter into a relationship with a service provider, you do agree to abide by their terms. It’s a valid contract, legally enforceable. So you’re the one who promised to follow the rules when you left your kid there.
Look at what I was replying to. We were not talking about contracts with a service provider.
Unless the rules contradict the law, then you talk to a lawyer and you’ll see them again in court, unless they know perfectly well that they are going to loose.
And, JFLuvly, you follow the law, unless it seems to be unconstitutional, then you still follow it, but also ponder to initiate a complaint of unconstitutionality and see it through.
Or you simply don’t follow it and turn your civil disobedience into a political campaign … or you follow it, but still do the campaign thing.
Whenever you think a rule, a regulation or a law is unjust or unconstitutional, there are ways to express this point of view that have a fighting chance to succeed.
You just have to accept the consequences that always arise when you don’t follow the flow.
I really see no need for this thread to be hijacked into another pointless “theological” discussion. (And there is a reason I used quotation marks in that sentence.)
[ /Modding ]