And so it begins: the long road to banning smoking outside
Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 9:05 It was reported yesterday that organisers of the London Olympics want to ban smoking in all ticketed areas, including those that are outside in the open air.
Whatever the event – archery, rowing, sailing – every venue, every towpath, will be "smoke free".
So too will the London Olympic Park because although most of it is outdoors (it's a park, innit?) that is going to be a "ticketed area" as well. (Yes, they're going to charge us for the privilege of rubbing shoulders with the corporate guests who have tickets for the actual events!!)
The good news? According to the Daily Star, "An Olympics spokesman said it would be impossible to impose the ban on people lining non-ticketed public roads to watch the marathon." I bet they'd like to try, though.
Truth is, the Olympics are being seized upon as a gilt-edged opportunity to experiment with outdoor smoking bans.
Far from being a celebration of a free and open society (with all its faults), we may as well be back in Beijing. At least they know how to put on an opening ceremony!
Reader Comments (14)
Sounds like a funny way of getting the whole country to get behind the Olympics. The whole thing looks more and more like an exercise in Soviet-era triumphalism.
I'm investigating having myself aneathetised for the whole event.
I will make a point of not watching one jot of the games. Especially when the organisers grovel to the high ups by giving them a special traffic lane.
Thought this was England ? Maybe am dreaming.
Simon, you are going to have to familiarize yourself with the Godber/WHO Blueprint:
http://www.rampant-antismoking.com
The Blueprint is the denormalizing of smoking/smokers from the public - indoors and outdoors - and which was set years before the first study on SHS. Rather than ban the sale of tobacco, although some are now entertaining even this idea, the [eugenics] goal this time has been to ban smoking in essentially all the places people typically smoke. The Godber/WHO Blueprint is in the physicalist/eugenics tradition, headed by physicians and the medically aligned. Physicalism/eugenics venerates the body and, particularly, athleticism. Smoking is viewed as a body poison that should be eradicated from the society/world. [The same fixation with physical strength and the modern incarnation of the Olympics could be seen in Nazism] Health is [dangerously] reduced to only a physical phenomenon. Banning smoking around athletes was discussed at the World Conferences on Smoking & Health in the 1980s: Athletes, who are viewed as “superior people”, should not have to “endure” the “pitiful habit” of smokers (i.e., “inferior” people). Smoking “infects” the “sacred” athletic ground.
I think the attempt has been to ban smoking at all Olympic venues since the 1990s.
We can see the same fixation on physicalism showing up at the World Conferences on Smoking & Health.
From the 5th World Conference on Smoking and Health, 1983, Winnipeg, Canada
"Free apples, bananas, oranges and bran muffins were available at breaks during the Conference. Young athletes, clad in gymnasium attire, conducted brief exercise rituals for delegates at many sessions. Health for all." (p.23)
http://www2.tobaccodocuments.org/ti/TIMN0449129-9153.html?zoom=750&ocr_position=above_foramatted&start_page=1
See also:
http://tobaccoreporter.com/home.php?id=498&art=3605
http://www.aroundtherings.com/articles/view.aspx?id=37487
The eugenics goal is to rid humanity of the mentally, physically, and economically disabled – defectives, undesirables - and to produce a master [physical] race. Included is the jettisoning of behaviors such as tobacco and alcohol-use that are deemed detrimental to the body. And diet and physical exercise are also critical.
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the corn flakes pusher from Battle Creek, lectured the conferees at a 1915 conference on race betterment in San Francisco: “The world needs a new aristocracy… made up of real Apollos and Venuses and their fortunate progeny. Instead of such an aristocracy, we are actually building up an aristocracy of lunatics, idiots, paupers, and criminals. These unfit persons already have reached the proportions of a vast multitude — 500,000 lunatics; 90,000 idiots; 90,000 epileptics; and 80,000 criminals, and we are supporting these defectives in idleness like real aristocrats at an expense of $100 million a year.”
http://hpr1.com/opinion/article/operations_for_goats_of_all_ages
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan served as a member of the state board of health and operated a sanitarium known for its unorthodox food regimens. He developed for his patients a natural product made of wheat flakes. In 1898 his brother, Will Kellogg, invented the corn flake and began selling it commercially through a company that would ultimately become the cereal behemoth the Kellogg Company. In the same year as the founding of the company, Dr. Kellogg founded the Race Betterment Foundation to help stop the “propagation of defectives.”
http://www.neatorama.com/2008/09/02/disturbing-facts-about-eugenics/
From the 5th World [Eugenics] Conference on Smoking and Health, 1983, Winnipeg, Canada
“Free apples, bananas, oranges and bran muffins were available at breaks during the Conference. Young athletes, clad in gymnasium attire, conducted brief exercise rituals for delegates at many sessions. Health for all.” (p.23)
http://www2.tobaccodocuments.org/ti/TIMN0449129-9153.html?zoom=750&ocr_position=above_foramatted&start_page=1
We now have a large global gym culture that didn’t exist 30 years ago. Gymnasia are selling points for hotels, cruise ships, social clubs, etc. They’re all over the place now. In these gyms, people flex muscles for hours on end (or walk/run on treadmills - like rats in the lab) and strut about checking each other out [physically] or stare into mirrors in abject Narcissism, oozing vanity. They also spend copious amounts of time monitoring their diet. These are the eugenics “master people”, the “Apollos and Venuses”, or, as one pre-Nazi German preferred to call the mentality – in derogatory terms, an “aristocracy of the bicep”. The critical problem is that, while there are more “good physical specimens” from this physicalist obsession, there may not be too much of depth going on between the ears, i.e., dangerous superficiality.
As a resident of the Metropolis I put my head in my hands the day it was announced that London had 'won' the games. 'Bread and circuses', 'give the mob games' sprung to mind as well as the NuLab trick of 'let's all have a party' as we're a 'young country'. Blair didn't half come out with some sh*te.
I know that some Councils would be relishing the prospect of being the first to implement open air bans (who would notice or ever hear of them, otherwise?) but isn't this outside their remit?
"In these gyms, people flex muscles for hours on end (or walk/run on treadmills - like rats in the lab)"
I regularly pass 2 gyms. I cannot see in the first but from it I see people exiting whose expressions are completely dead. There eyes say nothing and they look to have little between the ears. I can see the treadmills in the 2nd. as they are next to long windows. 5 days out of 7, I see nobody on them but on the other 2 days I see people on them with expressions of torture on their faces. It reminds me of how the Medieval Monks who travelled through the Country flagellating themselves must have looked and I imagine there's little difference in mentality.
There, surely, must be something Religious about all this obsession with suffering.
Hey now, let's not have a go at gym-goers! I work out 5 days a week, often at high intensity. The reason I do so is yes, you look better (which is always a plus considering that the opposite sex is as much a hobby as drinking and smoking is) but also, it has to be said, you get an endorphin rush if you're doing it right. Actually, it could easily be argued by people, if they were so inclined, that fitness fanatics are just junkies like smokers supposedly are - I know I tend to feel antsy and fidgety on my non-workout days.
However, on top of that, I'm running a half marathon next year and swimming a mile in Windermere. Apart from being healthy, such levels of fitness put me, I think, in a "morally superior" position when the likes of Donaldson and Arnott and that porker from the BMA when they have a go at me for smoking as they waddle and wheeze to their offices. 20 a day for 20 years - half marathon. Geddit anti-smokers? I see myself as living proof of their lies.
Besides, my position as a healthy (not healthist) smoker also enables me to see some of our favourite issues from different angles. For example, Big Pharma's drive to wipe out supplement companies has a lot in common with their aims to take over the legal nicotine market. Similarly, in the same way that the antis killed the pub trade despite never visiting pubs, there are some places (notably "Planet Fitness") that operate a "judgement free policy" -(supposedly so people who are new to working out can visit without feeling intimidated) yet they operate "Lunk alarms" which can be set off any time anyone lifts too heavy a weight, makes a tad too much noise or generally acts like a "lunk" - their charming term to describe someone who actually goes to a gym to work out - so much for a judgement-free policy! I see a lot in common with this "gyms are to go to, not to work out in" idea that throws out hardcore gym-rats and the "pubs are to eat in and use as creches" idea that throws out regular pub-goers who just want to drink and smoke and use a, well, pub.
Busybody, over-sensitive idiots who expect the world to be altered to fit their whims are the real problem, and it needs to be stood up to everywhere. If they can't stand smoke in a pub, then sod off or start your own - don't force pubs to change. Don't like people lifting weights around you? Then don't go to a damn gym and expect it to have pizza nights and lunk alarms (yes, "Planet Fitness" have pizza nights, too).
JUST LEAVE ME ALONE TO SMOKE AND DRINK AND FART AND WORK OUT!! Everything I do, even the supposedly "good" stuff is monitored and regulated by these idiots. When will they just go away?
Actually, there are other parallels, too. In the last 5 months I've lost 40 lbs following a ketogenic diet (ie high fat and high protein, low carb). Not content with haranguing me every day for smoking, they also want to start taxing "unhealthy" foods (ie cheese, eggs, red meat - all the stuff that has lowered my blood pressure, my weight and my resting heart rate), despite the many studies that show that their low-fat orthodoxy is not right (not for everyone, anyway). Similarly, their ridiculous BMI measures still have me as obese even though I now have a six-pack.
I just seem to spend my whole day shouting at the radio and saying "What about Enstom and Kabat?" or "What about Willi et al?"
I don't believe a damn word these people say.
On anything.
Mr.A, not having a shot at all gym-goers as such. I’m having a shot at the world philosophy (i.e., eugenics) that views the physical state as everything; that health only has to do with the physical state. And there are cultic disciples - those that follow the physicalist prescriptions (anti-tobacco/alcohol, constant monitoring of diet, physical exercise) of how everyone should be living – who view themselves as “superior” creatures with the approval of the medical bureaucracy and the State.
Oh I know - I've found your posts on the eugenic roots of anti-tobacco and their ilk to be really informative (albeit unsurprising). I just wanted to point out that the reason these liars have such traction nowadays is not that their lies are so convincing or that they have stitched up the Media or even that they have infiltrated those in power (although they have). The reason they have such traction is that we are sadly living in an unbelievably selfish, petty, egocentric age.
It seems hard to believe that we have gotten where we are re: smoking bans. But then when you realise these people who whined at smoke when they went to the pub are the same people who bleat about people lifting weights when they go the gym or, like that story a few months ago, complain about the smell of fish when they go to Hull (remember that one - bet he was an anti), you just come to the realisation that they are so selfish and self-absorbed that they care nothing for evidence or of the rights of others. They only care about themselves. Indeed, that is the one thing that annoys me most about the antis - the fact that they invariably whine about smokers being selfish, when in reality, only the most narcissistic of personalities would expect the whole world to adapt around them, even in places they will never go, and screw everyone else.
And sadly, the views of these idiots is what is promoted as "the mainstream view" by the BBC and every tax-payer funded body that leeches thousands out of my pocket every month.
As a smoker, the thing most likely to raise my blood pressure and cause a heart attack or stroke is Second Hand Smoke, not the myth, but the reality that the victimisation of a significant minority has been based on this wafer thin hypothesis.
I have to thank Chris Snowden's "Velvet Glove, Iron Fist" for causing me to think through what true epidemioligy is and what anti smoking epidemioligy is, (and I am not referring to the research linking lung cancer with active cigarette smoking).
@Magnetic refers to the Godber blueprint, set before the first study on SHS. This clearly indicates my point. Epidemioligy is research into an epidemic. In the case of SHS, epidemioligy has been research to create an epidemic, which it has not managed to do. The anti smoking fanatics have however, through an almighty confidence trick, managed it. One of the most common health warnings on tobacco products is, "Smoking will seriously damage your health, AND THE HEALTH OF OTHERS AROUND YOU".
In my sixty years, I have been bullied and patronised, I have been made to feel uncomfortable. If those in control of my life, (Parliament), had said, "Most of us do not smoke, neither do our constituents. We don't like it, it smells. We think you are stupid, second class. We know you pay us a lot of revenue, so we will not do the 'costing us money' thing. We know it doesn't harm us, but we hate it, it smells. So we are going to stop you doing it whenever and wherever we can. Tough. Live with it".
If they had said that, my reaction would have been, ok, I am being bullied and patronised, but at least they are being honest about their motives.
Apparently seven out of ten athletes at the Peking Olympic Games enjoyed a ciggie
they seem to have set a few records though !