Smoke, mirrors and dog-whistles

Now this (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/61583/smoking-ban-in-cars ) is one debate in the Wedding Cake madhouse I might actually follow next week.
It will be a litmus test, firstly of who in the House actually bothers to research health issues and secondly whether the Liberal Vannin project is finally dead in the water – or should at least have the decency to drop the world 'liberal' from their name.
If your only references to this smoking in cars issue are the BBC and some of what are laughingly described as 'serious' newspapers you won't have a clue. So try reading Chris Snowdon at http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/ and Dick Puddlecote at http://dickpuddlecote.blogspot.com/ to get the real back story.
Also, you need to know that when the BMA first peddled this atrocious bit of 'research' to the press and TV three years ago the BBC had to take down the original piece within hours and every newspaper which used it printed a retraction in the next issue. This was because the BMA spokesman 'forgot' to mention that the research was a computer model (not a physical experiment) based on a stationary vehicle with the engine and air conditioning off and all the windows closed. In other words, a hypothetical situation which was not physically possible in the real world.
Despite those numerous, often badly placed, retractions after the original story, the only 'results' from the 'experiment' that have since been quoted by the BMA , various state-funded 'public health' bodies and tub-thumping populist MPs are the sensational (and physically impossible) ones. While I am a lifelong non-smoker I think it important to point this out.
For one thing because the demonisation of any subculture without objective proof of harm or wrongdoing is simply not on.
For another because it is a worrying sign that a self-interested pressure group is persuading politicians to introduce measures which weaken the family and interfere with the ability of responsible parents to raise children in a decent, life-affirming way (not to mention giving police and other government agencies increasing power to barge into people's houses on the off-chance of catching them doing something that Stepford stiffs don't like).
A pressure group of Stepforders, by the way, which is often dishonest, increasingly even worse educated than their predecessors, but who gain jobs for life and fat final salary pensions when their complaints are taken at face value.
Having once briefly been at the same workplace as Zac Hall, back when he was earning money for flying lessons, I have serious doubts about him. He was a bit of an automaton even then, and nothing in his political 'career' has caused me to think he has loosened up since.
The tests will be (1) if Hall wants the statement in order to see fair, open and informed debate or if this is just another dog-whistle issue he thinks will get him elected again and (2) if his fellow MHKs (and especially Liberal Vannin) will cluck like headless chickens until the state grants itself yet more powers to kick in doors and pester grown adults doing things they have (unlike Manx politicians)made informed choices to do, responsibly and without bothering anyone else.
If the answers are 'No' and 'Yes' respectively then the only honourable thing for Liberal Vannin to do is disband or rename, and the only sensible thing the public can do is to happily and relentlessly disobey and mock such a cretinous piece of legislation until the police find something more useful to do.

Front line reporting from the War on Wowsers

The excellent Chris Snowdon has posted a 2012 review of neo-puritan nonsense over on his blog. It should be compulsory reading for any fool who believes that the governments of liberal democracies still regard the citizens who employ them as grown-ups.

As Chris concludes: “If there was ever any doubt that the campaign against smoking was a dress rehearsal for a wider crusade of puritanism and prohibition, those doubts were surely put to bed in 2012. The question for 2013 and, I fear, for many years to come, is how much more taxing, banning, lying and demonising will society permit before a line is drawn.”

Go to http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2012/12/good-riddance-to-2012.html and read it NOW, or you’ll go to bed without any treats.

Unholy Smoker

It probably says something about contemporary Britain that I had to find one of the wittiest defences of old school English ‘live and let live’ values I have read in a while in the Daily Mail, not the Guardian, and only after a tip-off from an American libertarian website.

On reflection, it may not be surprising that I cannot read it in the Guardian. As recently as 2010, they would still print Hockney’s comments on such topics. These days there is more chance of finding them in the Methodist Recorder than Britain’s greyest neo-puritan newspaper, which seems to have reduced itself to a mouthpiece for sundry anoraks, wet blankets, drabs and curtain twitchers – even if they do live in Hampstead.

David Hockney comments: “I am sick of the constant negativity in Britain, the utter meanness of spirit (possibly not good for the health) that seems to have taken over everywhere.”

Coming from Hockney, this is interesting, because way back in the days when Beatlemania first hit the US Hockney moved there to further his career. His reasoning (at least as outlined by the film-maker Derek Jarman) was that in Wilson’s Britain – on the surface modern and meritocratic, under it as hopelessly class, race, gender and otherwise prejudiced as in Empire days - there was no place for a working class queer artist with a thick Bradford accent. It wasn’t just the weather that was cold and miserable; it was the thick, talentless elite who ran the gaff, and the majority population who let them.

Having settled back in Britain (oddly enough because, as he says, even Manhattan is now as conformist as the American Midwest talented artists used to go to Greenwich Village to escape), his latest gripe is the escalation of UK health nazi madness and the new rulings that make it all but impossible for stores to admit that they have cigarettes for sale, or to tell potential customers what brands they have.

While I am not (and never have been) a smoker, the rapidly snowballing efforts by bansturbators to stop grown-ups taking basic decisions over their lives and health are important to monitor. As close observers are noting, any junk science scare story or tactic used by superannuated puritans to stop smoking today will be (and already is being) used to restrict or illegalise other grown-up pleasures under the thin excuse of ‘protecting’ public health.

The campaigns, the ethics, the methodology and the arguments are stupid, anti-democratic, and highly offensive. So, just as much as hedonists with a small ‘h’ need to speak out against religious fanatics who want us to all to be miserable and compliant, we also need to speak out against the quasi-religious, pseudo-scientific and cod-moralistic quacks running the New Church of the Empty Head. Vinegar-titted miserablists who would deprive us of any small pleasure still to be found in the 21^st century madhouse.

As Hockney says elsewhere in the piece (see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2129954/David-Hockneys-smoking-hot-memo-Andrew-Lansley-Keep-mean-dreary-views-life.html for more): “I say to the Health Secretary: we all die. It’s what you do in between birth and death that’s the concern of most people.”

He goes on to say: “I was told by an anti-smoking fanatic (and I know about them as my father was one, although my smoking elder brother has now lived longer than he did, as I will this year) that tobacco ‘killed’ one hundred million people in the 20th Century.

I pointed out one hundred million people were killed in the 20th Century for political reasons and their deaths were very unpleasant indeed. You cannot use a word such as ‘killed’ with smokers.”

Hockney complains: “The low-grade, low-intellect people now ruling us seem to have no vision at all.”

He concludes: “Mr Lansley, Mr Cameron, Mr Miliband, Mr Clegg: Keep out of my life. I don’t want your dreary view of life infecting me. It’s not good for my health, or others around me.”

Exactly the same story (be it on a smaller, duller parochial level) is unfolding on the Isle of Man. So, to those rumpled grey suits and minds that are the Manx versions of Cameron & Co, I would echo Hockney’s message.

Just look at yourselves in a mirror some time, you drab nonentities, then go away and die of the boredom you want to inflict on everyone else.

(hat tip to Lew Rockwell)