To think, "enough with the smoker-bashing"

[47to31in7days]

I opened up MN today to find a picture of an innocent little girl next to Cancer Research UK's spiel on plain packaging and child smoking. It says "Help us protect children from starting by supporting us..."

I am not and have never been a smoker, nor are most of the people close to me. The declining rates of smoking in the past few decades have certainly been good for individual and public health. So I'm not coming from the perspective of a disgruntled victim of the new persecution, or a Big Tobacco shill trying to contest whether it's that bad for you after all.

I signed up to the rival "Hands off our Packs" anti-plain packaging campaign when two people approache me in the street with their petition. I find the continuous anti-choice assaults on tobacco to be an injustice to the companies and people who choose to use it.

Nearly all the 11-15 year olds I knew who smoked when I was in that age group started by sneaking a cigarette or two off friends, their mum or someone else or by buying "loosies" which some inner city off licenses continue to sell to this day [though they have been banned for 20 years]. People only got near a pack when they'd moved from experimental to regular nicotine fixes. There was always a circle around the back of school where 4 or 5 of the older kids- probably 15, can't have been 16 as we had a different uniform for leavers' year in my school- pulled out cigs from packs that never got seen and distributed them to a whole posse of younger ones, who shared one between three or four of them. I was never tempted to join in and seeing a shiny gold pack- without gruesome warning pictures- was not going to make me.

They may well have figures suggesting that plain packaging will lower the number of smokers, which I am not questioning the validity of. It does not justify bringing in yet more legislative compulsion though. This government had said "no more nanny state." It promised to restore liberties. It attacked Labour's authoritarian record. The most insidious thing at all is that it is being pushed on a "safeguarding" platform. The signs outside primary school gates telling you to "protect" your children from secondhand smoke, the pack warnings using the same "protect" language and an image of smoke blowing toward a baby's face, it's all emotional blackmail against parents, especially offensive to those who are careful not to light up around their kids.

Child protection is too often used as a trump card to defeat principled objection to government policies that deny or circumscribe liberty of adults or youth. Besides which smokers have suffered enough already. Tax rises, publicans being ordered to stop them by central government, guilt trip tactics, advertising bans, now the display ban (after the legal challenge was tossed out)- I say LEAVE THOSE SMOKERS ALONE! AIBU to think the government and the medical establishment ought to back off quickly?

Getting upset at things which have nothing to do with misogyny is not conducive to the wellbeing of MANKIND

Plain packs all the way please, i can prtend i smoke BnH rather than Pall Mall for a change

Im 28, have smoked since i was 9, i quit 5 years ago when i found out i was pregnant with my first, stayed off them for the pregnancy, and the next one which followed almost immediatly. Started again last summer. Had to quit again for an unexpected pregnancy in novemeber, cant wait to have this little one so i can smoke again tbh. My choice, i know and accept the risks.

I fully support the smoking ban, not because i want to quit, i dont want to quit thanks, i enjoy it too much. I want to take my children out and about without being inflicted with harmful chemicals. And i quite like having somewhere to stand/sit and enjoy a ciggie without feeling guilty, or having to check with, or appologise to anyone for it.

Don't answer anything I said then. Just argue with something I respectfully asked you not to do. The generic 'he' is pointless and no longer correct grammatically. We are influenced by the language we use so why make it sexist? Who does it benefit?

As a smoker I used to hate all the attempts at getting me to quit by playing with my children's fears.
As a non smoker I can see that in the long run all the measures aimed at getting you to quit do cumulatively work.
It's very hypocritical though to make smokers feel like scum yet not make smoking illegal because of the extortionate duties.

olimpia - I wish it was.

*unless you're gay, black, poor, a child, a woman in need of reproductive healthcare...

What is this about?
To use the word "black" makes YOU a disgusting bigot, for accusing someone you don't know of RACISM when I am strongly anti-racist and have vehemently opposed the BNP along with all similar groups.*

Sorry...what? It's not OK to say someone is black? News to me, given my FIL is black and DH is mixed race and I'm generally guided by them on what they like to be described as....

It's really, really, really not racist or bigoted to describe someone as black. Just FYI.

Black is the correct word. What would you say 47?

No, that's not what I am saying and I think you know QUITE WELL what I am saying. That list of words had no place and "black" was worst because its implication is one of the most inflammatory and hurtful allegations in our society.

So no need for any FYI, YADNBU to use "black"... but YABU to use it in a list of adjectives to describe people that civil libertarians don't support, implying that I am one of them. I am saying you are being disgustingly bigoted by calumniating me with a 100% unsupported, false charge of racism Got that?

Oh and as far as language affecting the way we think and various social movements struggling to change it towards their perceptions of truth, I can understand your point. I am very down with Sapir-Whorf - which is why I refuse to use government approved definitions of my words outside of actually sitting in a courtroom for many things. I remember one thread on "it's not discrimination"... where people were quoting Acts (of Parliament and not of the Apostles) to suggest that banning someone from a job for being a redhead, eye colour, fat, shy, etc. is not discrimination because it is not a "protected class". This is not true outside an extremely narrow definition of the word, as any good dictionary would make clear; words used in laws are intended to be applied in that way when the legal system is in operation and a definition is needed from that standpoint. Here it's not discrimination qua crime, but rather a form of discrimination that remains legal in the UK. If all equality laws were abolished, that would LEGALIZE discrimination, not "end" it: the word would still apply to all the same cases of persons being judged unfairly based on whatever characteristic. I will not let Parliament or some judge tell me what words and expressions mean outside of that system- if you support the SWH then that is mind control and interferes with our right to freedom of conscience.

Yet combating true misogyny as in gendered slurs and ways of talking of women that objectify them is the proper goal of a feminist movement for linguistic reform. My choice to use the universal he is because I think it is the most elegant solution and the most correct according to grammar rules that many people still apply- I have checked this out. The alternatives are unsatisfactory on those grounds. Nothing at all to do with sexism, this is the sort of thing that makes women say "I'mNAFB..." so others will know they are not going to come out with such comments.