Yes there are, but you have yet to find them. You continue to want to define Liberty "according to Illbay." There is give and take in the debate, yet you only want to take.
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Posted on 07/17/2002 10:47:58 AM PDT by SheLion
GREEN BAY, Wis., July 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Green Bay Packer Ahman Green's participation in a Wisconsin ad campaign designed to raise awareness about the dangers of secondhand smoke was unveiled today. Green will be part of a series of television and radio advertisements that launched early-June and are being broadcast throughout Wisconsin. The new ads use personal stories told by Wisconsin residents who have suffered the effects of secondhand smoke.
Green is not a smoker himself, but he grew up in a household with a smoker and was diagnosed with asthma at age 14. The 25-year-old running back has to pay special attention to avoid smoke-filled environments in order to perform at his best. His personal experience and concerns for his own health and that of others has inspired him to share his story in hopes that it will lead to a smoke-free Wisconsin.
"Because my asthma is aggravated by secondhand smoke, I have to be very careful where I go. My options of which restaurants to eat at or what places I can go to often depend on whether there will be cigarette smoke in the air," says Green. "This can be frustrating and limiting, but staying healthy is important to me and vital to my career."
Green is featured in a television ad that takes place in a cafe. As he enters the smoke-filled cafe, he slips an oxygen mask over his face. The ad conveys the message that secondhand smoke can have serious effects on a nonsmoker. One of the most obvious places where cigarette smoke lingers is in bars and restaurants. Kathie Bundy, pub owner and performer from Manitowoc, WI is featured, along with Ahman Green, in the campaign ads. Bundy opened Stage Door Saloon, one of just a few nonsmoking pubs in Wisconsin. She is featured in a television ad that takes place in a smoke-filled restaurant. Bundy's story is meant to encourage other restaurants and bars to go smoke- free.
"Between concerns about my own health and complaints from nonsmoking customers, I decided that it was the right decision to go smoke-free," Bundy says. "Of course I had concerns about the repercussions this decision would have on my business, but the pub is as busy as ever and customers are happy they have a place to go that isn't filled with smoke."
Restaurant owners who are currently smoke-free or those owners who are considering making their restaurant smoke-free, can advertise their restaurant free of charge on the new Wisconsin Smoke-free Online Dining Guide. Owners simply log onto WWW.HADENOUGHWISCONSIN.COM , enter the Smoke-free Dining Guide section and submit requested information. All restaurant details will be verified and then posted. The new site feature was designed to encourage restaurants to go smoke-free and to support restaurant owners and customers that prefer a smoke-free environment.
The secondhand smoke media campaign is a component of the WTCB's statewide initiative for smoke-free restaurants, work sites, municipal buildings and homes. Each ad contains a tag line that directs viewers to the hadenoughwisconsin.com web site where visitors can share their own stories or seek help in quitting smoking.
The Wisconsin Tobacco Control Board is a Governor-appointed Board charged with developing a strategic plan, allocating funds and evaluating the effectiveness of Wisconsin's tobacco prevention and control efforts. The Board is comprised of state and local leaders representing businesses, education, health care, public health and political leaders from across the state.
So there's some reasonable limits that most can agree ought to be in place for individual liberties.
"Drinking responsibly" is a Libertine codeword for "Jush because that guy can' hold 'is likker don't mean I can'" as he stumbles out the door and slides behind the wheel of his SUV, a threat and a menace to anyone in whose proximity he will be during his drive home--assuming he can remember where that is.
Or like being addicted to an obsession, like telling people that one puff of a cigarette will kill them.
Those on this board who are grounded in logic and reality know that obsessions are the real killers.
Tobacco is merely a plant - obsession is the work of the devil.
Every move they make should be countered.
Who's stopping you?
Congratulations! You have stated that you are in support of a statist, nanny government that will take away not only smokers rights but your own rights as well. A government that regulates every aspect of your life. Things that have nothing whatsoever to do with smoking.
Of course then, illbay and rba will be whining terribly (even more that they are now) about the freedoms they have lost. But it will be too late then. The precedents will have been established for the state to own and control anything they want, including YOUR private property and YOUR children - and you two should know you have helped it to happen.
In their campaign against tobacco, statists have directed their efforts ostensibly only at smokers but in fact their activities are aimed at the rights of every individual in this country. You cannot destroy the rights of the few without destroying the rights of all. [If attitudes like yours continue ,] we will see vast restrictions on freedom of speech and individual property rights further diminished.
The premise of the smoking prohibitionists is: the state has the right to forbid an individual to take any action which is deemed harmful to him by statists, not just smoking, but anything which might be harmful to you—in other words, you do not have the right to follow your own judgment, to decide what is best for you, to decide what may be beneficial or harmful to you. Indeed, statists are now openly declaring this.
Statists are declaring you, the individual, as if you were some child, do not have the right to freedom in such matters. That being the premise, is there any aspect of your life that might not be subject to regulation? Not really. If one follows the prohibitionist premise to its logical conclusion, as statists always do, the state will begin moving to control and/or prohibit any product or activity that is proclaimed by the state to be harmful to your health. Indeed, the state has already made major steps in this direction and will continue to do so because that is the logic of the underlying premise accepted by those who support the prohibition of smoking.
Are you overweight? Do you drink alcohol? Do you eat fatty foods? If so, you must be controlled. What if the state decides beef is detrimental to you? Is beef to be banned from the market? Is it to become the next illegal substance? Yes, if the state decides it is injurious to you. Yes, if you accept the basic premise of the prohibitionists. If these statists succeed in the prohibition of smoking for the reason it is harmful, the statists will have all the precedent they need to "protect" you from other allegedly harmful substance.
If statists succeed in gaining acceptance of the notion that secondhand smoke is forced upon a child, then all is likely lost for freedom in America. The floodgates of statism will be wide open, bringing wave after wave of new regulations and laws regarding the rearing of your child in your home. There will be nothing to stop them. They will then be able to grab your children for any alleged harm that you might be bringing to your child, whether it is the food the child eats or the ideas you, as a parent, teach your child. Parents will be subject to having their children taken away from them by the state for all sorts of reasons, not just for smoking around their children.
If statists win this battle to "protect" children against secondhand smoke, it will happen just as surely as it happened in every country that has fallen to totalitarianism. Indeed, statists have already taken their first, successful steps to ban certain ideas, to make it criminal to express certain ideas—and you should know by now that those first steps are always followed by more steps, steps whose sound will resonate with the click of jack boots as they approach your front door.
Just as most parents have lost control over their child’s education, now parents are in danger of losing control of their children altogether. We are at a critical crossroads in this country: who has the right to decide how a child is going to be raised, the parent or the state? By right, it must be the parent. A parent’s right to life and liberty includes the right to raise their child as they see fit, without the forcible interference of others.
Now consider the alarming extent to which property rights have been trampled upon by laws banning smoking in so-called "public" places. Statists have pulled off this coup with virtually no opposition and hardly any public outcry.
When it comes to property, either you own it or you don’t—there is nothing in between. If you own the property, such as a home or a building, then you, the owner, have the right to set the terms of its use—this right is essential to the concept of ownership. Without this right, the concept of ownership is meaningless. If you are stripped of the right to dispose of or use your property as you see fit, you have effectively lost ownership of the property even though your name still remains on the title to the property. This was the status of "private property" in Nazi Germany. Bans on smoking in "public" buildings have resulted, in effect, in the state nationalizing all such property, effectively making it the property of the state since the state now sets the terms of the use of the property, not the rightful property owners. What was formerly private property has now been converted into "public" property.
The so-called tobacco "settlement" has established a horrific precedent that will soon be used against other companies and industries that have nothing to do with tobacco. Statists have now perfected a weapon, a technique, which will be a major instrument of war in their campaign to destroy freedom and the pattern of this technique is the following: file massive lawsuits for damages allegedly caused by some company’s product, damages which will bankrupt the company if they are awarded, and combine this with threats of massive regulations by the state—with the combination of these two threats bringing the company to its knees, getting it to agree to a "settlement" which effectively nationalizes the company, bringing its activities under the control of the state. In the process, statists extort billions of dollars from the victimized company, but to ensure they collect the loot they must permit the company to be successful enough—at least, for a while—to pay off the extorted sum.
In the case of tobacco, this means that tobacco companies are going to have to sell an awful lot of cigarettes to pay off the billions they are going to have to pay and they will do this with the complicity of their new "partners"—statists—who have been so loudly protesting the dangers of smoking. There are those who would accuse statists of being hypocrites in participating in this "partnership," but those who do so misunderstand statists. They could be accused of being hypocrites if they were truly concerned about the alleged health dangers of smoking, but they are not concerned about these alleged dangers. This tobacco "settlement" proves this fact: if they were so concerned about the alleged health dangers of smoking, they would not become a "stockholder," in effect, of these tobacco companies, "stockholders" who will financially benefit from the future sale of cigarettes, bringing them the billions of dollars in extorted booty, billions which will come at the price of the health and well-being of millions who statists claim are being damaged by smoking.
There are those who advise us to follow the money trail to explain the motives of statists in their attacks against tobacco, but money isn’t what they are after either. Ultimately and fundamentally, they are only interested in power, power over you. Money looted from the treasuries of such companies as tobacco manufacturers has only one interest to statists: it helps fund their efforts to gain more power. They will eventually arrive at some point in the future where they will have the political support, if our current trend continues, to shut these tobacco companies down, long before they collect all of the billions coming to them, and they will do so with great glee, cheerfully surrendering the billions, because it will mean they will have finally arrived at the point where their supremacy and power will be virtually unchallenged and unstoppable.
FATAL BLINDNESS #7
And I'm sure the statists appreciate your support. I don't.
Yes there are, but you have yet to find them. You continue to want to define Liberty "according to Illbay." There is give and take in the debate, yet you only want to take.
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How would Green impoverish bar and restaurant owners?...Would he prevent paying customers from entering businesses?....
Or would it be the hypocritical smokers who falsely claim to be for the business owners that would "impoverish bar and restaurant owners" by sitting at home in fear of not being able to go without a cigarette long enough to have dinner or a cocktail?
Well I'm sure the supporters of anti smoking legislation might like to try to - but at the moment, they are unable to do so. However they have their eyes on more control in the future, which I am vehemently opposed to. (See post 145)
I hereby volunteer to be webmaster of any PRO-SMOKING website, should there be someone out there who needs me.
Lewislynn, if you want to chip in a few bucks for domain registration and hosting, let me know.
In fact, there's evidence that they're coming after our cheeseburgers next.
You are 100% correct - it's not about health, it's about power over Joe Lunchbox.
Is this one of your facts? This is BS. This is propaganda you have accepted from the anti smoking nazi's. No more reliable than information from PETA.
Even if first hand smoke causes lung cancer, it takes decades to do so. To become ill with lung cancer due to second hand smoke, if that is even possible, would take a lifetime of constant heavy exposure - something that hardly ever occurs in reality.
If one were to eat a meal at McD's every day for 50 years the health risks would probably be equal. Of course, the statists are looking into that, and will attempt to limit or ban cheeseburger intake also...
And you really beleive yourself to be a conservative?
I truly get the feeling that you would LOVE to have the power to enforce your demands/wants/whims on everyone and everything around you within the limits of your sight/hearing/thought.
Drinking responsibly means that you have a designated driver.
What facts have you stated other than the one that we will take at face value about your immediate family?
Who passed prohibition?
Who repealed it?
'Nuff said.
Therefore, any of their spew concerning "responsible drinking" is just bullsh*t.
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