Is this your DADDY????
They'll have to say in their homes with the doors and windows locked.
And good riddance.
Is this your DADDY????
I won't care how UNCOOL it is to light my smoke in public. As long as it's not against the law, and sometimes maybe when it is, I will continue to smoke in public.
If for no other reason just to tick off people like you.
I'm not sure whether you actually agree with the current reasoning banning smokers from public places or taxing tobacco so outrageously or whether you just don't really understand that it could be YOU next.
In any case, smarten up before you're put into the reeducation camp for something.
Only an easily swayed weakling would be intimidated by the "uncoolness" factor.
That would probably be an important consideration for you, though.
The more smoking is demonized, the more "cool" it becomes to teenagers.
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Good riddance to freedom too, huh? And I have never smoked a single solitary cigarette in my entire life, but I believe in freedom to smoke in one's own home.
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.