🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4ikbhj$ofi@sanews1.morgan.com>,
Kenneth Wolman <kwolman@is.morgan.com> wrote:

[...]

>I am old enough to remember the not-so-slow transition of smoking from an
>acceptable practice to one which makes the smoker a pariah.  I find it curious,
>let's say, that sometime in the Seventies, all of a sudden all these people
>suddenly appeared with a host of respiratory ailments that they never seemed to
>have before.  Were these emboldened asthmatics who now had social morality on
>their side?  How DID these people survive before, when smoking was permitted in
>interior public places?

I think it far more likely that, given the belligerency shown by
smokers and their defenders, and here displayed by you, asthmatics and
such meekly accepted their place on the sidelines of society. But then,
in the 1970s at a time when "empowerment" was a buzz word and the ill
effects of smoke were becoming publicized (having already been
well-known and suppressed by the tobacco companies) they realized that
they were being denied their rights to be in assorted public and
quasi-public places, and demanded their rights.

[...]

>No, ma'am, I will not smoke around YOUR children.  It is your right to insist on
>that.  If you or one of your little Republic of Virtue friends tries to stop ME
>from smoking around MY children, you will have more than asthma to worry about.

It never ceases to amaze me how perfectly rational people, who wouldn't
dream of subjecting their children to the risks of the emissions from
some oil refinery, or steel mill in the same concentrations, will
insist on their right to foul up the air *inside* their homes with
similar emissions on the grounds that its *their* children and *their*
home and they'll damn well do as they please, rather as if the home and
the children had equal standing as forms of property.

And I do plead guilty to having made the same sort of rationalizations,
which in restrospect I can only ascribe to an addict's irrational
defense of his right to another hit.

I am removing sci.energy from the followups as this seems to have
little to do with the subject.
-- 


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