I saw on the TV that in New Zealand they are going to stop selling cigarettes to 14 year old kids then each year they will increase the age by one year until nobody is allowed to buy cigarettes.
Is this a good thing or are all the kids going to do vaping and stink the place out with all that cinnamon and herbs>
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Taking away a person's freedom is never a good thing.
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Lack of food kills 9 million annually, so maybe you should focus more effort on feeding people and less on taking away their only pleasure in life.
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It is unfortunate that in the modern world the government is largely seen as a vessel through which the collective imposes its general values onto the individual, rather than the protector of individual rights. Every proposed law is analyzed based on how it will "benefit the society" (whatever in the world it means) and not based on how well it aligns with the spirit of the Constitution. If a law reduces the number of cigarettes the average New-Zealander smokes per day, then that is a good law, and all the unintended consequences of said law are to be dismissed as irrelevant.
I am not interested in living in a smoke-free society. I am interested in living in a free society and enjoying the diversity of lifestyles people around me choose. The sterile society all these social engineers dream of to me is a horrible dystopia. Singapore on steroids. Enjoy living for 100 years and having no worries in life, as long as you obey by 36642578 crazy laws - and if you violate one of them, then be eaten alive by the morality police.
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It is however a good thing if that particular freedom of that person infringes upon the freedoms of most other persons such as inflicting passive smoking on others, making sickening ash tray smells, littering the streets with butts, overloading the health system and costing industry through absenteeism, under-performing and cigarette breaks.
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Have you ever thought of doing both as a trade-off? If you focus more on both feeding them and depriving them of ciggies then surely you are replacing a bad pleasure with a good pleasure. Sounds reasonable to me.
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What a person does to themselves and what health repercussions they have to deal with as a consequence is no one else's business. "Public assistance" is a problem in itself and needs to be abolished: let people make their own choices and deal with the consequences of them.
Instead, you folks advocate for all kinds of social welfare programs, and then want to restrict people's rights in order to make those programs sustainable. It is like buying a gun, shooting oneself in the foot and then suing the gun seller for damages. You chose to design the rules of the game this way - now enjoy what you have created and do not complain when others find a way to exploit the rules for their own gain. Do not like it - come up with better rules, do not blame the players who play by the rules of your own creation.
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Are you going to make cookies and chocolate illegal? Because I see fat people as being a burden on the healthcare system. I know a lot of old smokers...but I don't know any old fat people. Maybe fat people are the greater burden here. You want to tell us what we are allowed to eat?
Fat people under-perform in many industries. Just walking from one spot to another takes them twice as long as a fit and healthy person. It goes without saying, fat is never fit.
And no employer is obliged to give a smoker extra breaks to smoke their cigarettes.
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Well you might want to do what you want but when people say that sort of baloney there just trying to be tough and show off to other people. It rings alarms to me because when I hear that that tells me your going to do what you want to do at the exspents of other people like breathing your smoke at other people and throwing your buts every where and then your coghing up your snot all the time and spreading diseases like covid and then your in and out of hospitals and taking days off work and all that costs every body else and your work buddies have to work harder when your away sick and every time you have a smoke break. So when you analize it in the end you cant do what you like unless you go live in a cave.
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Just because you smoke and don’t take days off work does that meen that every one who smoke s doesn’t take days off work and I read the statistics of people who take days off work because of smoke related illnesses and there are more people in the world than you and your wife when I last checked so your assessment of 2 people being all of the world is clearly false and totally dum
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There are also people who take days off work so they can have more passionate sex with their lovers. Perhaps it is time to stop having sex? To outlaw it? Let us enact the same plan as the government of New Zealand allegedly is planning to and raise age of consent each year, say, by 6 months. How does that sound?
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No it isn't. For many people it's the literal truth. If it were a lie you wouldn't be having to discuss banning tobacco in order to prevent people smoking it. They'd simply choose another pleasure.
A survey of over 600 smokers by the Centre for Substance Use Research in Glasgow found that nearly all respondents (95%) gave pleasure as their primary reason for smoking.
https://www.forestonline.org/news-comment/headlines/pleasure-smoking-views-confirmed-smokers/
Smoking helps many people -- especially the impoverished -- cope with the stresses of an uncaring world which doesn't care if they live or die.
Simply put, you have absolutely no right to decide for others what they do to their own bodies. You aren't God, so stop pretending to be.
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Is the government going to tell me how many Twinkies I'm allowed to eat?
Is the government going to limit the numbers of coffees I have in a day?
I think at this point, I'd be happy if everyone that thinks such restrictions on an individual's freedom is a good idea, were to simply shut-up and die.
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But your pretending to be God though. And as usual you are so extreme that you quote an extreme tlink and say the dimmest estreme things that even a 3 year old would laugh at. What people put in there bodies has nothing to do with pork. Were talking about smoking and diverting to some dum generic argument and trying to think other people dont notice is just total controlling baloney.
We have every right to tell others to stop smoking in our faces and the faces of there kids because thats the law and weather you like it or not just because your so extreme and anti government thats just to tough so you can stuff that in your pipe and smoke it so long as its somewhere in private and you dont cough up your snot every minute all over the place and then go begging because you got lung cancer.
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And the "slippery slope fallacy" is actually not a fallacy at all, but a valid type of argument. When someone says that X has the property Y because it has the property Z, without specifying to what exact extent the property Z is expressed, then their argument must apply to the case of any possible extent.
It is only a fallacy when it extrapolates effects to where they are not extrapolatable. Saying that one cup of whiskey in a single day will kill you because one gallon of whiskey in a single day will kill you is fallacious.
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Furthermore, being fat is associated with disability.
No it's not it's associated with being a greedy piglet and a glutton (mostly)
When a person fat shames they are often being ableist.
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Likewise, if a person doesn't mind the consequences of smoking, it's no one's business what they smoke.
If a person wants to free-climb Mount Everest, no one should stand in his or her way.
Let's just allow people to enjoy freedom, and do your best to mind your own business.
If you want to say that smokers don't deserve to be covered under medical insurance policies, then rock climbers don't deserve to be covered for injuries they might incur while climbing, and fat people don't deserve medical coverage either. Let them pay for their insulin out of pocket, when they get diabetes.
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Next, what is "being ableist"? Is it when someone says that someone else is unable to do something? If so, then how is it a bad thing? I cannot run a sub-2 hour marathon no matter how hard I train - should I feel offended and shamed when someone says it to me? Perhaps, I should demand that, next time I run a 4 hour marathon, the listing on the scoreboard states that I have run a 1:50 marathon?
The connection between lifestyle choices and obesity is obvious to anyone who has ever been outside their shelter. Do you see thin sporty guys munching on the fries and cheeseburgers in McDonalds, and obese guys running on race tracks and drinking vegetable smoothies - or do you see the opposite? What utility does ignoring this connection have?
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As far as I know, not a single death has ever been causally connected directly to second-hand smoke. Second-hand smoke is untraceable in human body unless the exposure occurred very recently, and all the research on it is based on self-reporting of the like of, "My father was a smoker and I hang out with him a lot, and now I have lung cancer".
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Which brings us back to my point which you still have not addressed: that the threshold beyond which something can be considered "really bad" (and warranting legal restrictions on it) has not been established. Which threshold are you using and why? And are you using it consistently, or are you just nitpicking particular datapoints and ignoring the others, as long as it suits your political platform?
The fact that this statistic is dubious at best is yet another (major) factor at play. The governmental website references another governmental agency: in scientific literature it is called "self-citation" and strongly frowned upon when used for any purpose other than to extend on the prior work. Someone using themselves as a source for factual claims is not a legitimate way to do science. I cannot find a similar claim anywhere in the actual scientific literature, and for a good reason: in science effects are always separated from the background noise, and that is not something these governmental agencies do when making their claims.
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In another thread you claimed that you knew a lot about climate science, and then listed a few sources that had nothing to do with science. I do not think that you even know what science is: there is no such thing in science as "doubting too much", and you are not supposed to accept anything that is not supported by a sound argument. Which none of your claims in either thread have been so far. You just listen to whoever you arbitrarily selected as the authority and swallow their claims, even if it takes just a few seconds to click on a couple of links and see that the claims are false.
There is no such thing as being too demanding of logical rigor, but there is absolutely such a thing as being a carpet politicians wipe their boots off.
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I will repeat my quote which you apparently misread:
See the word "science" here? I am not talking about your average Joe thinking that the Earth is flat. I am talking about science as a methodology to establishing facts of the world. In science, either you make a logically valid argument, or you do not. Nor is there such a thing as "taking skepticism too far" in science: the more skeptical you are of unfounded claims, the more of a scientist you are. A "perfect scientist" is someone who does not accept anything that is not supported by perfectly sound logic, and even if the conclusion of an argument in itself is correct, if the reasoning is wrong, then the argument is illogical.
You have partaken in a lot of science denial around here, making claims contradicting scientific literature, and attributing findings to studies that do not have them. Are you a pseudoskeptic? Or does the term "pseudoskepticism" apply only to those whose misrepresentation of the content of scientific papers does not align with your political platform?
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Do you? You apologize, indeed, and update particular tiny pieces of information - but the conclusions which those tiny pieces should lead to stay the same. I can point out that every single claim you make about climate change or tobacco is wrong, and still you will believe in the conclusions that you believe in currently.
And even if you indeed patched up your conclusions as needed, you have certain ideas that are incompatible with consistent logical inquiry. The idea that being "too skeptical" is a bad thing naturally closes your mind to certain lines of questioning, which is incompatible with the basic requirements of science.
It is fine to operate like you are describing when you are talking about politics at a Thanksgiving dinner. Not when you are proposing policies that would affect lives of millions of people and make amazing scientific claims. When it comes to logic and science, there is no such thing as "ideology": either you do ideology, or you do science - you cannot do both. In science, you ask a research question and look for an answer; you do not make up an answer and then look at the data confirming it, dismissing the data contradicting it.
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That is what science is: it offers a methodology which, when rigorously followed, removes these biases from the equation. That methodology does not involve reading newspapers you trust and accepting their claims at their face. Science features infinite skepticism, in that if a claim has not been logically justified, then it is rejected regardless of how much you want/believe it to be true. And "too much skepticism" equating "pseudo-skepticism" does not even make sense linguistically, for "pseudo" means "masquerading as while not being", hence "pseudo-skepticism" would have to be something that is not skepticism. Once again, you "read somewhere" about this, but did not stop to think whether what you read dounded plausible and was justified. Are you noticing a pattern here?
"Flat-earthers" make a positive claim about the shape of the Earth with no evidence to back it up and sloppy arguments, which is the opposite of skepticism. But for that matter I highly doubt that you can justify the claim that the Earth is not flat, based on our conversations so far. The justification is not trivial and requires some knowledge and the ability to propose an experiment that would settle the matter, and do you think that you will find these in the Guardian and the other sources you use to acquire knowledge?
A proper epistemology does not close off any lines of questioning: you should always be on the lookout for new information, ready to patch up your beliefs as needed. If you adopt this mentality and embrace it, you will soon be shocked just by how many pieces of conventional wisdom turn out to be unfounded or just plain false. Have you heard that consumption of alcohol causes heart disease? It might surprise you to learn that not only is this causal connection not established, but the correlation is not even there: the graph of the heart disease rate versus alcohol consumption is U-shaped, with the minimum laying beyond the FDA recommendation for the "moderate consumption". But you would never know it if you only relied on the authors from your echochamber parroting each other's unfounded claims.
Natural sciences are extremely hard, and establishing any causal connections requires an immense amount of effort. It is okay to not want to go down this rabbit hole, but if you choose not to, then you should also adopt a degree of humility and admit that you are not qualified to make any policy prescriptions based on the knowledge which you do not possess. I do not know much about dentistry: do you think I have a habit of talking about how dentistries should be required to operate? I do not, trust me.
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A proper epistemology does not close off any lines of questioning: you should always be on the lookout for new information, ready to patch up your beliefs as needed. If you adopt this mentality and embrace it, you will soon be shocked just by how many pieces of conventional wisdom turn out to be unfounded or just plain false."
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