391–400 of 430 posts
This is a good thing. Maybe I could sit here and debate the pros and cons, supposed crap about my liberties, is the age bracket the right way to go about it. But this is a good thing, there is nothing good about cigarettes no matter which way you argue it, or compare it to anything else.
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Weed and tobacco are also very easy to make. They literally grow on trees[1]. [1] Technically, herbaceous plants.
Really in the case of tobacco, (almost) no one is going to grow it. It's a massive pain in the ass when most people are addicted to the nicotine. Synthetic nicotine in vapes are what would be black marketed these days.
So I would ban the manufacture and sale of tobacco, but make it perfectly legal to grow your own. Smoke as much as you want. Just don't harm others.
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Buckle up for more legally enforceable parental guidance for how you should live your life to serve the state
Should we completely stop smoking? Yes. There is absolutely nothing about it that is good for us or anyone near those smoking. Its not just how you life your life to the state, its for your own health and those around you. Your life will be marginally better without cigarettes.
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> wtf. This is a clear restriction on liberty The title is hyperbolic. It isn't a ban on smoking. It's a "ban on buying cigarettes." Commerce is being restricted, not consumption. If, presumably, you bring your own in from France, or someone bums one to you, it would appear you're free to smoke it. That broadly seems to strike a fair balance. Banning purchases and sales, not possession or consumption.
A lifetime ban on purchase is a ban. Don't be ridiculous.
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It’s the perfect way to phase it in. In ~80 years nobody will be able to smoke, but you never took the right away from someone that already had it. A huge win for society
That doesn't sound like a win to me, it sounds ultra authoritarian and restrictive. Prohibition has never cured us of a drug problem and tobacco is no different. You think jailing someone for decades for selling tobacco should be a thing? Because that is what such a policy will do.
You already can’t legally do a lot of things that appear to only be about yourself because society as a whole said it’s not good for everyone. You can’t buy cocaine. You can’t commit suicide (it’s illegal almost everywhere) . You can’t ride a motorbike without a helmet, or drive a car without a seatbelt. You can’t even build a house without a smoke detector or remove the airbags from your own car.
To some degree, if you want to, go buy 100 acres in the middle of nowhere and go nuts. Or move to a country that doesn’t care about all those things.
If you want to be part of a modern clan, it’s not helpful to do things that indirectly hurts everyone, even if on the surface it only impacts you and your body.
If you want all the benefits of a modern society, it asks you to not be a net negative. This is 10x important in countries with universal healthcare, ie all but one.
It's sad that the UK, which invented liberal philosophy, is increasingly accepting of paternalism. It's important that people have an inviolable personal sphere inside which they can live their lives as they see fit. That includes making decisions of which society disaproves. Moreover, essentially all behavior plausibly has "diffuse negative externalities". We should be very careful about adopting that ("harms others…
we now have empirical evidence of where liberalism leads us: to an amoral, predatory marketplace. which profits from exploiting people who are helplessly addicted to poisons like nicotine, processed foods and alcohol. how much worse does it need to get before we go back to the drawing board?
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Would a calorie cap be reasonable?
> Would a calorie cap be reasonable? A legislation that isn't possible to enforce is not reasonable, no. Banning cigarettes = easy to enforce. Banning sugar in soft drinks = easy to enforce. Limiting how many calories you can consume = how do you propose we do that? Do we even have the technology to track what someone eats? And do we carve out exceptions for athletes? If there was a way to cap calories without surgic…
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Oh, the hysteria people get over smelling a whiff of secondhand smoke. While you walk down a street full of diesel trucks, inhaling microplastics, microwaving your food in plastic, drinking water from plastic bottles, eating processed foods with nitrates, corn sugar soaked in round-up, standing out in the sun, getting body scans and dental X-rays. You know the only people who got lung cancer from secondhand smoke wer…
> purely a product of decades of expensively paid-for indoctrination No, it's because being around a smoker is deeply unpleasant. I'm old enough to remember going out before the indoor smoking ban took effect. The next morning I'd step into the shower and the smell of smoke would fill the bathroom as I washed it out of my hair. I would have a sore throat. It was all absolutely disgusting and we're so much better off…
This is the kind of action that really requires a referendum.
I completely disagree. Obviously people individually want to smoke - nicotine makes them feel good! - and there's a good chance they would vote to preserve that "right," but smoking is bad for society and we would unambiguously be better off if it didn't exist. One of the principal jobs of government is to stand for the good of the collective against individual selfishness.