Dinsdale wrote:
Great article. I'd recommend that the anti-smoking nazis not read it, though...it might bring their reason for being crashing down around them.
Hadn't read that before, although I've seen many of those statistics before.
And yes, smokers have less than a 1% chance of dying from lung cancer. Matter of fact, my best friend's dad was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer this week...a nonsmoker. My uncle is dying of lung cancer...a non-smoker.
Terry in Crapchester wrote:For the most part, if you start smoking, one of two things eventually will happen to you -- you will either quit smoking, or the effects of smoking will kill you.
You DEFINITELY shouldn't read that article. You'd feel quite foolish.
I'm not advocating smoking, nor am I suggesting it's in any way good for you. I'm just opposed to bald-faced fucking lies -- which is the smoking-nazi's MO.
Joe Jackson wrote:a majority of us will live into our 70s and die of either some sort of cancer, some sort of heart trouble, or some other ‘smoking-related' disease whether we smoke or not.
D'OH!!!!
Yup, that's right -- the
majority of non-smokers will die of a "smoking related" cause. Stats suck when they don't support your cause, eh?
What's this, Dins, really? Anecdotal evidence? Cherry-picking statements from an essay to support your case? If you want to go that route, here's one from the very essay you cited:
Joe Jackson wrote: Antismokers aren't lying when they tell you that smokers are, statistically, more likely to die of lung cancer.
And here's another . . .
Joe Jackson wrote:I'm quite sure that heavy long-term smoking has an adverse effect on the health of quite a few people, sometimes to the point of being a, or even the, decisive factor in their deaths.
In any event, I'm not sure that either of us should defer to Joe Jackson, best known for a few minor lightweight pop hits 25-30 years ago, as the definitive expert on smoking.
Dinsdale wrote:Terry in Crapchester wrote:Bottom line is that Big Tobacco execs are among the most vile, reprehensible people on the face of the planet.
They pale in comparison to the anti-smokers.
How, exactly? Are anti-smokers pushing an addictive, dangerous product on the American public? Encouraging adolescents to break the law?
To paraphrase Joe Jackson -- would you care to name one person, bar worker, spouse, whoever...who has died from secondhand smoke(I knew the answer to this one before I read that article).
Go ahead, name one. Just one.
You've moved the goalposts here. What you're paraphrasing is Joe Jackson's request to name more than one person you know who died from smoking.
I can name one of them: one of my wife's friends. Was her death premature? Maybe that's a debatable point. She was considerably older than my wife, but her age at death (66) was probably about 10 years less than the average life expectancy of a woman in the U.S. She was a heavy smoker, and she died of lung cancer, which wasn't diagnosed until about 4 months before her death. She had felt not well for some time, but kept putting off going to the doctor -- I think she knew the doctor would tell her to quit smoking. By the time she was diagnosed, the cancer was in such an advanced stage that they couldn't do anything for her except make it as painless as possible. Now, you'll undoubtedly argue that there were other factors in play, and perhaps there were, but it would be nearly impossible to argue that smoking was not a factor.
As for secondhand smoke, more than anything else, for me it's a quality of life factor. I like to take the family out to dinner every once in awhile. As I said, when I was a kid both my parents were heavy smokers when I was a kid. To this day I can still remember sitting at the dinner table and actually feeling nauseated from all of the secondhand smoke, even to the point, on occasion, of asking to be excused without eating. I also was exposed to a significant amount of second-hand smoke while I was in the Navy. I can't stand the smell of cigarette smoke. Also, both my wife and my son have pretty severe asthma, and second-hand smoke can trigger an asthma attack in either of them. I prefer not to be around cigarette smoke. I don't look down my nose at smokers, or think I'm better than they are, I just don't want to be around it. Nothing wrong with that.
Yes, I know that before the smoking ban in restaurants, there were smoking/non-smoking sections. Problem was, if you weren't a decent distance into the non-smoking section, you might as well be in the smoking section.
