HIDING FROM PUBLIC SCRUTINY

Image from HERE

It looks like the Aussie Tobacco Control's Globalink is losing some funding and has to stand to stand on it's own two networking feet, according to its Spiritual leaders head people in a memo to the faithful.

It says : "Over the past months we have all been alerted to the fact that Globalink will require new funding and administration in order to continue in 2012.

The dinosaur Puritans at Tobacco Control have realised that Facebook is a great, cheap, 21st Century tool for reaching mass audiences. However, it's open public nature is alien to the culture of secrecy employed by those at TC and its front groups like Globalink. They created a closed group to anyone but bigots and the intolerant.

They say : "Unlike Globalink, this group has no funding, no management committee, no constitution, no appeals mechanism for those we don’t allow to join and those we may have to exclude."

By "exclude", I assume they mean smokers but they don't mention us by name because they refuse to believe that we are a public grass roots, disorganised group and not paid, organised "moles" of Big Tobacco.

We welcome anyone working toward tobacco control goals. We don’t welcome anyone with tobacco industry ties and those who are regularly offensive

By "offensive" I assume they mean the angry consumers of a legal product who question their very questionable propaganda. Only by debate can we find out how such sanctimonious conclusions are reached and used as ammunition to impose further restrictions in society and divisions in our families and communities.

On the positive side, I guess they won't be spending much time in debate because of the hours they must have to waste in checking and re-checking applicants to their select Facebook club.

"We will do all we can to ensure only those with known track records or employment in tobacco control are admitted to the site. But we know from tobacco industry documents that Globalink has long been infiltrated and that people forward Globalink content to non‐members."

Excellent. At least the tobacco companies are doing something for their consumers when Tobacco Control's Globalink aims to plan further stigmatisation and denormalisation programmes for law abiding people whose only crime is that they won't do as Tobacco Control dictates.

The leaked memo ** shows ultimate hypocrisy within TC too. They slander smokers as people who are continually off ill, as people skiving for fag breaks, and yet they pour scorn on employers who don't let their tobacco control smokerphobic employees skive on FB.

Q "My employer won’t let me look at Facebook at work, so this group is a really terrible idea.

A Ok, we understand that some of you have employers who think you will waste the day playing online games and gazing at your friend’s baby photos unless your internet use is monitored or restricted."

I think that by hiding behind this veil of secrecy, and displaying its double standards, Tobacco Control is showing us how weak it really is.

** Disclaimer ** I picked up the Pdf leaked memo (without further comment) from Facebook where it was floating about. It was not given to me by anyone connected to the tobacco industry. I don't care where it came from. I'm glad I saw it.

TOBACCO CONTROL OUT OF CONTROL

I was trying to find the source of this image on the BMJ Tobacco Control site but I'd have to register to read the whole article. A tantalising piece of information about smokers as mushrooms caught my interest and brought to mind a previous newspaper editor who also thought it was Ok to call for attacks on minorities.

It makes me so said to see history repeating. In addition, I frankly despair at the suppression of the voice of our particular lifestyle group. The editor who allowed, and then defended, an appalling article calling for people to be shot in the streets, because her reporter didn't like what they did, should have apologised. Largely, she has ignored individual emails of complaint and commented instead in her newspaper why she felt the article was valid.

I also asked for the legal Right of Reply to allegations made against Freedom2Choose by an anti-smoker but have so far been ignored. "Name and Address Supplied" accused F2C of using propaganda "on web forums around the world denying smoking is harmful and denying links between passive smoking and illnesses in non-smokers and children."

Passive smoking has not been proved beyond doubt to cause harm but it has been seized upon by smokerphobics such as "Naas" to use as an emotional tool to blackmail people into believing it - particularly exploiting children as human shields in their argument.

If it was true that passive smoking killed children and smoking killed one in two smokers, then none of my generation would still be alive and in very good health. We are and we are as mad as hell at being coerced by fake charities because we won't quit.

The Science is not settled. Most SHS studies show what smokers' real life experiences have proved. It has no effect, it irritates some but also offers protection for some children No study shows a clear link between SHS and lung cancer

Naas also alleges that F2C's only reason to exist is "to persuade people to continue to smoke and to ignore advice about not smoking in pregnancy or in the presence of their children." This is absolutely untrue and defamatory of every member of F2C.

The organisation, which is not funded by Big Tobacco or organised by some Big T exec who sits in the shadows, is a collection of real, as opposed to astro-turf, individuals who simply want to be left alone. That's hardly immoral as implied by Naas' tone.

F2C supports those who chose to quit as much as it supports those who chose not to and it fights the corner of those currently being dehumanised, denormalised, abused and excluded. Unlike the anti-smoker activitist, F2C does not tell people what to do with their own children. That is their choice. If they choose to step outside, it's up to them. If they choose to smoke in their own homes, it's up to them. It is not the "right" of any anti-smoker activist like Naas to interfere in private family matters based on his or her own prejudices about where people smoke and what alleged "harm" they are causing.

One would hope that people like Naas would put their energies into fighting real child abuse if it concerns them so much rather than imaginary abuse based on their own phobic fears and loathing of one particular lifestyle group.

F2C also fights for the rights of hospitality owners to regain control of their properties and supports those pub landlords who have been stripped of everything they own, including their standing in their local communities, by a spiteful law that backed bigotry, intolerance and hatred when choice would have been the decent and honest way forward.

As we smokers slept and in consideration gave over many public spaces voluntarily without complaint to non smokers, believing there would always be a compromise in a fair country, the anti-smoker industry was already working on dismissing any future concern we would have.

Tobacco Control intervened to halt smokers being included in Human Rights legislation. TC has never represented smokers and yet managed to persuade governments that it spoke for us and said we don't consider ourselves a group. I think that used to be true but TC has since forced us into such a group defined by what we do - or fail to give up.

Tobacco control also dismisses us and grass roots smokers rights' groups as having been set up by Big Tobacco without giving any evidence except for the fact that such groups exist.

But when former Battle of Britian pilot Sir Christopher Foxley-Norris - of the same generation as many who now shiver in the cold outside of their social clubs - set up Forest in 1979, it was because he was an ordinary smoker who was assaulted by a smokerphobic woman on a railway platform when he lit up his pipe. It wasn't because he was approached by a Tobacco executive to do it in the way that the Royal College of Physicians was approached by Chief Medical Officer George Godber to set up ASH Uk using his position in Govt.

Tobaco control simply lies when it says : "... the tobacco industry created and supported smokers' rights groups (SRGs) in countries around the world to oppose clean indoor air laws and maintain the social acceptability of smoking."

Those groups have developed on their own and the reason they are far behind the anti-smoker industry in terms of "propaganda" is because these are real people - not paid professionals.

And if what Tobacco Control says about Big T "...developing ads to reassure smokers that they were not ‘social outcasts’ because of their smoking." then I say it's a necessity because of Tobacco Control's aim to encourage Govts across the world to treat smokers in exactly that way.

Instead of real health concerns, Tobacco Control only advocates the use of health as an excuse to push forward the real aim of a smoke free world at any cost. As one who has reported many inquests, I can confirm that the presence of asbestos is seen in the lung although the smoker's black lung isn't as obvious or they wouldn't have to use a pig's to scare the hell out of children.

Advocates should also continue to frame smoking as a health issue. Focusing on smoke as a pollutant avoids mentioning the smoker, and thus subverts the tobacco industry's metonymy of ‘smoker’ for ‘smoke.’ Eliminating cigarette smoke from indoor environments is equivalent to asbestos removal, and thus does not involve anyone's ‘rights.’

The very fact that ordinary smokers like myself are dismissed as "inventions" by the tobacco industry or "stooges" of Big T are some of the issues that anger me so much. I didn't even know the tobacco industry had the guts to fight our corner. Voices that appear on this blog and on other blogs I read are like mine. We don't get industry funding and we don't want it for fear of losing the moral high ground. We are ordinary largely lifelong consumers of a highly taxed legal product who are fed up at being treated worse than murderers.

Tobacco Control is out of control, inciting others to call for violence against us via the use of years of untruths and ideological propaganda. It is time this hate campaign against us ended and the anti-smoker industry's wild and outrageous health claims were put back into a proper and realistic perspective by the use of real independent scientists and experts and not those on the side of either Big Tobacco or Big Tobacco Control.

DUTCH SALVO IN WAR ON SMOKERS

I like this from Frank Davis about how the Dutch won the war in Holland against the multi-billion pound Tobacco Control Industry.

TC still dosn't get it and shrieks like a toddler having a tantrum that Bogey Men from the Big Tobacco companies have pulled the strings in the background when the war on choice in Holland was won by the little man and woman who just want control of their own lives back.

Way to go Holland - where's next?

H/T Bill Gibson. Bold emphasis mine - because they are the bits I like best.

Tobacco Control simply don't understand why the Dutch Smoking Ban has been (partially) overturned, and are desperately trying to find out what went wrong. How could it happen? They're convinced that Big Tobacco must've been lobbying ministers and funding protest groups. But in fact in Holland it was the small bars who came together to fight the ban with their own money. Big Tobacco played no part in it at all, despite allegations that they did. But Tobacco Control is stuck in a mindset that can only recognise wealthy tobacco companies as their enemy. They don't seem to understand that smoking bans actually do a great deal of damage to a great many people, and some of those people are going to fight them, using their own resources. It seems that TC believe their own propaganda, that they're 'helping' people, when in fact they're trampling on millions of people. All over the world, ordinary people are becoming activists of one kind or other in the fight against TC. And, as with global warming, the principal forum is the blogosphere. But TC still has all its guns aimed at the tobacco companies, and they're all facing the wrong way to deal with this mounting global upsurge of grassroot resistance.

It seems that the problem in Holland was that Tobacco Control had a monopoly on the tobacco-related information supplied to the media and to the government. They could tell any lie they liked, and it would be swallowed whole. But in Holland the stranglehold of TC has been broken by the concerted resistance of the small bars and their private supporters, and the media and the government has begun to find out that there are people who contest many of TC's claims, and who can show that TC has been lying. The credibility of TC has been tarnished. They are no longer being believed quite as readily as they were before. And the news is gradually spreading from Holland to Belgium and England and Spain, where TC has a similar arm-lock on news.

Tobacco Control is beginning to face the same sort of problem as the IPCC and the high priesthood of the global warming movement. It's a wealthy institution (some $800 million of taxpayers' money from smokers helps fund TC's war on smokers), and it's used to fighting with other big, wealthy institutions - like tobacco companies. These ponderous, muscle-bound institutions have no idea what to do about the blogosphere on which thousands of little one-man (or one-woman) blogs and forums have started talking to each other, and increasingly ignore the established institutional authorities who used to have a monopoly on information.

Can Tobacco Control (and the global warming priesthood) adapt to the new situation, and mount a successful defence of their respective orthodoxies? Probably not. They're too big and unwieldy. And they're stuck in rigid, outdated mindsets. They're like conventional armies facing guerrilla armies in asymmetric warfare. They have big howitzers and tanks to fight other conventional armies, but these are no good against a dispersed guerrilla army that never engages in pitched battle, but instead constantly harasses the conventional army, and slowly wears it down.

I can think of one or two things that TC might do restore the situation. Because one obvious message is that... But, hey, wait a minute! Why the hell should I help these bastards out?

Tobacco Control is something to be destroyed.

THEN AND NOW

Righteous folks who care about people are often offended by the comparison between how smokers are treated in the healthist 21st century and how Jews were treated in the fascist 20th century.

The offence is caused because they believe the propaganda about smoking and want to try and save people who smoke from themselves. Their stance comes from a caring perspective but they don't realise that they have been lied to by those who not only hate smoking but people who smoke too.

They say that it's outrageous to compare not being able to have a fag with what happened to the Jews and I actually agree with them. But for smokers the issue is not about being able to smoke or not. It's about how anti-smoking propagandists backed up with Govt money and resources are inciting hatred against people who smoke to turn wider society against them.

Even if they stopped smoking the hate would continue. Their alleged rotten teeth wouldn't suddenly be clean and white would they? Any fatal illness they might have picked up wouldn't suddenly get better would it? They'd still be considered as a smoker even if they had stopped smoking wouldn't they? They'd still be accused of having contributed to global warming and the deaths of millions to come from their past "passive sharing of smoke" or "passivrauchen."

That is where the comparison with what happened to the Jews - motivated by the same kind of hatred - is relevant. After all, even some Germans back in the days of Nazism believed that all Jews had to do to stop the hate was change their religion. After all, religion is a choice isn't it?

Their Govt told them that Jews were as poisonous as mushrooms and like a bad mushroom could kill a whole family, Jews could murder a whole village, a town or even a nation. Perhaps it was the righteous of those times that cared about people who jumped on the bandwaggon of hate against Jews for the "greater good" and allowed the holocaust to happen by passive compliance.





Just as Jews then were promoted as greedy, selfish, dangerous, and fat smokers, so are smokers today compared in similar terms.

What was missing from wider society then to enable to climate of opinion to swing with the Nazis against the Jews - and other undesirables - was the principles of tolerance, fair play, and compassion.

Just as it is missing from THIS intolerant person who refuses to believe the world is big enough to share because he personally hates smokers - ie: people now defined as a lifestyle group.

Just as protection of the Jews and positive comments about the Jews was banned in the 1930s, so is any protection of or positive comments about smokers banned in the 21st century.


Whatever people might think of smoking, how ever much they may fear it, hate the smell of aromatic tobacco, or care for those they want to save from themselves, no-one can deny that the bottom line on this issue to keep both sides happy, and to end hate, is tolerance, choice and respect for people's differences and beliefs.

I don't believe that this will end in the gas chambers for smokers but how far down the road of hate do we want to go as a society? I believe the constant attacks on smokers by the state with public support will end with them being forced into sub-normal classes, criminalisation with laws made against them, and ultimately being locked up as the Jews and other undesirables were before the holocaust happened.

I find it ironic that ordinarily fair minded and compassionate people who are offended by the comparisons of hate directed at smokers now and Jews then are persuaded by the tool invented by Himmler - propaganda.