 NOTES ON THE GREAT RETARD SMOKING DEBATE
As I mentioned yesterday, the province of Ontario will put into effect a draconian and evil set of smoking prohibtions on Wednesday. This, as you might imagine, has resuted in almost no debate, because smokers are seen as less than completely human and should be punished as cruelly and unusually as possible. As you know, Canada is famously without an Eighth Amendment - at least one that means anything.
However, the dumbest paper in all of Canada, the Toronto Sun, has joined the debate by pitching its two most addled reporters together for a great retard cage match. The topic, "Smoking: Is It Only Slightly Evil, Or Worse Than Genocide?" The debate, such as it was, ran on Friday and pitted Connie Woodcock against Sue Ann Levy. That these are the smartest people the Sun could find says more about the Sun than you need to know.
Of course, when you have two empty-headed yentas debating anything, where else can you start but aesthetics?
CONNIE: When I was a young reporter long ago, everyone in the newsroom smoked -- and butted their cigarettes on the floor. It was dirty, dangerous -- and perfectly normal at the time. Everyone did it. Looking back, I find it hard to believe we ever did such a disgusting thing.
SUE-ANN: DID a disgusting thing? I find smokers of today just as disgusting. It's bad enough that I walk to work or home fending off a gauntlet of smokers choking up what little fresh air there is left in Toronto. But what is it with this flinging of butts out onto the streets and sidewalks as if they were ashtrays? Smoking is a filthy habit and smokers inconsiderate litterers.
CONNIE: Aw come on, Sue-Ann. How can you tell in Toronto amidst the real litter -- fast food wrappers, coffee cups, old newspapers -- blowing around? As for fresh air, don't make me laugh.
If you have any question, yes, it does appear that these crazy bitches are serious. Cigarette butts, coffee cups, newspapers and fucking BK wrappers are the biggest things that make Toronto unsightly.
What they aren't telling you is that Toronto has a more significant homeless problem than any other city of its size. On any given night there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people sleeping on the streets. Did you know that your average homeless person is considerably larger than your average cigarette butt? And if one is considered homeless, one can also be considered bathroomless as well. Say what what you will about cigarette butts, but there is no recorded instance in human history of the fucking plague being spread by them. The same cannot be said of human feces in the street.
I also have more experience with the homeless than probably 90% of my readers. Here is what I've learned; more often than not, homeless people are frequently drunk and crazy people. You want to see what a mess drunk, crazy people can make? You really should, because you would no longer worry about butts on the goddamn sidewalk.
SUE-ANN: Which is exactly why I can't wait for the province's new no-smoking laws to come into effect next week. The more draconian the better, I say.
Yes, draconian laws do tend to pretty a place up. Just look at Warsaw from 1941-91. They also have a reputation for making trains run on time, too.
What disturbs me the most is the rush to pass draconian laws over bullshit issues. Is smoking really the single biggest problem Ontarians face? It has to be, since the Liberals at Queen's Park have taken over what has been a municipal issue for about two hundred years. So it has to be pretty serious.
There's also the issue of enforcement. Specifically, who will bother with it? Enforcement takes money and resources that could better be spent elsewhere. Have all the murders been solved and illegal guns been taken off the streets? Really? Because it sure doesn't sound like it.
SUE-ANN: I can't understand why some people continue to smoke. Look, I'm well aware that it's a highly addictive substance, more addictive than any hard-core street drug. But why the heck would you knowingly poison your body with something that can lead to so many cancers, heart disease, emphysema and a long list of other health issues? To me, it's like playing Russian roulette with a semi-loaded automatic.
There you have it, "draconian" laws should be passed on things that Sue-Ann Levy doesn't understand. Get ready for a lot of laws, teenagers, because I think there's a long list of things she doesn't understand. Starting with the fact that playing Russian roulette isn't illegal in Ontario. But smoking in a bar will be on Wednesday.
Also, automatic weapons will fire for as long as a finger is on the trigger or until the weapon is empty. So, it doesn't really matter if it "semi-loaded" or not. This is why automatics are the perfect gun for Sue-Ann Levy to play Russian Roulette with.
Let's think this through for a second. Suicide or attempted suicide hasn't been a criminal offense in Canada since 1962. You can stand on a street corner and drink an entire gallon of bleach - which is demonstrably more harmful than tobacco - without consequence, other than possibly being charged with disturbing the peace or littering. Or making a really foolish looking attempt at suicide.
I hate to break it to you, but my health is not your problem.
CONNIE: Please. You live and walk around in Toronto and you think I'm playing Russian roulette? Isn't it just like the Ontario government to pass a law that isn't necessary anymore? Please tell me where in Ontario you could smoke in an indoor public space on May 31? Most municipalities already have non-smoking bylaws and in the ones which don't, public pressure has been so strong, you'd be crazy to try lighting up anywhere. Even my neighbourhood pub has been smoke free for more than a year.
SUE-ANN: High time too. I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to go to bars and night clubs again. Like many non-smokers, I used to avoid them like the plague because I always came home with a sore throat and clothes reeking of cigarette smoke. It goes to show that all the hysteria from restaurateurs and bar owners about the adverse economic impact of the smoking bylaws was mostly smoke and mirrors. I'll bet not one restaurant in this city has gone out of business due to the smoking bylaw. It's the quality of the food, value and service that makes or breaks an eatery in this town.
You know, Sue-Ann is exactly the kind of woman you want to meet in a bar. As a general rule, women who don't smoke also don't fuck a guy three hours after meeting him in bar. Trust me on that, okay? Sure, a woman like Sue-Ann might give you a handjob, but that's the last thing a man needs from a woman. We can take care of that ourselves just fine, thank you very much. There are basically only two things that women can't do as well as men, give handjobs and kill bears.
 Amazingly, Levy also managed to change the subject halfway through her answer. Bars and nightclubs are decidedly different from an "eatery." An eatery is where one goes to, well, eat. Bars and nightclubs are where horny people go to get drunk and look for someone to fuck. And, as a general rule, people who like to get drunk and fuck also tend to like smoking. These things tend to be connected.
CONNIE: I have a marathoner relative who quit smoking 20 years ago but who spends the day riding a commercial sprayer, applying Round Up to farmers' fields. He's in great physical shape, but what do you think he's going to die of? Also, I find the distance provision at hospitals especially annoying, not for me, but for people trapped there -- nurses, hospital patients, support staff. You'll tell me they shouldn't be smoking anyway but the fact is, they do, as do many people suffering from excess stress.
SUE-ANN: What about the stress they put on their already frail bodies? This is something else I'll never understand -- a hospital patient smoking his or her brains out while hooked to an IV and hunched in a wheelchair outside the door of one of the downtown hospitals. Those who insist on continuing to smoke -- after being diagnosed with cancer, heart disease or other smoking-related diseases -- should be denied insurance coverage. As it is, smokers should be required to pay higher OHIP and insurance premiums.
This is perhaps my favourite argument of all, and the one most perplexing to my American readers. OHIP is the Ontario Health Insurance Plan, or our "free health care." I put quotations around the phrase "free heath care" for a couple of reasons. Firstly, 40 cents of every dollar spent by the Ontario government goes through OHIP at some point. For something that is "free," it costs an extraordinary amount of money.
Also, Ontario residents have no choice but to belong to OHIP. If you, as an American, have a private plan that pisses you off, you are free to switch providers (assuming you can afford to, which you can't, but that isn't the point.) I cannot. The only way I could "opt out" of a provincial health care plan is by moving to the United States. OHIP is also not free of charge - the McGuinty government broke a campaign promise and re-introduced premiums - nor is it freely chosen. In no sense of the word is Canada's health care system "free."
So when a crazy bitch like Levy suggests denying smokers coverage, she actually means denying them medical care. This is because, under the Canada Health Act, it is illegal for a doctor to bill for anything that is covered by a provincial health plan. And smoking-related illnesses are covered under all ten provincial plans.
But she makes a particularly stupid case, one that I've been having fun with since college. Smoking-related diseases are behaviourally contracted, to be sure. But guess what? So are other diseases. Lots and lots of them.
For example, obesity-related deaths are soon expected to overtake those related to smoking. 300,000 people in the United States ate it, both literally and figuratively, in 2001. Tobacco killed about 435,000 Americans that year. North Americans are a whole lot bigger than they used to be, and something tells me that this has much more to do with Wendy's than it does with Darwin. A lot of it has to do with choosing to slam back 14 triple cheeseburgers in a single sitting and then having 87 donuts for dessert. Those illness are entirely based on individual choice.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but 60% of the American population does not suffer from a fucking "gland problem," okay?
Then there's the ultimate way to choose to die - AIDS. Ever since donated blood began being screened for HIV in 1984, it has become practically impossible to contract HIV by accident. Actually, given the pathology of the virus, you have to work pretty hard to get it.
 If you want to avoid dying of AIDS, there are three simple steps you should take;
- 1) Try not to share needles with anyone who has lost 40 pounds in the last 25 minutes.
- 2) Avoid fucking everyone you see without a condom.
- 3) Do not do Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain routine in a shower of someone else's blood.
And..........that's pretty much it. Enjoy your AIDS-free existence and y'all come back soon, y'hear? By the way, you're welcome! Yes Virginia, cigarettes are bad for you, but so is stuffing 82 Ding-Dongs in your pie-hole at once and having an unprotected anal gang-bang with 27 strangers. But the only people who should be denied care are smokers. Why should they be allowed to die while equally irresponsible people get the fruity nectar of medical science? It couldn't be because AIDS primarily affects white homosexual men and black women and that fat people are awfully fucking touchy, could it? Or maybe because everyone likes to eat and fuck, and they're a little worried about their own self control, perhaps? The faces of these diseases might look different, but the personal responsibility for them is the same all the way around. I think we actually should do it Sue-Ann Levy's way. You break it, you bought it and fuck you very much. If nothing else, it'll show just what a "compassionate" society we are. Let's see how "universal" universal health care can be. CONNIE: What has the anti-smoking campaign accomplished lately? Many people have stopped but kids continue to start at early ages. It's caused financial hardship to corner store operators and they're about to suffer more now that advertising and display are becoming illegal. Sure, let them sell lottery tickets.
SUE-ANN: Oh cry me a river. I'll bet lottery sales have grossly overtaken any gains achieved from cigarette sales. And what's wrong with that? You've got to take out a small mortgage to buy a carton of cigarettes and buying a scratch ticket is a bit of mindless fun -- as long as you don't spend the grocery money doing so. The last time I looked, lottery tickets don't stink up the environment.
Except that a good number of people who play the lottery do spend the grocery money doing so. Here's an experiment for you. Go to your nearest lottery desk. If you see Thurston Howell III and Lovey there, rush back and let me know. The fact is that most of the people who play lotteries are very poor and very, very dumb. Lotteries are marketed to the very people who can least afford to play them. All you have to do is look at your average commerical for a lottery. Chances are you'll see some putz spend three bucks on a ticket and suddenly wind up on a tropical island. Christ, if private companies ran lotteries instead of the government, they'd be driven out of existence for misleading advertising that swindles the stupid. If anyone wants to get hyper-technical about it, the primary beneficiary of both tobacco and lottery ticket sales is the fucking government, who runs one and taxes the other at a rate of nearly 900%. Levy, like a good communist, also fails to understand that businesses exist to maximize profits, not to have one sector of the business cover for the government mandated losses of another. What the tobacco advertising and display prohibitions do is interfere with the basic market forces of supply and demand. It presumes that if you can't see a product, you won't want it. And we all know how well that worked with crack, heroin and prostitution, now don't we? It also displays a shocking ignorance of what advertising actually does, particularly for someone who works for a newspaper. All advertising does is influence brand-selection, not the behaviour itself. You cannot devise a commercial so clever that it would make a gay man want pussy, but you can influence the kind of pussy straight men want. I could write and produce the greatest campaign ever for National Beat Your Wife Week and spend millions of dollars on TV time promoting it, but at the end of the week, I can guarantee that there will be no more battered wives than there are any other week. Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is an idiot. By the way, Miss Levy, I would suggest that nothing stinks up the environment quite like broken dreams. CONNIE: Tolerance is not your middle name, is it? Live and let live, I say. This law will do nothing to stop people smoking. Hard core smokers will smoke regardless. It's my experience that a certain stubborn segment of the population will only smoke more, out of spite. Meanwhile, when I step outside for a smoke, I'm not alone. It's starting to get crowded.
SUE-ANN: Why don't all of you huddle together and blow smoke at each other? At least that will keep you warm on those bitter winter days. If I had my way, I'd ensure that no one could smoke within 9 metres of entrances to ALL Ontario buildings, not just health-care facilities.
Do you folks know how far 9 meters is? 29.52 feet is how far! Have you ever seen a 30 foot wide sidewalk? I haven't. I think that evil cunt just told me to go smoke in traffic! If any of you see Sue-Ann Levy before I do, punch her in the face for me, will you? And it just goes on and and on between these two. And both of them ignore (or don't seem to understand) a basic fact - tobacco is a perfectly legal product. Not only is it legal, it provides the government a good deal of money that it would have to make up elsewhere if everyone suddenly stopped using it. Once upon a time, we used to be a much more polite society. Then somebody had to go invent liberals, who think that good manners are not enough when there could be laws instead. When I was a kid, you could smoke anywhere, anytime. But if somebody was nice about telling me that my smoking bothered them, I'd either go somewhere else or stop smoking. It was actually pretty simple, if you were nice to me, I would accommodate you. But that was before everything was legislated instead of discussed. There's nothing as shrill as someone on the right side of the law, and nothing as obstinate as someone on the wrong side of it. Once you introduce politics and the law into anything, being polite or nice becomes nothing but a distant memory. For the most part, the old way worked beautifully. Would you run into an unpleasant asshole from time to time? Sure you would, but the world is full of assholes. The problem is that in Sue-Ann Levy's world, everyone is an asshole. Special Note: The Zombie cigarette package was created by the great Ford W. Maverick. He does rule at these things, doesn't he? Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: The World is Fill of Bastards By: Mary Prankster From: Roulette Girl Permalink
|
