Originally Posted by roachboy

well the tax thing is easy---roll your own.

and the smoking ban thing is not a big deal. like i said before, i prefer pubs that have good beer and permit smoking and there are such and in likelihood there would be after smoking bans--there are generally loopholes and folk find them.

and like most folk who smoke, i am ambivalent about it and imagine myself quitting soon and so maybe at some point none of this will matter to me.

what is annoying about this issue is the conversations---well more the tiresome shouting matches--like this thread.
the only reason it has unfolded as it has is because no-one is addressing actual human beings in it--they are addressing little messages with pseudonyms attached.

i think lots of people like little waves of hysteria.
they enjoy them.
they enjoy being terribly righteous and feeling like that connects them to some larger identity---protectors of some imaginary public interest or some such--it is fun, it is gratifiying ----but most of all it is easy peasy--you can use self-righteousness as an excuse to ignore your usual restraint of tone, which is built around functional communication in complex social situations---
but which for some folk must be frustrating as hell--because you give em an excuse to ditch it and it is not even a memory thereafter.

a messageboard---now this is a VERY SIMPLE social situation, no matter how you use it to project a sense of community at other moments---it is simple because it is abstract---and its simplicity is enabling in a problematic manner when little waves of righteous hysteria blow across the land--and the do all the time---this is the land of endless hysterias---they are a big compensation for the fracturing of collective identity, we love em, we need em---and they SUCH fun.

these little waves of bourgeois hysteria wrap up in a veneer of self-righteousness access to this crude and tedious version of yourself, which is among the most primitive and least socially adjusted of them.

let's call him your inner shithead.

everyone has one.
you know: your inward insufferable bore.
your inward, infantile, insufferable little bore.
everyone has one.

that is most of what i see from the antismoking mounties: posts that enable them to take their inner shithead out for a little walk.

none of this is about persuading anyone of anything about smoking either way.
none of this even presents a pretense of an actual interaction.
and if you addressed 3-d smokers as you address them here, the outcomes would be a donnybrook.
and that is what you want--at least what you want here, when there is no danger of it actually happening--here where the stakes are minimal.
nice work.

no wonder the serious issues at the core of questions to do with smoking, where it should happen etc get buried---this kind of debate is not about that--it is not even a debate--it is a kind of park where people go to let their inner shitheads run around.

maybe this kind of conversation would be better if everyone acted more like rational human beings.

i hope there is such a therapeutic function to the snippy "i dont like smoking harumph harumph" posts above.
because they sure as fuck are not about changing anyone's mind or habits.
if you want to do that, you need at least to address others as human beings.
but what fun is that?