Another great victory against the forces of evil
The Santa Monica City Council, west of Los Angeles, has given final approval to an ordinance banning smoking at the city's beaches and restricting smoking at the pier to designated areas.
With this new law approved late Tuesday, Los Angeles County is getting 21 kilometers (13 miles) of smoke-free beaches.
Friday, the Los Angeles City Council adopted a beach smoking ordinance.
Robert Berger, director of Communities Organized Against Smoking and its Trash, called the ordinance's passage a "milestone."
AFP Apr.28.04
This is like that psychological phenomenon where the inability to get at the real cause makes you jump all over the accessible bad. What's that called?
If you asked most kids under the age of 10 which they'd be better off doing - Sitting in a room full of cigarette smokers? Or sitting in a room with an idling, brand new, upmarket SUV? - the great majority will pick the SUV.
And there's your failure. Complete, total, abject failure.
Two things about this nauseate me:
One. That. That the car is killing us all, but we're going to go out tobacco-smoke-free.
Two. That the tools of manipulation and soft coercion, that were originally used to get people strung-out on tobacco, were used to "free" people from tobacco use, without the tools themseves ever being morally examined.
It's the power they bestow. The awesome magnificent power. No way anybody's going to give that up.
And that's why the car's still unquestioned.
Even though it's thousands of times more deadly, and doing far more damage to us all, including those innocent children who've been freed from the poison of second-hand smoke.
Iraq is the car.
Global warming/climate chaos is the car.
The greatest single cause of death for people under 30 is the car.
But they're not smoking while they die - way to go, valiant warriors!
The tools of manipulation, advertising propaganda, video/film/real-life role modeling, those are the sacred tools, as is the automobile. Because they give power to what are essentially weak and cowardly people.
People who have ganged up on addicts and stubborn rebellious self-destructives. And won.
Triumph!
How brave you are, you anti-smokers.
Now that the tobacco empire has diversified itself into safety, and your only real opposition is a bunch of confused losers.
