I don’t normally smoke and after the election I don’t plan on smoking. However, for the remainder of the election campaign I will take up smoking to highlight the need for Australians to throw off the nanny state and reclaim our freedom to choose.
It seems like every time a politician talks in Australia another freedom is removed. Politicians and bureaucrats have taken to treating citizens like naughty children who need Uncle Howard to protect us from the evils of tobacco, alcohol & gambling. Personally, I am able to make my own decisions and run my own life. Further, I think the vast majority of Australians are also perfectly capable of running their own lives without big brother looking over their shoulders and telling them which hobbies, habits and preferences are optimal.
I already enjoy drinking and playing poker and make no apologies. While I’m not a smoker, I certainly stand up for the right of people to smoke without being hassled or made into a pariah. To show my support for smoker’s rights I will smoke every day for the remainder of the campaign.
November 2, 2007 at 5:48 am |
You should quit poker and keep smoking.
November 2, 2007 at 8:13 am |
This is the funniest thing I’ve read today. It’s also the first thing I’ve read today.
Thanks for the support either way. I know that myself and many other smokers are sick of being marginalised for participating in a completely legal activity.
November 2, 2007 at 10:49 am |
As an act of solidarity I will continue to smoke.
November 2, 2007 at 10:53 am |
[...] Youth Takes Up Smoking LDP Queensland Senate Candidate John Humphreys – a non-smoker – has pledged to take up smoking for the duration of the election campaign. I already enjoy drinking and playing poker and make no [...]
November 2, 2007 at 11:28 am |
[...] Senate candidate for Queensland John Humphreys has admitted to smoking marijuana, and has recently taken up smoking cigarettes as an act of [...]
November 2, 2007 at 7:24 pm |
You are a moron. Showing you are an individual by filling your lungs with a mass of toxic chemicals. Totally brainless.
November 2, 2007 at 8:29 pm |
But Harry, he wouldn’t do it to himself if you didn’t support these oppressive laws.
Morally, you are obliged to stop support of anti smoking laws.
November 2, 2007 at 10:45 pm |
Hopefully you can give them up when the contest is over. I thought it was more of a State issue anyway….Nana Bligh
November 3, 2007 at 1:58 am |
Banning somking in pubs was one thing.
Banning it in clubs violates Freedom of Association; we can not do collectively what we may do individually.
November 3, 2007 at 2:15 am |
Banning it in pubs violates the rights of private property owners.
November 3, 2007 at 7:50 am |
[...] pariah and LDP Senate Candidate for Queensland, John Humphreys, has decided to start smoking throughout his campaign “to highlight the need for Australians to throw off the nanny state [...]
November 3, 2007 at 1:28 pm |
Why stop there, John?
Remember the party supports drug legalisation, gay marriage and abortion rights… just some further possibilities.
November 3, 2007 at 1:30 pm |
Should probably start with the things that are still legal
Though I did just get quite an interesting mental image…..
November 3, 2007 at 3:15 pm |
You are a moron. Showing you are an individual by filling your lungs with a mass of toxic chemicals. Totally brainless.
Do you really not get it?
There’s nothing brainless or moronic about it. Smoking might be a bad choice, but it’s John’s choice, nobody else’s. That includes you or the government acting at your volition. That’s the whole point.
November 3, 2007 at 3:22 pm |
If we were really serious about forcing people into being healthy we’d offer publically funded gym memberships and make everyone go for 2 hours/ night.
Personally I’m not addicted to smoking, but I’m addicted to doing little physical exercise. My habit of laziness is hard to break as smoking, and probably as bad for my health. But it’s my choice, not the government’s.
November 3, 2007 at 3:51 pm |
Smoking for the duration of the election sounds much less dangereous than a hunger strike. And whilst smoke is bad for your lungs excess government is bad for your society. Perhaps ballot papers should come with a health warning to that effect.
November 4, 2007 at 10:55 am |
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22696091-421,00.html
Weird story right there.
November 4, 2007 at 7:04 pm |
Recent evidence suggests that taking one or two cigarettes is highly predictive of people becoming addicted to smoking – most who try do continue to use. Moreover, if people experience nausea or feelings of discomfit during their first couple of smokes they are more likely to eventually get addicted – the ’sensitivity hyothesis’.
Filling your lungs with tobacco-specific nitrosamines to show you have freedom of choice discredits the LDP as a group having even the most remote intellectual interest. Just bloody stupid.
3.4 million Australians now smoke and half of them will die as a result of their smoking habit. And you want to assert your freedom rights by encouraging (you are!) these people to smoke? You are precisely (and exactly) doing what the tobacco companies want. It is incredibly stupid.
Sam, If you can quit smoking (for say 6 months) and publicly repudiate this LDP nonsense I’ll post you a bottle of 1983 Grange Hermitage to celebrate. That’s a better outcome than scoring 0.001% of the vote in Stirling.
November 4, 2007 at 9:22 pm |
hc — I have trouble being angry with you because I think you really do have our interests at heart. It’s sweet. Thanks for your concern.
I also worry about your life and I think you work too hard. Life isn’t about work Harry… there is so much more out there. Dying a few years earlier is an incidental inconvenience compared to the problem of not living a good life, and I’m worried that you have your priorities all mixed up. Please consider quitting your job and travelling for a while. Try to remember what your passions were as a youth and pursue those dreams. Life is too short to spend all your time worrying and working.
If you do manage to quit over-working then I’ll send you a joint. It should help you relax. That’s a better outcome than spending your life fretting about the health of Sam’s lungs.
November 5, 2007 at 3:03 am |
John, You are promoting the social acceptibility of a pointless addictive activity that kills people. No matter how you smartarse it, that’s a stupid act of unique immorality.
November 5, 2007 at 3:13 am |
As we have spent lots of time explaining to the anti-gay people, tolerance does not imply acceptence. The LDP neither endorses nor condemns anybody’s lifestyle choices.
Now go to bed hc… it’s too late for you to be blogging and you should know better.
November 5, 2007 at 8:16 am |
hc, what’s immoral is that you think you know what’s right for other people and that you have a right to force other people to make the choices you approve of. That really is immoral.
November 5, 2007 at 9:23 am |
John, You are promoting the social acceptibility of a pointless addictive activity that kills people. No matter how you smartarse it, that’s a stupid act of unique immorality.
Christ almighty. Another self-righteous dill who wants to control other people’s lives.
November 5, 2007 at 11:37 am |
I’d rather lead an interesting life and die at 50 than lead a boring life and live to 100.
Drinking, Smoking, Gambling, Unprotected Sex, Fighting, Driving Fast, Double Whoppers with Cheese and Bacon and all that sort of are what makes life worth living.
You would make us give it all up so we could watch the price is right in our nursing home at the age of 100.
If you want to do that, then that’s fine with me. Personally I’d rather be dead.
November 7, 2007 at 2:47 am |
Sam you also enjoy blogging and logic. You have a strongly developed sense of logic that you like to apply to social issues. Apply it to the issue under discussion.
Life is better than death and disease postponed is better than disease now. This is logic not authoritarian nanny-statism. It is non-arguable if you are honest.
People who smoke are stupid in that respect – they admit so themselves since almost all want to quit. Pushing things in the opposite direction and saying well, its OK, you are just exercising your daft individual preferences defies logic.
Its a matter of learning and logic. Do you reject a baby’s preference for crapping in their nappy? How about trying to stop 15.9 year olds from smoking (the average age of smoking initiation in Australia) when by age 20 they will regret ever starting the habit.
And stupid habits that reduce the welfare of people call for a response – who will provide it? The tobacco companies making money from the habit? It is necessarily a political response based on sound scientific knowledge. The case for LDP non-interventionism evaporates.
November 7, 2007 at 3:31 am |
“stupid habits that reduce the welfare of people call for response – who will provide it?”
Free associations of citizens. Cancer society of australia. Interest groups. Anti-smoking intrnet forums. Scientific magazines. Doctors. Harry Clarke. NOT THE GOVERNMENT.
November 7, 2007 at 5:45 am |
Interventionism is addictive. It is better to avoid the first puff of interventionism than risk becoming addicted to the activity.
November 7, 2007 at 7:23 am |
Life is better than death and disease postponed is better than disease now. This is logic not authoritarian nanny-statism. It is non-arguable if you are honest.
Death is inevitable and pleasure now rather than moderation leading to longevity is a choice people have been making since the dawn of civilisaiton and is a choice that pretty much every individual makes to some extent today. The point is it should still be a choice that the individual makes, because it’s their life that they’re trying to optimise and only they really know what they want. hc, admit it, you simply do not know what is better for other people. ‘Life is better than death and disease postponed is better than disease now.’ is an oversimplification of the situation that you have made to falsely justify your position.
You could take this to extremes, and undoubtably some of your ilk would like to, by enforcing calorific restriction. I fully believe that there is enough eviidence to support that fact that calorific restriction makes people live longer. We can could extend people’s lives by somewhere between 5 to 20 years if we could only get full control of what they eat. After all ‘life is better than death’ and those people who want to chow down a high calorific intake (and I’m not necessary referring to obese people) can just shut up, because the best choice is being made for them according to hc’s ‘reason’.
In a further vain attempt to justify your position you’ve also tried the ‘think of the children’ technique. No, hc, as you’ve probably been told many times before, when we talk about personal choice we are talking about adults of sound mind. Most of us would support some reasonable intervention of the state in the protection of children, but of course, parents do it naturally the vast majority of the time.
You’ve gone over this so much in your own mind without looking at the outside world that your view has become blinkered. That’s fine in itself, but you want to have choices enforced by law that affect other people’s lives. Now that’s dangerous.
November 7, 2007 at 8:05 am |
Boris, Terje and Mick – that’s a beautiful 3-pronged demolition.
November 7, 2007 at 10:14 am |
“Stupid habits that reduce the welfare of people”.
That’s a pretty good description of most government intervention.
“It’s a matter of learning”. How does government force imply any learning? In fact, I’d say it takes away the need for any learning.
hc, your comment comes across as being highly confused and very poorly constructed in terms of logic.
You have given no logical reason why John Humphries is or is attempting to “push things in the opposite direction”. Shouldn’t you back up this allegation? Where has John stated he wants to get more people smoking?
Perhaps consider a political candidate that went on a hunger strike. Does it follow logically that they are then trying to get the nation to take up starvation?
And you give no logical argument for why the state should have a say in what you can or can’t do to yourself except for the allegation that some activities lower the “welfare of people”. You need to explain yourself here. You’re vagueness and lack of explanation is arrogant.
In addition, you have not responded to the many rebuttals offered to this argument throughout the comments.
Your last paragraph performs yet another non-sequitor as you jump to say that the libertarian argument “evaporates”. Your comments would be considered rude and condescending if it weren’t for your obvious confusion and ignorance.
November 7, 2007 at 10:27 am |
The SMH has refuted John Humphreys logic. The problem with Johns position is that it is droll.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/federal-election-2007-news/rudds-efficient-gains/2007/11/06/1194329223583.html?page=2
November 7, 2007 at 11:29 am |
It’s a shame that didn’t get run in some paper that wasn’t pretending to be elitist, like the Telegraph, especially if it went online on one of their blogs. I think there’d be plenty of working people who’d respond to that. Which is probably why it won’t get run in the Telegraph but will be run in a Fairfax ‘latte news daily’ broadsheet, and why it definitely will never end up on one of their blogs.
November 7, 2007 at 12:24 pm |
I am actually not so sure as to the usefulness of John Humphreys’a stunt. It may attract some publicity, but it can also be seen as promoting smoking, contrary to LDP policy.