Tuesday 21 December 2010

The Art of the Smoke War.

Congratulations are in order to Junican, who has won the BMJ's prize of a year's subscription to Smoker-Bashing Monthly.

The BMJ still don't get it. They call us 'pro-tobacco blogs' but that is not what we are. We're just smokers. We are not 'pro tobacco'. We are 'pro being left the hell alone'. We have no interest in turning non-smokers into smokers like some kind of yellow-fingered vampires or Marlborg Collective.

I've just had an image of the Marlboro Cowboy with one of those Borg arms, which includes an ashtray, a rolling machine and a lighter. Must find time to fire up Paint Shop later. 'Come to Marlboro Country. Resistance is futile'.

No, we aren't interested in 'recruits'. We are not interested in making everyone live their lives the way we choose to. We are not interested in forcing non-smokers to smoke, we are not even interested in forcing them to be anywhere near us while we smoke, despite the smokophobe insistence that 'we want to smoke everywhere'. We don't want access to your house so we can blow smoke into your child's cot. We don't want all of the train or all of the bus or all of the pubs and restaurants. Smokers are around 20-25% of the population. How about 20-25% of the pubs, train carriages etc? No? Of course not. That would be letting the Untermensch think they might actually be human and the spiteful smokophobes could never stomach that.

Smokers are not the ones demanding compliance and demanding you live your lives as instructed. We are the opposite of that. We are, in fact, fighting that.

Nobody pays us to get all frothy-mouthed and wild-eyed about the medical profession, which seems to have amended the Hippocratic Oath with the words 'except smokers, drinkers and fat people', which tells us all our NI payments were in vain, it was just a protection racket after all, and that they will stand by and watch us die unless we live our lives as they dictate. We don't need to be paid to be angry about that, as a moment's reflection should make clear to anyone with half a brain.

I can only suggest that each member of the BMJ select a brain from their formalin-pickled collection and have it installed in place of their own. It is certain to be in better working order than what they have now and, unless they have Hitler or Stalin in their collection, it could not possibly be more vicious.

Should I ever require the attention of a doctor, and be ordered to assimilate or be left to die, he/she (and everyone within bellowing range) is going to hear about the Hippocratic Oath and how modern medicine has abandoned it, along with all pretence of scientific enquiry, in preference to witchcraft and hyperbole and outright lies.

I bet I'll never be able to get an appointment once they read this. But then what would be the point? I could go in there with erysipelas and it would be classed as smoking related. I'd be better off with a homeopath or an acupuncturist or even a man in a big mask with bells on his ankles who shakes a gourd full of dried peas at me and howls. The modern medical profession is now so bound up with smoking, drinking and waist size that they have forgotten the existence of bacteria and viruses. Smoking causing inner ear infections? Would you trust any oaf who believed that kind of nonsense with something as complex and potentially dangerous as cancer treatment? No, go for the gourd and dried peas guy. At least he won't give you a suicide pill to shut you up.

He also won't demand you pay for his services in advance, under threat of force, and then tell you to get lost when you need those services because you aren't wearing the right kind of hat.

So, can anything legal be done about this dismissal of the medical oath? Probably not. It's been changed so many times that it's not what we thought it was any more.

Perhaps the most drastic change to the Hippocratic Oath is this: it has degenerated over the ages from a solemn binding treaty where the physician takes full responsibility for his conduct to a meaningless formal adherence to tradition where doctors no longer have to worry about deities striking them down for malpractice (let alone being penalised for deviance from the oath).

It doesn't mean anything any more. If they want to watch you die, they can, and then they can say it was your own fault for smoking/drinking/eating or wearing the wrong kind of hat. We can't use that against them in law, but we can use it in public. The medics might have abandoned their original oath but the public think it still matters.

Legal redress might, however, be possible through NI contributions. These, we are told (yes, I know it's a lie and it's really just another income tax) are collected from us - by force - to pay for our pensions and for any future NHS treatment we might need. Fighting on the tobacco tax won't work. That's just tax. National Insurance, we are led to believe, is specifically to pay for pensions and NHS. Almost everyone in the country thinks that's true.

So, if we are forced to pay this - we'll go to jail if we don't - but when the time comes when we need to use the service we've paid, for, we are told we can't, then we have a case. It's simple extortion. A protection racket. Pay up or we'll beat you up, but don't ever try to make a claim.

Keep in mind that our opponents have no interest in being truthful. They are not under an illusion, they know they are lying and they know it's a propaganda war. Smokers keep responding with facts, but facts are dull. Stories are more interesting because all they need is plausibility, not truth. Try this one. Stories can be filled with sensational claims that capture the imagination. When you get into the statistics and the original research, you can root out the lies, but few will wade through a scientific paper. They are deadly dull. I've written a few myself and the rules are the precise opposite of those for writing stories. They must be impersonal, detached and passive. Facts only, and dry, non-excitable discussion. Well, the antismokers get a bye on facts but real scientists don't.

We need more than the truth. We need imaginative propaganda. We also need to be utterly merciless. Forget the tobacco companies, we'll get no help from them. They don't care how much they are fined, they just pass the costs on to us. Far from being paid by them, we are paying their fines for them. The bastards who rely on us for their income have abandoned us, which is why I am buying seeds in the Spring.

So, let's make the point on blogs and message boards and newspaper articles that denying treatment to specific groups because of lifestyle choices violates the Hippocratic Oath. Keep doing that, and sooner or later, one of their idiot drones will reveal that the Hippocratic Oath has been abandoned. That will have far more effect. If we say it, they'll scoff. It will take a reveal from one of their own to do it. We can force that to happen.

The same thing with NI. Pick and pick at it and sooner or later, one of those the lower drones trust will reveal that NI does not pay for anything specific, it's just another income tax. We can force that too.

Not so much in blogland, where few tread. In the pages of the Express or the Telegraph or better yet, in the high blood pressure world of the Daily Mail. If it can be made to happen in the Guardian, well there'll be a collective intake of breath from the tax-avoiding lefties on there because they already know all this and we're not supposed to tell anyone.

If we can get someone like the BMJ to confess that the Hippocratic Oath no longer carries any penalty for letting patients die for fun, or that NI doesn't pay for NHS treatment but is just more income tax, it will carry far more weight with the sheeple than anything we could ever say.

The enemy has no sense of humour and no sense of irony, but has an absolute sense of superiority. We can make them reveal the truth by letting them be superior because they think it will make them look clever.

They are dogmatic. They believe themselves to be absolutely in the right. 'The science is settled' is their line. They are cast iron. Banging your head on cast iron only achieves a sore head.

Try bending it, slowly, and what happens?

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello, Leg Iron.

Here is a copy of a post which I have just made on DP's site:

""I have to split this into two parts because of the 'characters problem....

The first that I knew about this silliness was your report, DP. Isn't chance the most amazing thing? Day after day, I have looked at the VOTE and waited for the result, and been surprised that the thing is still going on! And then you beat me to it! Swine!

Anyway, here is my reply to the 'BMJ Editors' who signed the the admission of defeat:


""I thank you for the award of the prize of a subscription to 'Tobacco Control' magazine. I am much gratified, since the last thing that I won, without much effort, was an Easter egg when I was 17 years old.

Oh, by the way, there is a misconception in your above statement.

Your statement suggests that I have ‘colleagues in the pro-smoking lobby’. This is not true. I have no ‘colleagues’. I am merely a little, old man of 71 years caring for a little old lady of 69 years who has MS, whose occasional trip to our local pub has been ruined by the catastrophic effects on our pubs of the smoking ban, and I am merely a commenter on various blogs, on which ‘pro-freedom’ matters are discussed. I also have no significant political associations, or any other similar associations other than ‘signing up’ to newspapers and such in order to comment. I comment on many of these sites about a multitude of things.

Further, you say that my ‘colleagues’ on these blogs ‘tipped my idea over the top’. Erm.. 70% as opposed to the nearest, about 9%? Tipped over the top? No. There is a clear indication that your members, on the whole, are not interested and are probably not in agreement with your demonisation of smokers. Also, it may be that some other commenters on other blogs voted for my idea for fun, but it is also true, and something that you do not know, that a young man who is a relative of mine, put out the message to his friends on the internet to vote for my idea. They did not have to – they did it of their own accord. They did it because my relative suggested that they do. IS THIS AN ENORMOUS CONFOUNDER? Of course it is! In any study or survey, CONFOUNDERS can have an ENORMOUS effect.""

Anonymous said...

Furthermore, at no time did I state my full name in your blog comments. In the BT phone directory there are only 20 ‘J Watson’ s in the area in which I live (which you must know since you have been trawling various blogs for information about me) and only one specifically named. I may well, therefore, receive an amount of nasty correspondence. Now, it may be that your employees receive nasty correspondence, BUT THEY ARE PAID A SALARY! I am not. You should not have published my full name. The fact that, in a different context on a different blog, I told people who I was is no excuse.

Furthermore, you say that my ‘idea’ was a good idea. It was not. Everyone with any sense knows that THE PROFITS of tobacco companies are spread all over the world among the shareholders, many of which are pension funds in the UK of the very organisations which promote Tobacco Control. Do the BMJ pension funds have investments in Tobacco Companies? Have the BMJ pension funds EVER had investments in Tobacco Companies? When did that cease to be the case, if it has?

As for the HEALTH COSTS (of the enjoyment of tobacco) in my idea, I can only say that the idea of ‘Health Costs’ is ephemeral. The complexities are too great for proper science to come to any definite conclusion. The complexities of a mere three constituents in Electromagnetic Effects are huge - only THREE multivariables, the electric current, the electric field and the magnetic field – and no one has really bottomed it. It is obvious from the recently issued ‘Report of the Surgeon General 2010 re Smoking and Health’ that there are HUNDREDS of multivariables in the human genome - just too many multivariables to draw any specific conclusions. This fact cannot be hidden by bluster.

Also, IT CANNOT BE TRUE that you knew about my little wind-ups (the ‘propaganda’ thing) before you chose my idea to be one of the six contenders for the prize. Not even tobacco control zealots could come up with any sensible or logical reason for choosing an idea from a person who is ‘a known colleague of people on pro-smoking blogs’ when there are others to choose from (no matter how silly they may be).

Finally, it simply is not true that I, as a person who enjoys tobacco, have ever, in all my life, harmed in any way or caused the death of any other person in whose presence I have enjoyed my tobacco. Where is your proof? (And don’t say Roy Castle, because it is well known that Roy (God Bless Him) smoked cigars).

Sincerely,

Jwatso (aka Junican).""

Since the BMJ published my full name, it would not surprise me if there are not those fanatics who might try to get at me, but I HONESTLY SWEAR THAT I HAVE NEVER RAPED ANY SWEDISH PERSONS, EITHER MALE OR FEMALE, AND I ALSO SWEAR THAT I WAS ELSEWHERE AT THE TIME, M'LUD.

I am also posting this on Leg Iron and Frank D and Subro. I know that they are interested.

PT Barnum said...

So gratifying to see that the BMJ can be simultaneously slimey ("we knew it was a trojan horse all along") and vindictive (in revealing Junican's real name. It's always pleasing when someone lives down to your expectations of them.

As for exposing the medical industry for the "hippocrits" they have become, I'm inclined to think it's a non-starter since the entire British population seems wedded to some sentimental version of the glorious NHS, discounting even their own terrible experiences as somehow unusual.

Neal Asher said...

You've got my email, Leg Iron. Send me your address and I'll post you some tobacco seeds. I brought enough back from Crete to sow a few acres.

Take a look here:
http://theskinner.blogspot.com/2010/10/making-cigars.html

and here

http://theskinner.blogspot.com/2010/10/tobacco.html

Chief_Sceptic said...

Are the "ban everything" mendacious weasels getting more numerous, or just more frantic ? ...

The 'head-count' of - we are all doomed stories - or - everything is bad for you cries - seems to be increasing ! ...

Fuck every one of them ...

Anonymous said...

Yes the ritcheous the scare mongers and the manipulative are already falling foul of "chicken little syndrome.
The ppublic are growin more weary and cynical of it all day by day.
Their running out of sheeple.

dave chandler said...

A year ago I was diagnosed with pre type 2 diabetes,twice in subsequent consultations I have been asked if I smoked and said no as had given up 14 years ago,the nurse looked pensive when I said this and I was puzzled.I was due for another double test last September which was the last time I was asked if I smoked.Despite phoning to check when date available for the test I have been fobbed off with the surgery being behind with testing...for 3 bloody months,no way.Tomorrow I am going to phone and ask outright if this is because of surgery policy to make smokers second class.Are they paid per patient?if so then they are claiming under false pretenses and I will threaten to sue and go to the local papers.

Anonymous said...

So - The ugly gnarled LegIron persona is not as previously advertised.

The revelation was interesting.

Have a great Xmas and new year and best of luck with your upcoming published work.

Expat Brit living in Canada

Leg-iron said...

Junican - well said, and let's hope the smokophobe loonies stay away from you. I've linked to Frank in the next post because he's put your response into a post.

Leg-iron said...

PTB - to these people 'honour' is a dirty word. We really are up against utter filth here.

Leg-iron said...

Neal - will do. I have to sign out first because I set up that Email after I set up the blog and I can't be in two Google accounts at once.

Leg-iron said...

Chief Sceptic - they are running scared. The big 'Game Over' sign is ready to light so their desperation is showing.

They can feel the Grim Smoker nipping their heels.

Leg-iron said...

Anon- true, they are far past the boundary of 'credible' now and still they keep going. I think we should help them along.

Leg-iron said...

Dave - I think they are paid per patient but since I haven't been in nearly two decades I'm not sure.

Type 2 is manageable by diet without drugs. If you're only pre-type 2, check what you should be eating/avoiding.

The really nasty cynic in me suspects that they might want to increase the 'death by smoking' numbers because they really don't match what has been claimed. Then again, I write horror stories.

I have to wonder if I'm also living one.

Leg-iron said...

Expat Brit - I use a body double (not face, just body) for photos, to save on paying photographers for lens damage.

Did you enjoy the jolly tale?

smokervoter said...

Here's a sentence from the Hippiecratic Oath (portmanteau of ex-Hippie+Democrat) "In purity and holiness I will guard my boring life and my old 60's poster art."

Anonymous said...

Leggy

Yes, I enjoyed the short story. Also couldn't resist exploring the Romulus Crowe blog. Have heard about some paranormal events from others but never experienced anything credible firsthand. When much younger (teenage years) I participated in some Ouija board stuff in a Welsh Fish & Chip shop. Spirit-related responses to my questions did nothing to promote credibility although the concepts remain interesting in a "Third-Hand tobacco smoke" way.

All the best and many thanks for the brilliant and continuously informative entertainment.

Expat Brit

dave chandler said...

LI,if they are paid by patient then they are a fiddling lot.I lived in Aberdeeen for 4 yrs late 70s then moved back south.2yrs ago I had a vertigo attack while at a mates in Edinburgh and when able to walk went to local doctors,went to chemist with prescription and was asked address.Was told it was wrong as they still had me on books in Aberdeen,20 odd years coining it as all my records had been transferred south again.

banned said...

Missed this first time around. Well gone Junican and all who voted for his entry.

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