Smoke tabs. Drink Beer.
Posted by sim-o
December 18th, 2009
A lie, by definition, is something you say which you know is untrue. (The Iraq Inquiry may provide the right label for Tony Blair’s misleading statements.)
The vaguer category of ‘dishonest’ applies to all sorts of official statistics, as presented by the Government, in policing, immigration etc.
But how do you classify claims that are obviously false but are being provided by those who are apparently too stupid to understand them?
After an intro like that, whatever you say afterwards needs to be bulletproof. Unfortunately it doesn’t start well for Andrew Alexander. The first bit of gobbledegook is…
Smoking is an interesting area because the figures – intended to make your flesh creep – must be, by definition, false.
We are told that smoking ‘costs’ the National Health Service £1.7bn, or maybe £5bn. They are not just guesswork, they are patently contrary to common sense.
What definition of the figures? Why must they be false? They could be, but why ‘must’ they be? What are the real figures, then?
Andrew doesn’t say. The only figures Andrew quotes are the two numbers are in the above quote. He doesn’t say how much tax is raised from tobacco or anything mention any other numbers apart from the number 12 – the number of years he once gave up for.
We are told that smoking is a cause of lung cancer and heart disease and other potentially lethal disorders.
That may well be so.
But if smoking leads to premature deaths, it obviously saves the NHS money, since it is in old age that the cost of medical attention soars.
If we could all arrange to die at retirement age, the NHS would save an awful lot of money.
The whole article is written like this. I can just picture this guy sat tapping out this article in a dark room with his tinfoil hat on, curtains closed so ‘they’ can’t see what he’s up to. A cigarette with a long ash burning down in an ashtray filling the room with it’s blue smoke.
The problem is that not everyone just drops down dead. for many smokers, the unlucky ones that don’t die all of a sudden, death is a slow lingering one, full of respirators and pills and pain and pacemakers and amputations and transplants and regular visits to hospital and the gentle decline into a physical state that belies a persons real age.
All that care costs money. Money that is being prematurely spent on someones health.
Moreover, smoking is an appetite suppressant and may therefore reduce obesity, which is certainly a cause of heart disease, and other disorders, costing the health service an awful lot of money.
Smoking is not an appetite suppressant. If it was, you’d never see a fat person with a fag, would you? Obesity may be a cause of heart disease, but smoking causes lots of diseases too and also makes you lethargic, contributing to, yes obesity.
An outright lie is also included in the anti-smoking campaign.
Tobacco manufacturers have to warn purchasers that, among other things, ’smoking kills’.
If one said that prussic acid kills, it would be true. A more honest statement would be that tobacco can kill. Only the illiterate or mentally idle will fail to see the difference.
Only a pedantic denialist would bring it up.
Alas, there is something about smoking which damages the mind – of anti-smokers. Normal as they may be in other respects, they rave and rant about tobacco.
Anti-smokers, the ones that rant and rave, are generally ex-smokers. The reason they are so passionate is because i) in the back of their mind they are still addicted and the best form of defence for their will power is attack, or ii) they know first hand what being a smoker, the nasty side of smoking, is all about or iii) reasons i & ii together.
[Duncan] Bannatyne apparently had great trouble giving up many years ago. So he wants others to suffer, too.
Poor chap! I am sorry he found it so hard.
Andrew Alexander gave up too, for 12 years, but found it so easy, and had so much free cash and didn’t mind the smell or the panicky feeling of nearly running out of baccy in the middle of the night, that he went back to it. Oh, my mistake. he blames writers block.
I would watch a fellow pipe smoker as he sat down to do the same, slowly and thoughtfully filling his pipe (an art you have to master), finally lighting up and allowing that slow upward drift of the curling smoke.
Nice bit of romanticising there, eh?
Sensibly, I returned to the habit. Pipe-smoking is a very ruminative process. It creates the right spaces and pauses for a writer.
Smoking creates the spaces and pauses because the smoker is thinking about smoking, not writing. A non-smoker, goes for a walk or makes a cup of tea.
But we have not finished with the statistics yet. Second-hand smoke is claimed to cause many deaths and is the basis for tyrannical curbs on offices and pubs.
Finished with the statistics? I didn’t realise we had started with them.
This figure is arrived at by guesswork, inspired by hysteria, and masquerades as scientific ‘proof’ – a process which characterises our age.
If smoking isn’t as bad as Andrew says, and it is all assertion and opinion in this piece, then I would like to know if Andrew encourages and approves of his children, or if he doesn’t have any, his young relatives, smoking. If his son started smoking at, say, sixteen, would he slap him on the back and say ‘good decision, lad, you’ll really enjoy smoking. It’s great’.
Categories: Healthcare | Tags: openly ignorant, smoking
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Tim Ireland, mailwatch. mailwatch said: New Post: Smoke tabs. Drink Beer.: A lie, by definition, is something you say which .. http://bit.ly/5FWmJl #media #dailymail [...]
I love the way he styles himself a “writer” and yet he “writes” for the M*il. I can play “Chopsticks” but I wouldn’t assume to call myself a pianist.
Top notch blog BTW.
‘Moreover, smoking is an appetite suppressant and may therefore reduce obesity, which is certainly a cause of heart disease, and other disorders, costing the health service an awful lot of money.’
THAT comment is a particularly stupid and dangerous one to make, considering how many teenage girls start smoking because they think it will help them lose weight.
Besides, isn’t there quite a big difference in the dangers associated with pipe smoking and cig smoking? You generally don’t inhale the smoke from a pipe for one.
So this bloke believes that smokers all die prematurely and save the NHS loadsa money? He should have seen my stepfather – a 40-a-day man right to the end of his life.
First, he developed a leg ulcer which wouldn’t heal. He spent over a year doing little but sit in his armchair with this disgusting stuff oozing down his leg and into towels on the floor. A nurse visited every day to change the dressings; frequent visits to doctors and several hospital visits were unable to cure the ulcer so he eventually had the leg amputated.
He carried on smoking. Within six months an ulcer appeared on the remaining leg and the daily nurse visits and weekly doctor visits resumed as before. He carried on smoking as before. He would have lost that leg also, if the ulcer hadn’t eventually turned septic and killed him. He was 84 when he died.
Ooh, the fortune he must have saved the NHS by smoking and dying quickly at a young age! /sarcasm
I should have said that my stepfather’s leg ulcers were the direct result of his smoking, and that he was continually told that, by everybody.
“claims that are obviously false but are being provided by those who are apparently too stupid to understand them”
“guesswork, inspired by hysteria, and masquerades as
scientific ‘proof’”
Now where have I seen that sort of thing before? Oh yes, The Daily Mail!
“figures – intended to make your flesh creep – must be, by definition, false”.
I will bear that in mind the next time I see a DM article.
[...] got a new post up at Mailwatch. Some cunt thinks smoking is good and that smokers do the NHS a favour by dropping down dead [...]
I don’t understand what this article is trying to achieve.
It’s partly a rant against the anti-smoking lobby, but it doesn’t actually question the basic assertion that smoking is very bad for your health.
Other than that it’s a motley collection of unconnected ‘facts’ in favour of and even romantisising smoking.
The idea that resuming smoking after 12 years can ever be described as “sensible” is plainly idiotic (unless you’ve only got months to live so you might as well enjoy it). Perhaps he did it just to spite the anti-smoking lobby.
Has AA been thrown out of somewhere for smoking? Or is the tobacco industy employing him? Or perhaps he’s just cracking up (all those years writing articles he knew were misleading because he was leaving out any facts that didn’t fit).
A bizarre article even by DM standards.
in fairness, since smokers DO tend to die younger and thus replace the diseases of extreme old age with the diseases of extreme smoking, the *concept* that dying over the course of 5 years from emphysima at age 50 is potentially less costly to the NHS than dying aged 80 (following two bouts of pneumonia, a hip replacement, and 6 weeks of end-of-life intensive care) is plausible. Doesn’t make it obvious, or true, but there may be some merit in re-examining the claims. But as a doctor, an experienced statistician or a heavily researched piece of investigative journalism. With, y’know, citations. and references to studies.
but who needs research when you can resort to Common Sense? after all, Common Sense gave us Trepanning, witch burning and the healthful effects of the radium water enhancer!
So if the generous soul claims that his habit is doing us all a favour by killing him early why doesn’t he just book a flight to Zurich as soon as possible?
It would be easier to take this site seriously if it went after ALL newspapers which publish lies (Daily Mirror springs to mind) and not just right wing ones
There are sites that deal with other newspapers and there are also sites that deal with the print press in general, but this one, as the name suggests on watches the Mail.
It would be easier to take you seriously if you had bothered to use a proper name and email address.
WOW. The sad thing is that he’s receiving positive feedback in the comments – one person even said the article was “balanced”.
“THAT comment is a particularly stupid and dangerous one to make, considering how many teenage girls start smoking because they think it will help them lose weight” – Mr Mordon,
Yes, the only thing that prevents me being a more regular visitor to this site is that its educated, liberal writers seem to have an even lower opinion of us stupid, ignorant, worthless, disgusting, ticking timebomb, NHS-wrecking, candy-stealing fatties than even the Mail itself. And with at least three fat panic scare stories a day, not to mention the that really does take some doing. I’d expect a blog which does an otherwise admirable job of calling out bigotry, illiberalism and the lazy reliance on stereotypes to maybe apply a little more analysis before taking the media’s assertions about the ‘obesity epidemic’ and its effects at face value – I’d recommend Paul Campos’ ‘The Obesity Myth’ and maybe Gina Kolata’s ‘Rethinking Thin’ as a 101, and go from there – but then maybe I’m being unreasonable, since it would appear that one of the few things that transcends distinctions of Left and Right in this country (albeit for entirely different reasons) is a shared contempt for and desire to eliminate The Obese.
“not to mention the that really does take some doing”
Was meant to read ‘not to mention the endless tales of celeb weightloss and gastric origami’ – blame morbid obesity of the typing finger for hitting ‘Comment’ too soon…
“Yes, the only thing that prevents me being a more regular visitor to this site is that its educated, liberal writers seem to have an even lower opinion of us stupid, ignorant, worthless, disgusting, ticking timebomb, NHS-wrecking, candy-stealing fatties than even the Mail itself.”
Any examples of this Richie? I’ve just searched the forum and found precisely 8 mentions of the words obese, obesity and fat out of the thousands of posts on there and if you put this into google (obese site:www.mailwatch.co.uk) there’s only one nasty comment about obese people and that’s from someone calling themself White Supremacy and who is obviously a far right sympathiser.
Look, I like this site a lot – but nothing you say will reverse the fact that smokers contribute three times as much in tax revenue as the NHS spends treating them.
i had an ulcer last year because i am fond of skipping meals and working too hard. it was quite painful:~-