The Nanny State Stikes Again

This one's for you Historian - Smoke happy Italy bans smoking!
Italy Bans Smoking

 

Cheers Drache,
Don't believe in giving my much-maligned blood pressure a fighting chance, do you?!

 

Well, it will improve without all the second hand smoke!!

 

Doesn't NY city have a 'no smoking' ban?
Read this is the local newspaper. Macy's Dept. store in New York decides not to display anything with the 'C'word [Christmas]. I never knew Christmas was a dirty word.
Not just NY,either.Some public schools banned "Silent Night" and other carols at any school sponsered event.In another state, the school board banned students from distributing religous Christmas cards.In Texas, one school district tried to prohibit 'red and green'sweaters.
My favorite one, in California Gov.Schwarzenegger said "the state hoiday tree will be called a Christmas tree while he is in office". Kinda made me teary eyed.

 

Yeah, it's been a couple of years now - I think most people have gotten used to it (except I see smokers huddled outside freezing in the winter). As for the U.S., I think we're in trouble when I can see people getting murdered on TV, blood and gore - but "they" freak when we see a breast flash at the Superbowl

 

Well, the Scottish Parliament was in an uproar yesterday.
Apparently, someone actually read the proposed anti-smoking legislation and had kittens.
It's worded to the effect that it also bans the burning of smoke-producing incense etc in religious places, which are included in the smoking ban. It seems the baby-boomers running Scotland have been listening too much to their own propaganda about "religion being in decline"!
They are now facing a major (and embarrassing) rewrite because the arrogant jobsworths just assumed that no-one would dare argue with them.
Know the really annoying bit though? An election is due this year, Labour have no chance of losing in Scotland regardless of what they do, because most of the people who are whinging about them now are brainwashed to the point of thinking it's both illegal and immoral to vote for any other party.

[ 17. January 2005, 03:53 PM: Message edited by: The_Historian ]

 

Exactly "what" are they smoking?

 

The second-hand smoke from the incense candles.....apparently.
See, this is what all the zealots forget in their rush to rule everyone else's lives. They write legislation with phrases like "protecting people from second-hand smoke"...then don't bother explaining that they only mean TOBACCO smoke. So of course, some non-entity gets to interpret the "law" exactly the way THEY want to, safe in the knowledge that the ambiguity of the wording protects them from having to justify their stupidity in court.
God, my blood pressure. I'm getting too old for this soapbox stuff....

 

Another day, another soapbox.
The Scottish Parliament is pressing ahead with plans to teach sex education to kids as young as six, despite a storm of protest from the leader of Scotland's Catholics.
Apparently, this brainstorm will teach them how to be better citizens...in the country with Europe's worst rate of teenage pregnancies.

 

Say wha? 6 year olds/sex? - I gather there's going to be a lot of giggling in class ...
Talk about uber-government.

 

I was watching a movie last week about Catholic nuns in Ireland who took in "wayward women" and forced them to do laundry and fed them mush. It said in the movie the last one was closed in the late 90's. The movie was called "The Magdalene Sisters", it did not give a good image of the Catholic church and the nuns and priests who ran it.

I know you are from Scotland Gordon but do you know about this practice and how true the movie was ? I don't know much about the Catholic church or Ireland. The movie made them look like they were slaves.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318411/

I hope you have seen the movie and can tell me how accurate it is. It seems too bad to be true in modern times but who knows ?!

[ 24. January 2005, 09:27 PM: Message edited by: TA152 ]

 

Hi TA,
From what I remember, that movie was based on a true story not that far back in the past.
It was common practice in the '60s to "persuade" single mums to give their babies up for adoption to spare them the shame ( ) -a British MP was one of them, and was reunited with her son last year.
Trouble is, someone read the contemporary legislation recently and discovered that these women had a legal right to KEEP their babies. The authorities had no right coercing them in the first place.
I seem to remember a similiar case not that long ago concerning British orphans sent to Australia in the '50s and '60s. Can't remember all the details though.

 

The part I was wondering about is were the women really locked up and forced to do laundry so the nuns could collect money for themselves ? It seems like that part is more illegal than taking their babies from them. ( I seem to be off course from the smoking theme but when you mentioned sex and the Cathloic church it reminded me to ask someone about the accuracy of the movie.)

Looks like you are moving up in the world ! Look at that new medal !!

 

I know! Shiny, innit?!

The thread is designed as more of a soapbox forum generally, than just for the smoking debate TA. Feel free to shout the odds yourself!
Some parts of the film were probably artistic licence, but hopefully not all of it.

 

( Yes - congrats on the 'gong', Gordon ! We'll have to arrange a suitably humiliating ceremony..... )

 

What-AGAIN?!!

Cheers martin!

 

Well, in the US, there's in depth sex education by age ten, and that leads to quite the giggles. I doubt Britain's teen pregnancy rate is near as bad as the US, in my own state there are kids as young as 13 getting pregnant. And worse, the only choices they see are aborting him or her ord dumping the baby in a dumpster after the birth.

 

13? Wasn't Juliet that age when she married Romeo and slept with him?

Well, if that teen-pregnancy rates are the rule, then why is such a heated debate to give those kinds free condoms when it is more then proved that this single action dramatically decreases AIDS and pregnancy?

I not long ago was in high school, a Catholic one with very few sex education, and believe me, teens don't need encouragement to have sex, they need to learn how to do it responsibly! Better encourage them safely rather than keep them in a very dangerous state of sin-free ignorance.

Is it immoral to give free condoms and a lot of sex education to African teenagers because it may encourage them to have sex at early ages? Perhaps, but what about 60% of the children of the entire continent having AIDS? Does it count? What if millions of free condoms had been distributed among the population some years ago?

I know how teenagers think, I was one until two years ago… I know friends who started their sexual life at 13 or 14 and didn't used protection because:

1) They didn't know they needed protection.
2) They were ashamed or couldn't afford to buy some condoms at the pharmacy.
3) If they had protection, they didn't know how to use it.

If you give a teenager a condom and teach him how to use it, that automatically attracts a girl (or boy, why not) towards him and causes sexual intercourse? Ha! I bet most of us would like if it was that easy…

But if the boy knows that without a condom sex can produce a baby or cause him a very disgusting or fatal decease, he'll think twice before he dares even to think 'sinfully'.

Give them the knowledge and give them the plastic. They'll do the rest. But don't try to make them chaste and keep the protection out of reach because it simply won't work: remember the 1920s and the try to ban sinful alcohol forever?. The difference between whisky and sex is that sex can spoil two human lives forever or kill many thanks to AIDS.

"O tempora, o mores!" Cicero would say: a different moral for each time…

P. S. Sex education at 6 is yet too early, though… but 10-11, just before puberty is more than OK, I think.

 

Hmm,
I still think that saying no (whether that's trendy or not)is a million times more effective than any contraception.
Two areas of Scotland-Fife and Glasgow-listened to the trendies and dished out free morning after pills to girls as young as 13. Both areas now have scarily high teenage pregnancy rates to burden the welfare state with, as the latter is currently too busy crusading against smoking as the latest threat to civilisation.
I find it strange that the medical authorities in Britain are always in favour of the methods you suggest, but then go on public record to warn that venereal diseases are at an all-time high. And our media is so full of brain-washed Liberals who either can't or WON'T draw a connection, and ask awkward questions as to why that should be!
I endured trendy teaching methods and ideas in the '70s Freddie...I'll die before I let them inflict the same BS on MY kids. I don't believe all this "they're-going-to-do-it-anyway-so-let's-help-them" crap; that might be true of the middle classes, but they are NOT in the majority outside larger cities.
Any kid I've ever met took a perverse delight in doing the complete opposite of what all the "experts" cheerfully predicted they would.
There I go, showing my working-class roots again...

[ 25. January 2005, 07:08 PM: Message edited by: The_Historian ]

 

Well, indeed. Condoms have a 1% margin of risk (which increases due to ignorance about its use and handling) whilst sexual abstinence is 100% effectiveness without margin of risk.

However, in nowadays world (in fact, in this world throughout all its ages) it is naïve to think that pre-marital sexual relations until marriage and promiscuity can be stopped and banned from this earth.

I am not criticising the fact of sexual abstinence (the most effective anti-pregnancy and anti-AIDS method) being encouraged, on the contrary, I applaud it. But I find completely idiotic and irresponsible to try to impose abstinence and at the same time forgetting about practical precautions. Whilst there's argueing all over the world about whether it is 'morally correct' or not to teach sex education and providing condoms, thousands and thousands of teenagers get AIDS and/or get pregnant every day. The cost of such argument is damned too high. Better ACT NOW, rather than facing Africa's actual situation in 30 years.

I'm not morally liberal, I'm bloody practical.