And the Debate was Over

I’ve actually got an e-cig, but I had a little contretemps with a vaper on Facebook last night. Here’s the exchange:

It ended there, with my permissions revoked. I’d checked midway through the exchange to see if he was already a friend of mine, and he wasn’t. So I don’t know how he did that.

It’s one of the reasons why I hesitate to include vapers among my Facebook friends: all too many of them are as big antismokers as anybody. Particularly if they’re ex-smokers.

But I thought the exchange was interesting, for all that. It allowed me to call into question that 400,000 figure, which clearly isn’t any sort of “fact” at all. I’m not sure how it’s arrived at, but it’s probably done by figuring out how many smokers in the USA on average die every year, and supposing all these deaths to be caused by smoking, and maybe adding in a few more for all the non-smokers who are supposedly felled by passive smoking. It will be a figure that is arrived at by assuming as fact what it is supposed to prove. It’s a piece circular reasoning which arrives at the answer that was first thought of.

Then he goes and googles the numbers, and makes an appeal to authority. To Google. To “respected organisations”. And that allowed me to ask if he believes everything he reads on Google, everything “authorities” tell him.

And then he pulls out the old standard “My grandfather/father/uncle/dog died from smoking”, which relies on the belief – acquired from the 400,000 “deaths” attested by “respected authorities” – that smokers are always and invariably killed by their own smoking. And so I ask: how do you know for sure that smoking killed them?

Interestingly, somebody else steps in and admits that maybe the figures are exaggerated, but so what. Which is a different and interesting line of argument.

But by then he’s getting really steamed up. And he tells me I’m crazy and a troll and a moron, and he goes looking to kick me off the thread (and succeeds pretty rapidly). And with that the debate was over.

Meanwhile I haven’t called him anything, and am not in the least bit steamed up at all. I’m just asking questions which he can’t answer. And he can’t answer because maybe nobody’s ever asked him questions like that before. And he can’t handle it. And so he ends the debate. And maybe he then goes and deletes the discussion, rewriting history to make it look like it never happened ( I have no way of knowing if he actually did and it seems he did).

It’s just like “the debate is over” on global warming (and plenty of other matters too). You believe and repeat unquestioningly a set of mantras of one sort or other. And you don’t know how to respond to having any of these questioned except by pulling out another mantra.

I guess it’s how religion works. You have a set of mantras or dogmas which everyone repeats, and the repetition re-enforces everyone’s convictions. The one thing you can’t have is anyone questioning these convictions, because that tends to break the spell. So you can’t allow debate. If anyone starts any sort of debate, you have to shout them down. Or revoke their permission to speak.

And it helps one helluva lot if you can have the media and the government repeating your mantras, and disallowing any debate about them.

And maybe religion like this is completely unstoppable. Or it remains unstoppable until the belief system – the set of mutually-re-enforced circular reasonings – collides with reality. Like when stopping smoking doesn’t cut the lung cancer death rate. Or rising CO2 levels don’t warm the planet. Or the Euro ceases to be a sustainable currency. And even then the belief system may just need to be slightly tweaked to limp onwards. The lung cancer epidemic is being driven by secondhand smoking. Global warming is being delayed by Chinese smog. EU rules can always be bent or broken.