Thinking Too Early In The Morning

H/T Mike F for William M. Briggs, on an encounter with an antismoker:

I had hit upon, quite by accident, The Argument, the one method of persuasion that has no counter, that works like garlic on vampires. If you enjoy it, it must be good. Not just as in it feels good, but that it is morally good because it feels good.

That set me thinking far too early in the morning to be good for me. Surely for self-denying antismokers, if something feels good, that’s the very best reason there is to condemn it and to suppress it?

And, aside from that, is something morally good just because it feels good? I’m sure that pickpockets must feel good when they successfully lift a wallet stuffed with large-denomination banknotes from someone’s back pocket. But does that make picking pockets morally good?

But anyway nobody has ever walked up to me and said that I shouldn’t smoke. It seems to happen regularly to other people, but not to me. Spectator columnist Rod Liddle wrote a few years ago about how someone had done that to him on a London street, and he’d just told them to fuck off. I hope I’d do the same.

The Mind-Your-Own-Business used to play strong. You did what you wanted, I did what I wanted, and with the usual provisos and within well known boundaries, as long we both kept to ourselves, we could still get along. We could even be friends.

But this idea is now dead. To modern moralists, everything is their business. And nothing makes them happier than telling people what to do.

Disagreement is not and cannot be tolerated.

We could even be friends… It follows that now that we can no longer get along, we can no longer be friends.

And that’s the conclusion that I’ve drawn about antismokers. We can’t get along. We can never be friends. You’re either on one side of all this, or you’re on the other, in what is a slowly emerging civil conflict, in which there’s no middle ground.

A link in one of the comments then took me to John Brignell’s review of MJM’s Tobakkocnacht, the first line of which I tripped over:

There is only one scientifically attested observation about tobacco, that there is a marked correlation between inhaling its concentrated smoke directly into the lungs and the development of cancerous growths in those delicate organs. Everything else you read about it is nonsense or, as we call it now, epidemiology. The great man who conceived the prospective study that led to that observation maintained his integrity to the bitter end and refused to lend his imprimatur to the waves of dodgy statistics that followed.

It reminded me immediately that the famous statistician Sir Ronald Fisher had managed to acquire the raw data from Doll and Hill’s 1950 London Hospitals study, and used it to show that the patients who inhaled tobacco smoke enjoyed a protective effect:

No particular importance need be attached to the test of significance. It disposes
at about the 1 per cent. level the hypothesis that inhalers and non-inhalers have the
same cancer incidence. Even equality would be a fair knock-out for the theory that
smoke in the lung causes cancer. The fact, however, and it is a fact that should have
interested Hill and Doll in 1950, is that inhalers get fewer cancers. and the difference
is statistically significant.

In short, the more concentrated the smoke, the fewer the cancers. Which is quite the opposite of the assertion in the first line. So not only is “everything else” nonsense, but so also is the “one scientifically attested observation.”

It’s all nonsense.

Anyway, once I’d got past that hurdle, the rest of the review was easy reading. I found little to disagree with.

The subtitle “The anti-smoking endgame” tells you much more about it: for this is the boastful claim being made by the proponents for the stage they have reached in their campaign. They have lied, lied and lied again to achieve their ends and have had the audacity to call their lies “science”. Along with their friends in the global warming campaign they have effectively brought the age of science to an end. They have achieved virtual control over the media and extra-governmental authorities (such as CDC and EPA) who have made blatantly fraudulent statistics deemed acceptable to the political class.

What we have these days is the simulacrum of science. The peer-reviewed papers have numbers and tables and charts and graphs. They look like science. But they are not science. Because the conclusions are drawn first, and then the data are collected to support the conclusions. The researchers are not interested in science, but in giving the appearance of being authoritative scientists whose word can be trusted, whether in respect of tobacco or carbon dioxide or anything else. They are interested in political power rather than scientific understanding. They were only ever pretending to be scientists so as to acquire the trappings of authority. In another era, they would have become priests or magicians.

The inevitable result, when people eventually realise that they’ve been duped, will be the complete collapse of public trust in science and scientists. Whereas once they believed everything they were told, people will cease to believe anything they’re told.

And why should they? Why, just because some research scientist publishes some peer-reviewed paper in some august journal, should anyone be obliged to believe it? And why should they be required to give reasons why they don’t believe it?  What’s wrong with simply saying, “I don’t believe it, that’s all.” Or, “I’ll carry on thinking what I used to think, thank you very much.”

Anyway Newton, Einstein, Watson and Crick, were not peer reviewed.

And all that before the clock struck noon.