Great Free Publicity

Guess what? Along with F2C and DP, I’m in the Guardian! With no comments permitted, natch.

Linda Bauld of Stirling University called the police last September when a pro-smoking blogger calling himself Frank Davis wrote that: “You should start worrying when bricks start getting thrown through your window or messages daubed on your door.”

Bauld should emigrate, Davis added, so she would be elsewhere “when your old university department gets torched and your old colleagues are strung up from lamp-posts.”

And aren’t I ever so thoughtful and considerate, to let these people know what’s going to be coming down the track, years before it actually happens?

Any organisation that sets out to vilify and degrade a quarter of the population, whether they are smokers or anybody else, is inviting big, big trouble for themselves.

Davis has said of Ash’s director Deborah Arnott that “I’d have had a hard time preventing myself from strangling Arnott on the spot and on camera, or bludgeoning her to death with a microphone stand.” He calls anti-smoking campaigners “Nazis” and has compared Arnott, to Hitler.

Well, it’s true. I would have a hard time. I hope I never get invited to debate with her. Probably won’t be now. Pity. But there was nothing to debate anyway.

And they are Nazis. They’re using genuine Nazi eugenic ‘science’ (Lickint, Muller, Schairer, Schoeniger, et al) to pursue the Nazi goal of demonising, excluding, and ultimately eradicating smokers, who are regarded as a kind of vermin no different from Jews or Gypsies or homosexuals. And they’re pursuing this goal using Nazi methods of state coercion and state-sponsored propaganda – the Big Lie -. And, like Nazis, they are a predatory organisation that steals from their victims, misappropriating their good name, their jobs, their homes, and their money.

If it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.

I know that Simon Clark doesn’t like calling them Nazis:

As for comparisons to Nazis, “As I have said many times, repeated references to a totalitarian regime that slaughtered six million Jews is inappropriate and embarrassing in relation to tobacco control. In terms of building support for our cause, it is entirely counter-productive.”

I agree it’s inappropriate. The historical Nazis demonised, persecuted, exiled, and ultimately murdered tens of millions of ‘undesirables’ within the confines of Europe. The modern Nazis are demonising, persecuting, and exiling hundreds of millions of ‘undesirables’ over the entire world. And this time there’ll be no hiding place. So the modern Nazis are actually far, far worse than their historical predecessors.  This time the holocaust is to be self-administered – using suicide drugs like Chantix and Zyban.

Anyway, my hit count has been maxing out since 7 pm when the Guardian piece appeared. It’s great free publicity. DP and F2C are probably experiencing the same. Thousands of smokers who’d never heard of any of us now have. Thanks a lot, Tobacco Control!

I’ll have to read the Guardian article carefully, but it looks to me like us bloggers have been getting under TC’s skin far more than we ever thought we did. They’ve been ringing the police every afternoon by the sounds of it. But then, since these people are frightened of tobacco smoke, they scare very, very easily. And they wouldn’t do anything like contact me, would they? No, of course not.  They head straight for the authorities, and dial 999.

There were of course the usual attempts to link people like me with Big Tobacco.

“…This is part of a deliberate attempt to misinform the public and politicians, denigrate our research and to harass, denigrate and undermine us as researchers.”

Bath University is to host a new website, TobaccoTactics.org, to monitor and counter moves by the industry and its supporters to fight control measures.

“When people make comments online, I sometimes wonder whether it is a real person or manufactured false identity. There are various front groups for the tobacco industry, and , I think, front individuals who post negative comments.”

She [Arnott] believes tobacco industry fears over plain packaging of cigarettes are linked to the apparent upsurge in vitriol and threats, although there is no evidence firms are in any way funding or connected to it.

Quite clever, isn’t it? You suggest several times that it’s all a deliberate misinformation campaign being run by Big Tobacco, and then finally say that there’s absolutely no evidence for any such thing.

It would be a bit like me saying that Deborah Arnott sleeps hanging by her clawed feet from her bedroom ceiling, …but that there’s absolutely no evidence for it.

Not yet, anyway.

It may not, however, just be the Guardian piece which has sent the hit count sky high. Last night’s piece on California’s Proposition 29 is at Number 2 on Google today. So I might be helping to prevent Stanton Glantz & co getting their thieving hands on another $750 million of smokers’ money. I bet that prospect exercises TC far more than anything else I may write.

P.S. Pat Nurse on this story.