H/T Walt for this New Republic piece, The Lethality of Loneliness:
Just as we once knew that infectious diseases killed, but didn’t know that germs spread them, we’ve known intuitively that loneliness hastens death, but haven’t been able to explain how. Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking. A partial list of the physical diseases thought to be caused or exacerbated by loneliness would include Alzheimer’s, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer—tumors can metastasize faster in lonely people.
The relevance of this to smoking bans is that the ISIS survey showed that
Nearly half of all smokers reported that, since smoking bans had come into force, they saw less or much less of friends and family.
These people had got lonelier.
And I’m one of them. I hardly know anybody now. However, I still regularly see my brother and his family. And I’ve won myself a lot of friends all over the world by writing this blog. And I can’t say that I ever feel particularly lonely. That may be because I was living a relatively isolated life before the smoking ban, and so have got used to it. And I like my own company, and always have lots of things to do. The main thing I feel is profound anger at what’s been done to me and hundreds of millions of other people.
But I have no doubt whatsoever that smoking bans have brought profound loneliness to many millions of people. They have, after all, been “exiled to the outdoors”.
Loneliness varies with age and poses a particular threat to the very old, quickening the rate at which their faculties decline and cutting their lives shorter. But even among the not-so-old, loneliness is pervasive. In a survey published by the AARP in 2010, slightly more than one out of three adults 45 and over reported being chronically lonely (meaning they’ve been lonely for a long time). A decade earlier, only one out of five said that. With baby-boomers reaching retirement age at a rate of 10,000 a day, the number of lonely Americans will surely spike.
Obviously, the sicker lonely people get, the more care they’ll need. This is true, and alarming, although as we learn more about loneliness, we’ll also be better able to treat it. But to me, what’s most momentous about the new biology of loneliness is that it offers concrete proof, obtained through the best empirical means, that the poets and bluesmen and movie directors who for centuries have deplored the ravages of lonesomeness on both body and soul were right all along. As W. H. Auden put it, “We must love one another or die.”
Who are the lonely? They’re the outsiders: not just the elderly, but also the poor, the bullied, the different. Surveys confirm that people who feel discriminated against are more likely to feel lonely than those who don’t…
And of course smokers are bullied and discriminated against.
And it all goes to show, once again, that smoking bans have got nothing to do with health. After all, you don’t improve people’s health by making them stand outside in all weathers, and cutting them off from friends. And anyway, secondhand tobacco smoke is harmless. The research says so.
No, this is a piece of eugenic social engineering, designed to rid the human herd of undesirable social types like smokers, drinkers, and fat people. It’s no different from ridding society of homosexuals, Jews, and Gypsies. It is, in short, a piece of Nazi social engineering.
No, Tobacco Control is not trying to help smokers. It’s trying to eradicate them. And making them stand outside, and expelling them from society, is one way of doing that. The same goes with drugs like Chantix which encourage smokers to commit suicide.
Nobody should be too surprised that such a Nazi social engineering programme has been undertaken on a global scale. Eugenic thinking was not confined to Nazi Germany. It was a mainstream ideology in America and Britain as well. And it never went away. It just renamed itself as Public Health, and continued multiplying throughout the medical profession and elsewhere.
And it’s why there’s going to have to be a complete purge of Nazi doctors from the medical profession. And why Tobacco Control and the WHO must be destroyed.
And this will happen one day. And there will be Nuremberg trials as well. And hangings.
These new Nazis haven’t actually started herding ‘undesirables’ into gas chambers. but they would probably like to, and their ideology inexorably leads in that direction. After all, they’re trying to rid the world of particular kinds of people. And once you’ve set out to do that, the option of mass murder becomes inescapable. It’s where their logic leads.
It surprises me that so few people can see this. But then, people don’t believe that a Nazi era could ever be repeated. They think that it couldn’t happen all over again. That it’s impossible. And they continue to think it’s impossible even when they watch millions of their fellows being reviled and ‘exiled to the outdoors’ and viciously discriminated against. But Nazism never really went away.
I think the resurgent Nazis won’t succeed in their goal of ridding the world of ‘undesirables’. I think they’ve made themselves too many enemies. Add up all the smokers and drinkers and fat people in the world, and they probably make up the majority of humanity. The old Nazis made the same mistake. They bit off more than they could chew.
And also the new Nazis are collapsing the economies of the world, as they exile and expel more and more ‘undesirables’. And more and more people stay home and stop spending because they’re no longer welcome anywhere.
And in the process, more and more people are becoming aware just how thoroughly evil they really are, and that they must be stopped, and that they must be got rid of. Every single one of them. In a sort of reverse eugenic programme.
Frank Davis 
“Every single one of them. In a sort of reverse eugenic programme.”
It’s not eugenics Frank, reverse or otherwise; it’s vermin control…
The seriously, seriously big problem is how did the Zealots get away with using epidemiological studies which show negligible effects of SHS to actually BOOST their claims of SHS harm. We know how the trick was pulled, which was to arrive at an average of all studies of, say, an RR of 1.25, and then apply that RR to all the population who might be at risk, and then calculate a number of deaths. The trick was to take a minuscule risk which every single person shared equally, and then, somehow, create a crystallisation if those thousands of individual minuscule risks into one actual death. What has never been explained (and the same applies to the Doll Doctors Study) is why and how one particular individual should succumb to some disease while the rest do not.
What should have happened, as a result of Doll etc, is that efforts should have been made to find out what was DIFFERENT about those who succumbed. Instead, the Zealots managed to institute a POGROM designed to eradicate people who enjoy tobacco.
And STILL the medical profession is no nearer to finding out WHAT IS DIFFERENT.
Lovely post. Thank you.
I’ve wondered about that very thing a lot lately – if loneliness, or the desire to cast others out of ‘their’ crowd and make them go away isn’t a part of human nature, like hate, anger and fear…
I’ve always been the black sheep of the family, the artsy fartsy one in a crowd of rational, linear thinking engineer types. I’ve always asked ‘why’ when they seemingly just accept what’s handed out from everywhere else. I’m the only smoker in the group… Often, they love to go out of their way to make me seem irrelevant and feel isolated. They love to drop hints of all the things I could and should change in order to be accepted… Puzzling – I’ve never asked them to be otherwise – I don’t know why they feel compelled to change the way I see or approach life…
On the other hand, I have friends who love me as I am and don’t view any part of me as needing to be changed or isolated or overly riddled with flaws of any sort.
I think you’re right about the eugenics aspect – it’s clear that it is all social and physical engineering – nothing to do with health of anyone. I really do think they’d love to rid the world of anyone not willing to become a perfect drone. Free thinkers and non conformist really stir the shit up and they change things in ways not easily controlled. They question things, by nature. Of course the social engineers want them marginalized and expunged.
And loneliness is truly a part of that – in fact smoking bans, and pushing smokers outside is exactly that – making people excuse themselves from the group or any part of a social activity, in order to smoke. You choose isolation in order to smoke – or rather they chose it for you.
I’m glad that nature is much more powerful and creative than the human intellect – it always seems to win out and I’m certain that eugenecists will fail – in fact, maybe that’s exactly what they are – a narcissistic failure of human nature.
:)
New York City has become a great paradox to me. A city that once boasted of being tough, cool, unfazed by anything, accepting of everything, the natural home-away-from-home for eccentrics and isolatos (who would suddenly find a niche, and grab the rewards of eccentricity), has suddenly become so frightened, bovine, conformist. How does the character of a city morph? Is it Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphic resonance”? A worldwide contagion? Beats hell out of me.
Morphic resonance is a very good suggestion. But if that is true, we only need 100 smokers doing the same thing to change it :)
Something Rose replied a few days ago made me think.
I wish I still knew people to invite, I went to ground in 2007 and cut myself off from everything. Nobody seemed to understand what I was talking about, so instead of continuing to bore them, I removed myself.
It has been a long time since I have met up with the people I just used to know. This is due to that I no longer visit pubs and stay away from work dos. The people I term friends are the ones for whom smoking is not an issue, so we visit each other. One non-smoking friend designated the nicest room in her house (with a lovely fireplace!) as a smoking room as she thinks she would be a rude host if she does not cater for everyone; another has a bar room in her house and says: “a bar without ashtrays? What next???”
But my friends are people I met a long time ago; we talk and we help each other. Everything else is irrelevant.
Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking.
This probably suits tobacco control. The death of lonely people can be attributed to smoking.
They tell us all that without smoking we all live “10 years” longer, yet they haven’t got a clue what to do with the people who (having lived through a lot of smoking/passive smoking in the 50s, 60s, 70s etc.) already do that.
A sad fact of our times – common sense has to give way to fanatics………….
“One non-smoking friend designated the nicest room in her house (with a lovely fireplace!) as a smoking room as she thinks she would be a rude host if she does not cater for everyone;”
I wish, I had such friends. The only person, who invites me to smoke is my 99 year old neversmoking mother. She loves it.
Australia’s unannounced ‘totalitarian’ web filter causes alarm
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/17/australia-internet-block
“Australia’s government is under fire after it appears to have introduced web censorship without warning, expanding already-controversial powers to block access to child pornography into a wider web filtering system.”
Another lonliness inducing measure (lock them out) from the poster child government of the modern Nasties.
We should start to label them ‘Nasties’; they need a name that sounds exactly like what they are but without making the general public feel uncomfortable about using it (taking a leaf out of the Nasties’ book – slowly, slowly catchy monkey).
they need a name that sounds exactly like what they are
Shoggoth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoggoth
It might express the revulsion some of us feel.
‘Lovecraft writes them as massive amoeba-like creatures looking like they are made out of tar’. Would that be the tar that we’re told fills smokers lungs?
I was under the impression child pornography is illegal! I take it, the web sites are also illegal and therefore well hidden so not many people stumble across them.
In fact, why do these sites still exist? Perhaps the funds funneled to tobacco control should be put to better use!
The BBC has a solution to pornographic web sites. Educate 3 year olds about pornographic web sites. Just in case they use a computer or their smart phone.
I rest my case.
I don’t think they want to kill us. I think they simply don’t care. They won’t kill us, because – as they surely know – there are always more to rise up in our place when we die. And whatever we officially die of, they will say it is because we smoke. As I’ve said too many times before, what they want to do is continue to hide the true (and very profitable) reasons for the never-ending increase in cancers and other diseases,and promulgate the culture of self-blame.
I recently met someone I haven’t seen for years (always an anti-smoker) who told me his father had died of heart disease in his eighties. He said it had come as a shock since his father had been “very health-conscious”, and added: “But he was a heavy smoker all through his twenties – that’s what did it.”
The Tobacco Control lot have successfully filled the public’s head with garbage.
I think that people have a need to find some external cause when a loved one dies. I remember the death of my mother in law. She had terminal breast cancer. She was in hospital in her final days. My father in law was with her when she died. He called the nurses when she she breathed her last. Later he said to me, “If only the nurses had come quicker”
It must come as shock to so many kin of non smokers. Worse, it many cases they’ll never know what actually brought the illness on. Or rather, have an excuse. It’s so convenient to blame smoking – what the hell would they do in a tobacco free world? Probably take great offence when told most deaths and disease are still self inflicted.
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/05/18/can-think-yourself-well/?intcmp=features
When people are doing everything “right”—eating veggies, avoiding red meat and processed foods, exercising, sleeping well and so forth—we should expect them to live long, prosperous lives and die of old age while peacefully slumbering, right?
So why is it that so many health nuts are sicker than other people who pig out, guzzle beer and park in front of the TV?
Five years ago, I started working in an integrative medicine practice. My new patients were some of the most health-conscious people I’ve ever had the privilege to serve. Many of them ate a vegan diet, worked out, slept soundly each night and took vitamins every morning.
But some of them were also mysteriously sick, complaining of fatigue, aches, gastrointestinal disturbances and other symptoms.
My patients’ answers often gave me more insight into why they might be sick than any lab test or exam could.
They were unhealthy not because of bad genes or poor habits or rotten luck, but because they were lonely or miserable in their relationships, stressed about work, freaked out about their finances or profoundly depressed.
This is not “woo-woo” metaphysics here. The scientific evidence I have uncovered in major medical journals backs this up:
My patients’ answers often gave me more insight into why they might be sick than any lab test or exam could.
They were unhealthy not because of bad genes or poor habits or rotten luck, but because they were lonely or miserable in their relationships, stressed about work, freaked out about their finances or profoundly depressed.
I agree with this; non-stop stress and loneliness are the biggest killers.
That’s a fine mess the healthists are creating. They go on and on and on and on and on about ‘health’ and ‘bad habits’. People who quite happily led their lives feel coerced into joining some (at an expense, of course!) gym and find themselves taken over by ‘personal trainers’. The fact that they will ‘ease you in’ just in case your heart packs in causes in most cases panic and compliance. (I just told this personal trainer to get lost; if he would find me later on the floor, it would be a case of phoning either an ambulance or the undertaker, so what’s the big deal? The big deal was THE STRESS IT WOULD CAUSE TO THE STAFF AT THE GYM!!!!
Needless to visit was my only one to the gym. I refuse to stress about my heart, less even about some paid ‘personal trainer’. Being quite an active person, though, I tried bungee jumping instead. I found the latter far less stressful than the staff in the gym going on about “health”, although free fall scares the wits out of me.
Stress, loneliness, worries – all causes depression. For depression the medics can prescribe drugs, so we all should be ‘happy’. Except – we aren’t. But then, tobacco control surely will find some smoking related cause for depression. It makes me laugh.
Couldn’t agree more, Gary. Stress, whatever the reason, is the 900 pound Gorilla in the room, It’s the GREAT killer that most medical people just don’t talk about. Why? Because there is no pill or ban or whatever that can do anything about it. Few people handle stress well but those that do, I believe. live a long life no matter their life style or what they eat or whether they smoke or drink.
they have come up with a vaccine for that hah hah!
“But then, people don’t believe that a Nazi era could ever be repeated.”
But then, most people are terminally superficial, aren’t they? The old adage that “there’s more than one way to kill a cat” simply doesn’t resonate at a meaningful level. For most people if it isn’t dressed in jackboots, bearing a swastika banner and goosestepping its way down the High Street then it can’t possibly be Nazi ideology, or even anything which could be equated with it at any level. If it isn’t anti-Semitic then it can’t possibly be Nazi ideology. If people aren’t being physically herded into “shower blocks” ready to be eliminated with Zyklon-B, then it can’t possibly be Nazi ideology. When they say “It’ll never happen again,” that’s what they mean – because the true roots of Nazi ideology, the real evil behind it, consistently elude them – and in that respect they’re probably right. The new Nazis wouldn’t do anything so overtly similar this time around because, wicked though they may be, stupid they’re not.
The fact that the principles behind the ideology are identical, the methods used to convince, nay, enthuse, a easily-led public that their actions are the right thing to do are identical, and the end goal – elimination of “undesirables,” whether by well-organised mass murder or by killing them slowly and insidiously – is identical, is easily hidden from a gullible public beneath the simple expedients of a different target group, different outfits worn by the perpetrators and a faux-outraged (often suspiciously so) rebuttal of any use of the “N” word in connection with their activities.
And the majority of the unthinking public swallow it every time – hook, line and sinker – just like they did last time.
I dunno jax. Denying jobs, housing, medical care to smokers sounds a lot like the real thing to me. Banning smokers from all indoor and now outdoor public life. Same as Then. Overtly similar. Though of course you’re right that no Nazi ever thinks he’s a Nazi.
Marie– I am washing yams as I smoke.
This writer is a total abstainer. My BMI is 21, perfect even according to today’s new, sick standards. I never drank in my life and I “hate” the smell of alcohol, especially when I am eating my food. I dislike the irrational stupor of the drunk. I am “forced” to stay home on Saturday nights because of all that drinking and driving that is going on. Drinkers have a terrible breath. The world would be a better place without those idiots (some of them with disgusting, lardy bellies, too!) who often vomit and pee on themselves while they belch and howl about how much they love the smoke-free environment.