I’m still thinking about Mandy’s boyfriend. The one who asked me for a light in the pub garden, and then sat down and said, “I’ve quit.” Mandy was going to kill him if she found out that he’d been smoking, and he was going to have to buy some mints to disguise his breath.
I wonder if it worked? Maybe it didn’t? Maybe, with the first peck on the cheek from him, she caught the unmistakable stench of tobacco smoke, and recoiled away, coughing and spluttering. And so she got a broom from the broom cupboard, and used it to kill him there and then.
She’s probably just finished burying him in the back garden, and already has found a replacement for him.
The trouble with Mandy’s boyfriend, I’ve been thinking, was that he was simply too nice. He wanted people’s approval, and he’d do anything they asked to gain it. He was a doormat. And now the doormat had been thrown out and buried in the back garden – and replaced by a brand new doormat.
Most smokers are nice, friendly, sweet people. And if you ask them to step outside to smoke, they’ll do just that. And if you then tell them to not just step outside, but to walk 50 yards outside before they light up, they’ll do that too. And if you then tell them to walk 50 yards outside, and put on a dunce’s hat before they light up, they’ll do that as well. And so on. And with each humiliation, the smokers’ self-esteem drops another notch or two.
I know what it’s like. Something very like that happened to me a long time ago. I was aged about 15. Everybody liked me. Or everybody used to like me. But now I was finding myself coming under attack from a few people. And I didn’t know why. And so I responded by being even nicer to the people who were attacking me. But somehow or other that didn’t do any good. They only got nastier. They only got more and more mean and abusive. And my self-esteem started to tumble. My friends drifted away from me.
I’ve told this story before somewhere. But the long and the short of it was that I learned to stop being so nice, and started to get nasty. First I stopped being nice to my bullies. And then I started to resist them a little bit. And finally I started to attack them. And attack them out of the blue.
I was standing near one of them once, and he was talking happily about something to a couple of other people, and I was listening, waiting for a chance. And then I stepped in and landed a brutal insult on him. His face fell a mile. He looked like he’d been hit by a brick. And I was delighted. I was cock-a-hoop.
And I never had any trouble out of him again.
The same thing is happening to smokers today as was happening to me over 50 years ago. We’re witnessing large scale bullying. We’re seeing bullying on a global scale. Tobacco Control is a whole army of bullies, stomping all over the world.
And smokers wonder what they did to deserve this. And they try to be nice. But it has no effect, and it only makes TC nastier.
Smokers are going to have to stop being so nice. They’ve got to start to get nasty. They should stop treating their enemies with a respect they don’t deserve.
I know that’s going to be hard. Because I can still remember how hard it was for me to stop being so nice, and to start getting nasty. I really didn’t want to be nasty. I found it very, very difficult. I could only manage it by slow degrees. It wasn’t too hard to stop being so nice. But it was much, much harder to get nasty.
My uncle Francis, after whom I’m named, was a nice guy. I keep a photo of him on my mantelpiece, and his sunny niceness oozes out of it. And he was also someone who’d had to learn to get nasty. He’d had to learn to be very, very nasty. He’d had to learn how to climb into a Spitfire and shoot at other planes and kill their pilots. You don’t get much nastier than that. And I bet he found it hard, because he was a nice guy. But he did the right thing. He did what he had to do.
I’ve never met Deborah Arnott or Linda Bauld or Stanton Glantz or any of the other bastards in Tobacco Control. But if I did chance upon them, I wouldn’t be nice to them. I wouldn’t be polite and deferential.
I’d attack. I’d walk straight up to Deborah Arnott and call her a poisonous little shit to her face. Because that’s what she is. That’s what they all are.
And if I was feeling sufficiently nasty, I’d spit in her face as well.
And if I’d got up to Spitfire pilot levels of nastiness, I ‘d put my foot on her scrawny neck as I drove a wooden stake through her rotten stinking heart – assuming she’s got one.
Smokers are going to have to stop treating these people nicely. They’re going to have to stop according them respect they don’t deserve. They’re going to have to learn to be nasty.
And I think smokers are going to get nasty. Because if they haven’t yet learned the lesson I learned 50 years ago, they sooner or later will. Maybe, like me, they’ll only learn it when their self-esteem has dropped to near-zero.
They won’t just get nasty with Deborah Arnott. They’ll get nasty with bullying doctors and dentists. They’ll get nasty with any antismoker they encounter. They’ll get nasty to their MP who voted for the smoking ban.
They’ll get nasty with pretty much everybody.
Frank Davis 
“They’ll get nasty with any antismoker they encounter.”
In the nicest possible way, of course! ;=})
OK, I was thinking of Kenny Everett best possible taste
Well I make it very clear to everyone I know and on forums that I think that smokerphobia utterly unacceptable. It would not need a particularly large number of people to do the same to cause a sea change of attitudes. The problem is that most people are not very well equipped to deal with the anti-smoking hate memes. That is why we need our own memes, “smokerphobia” is a good one because it is obvious what it means and I use it more and more. “The anti-smoking industry is …” is also good and in more informed circles “The tobacco control industry is …”. In addition I am happy to fight fire with fire, for example, if someone someone tries to infer that smokers put their children at risk by smoking in the home (SIDS for example) then point out that many more children could be at risk by not smoking in the home because “According to an IARC study the children of smokers are about 20% less likely to get lung cancer than the children of non-smokers”. They use hate memes we need memes in self deference. Memes are powerful and can travel far and wide.
Reblogged this on Contra la ley "antitabaco".
I agree it is time for smokers to get assertive and push back against persecution. This requires exposing tobacco control’s fradulent foundation of lies. It also demands smokers assert their political clout at the voting booth and lobby the political establishment to reject the bullying.
We need a smokers’ boot camp- learn to stand up for yourself and get nasty! I know I could use it.
By a VAPER! http://vapingpoint.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/the-wolf-in-sheeps-clothing-tobacco.html
She is one of the few prominent vapers who has always supported smokers, because she understands what Tobacco Control actually is. It’s a shame more vapers don’t have her appreciation of the monstrous scam that is Anti-Smoking.
the monstrous scam that is Anti-Smoking.
Yes, we’re up against a mind-bogglingly massive scam, replete with wide-ranging implications as to what a sinister entity modern States and economies have evolved into globally (think about it: nothing short of a regular integration of State and economy could have pulled this one off!).
Sort of a turning point for me was reading the last paragraph of one of Frank’s posts three and a half years ago: “It’ll be the story of the century: how unscrupulous knighted doctors and university researchers and established politicians and large industries colluded for over half a century to construct the most gigantic scam in the entirety of recorded human history. The mass media will be able to live off the shock and horror of it for decades. And politicians will be able to build reputations around bringing the malefactors to justice. And they’ll be asking: How were we all fooled for so long?”
Up till that time it was only very gradually dawning on me that 2nd-hand smoke danger couldn’t be some white lie that had been grafted onto a major and vital scientific discovery in order to better drive the point home for the hoi polloi. I now know this interpretation was beyond ludicrous and that the whole thing, far from being a white lie, is blacker than the blackest of so-called smoker’s lungs.
As a matter of fact, that’s how Antis got about their way, and that’s how those ill-fated social justice idiots manage – they get nasty, throw a tantrum, cry like a little baby, and people seek to appease them. I don’t think there’s much need to go to such lengths, but as it is, saying no, standing your ground, and practising civil disobedience, calling people out on their BS and refuting them, one at a time, is helpful. I myself have convinced quite a few people that all they were told about smoking is utter nonsense. A med student won’t talk to me anymore because she was out of arguments.
This is a very nice article, and a much needed one. Smokers often ARE too nice and too willing to forfeit their rights.
The trouble with getting nasty is that in many cases, the immediate bullies are friends and family. Nastiness towards them is not an option. As a result, some smokers feel themselves boxed in. So eventually, oozing guilt and dripping with self loathing they behave exactly as the behaviourists want. That is, they jump into the arms of their tormentors and try to prove themselves worthy by joining in the bullying as vehemently as they possibly can.
Knowledge is power, from a virtually standing start we have built up a lot of ammunition and can refute any argument that is raised against us and do it with a confident smile.
In fact, I enjoy doing it enormously and welcome the opportunity both online and in real life. I’ve had some wonderful conversations with total strangers, “do you mind if I smoke?” is my cue, I get out my cigarette case and join them, I can answer all their questions, give them a brief history and leave them smiling and with renewed confidence. It’s just like breaking a spell.
Confidence trick
“It is essential that campaigners create the impression of inevitable success. Campaigning of this kind is literally a confidence trick: the appearance of confidence both creates confidence and demoralises the opposition.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2006/jul/19/health.healthandwellbeing
Thanks for the tip, Debs. : )
With hired guns like Arnott there’s no other option than to get nasty. But with the rest of the people I think it’s best to get them to understand the scam that TC is. And that smokers are not some dumb pathetic addicts like TC portrays them but normal people.
Yes, I’ve been wickedly nasty on occasion, except, as Tony said, with relatives who once took me by surprise. I just never went back there again. But, getting off the smoking issue, I think there’s something broader going on with Mandy’s boyfriend.
In a column in last Sunday’s Times, Hillary was going on about how it was sexism that defeated her. And referring to it later that nite, a talking head (male) said that Trump represented a kind of outdated throwback image of masculinity that appealed to the deplorables –an image he snidely implied was passe and of which he was not mourning the passage.
And there, perhaps, you have it. The new male ideal has been defined (by women and the general culture) as closer to Obama–a well-groomed, thoroughly henpecked Hamlet. (the guy who quit smoking on Michelle’s demand in exchange for her “permission” to “let him” run for president; who joked about eating cheeseburgers on the sneak.) Or Kerry, who dove so deep into “nuance” he couldn’t come up with a declarative sentence, and apparently said “Yes, dear” to the Iranians. This is not to defend Trump as in any way a positive avatar of maleness, but just to observe that it seems as tho men are being tamed by the culture and the women who ferociously boast of being “nasty.”
I read a similar thing yesterday in Quartz:
Bordo’s central premise, she explains, is “that the Hillary Clinton who was ‘defeated’ in the 2016 election was, indeed, not a real person at all, but a caricature forged out of the stew of unexamined sexism, unprincipled partisanship, irresponsible politics, and a mass media too absorbed in ‘optics’ to pay enough attention to separating facts from rumors, lies, and speculation.” For her part, Hillary knew, from decades of sexist attacks on her character, that she had to stay focused on the issues, even if that meant she was criticized for not being a showman on the debate stage. As a Vox language analysis of Clinton’s speeches shows, Hillary spoke primarily about policy and abstained from personal subjects, save the few heartfelt moments in her viral “Humans of New York” post: “I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk.”
Viewed through a gender lens, the presidential election was nothing less than a manifestation of the America’s ongoing gender war, magnified to mythic proportions
I thought the article above was complete tosh. What I’ve got against Hillary Clinton is that she’s an antismoker, not that she’s a woman. If I’d had a vote, that’s why I’d have voted against her. The US left seems to me to be fighting old battles from the era of the 60s and 70s. Civil rights. Women’s rights. Gay rights. They may as well be continuing to campaign against slavery and English tyranny. Perhaps they are? They campaign on behalf of the old excluded and reviled minorities. They’re oblivious to the new excluded and reviled minorities, perhaps because they’re usually responsible for their exclusion. They’re all still stuck in the 60s. The events of that decade framed their outlook back then, and continue to frame it today.
Hillary Clinton had arranged for a real glass ceiling to be shattered on her election last year. This always struck me as an empty gesture, because there have been countless numbers of women who had already broken glass ceilings before her, including Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, Angela Merkel, Gold Meir, and many many more. It was just that Hillary Clinton had never broken the glass ceiling herself. It wasn’t about glass ceilings: it was about vain, egotistical Hillary Clinton and her immense sense of entitlement.
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First I stopped being nice to my bullies.
My own school days were a nightmare and genuinely traumatic to the point that even now I still have nightmares about them 35 years or so after. Mainly because I was not only the fat middle class RP speaking, NHS specs wearing kid in the class but a right ‘know it all’. I’ve probably said this before here that for me personally the answer was Violence. Not insults. And so much violence it shocked the bullies. Two of my tormentors landed in hospital. The worm turned. You laugh at me , I parboil your head or fracture your skull with the heaviest lump of something i can find. Always with a weapon and always from behind. Always ‘if one blow hurts them then land a second and third and fourth on the same spot until the teachers drag you off, sod clever ‘combinations’ ‘.
After my school days I made it a rule; “It is always better to be tried by 12 of your enemies then buried by 6 of your friends”.
Strangely enough a few years later i bumped into one fo my tormentors outside a pub. He didn’t recognise me as I had slimmed down and gotten contacts and worked on my people skills. When realisation did come upon him he got very scared because he knew that I would happily introduce him to a world of pain and that I was alcoholised enough that even if he’d knifed me I wouldn’t have still managed to circumcise him with a broken beer bottle before I went down.
I parboil your head or fracture your skull with the heaviest lump of something i can find.
Well, I never went quite that far. In fact I didn’t use any violence at all. Nor did my tormentors use physical violence against me. But they were just as effective with their words as they might have been with their fists in reducing me. It’s not for nothing that it is said that “the pen is mightier than the sword.”
Oddly enough I also came across one of my tormentors a few years later. I was pleased to learn that his mother had thrown him out of her house, and that one of his girlfriends had thrown a brick through his window. Obviously he had continued to be as obnoxious as he always had been.
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I never let anyone bully me about smoking, told Drs I had neither the intention or wish to stop so not to waste time on it. Also if smoking outside the hospital, not near the enterance, I have not hesitated to say there is no law against it. I couldn’t care less about approval or not, we should all stick up for ourselves,