Tide turning?

The Daily Mail loves a good hate-fest. The War on Smokers has been one of their favourites for a long time and they routinely put up their antismoking propaganda in the middle of the night. Most smokers are asleep at this time, but the undead of the antismoking world are ready to drop in vicious comments about people they’ve never met who do something that has no effect on them whatsoever.

It was no big surprise to find that they had copied the Grauniad’s attack article, intended to frighten Dick Puddlecote, Frank Davis, F2C and all the other smoky bloggers into silence, and added it to the site at 3 am last night.

Lately, there has been a change in the tone of the comments on those antismoker articles. More and more nonsmokers were putting in comments like ‘I hate the smell of tobacco smoke, but surely this is going too far now?’ The rabid antis were getting deep into red-arrow territory too.

This latest article has been up for 24 hours and so far has no comments at all.

Odd, that. Especially since there has definitely been at least one. The Filthy Engineer left a comment last night. No sign of it, and no gibbering wannabe gas chamber operators to be seen.

I wondered if maybe the Mail had a lot of comments and didn’t like what they were saying. It could be, as Filthy suggested in comments at his own place, that the Mail comment moderators all bunked off for the long weekend, but there are comments on articles put up there today. So it’s not that there’s nobody dealing with comments.

Could it be, just maybe, perhaps, that the Mail has realised that we smokers are long past the stage where we have had enough? That we are not going to sit back and take it any more? Did they see, at last, that we have not attacked anyone but have been consistently and increasingly attacked, verbally and physically, with the full encouragement of all those who now claim we are threatening them? With Government approval, people have openly despised us and even attacked us for no other reason than we have a little bit of leaf wrapped in paper.

ASH trying to threaten us? They have done nothing else since they began. We are threatened every day, we are despised wherever we go, denied the comfort of the pub, restaurant or cafe, denied even the opportunity to set up smoker-only clubs. We are denied employment, the NHS openly hates us, every major political party openly hates us, and they think we are going to cower and whimper now?

We have been shat on from heights God has never visited. Every day. Every time we open a newspaper, there it is. Another hate article. ‘No Smoking’ signs have begun to be replaced with ‘No Smoker’ signs. We have no fear left. What are you going to do, put us in prison? It will soon be the only place in the country where we can smoke indoors.

Has some of that finally sunk through the booze-addled reporter minds at the Mail? have they noticed their tipples starting to attract the same attention as our smokes yet? CAMRA haven’t, so maybe not.

We can but hope. It’s more likely that the dopes of ASH realised that all they had achieved was a huge boost to the readership of the blogs they targeted, and even to those they didn’t target. There was a lot of ‘hit fallout’ here over the last 24 hours, at one point it was at 200 hits per hour and yesterday was one of my rare 1000+ days.

Realising their blunder (actually, based on their past record, someone would have had to explain it to them), did they then order the Mail to spike the story? I couldn’t find it on their site today and had to go hunting for the link at Filthy Engineer’s place.

Do ASH have control of the Daily Mail? Well, they control our feeble government and it’s been clear for some time that the government control the news so by extension, yes. I picture the Dreadful Arnott ‘doing a Gordon’ down the phone to Cowering Clegg and threatening to tell his wife about his sly puffs behind the bike shed if he didn’t behave as directed. Whoops – have I said too much?

The ASH drones trolling at Frank’s place are using the same playbook they’ve been using for years. No imagination at all. One came out with ‘the game has changed’.

Yes indeed, the game has changed. We smoky bloggers could barely get a comment in the newspapers, much less a story. That’s changed. Most of the smokers on the planet didn’t even know we existed. That’s changed too. Frank, DP and F2C are now famous and they have a long list of links to other blogs. A lot of people are about to find out that ASH have not been telling them the truth. They are about to find out what their own government has done to one-fifth of this country’s population.

It’s too late to spike the story. The can of worms is fully opened and these worms have teeth.

The game has certainly changed because of that Grauniad article.

It might even be that the tide has turned.

UPDATE: As several commenters have pointed out, the comments on that Mail article are appearing now. So maybe the moderators were just outside having a smoke.

The Mail has another one that might be relevant here.