A Shot in the Smoke War.

(Quicki blog – early work tomorrow. Not many left.)

There is a man in Aberdeen intent on sueing the Scottish government over the smoking ban. His claim is that it has ruined his life and he wants a million pounds. No he doesn’t, not really. What he wants is what we all want – the right to live life our own way again.

Simon Clark thinks his action is a waste of time and money.

Justice4Smokers disagrees and thinks the case should be fought. As do many of Mr. Clark’s commenters.

Who is right? They both are.

The Scottish Nannying Puritans will laugh off any attempt at redress from the smokers they so delight in tormenting. Pubs closing down? Look again. The SNP are also vehemently anti-alcohol. Pubs closing down is what they want to happen. The destriuction of social life and any form of enjoyment for the little people is a feature of the smoking ban, not a bug. It is exactly what it was intended to achieve.

The MSM will not report the case, unless the Puritans win and then it will be front page news. ‘Smokers slapped down again, ha ha ha’.

It’s rather like Hamas firing rockets into Israel with no real hope of hitting anything important nor indeed of hitting anything at all.

However.

I think Hamas are either incredibly dim or incredibly clever. They must know they cannot win a stand-up fight with Israel. Their random fireworks are no match for Israel’s precision bombings. Either they really believe they can make Israel give up by blowing up sand or they are up to something much more devious.

Hamas are the ones who break the ceasefires but that is not what is widely reported. Israel’s retaliation produces much more newsworthy destruction than the pop-fizz-bang of a rocket landing somewhere in the vicinity of a shed. Hamas know they cannot win this war. They are not trying to win. They are trying to goad Israel into an over-the-top response. Then the rest of the world will turn on Israel and… that’s what is happening.

Hamas are not the good guys. They are letting their own people die to further their ideology. They are deliberately setting up their rocket bases in civilian areas, knowing perfectly well that the Israelis have no choice but to target those areas. Israel are not the good guys either. Hamas put their children in the Israeli sights but it’s the Israeli finger on the trigger.

What else can Israel do? Hamas have them backed into a corner. Stop the rockets by hitting Gaza or let them come, not much of a choice really.

It occurs to me that we are in a similar situation. In the Smoke War we are firing little rockets into the desert. They do little more than irritate Anti-Tobacco but that irritation is growing. Even when the MSM report on the proliferation of shed-pubs in people’s gardens, they neglect to mention the why of it and ignore the ashtrays on the bar. There is no mention in the news of the increasing number of people buying their tobacco abroad or from Man with a Van or growing and curing their own. Those shots landed in the desert. They were noticed, but publically they are brushed aside as irrelevant. Yet it rankles that we can do these things and still get away with it.

More and more people are buying tubing tobacco and making their own. Even at shop prices it’s much cheaper because loose tobacco is less heavily taxed than readymade cigarettes. Once you have the knack of tubing, it’s easy to shred and stuff a bit of leaf. Then it becomes very cheap indeed.

The rise of vaping was a rocket that shook the roof tiles of Tobacco Control. That was a close one. It threatens their masters, the Pharmers, and it warps the tracks of the gravy train. Their response is, frankly, ridiculous but the MSM report it anyway. The MSM report what they are told to report. There is no ‘free press’ and it’s quite likely there never has been. Before the Internet, all we had was the news reports. Were any of them ever really unbiased? Back then, we had no way to check.

The shots we have fired have not cost us money, on the whole. Mostly they have saved us money – in terms of tubing shredded leaf, a lot of money – but should  we balk at the idea of firing a big, expensive one? Will it win the war? The answer is probably ‘no’ but we aren’t really trying to win… because we can’t. We cannot beat an enemy with endless funds provided from taxes and Pharmer profits, when all we have are our scrap-metal fireworks.

We can, however, goad them into greater and greater acts of idiocy and that does work. It is already working. When the Daily Mail puts up another of its ‘smokers are bad, m’kay?’ stories they get more comments starting ‘I’m not a smoker but this is just getting ridiculous…’

We won’t get the MSM to support us against the bigger, stronger enemy but every step that enemy takes towards total lunacy turns more people against them. The drones are at last starting to look at it all and say ‘Huh?’ Keep pushing, keep goading, keep firing rockets into the desert. The antismokers have, unlike Israel, nothing real to use in retaliation. They have no equivalent to a laser-guided missile. They have no proof of their basic claims, their more outlandish ones are the sort of thing they might have come up with on a drunken night out – if they were capable of enjoyment, that is.

They claim the moral high ground but we are not the ones using children as human shields here.

So, should Mr. Auld fire his rocket into the desert and hope to hit something? It’s going to be a very expensive rocket and it will probably not hit anything important. He probably will not win his case.

But if it gets any coverage at all, it will rattle their roof tiles. It could get a few of the compliant smokers thinking ‘Hey, he’s right, you know’ and bring them out of the shadows.

Is it worth it?

Better yet, is there a cheaper way? Do we really need to fire the rocket at all? Could we just pretend we’re going to? It might well have the same effect.

If the MSM got wind of a campaign to raise funds for Mr. Auld, that might be just as effective as the court case itself – and might be even more likely to get into the news.

We don’t have to always tell the truth. The enemy never do.