Posts by Lucy Stewart
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a small part of the population
The last stats I saw – admittedly a few years ago – had smokers as about 20% of the general population and higher in some subgroups (esp. Maori and Pasifika women.) That’s not a majority, but it’s not “small” by any standard. Have numbers of smokers really decreased that much in the last five years?
And I think the key is as George says: most smokers become addicted as teenagers, with health consequences for the rest of their lives. I think it’s pretty obvious why it’s a public good to minimise the chances of people taking up a very highly addictive and unhealthy habit at a young age.
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Up Front: One, in reply to Gee,
There’s definitely a feeling outside of NZ that we should be ‘over it’ by now, and that ‘insurance will cover everything’ that isn’t loss of life. But so many people are still dealing with the day-to-day coping.
Christchurch has really profoundly changed my attitude to natural disasters, in that before I used to think "Oh, that's terrible, but at least it'll be back to normal soon" and now I look at things like the flooding in Vermont and think of the years and years it will take to restore communities to something like their former selves, how some just won't recover.
It's taught me to think of even the physical structures of places in terms of human effort - the effort to build them and the effort to make the money to do so, and in those terms, damage is exponentially larger. Speaking of millions and billions of dollars to repair Christchurch is easy, because we hear those numbers thrown around so often; now think of the hours and the number of nails and planks and plans and kilometres of sewerage lines and litres of paint...if nothing else, it makes me so much angrier at the way insurance companies are behaving. When they screw people like they're screwing red zone homeowners, they're not just stealing the past payments made to them in good faith, they're stealing Christchurch's future. All that effort, turned inward to rebuilding things lost, just to get back to where we were. It's sickening.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to Sacha,
I’m not thinking black or white. You could treat it the way people are suggesting for the other smokable crop – make it legal to grow but not to mass-market.
This graphic suggests that New Zealand's climate probably isn't great for tobacco growth (if we're talking about people growing it individually, throughout the country), though I suppose if everyone could only grow very small amounts that would at least cut down on consumption...
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to Max Rose,
Which is a point that Noam Chomsky made in Manufacturing Consent: somethig along the lines of “you don’t need a conspiracy theory of backroom deals when right-wing politicans and corporates all want the same thing anyway.”
Kind of like that saying about malice and incompetence, only this would be, uh...malice and habit?
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to izogi,
Even major oil corporations have been slowly re-branding themselves to more generalised “energy” businesses instead of oil drilling businesses, leaving doors open to bring in new expertise and get into alternative kinds of energy as it’s prudent for them to do so, because that’s what they might need be if and when excessive use of oil is no longer acceptable.
Sloooooooowly is the word for it. On American Sunday morning TV - which is when all the major free-to-air political interview shows are - 90% of the ads are about how wonderful and amazing and clean coal and natural gas and oil shale are and how many jobs rely on them and did I mention JOBS JOBS JOBS. The majority of their public campaigning isn't going into proving they can change, it's going into proving they don't really need to.
You're absolutely right about how much worse Big Tobacco's reaction has been, of course, but I just wouldn't extend the fossil fuel people that much credit. They'll cling grimly on to current profit models until they have no other choice.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to dc_red,
And extra marks for throwing in ‘scare quotes’ around health ‘researchers’ … probably better saved for those employed and contracted by your own industry to obfuscate and contest.
I do wish they'd told me what results to produce when I was doing government-funded health research. It would have saved so much time I spent on actual scientific experiments. Those people doing the glamour research on tobacco and cancer have all the luck.
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We’d seen the photos and the film, but until you stand there and you look and you realise that you loved Knox Church, that you’re never going to drink in the Dux again, it just isn’t real.
Is that really the final word on the Dux? I hadn’t heard. God.
If you suspect you might give even the tiniest fuck, come and see. Before it’s all erased.
I pretty much knew when we left last year that I wouldn’t be back for a couple of years at least. I can’t say I regret going, but if I’d known…I don’t know. I am terrified that it’ll all be gone by the time we make it back, and I won’t even be able to remember what was there.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to Carrick Graham,
So Keith you may have the "shit scared out of you" by a submission and your view of corporates, but the flip side is that democracy is poorer for excluding people/companies from shaping policy in New Zealand. That is what you should really be scared about.
Corporations want one thing: profits. Tobacco corporations make their profits from one thing: selling a product that kills people and puts a huge burden on our health system. A healthy degree of scepticism regarding anything tobacco companies suggest be enshrined into law is not only warranted, it's required.
Furthermore, I know that America's bought into that whole "corporations are people" line, but I'm kind of hoping we can bring a little more realism to bear. Corporations have demonstrated that they are perfectly happy to take all the rights of individuals, but none of the responsibilities. They are not citizens of any country; they have no loyalty to the betterment of any country. Individuals within corporations are perfectly entitled to participate in politics, just as anyone is, but corporations as entities? Yeah, that's problematic.
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OnPoint: Other People's Wars, in reply to Greg Dawson,
Assuming everyone agrees that there is such a thing as just war, and that it is possible to have such in a war of invasion.
It remains a fact, though, that we have the term murder as a specific descriptor for unlawful killing, and we can have an all-day argument about the lawfulness of the war in Afghanistan - and the necessity of New Zealand having an SAS-style group, or a military, at all - but describing the SAS offhand as "murderers" is both incorrect and hyperbolic. "Killers" would be entirely accurate. That's quite often their job. But murder, sort of by definition, isn't.
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Up Front: I'll Be in My Bunk, in reply to Emma Hart,
And the majority of Espenson’s episodes feature Hot Gay Sex.
I did hear Jack appears to have transitioned from Omnisexual to Just Really Gay (categories other than gay or straight being just too confusing). That would be disappointing.