Seven minutes of insanity
Last week Christopher Snowdon posed the question "James Reilly: liar or simpleton?"
I would suggest that there is a third alternative – the man is insane.
In the following clip he quite deliberately and calculatedly presents a lie as a fact to the committee on plain packaging.
I must assume that Reilly is a reasonably intelligent person, seeing as he somehow managed to qualify as a doctor, so the explanation for this lie must either be that he failed to do any research and just went along with Tobacco Control's propaganda or else he sincerely believes that lying to his own parliament is perfectly acceptable as a weapon against the tobacco industry.
Reilly's obsessional hatred for the tobacco industry is patently obvious. He all but says that those poor Swedes are slashing their gums because the industry forces them to. They are hapless puppets in the face of the Evil Industry who will try anything to force people to consume tobacco.
Reilly was interviewed on the radio yesterday. I would urge you to have a listen.
He really does seem to believe that the tobacco industry is the epitome of all that is evil. Apparently their sole aim is to corrupt "our cheeeldren" and the health of our nation? If you are not 100% against them then you must be on their side. If you have any dealings with them whatsoever then you are as evil as them. He can barely bring himself to mention them by name and spits the words out as if to prevent himself from becoming contaminated.
One of his criticisms of the industry is "their inability to come out and tell the truth" which is somewhat bizarre after seeing the video above?
"We are fighting for the right for people to live their lives to their full potential here in Ireland, in Europe and across the World"? Does this man seriously believe that he is on a crusade to save the world?
Note that the tobacco industry does not have customers – they are "addicted people"!
The part that worries me the most is his assertion that "we" will fight Big Tobacco to the very end in the courts regardless of cost. Big Tobacco has "billions and billions and billions" but we have the Irish People and The Truth. Somehow the latter is a winning combination and is going to defeat the finest legal minds?
The man is clearly out of touch with reality. He is letting his obsessional hatred for an industry cloud his judgment and is going to cost this country billions to defend the "plain packs" idea that has proven to have little or no effect.
The man is not only insane but is dangerous.
Hi there!
As a swede I can tell you a couple of things about snuff (in swedish, snus). I use it. I was a smoker before. Snus is better because you only get nicotine in your system, not a lot of other sh…t. And you can visit a pub without hateful eyes eating you up.
We started with our kind of snus in the early 1800. Some brand are still around. There is a lot of idiots even here in Sweden. They say that snus can give you pancreas cancer. It’s strange because we are the only country in the world that uses snus in a big way. Still we don´t make it to the top 20 countries with the most pancreas cancer. Don´t you belive me? Take a look here:
http://www.wcrf.org/int/cancer-facts-figures/data-specific-cancers/pancreatic-cancer-statistics
Just saying …
The first rule of dealing with Tobacco Control – Don't believe a singe word they say, as at best it's a gross distortion of the truth and at worst it's a blatant flagrant lie.
By the way, do you really cut your gums to insert Snus? 😉
Wow! This guy is dangerous. Here when we find someone so fixated on a single subject of crusade we relagate them to a back water committee where they can't do much damage. Case in point is Representative Dianne Feinstein of California. She was rabidly anti-gun and for a short time when the demoncrats were in power in the 90's she was influencial but eventually people got sick and tired of her lies and deciet on her single subject of crusade and ignored her. Thankfully she has now retired from the House of Representatives and poses no more problem to the American people.
You need to take this Reilly guy and commit him to some do nothing committee and get him out of the power he currently holds. He's nuts.
He was Minister for Health and made such a bollox of the job that they moved him to Minister for Children. He is a real danger and shouldn't be in any kind of job with any influence. He's a rabid fanatic, a bully and a fucking loudmouth. Unfortunately he is also deputy leader of the party, so if anything happens to Dame Enda…… God help us!
Remember kids its not lieing if its for a goverment approved reason just the same as its not spying when they hack your simcards emails skype xboxs windows systems and so on nope its security.
We have fallen so far so fast its awe inspireing but fuck it right the Oscars and the voice are on so duuuuurrrr
In the last few years we really do seem to have fallen off a cliff. We are falling faster and faster and I'm just wondering when we will hit the rocks?
Grandad, there have been several accelerating points that have really hurt us here in the US and which have had worldwid repercussions.
(1) Late 60s: Slimy lawyer Banzhaf grabbed the power of television from the TCs in the late 60s when he managed to grab a slick court and push a ruling through in favor of "equal time" (or at least SOME free time) for antismoking ads to "balance" cig commercials. The TCs were so freaked by the nasty ads that they didn't fight as hard as they might have against the ban on TV advertising. Duh… THEY got banned, but the Antis' ads kept rolling.
2) 1975: Godber's Conference with its slick emphasis on building fear and hatred among nonsmokers: before that, the Antis were clearly a very small fringe group of nutsos, but the ETS issue allowed their numbers to multiply enormously through fearmongering.
3) 1988: Glantz grabbed millions in tax money from a 25 cent earmarked cig tax in California: Suddenly the Antis had tens of millions instead of tens of thousands of dollars to play with.
4) California got a restaurant ban with the legislators slickly tricked into allowing a bar ban three years in the future: that way they avoided a lot of the political hit-back that an immediate bar ban would have caused, plus, although it was portrayed as a total ban, it actually allowed a lot of leeway: any bar with under six non-family employees was excused… but that loophole was rarely mentioned when other bar bans were proposed elsewhere.
5) 1998: the Master Settlement Agreement, basically the product of an unConstitutional compact of 45ish State Attorney Generals ganging up on a private industry, got **REAL** money for the Antis: Not just a few million or tens of millions from California, the NicoGummyPatchyPeople, and the fear-mongering charities, but literally 500 million to 900 million EVERY YEAR to "Tobacco Control" from the "invisible tax" levied on smokers through the tobacco companies. This financial input was what really put the Antis over the top.
6) 2002/3 Through simple, stupid, pure, incredible luck the Antis got three of "their own" in power in NY State (Gov. Pataki), NY City (Bloomberg), and Delaware (Gov. Anne Minner) — AND, through a huge influx of money also grabbed Florida (again, as in California, posing as a total ban although it excluded "free-standing bars.") The fall of NYC allowed them to play the "If we can do it THERE, we can do it ANYWHERE!" card, and the leadership of NYC's bars made the huge mistake of trying to play the "We're upstanding law-abiding businesses and will enforce the law while we overturn it in courts." game. ::sigh:: I think that particular decision was our real Waterloo: the bar owners themselves were set for defiance, and could have won… but their own leadership told them to "be nice" and act as kapos. :/
2006: Three US States fell in popular votes in one election: Ohio, Arizona(or Arkansas?), and Nevada. Arizona/Arkansas and Nevada successfully largely fought back eventually, but Ohio, despite an incredibly hardworking core of some really dedicated and talented folks, was totally wiped.
Everything since then has just built on the above. Those were the "rocks" and we've hit 'em and they've hurt us… a lot. We're now paddling around in the pool below where the Antis are trying to drown what remains… but we're still occasionally able to climb up on the bank and fight back — all we need is a good bridgehead or two where people can see us and hear us properly and we'll be set: we just need to keep our eyes open for the opportunities of those bridgeheads and grab and defend them where they're strongest at this point.
That's what I devoted the last section of TobakkoNacht to: "The Endgame." Bars and Casinos (in some states), Open-Air bans on Campuses, car-bans, and apartment bans are the places we've been able to stake out some defensible perimeters where we have potentially enough support from ordinary sane nonsmokers to be able to successfully fight. The Antis already know this, and you can see them pumping people and propaganda into those areas every day. Anywhere we have some willing "feet on the ground" in those fights we need to give our support, make our ground firm, and start to climb back up to at least a reasonable plateau on high ground.
Heh… see what a degree in Peace Studies will do for ya?
;>
MJM
Indeed, the US was frequently cited in the run up to the bans here.
The Godber Conference was probably their master stroke. They knew they wouldn't get the world to back them in their more Draconian moves unless they had widescale backing from the general public, and what better way than to convince the non-smokers that they were somehow involved too. If we can crack the SHS myth then that will do the Anti movement enormous damage as they would not only lose their army of gullible public but would be shown to be nothing more than a bunch of fanatical liars.
The main problem we have now is thi league table they seem to have set up, listing the countries and how intolerant they are of smokers. There is a constant scramble to get to the top of that table to be seen as "leaders". Our own nationwide ban was hailed as "a first in the world" and is frequently mentioned by the Antis. The latest of course is the fight between Ireland and the UK to be the "first in Europe to introduce plain packaging", and I get the idea of being first is more important to them than the legislation itself. We seem to have missed out on the ban on car smoking [OK, smoking in cars! You know what I mean!].
I take it that, as a doctor, he is still on the medical Register? Is there a case to be made for having him struck off?
In the real world there probably is a case, but you know how doctors all stick together and back one another up. It would be simpler to just shoot the fucker.
In a very real sense, this man is abusing children in that he is abusing our love of our children in order to manipulate our behavior. While it's clearly not the same physically, it is most certainly the same psychologically as entering a battlefield with a human shield of children in your front ranks.
The man is despicable.
– MJM
I could not agree more.. I have reached the stage where I mentally blank out any mention of children, are they are abused in just about every argument put forward by Tobacco Control. I call it Child Fatigue.
I've lately been watching a fascinating series called "Brain Games." A good bit of it deals with how our brains can be manipulated to perceive and react to things falsely because of inbuilt biophysical/chemical aspects that we have very little control over. VERY nicely done program if you can get it — It's currently on Netflix. In any event: at one point in season two they talk about our emotional reactions to sound, and how important it is for the survival of a species for the adult members to auto-react very strongly to sounds of babies in distress: the babies are vital to the future of the species… and THAT is a good part of why impaling the children on poles and waving them in the air works so well for the Antis: That threat of harm to our children is something almost impossible to ignore on a gut level. And they manage to get away with it even when the children have little or nothing to do with a particular ban: simply the child-imagery is enough to engage our reptile-protective brains even if intellectually we know the kiddies aren't spending their afternoons at Bob's Boozeria and Tiffany's TitterLicious Tavern Gents' Club.
Anytime you see it used out there, POINT IT OUT EXPLICITLY. It doesn't wipe out all its power, but it DOES help.
PLUS: WE CAN USE IT TOO! While I haven't seen any bans overturned with the argument yet, I *have* seen opposing commenters hoisted by their own petards (Heh, look that phrase up! LOL) when I point out that all those poor little vulnerable innocent children with their big blue eyes are seeing, every day, just how GREAT it is to smoke when they look at all the crowds of happy, tipsy, joking, flirting smokers gathered around having fun outside of pubs! Hey, we've gotta STOP this and PROTECT those children by moving those dirty ol' smokers back into pubs and restaurants and smoking rooms (don't use the pretty word lounges or they'll catch on ot what you're doing if you're trying to be innocent about it. :> ) and out of the sight of the widdle chillun! I've never REALLY tried pushing it as a serious argument (I'd clearly have to have a fake persona to do that, and I've avoided such things in order to better defend myself against the perennial "He's a Tobacco Company Provocateur!" charges) but it could probably be done. Meanwhile, just posting the thought, even when not seriously pushed, gives some pause as people stop to think about the "unintended consequences" of the Antis' dirty work.
– MJM
Meh! I don't have a Netflix subscription. Maybe there are other [*cough*] methods of obtaining the series…!
Indeed, you have given me an idea for a post which I shall mull around for a while to see what I can make of it.
It's from network TV originally (you can tell because of the obvious breaks for commercials) and then just picked up by Netflix a year behind broadcasts. Could well be out there online!
🙂
MJM