[Skybird]

August, I read about this story in German news since several days. The first instance is over, he has lost, and now can appeal in the next higher instance. Anti-smoker activist applaud the verdict, and there is a clear trend towards general tightening of such paternalism in Germany in general. And increasingly courts support it.

And when is "too much" too much? How much smoke is acceptable to be smelled, how much is a reason to throw somebody out? I person like me would be very sensitive to cigarette smoke, others are less. There is even a strong smoker in the six-appartment hpouse where I ,have my appartment, under the roof. When this man opens his windows, you can smell it one house left and right of our property for some minutes.

Still, I leave him alone, and I relaise that he carefully avoids smoking on balcony (which formally he would be allowed by laws - at least for the time being, some already rasie doubts about this law now), or in the garden.

And I am only about the ideological crusading part of these things. Lodger interest organisiation that we have over here says that claims with comparable arguments like in this case have been filed at increasing in numbers in recent years.

It does not stop with imperial health enforcement and social issues missionising. If everything else fails, then you always have the political correctness brigade and the Islamophiles. In more and more federal states, children in kindergarden and school can now get only halal food, and by that are forced to follow Isamic dietary rules, no matter what. Two weeks ago it also was reported that the federal state and city state of Berlin needs to import its school diners from the surroundign state of Mecklenburg Vorpommern now. Because in Berlin, school food is halal only now in general - but the city's laws also ban kosher butchering due to animal protection laws. In Meck-Vorpom such laws are still not yet implemented. - Why must infidels submit to Islamic dietary rules in general at all?

It'S strange. When I complain about neighbours playing their radio so loud that I need to listen in, at the cost of my own life, then you guys in past discussions hang at my throat immediately. But now that I defend a smoker's right to smoke at home, in his own "four walls", you again do not like it.

Damn all that social fascist paternalism, all this enforcement of ideologically correct behavior in the name of good intentions and well-meaning. It is and re,mains to be growing paternalism, authoritarianism, state-obedience, social anonymous pressuring and mobbing. What people lose there, many will not realise before it is lost completely. And then it is gone and regrets come too late.

What it comes down to? Ther ewill always be some smoke movbing into the public sphere, a smoker cannot prevent that completely, its impossible. And the question of how much is too much is a question that is set to be answered increasingly to his disadvantage. yesterday, a random interview I saw on TV, a jurist indicated that the legal permission to smoke on your balcony could have a limited time left only from now on. Chances when sueing people to make them stop smoking on their balcony, are currently seeing steep climbs. Not everywhere. But in ever more places.