Social fascism scoring points again in Germany

[Skybird]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23514320



I am for a smoking ban in public places and buildings. I am for health insurances not paying diseases that a smoker has caused himself by his smoking, for I refuse to pay for somebody else who has worked to make himself sick - I am not solidaric with people behaing stupid and self-damaging.

But I say that forbidding smoking in your private sphere, your own home, goes too far - and let not be mistaken over it: if this sentence survives it through the instances, then Germany is on the path towards such a ban. Whats next? Regulations of healthy diets you have to keep in your own home? Legal obligations to buy only certain brands of tea or coffee? Banning prepration of Pommes Frites due to acrylamid? Censoring what kind of music somebody can hear in his own flat (as long as he does not exceed the volume and makes every neighbour his involuntary audience)?

The court has overstepped a red line here - and it is me saying that, and I am really no friend of smoking, especially cigarettes stink like the plague and even as a passive smoker of some minutes only it sticks to your skin and hair and clothing even days later.

Green politicians over this year have repeatedly demonstrated quite some militant attitude in advocating enforced educational lessons to the population. Totalitarianism is quite popular to push their ideological goals, if one follows Jürgen Trittin or Katrin Göring-Eckhard.

'Social fascism'? You are comparing a dispute between a tenant and a landlord with the rise of the Nazi party?

Skybird, you really are an obnoxious piece of work.

[Skybird]

I label a years/decades-long trend

- in social, paternalistic and control-raising developments, and

- political developments based on PC,

as "social fascism", that always include a very strong component of growing authoritarianism, state-legislation and totalitarianism in the name of social causes, social justice, social well-meaning, social equality, social whatever;

and this is all is something of which this smoker-story is just one more illustration.

[August]

Skybird you're being misleading.

From the article:

A court in Germany has ruled that a man who smokes in a rented flat can be evicted if the smoke gets into public areas of an apartment block.

Then further:

At the same time, the verdict maintained that people had a basic right to smoke in their own homes.

So the fascist German government really isn't intruding into a persons "private sphere" now are they?

[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.

[Skybird]

Ah, just in: (in German)

http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justi...-a-914026.html

[the_tyrant]

Originally Posted by AndyJWest

'Social fascism'? You are comparing a dispute between a tenant and a landlord with the rise of the Nazi party?

Skybird, you really are an obnoxious piece of work.

Did you know that it was the Nazis who introduced anti-smoking legislation first?

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by the_tyrant

Did you know that it was the Nazis who introduced anti-smoking legislation first?

Finally! I applaud you. You are the first having taken note of this little ironic implication that I inidrectly hinted at and which maybe was a bit too subtle this time (or that got missed because I also used the term before, in other contexts).

The Nazis campaigned strongly against smoking, and the German medical research on the negative effects of smoking was the most modern and enlightened of it'S time, the data collected was superior to other states' projects on examining health implications from tobacco - if they even ran such projects. Smoking was prohibited by law in certain public places and public transport.

Originally Posted by Skybird

Finally! I applaud you. You are the first having taken note of this little ironic implication that I inidrectly hinted at and which maybe was a bit too subtle this time (or that got missed because I also used the term before, in other contexts).

The Nazis campaigned strongly against smoking, and the German medical research on the negative effects of smoking was the most modern and enlightened of it'S time, the data collected was superior to other states' projects on examining health implications from tobacco - if they even ran such projects. Smoking was prohibited by law in certain public places and public transport.

Never let the facts get in the way of good propaganda:

....in 1840, the Prussian authorities re-instated a ban on smoking in public places. Thus, state restrictions on tobacco long predated the Nazi era

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2441844/