Another anti-smoker comes out of the closet: Damian Penny on the smoking ban in Newfoundland, and "how filthy cigarette smoke can be."
I think spitting is a good analogy. Don't think about the public health concerns-- consider that for many years, cigarettes were expensive and tobacco-chewing was much more popular than it is now.
Your right to smoke in a restaurant, 2003 = a man's right to spit a plug of tobacco on a barbershop floor, 1950.
The difference is that in years gone by, when the majority of citizens choose to limit tobacco users' freedom to dirty up places of public assembly, the tobacco users took it like men. But now, after the "me decade" and the "sensitive 90's kind of guy" movements, they've learned how to whine (and even how to cast smoking as a libertarian slippery slope/rights issue, and we'll never hear the end of it.
Penny ends with this great quote:
You may think you need to smoke - but sometimes I need to piss, and I don't have a right to do that in public.which reminds me of the Steve Martin routine: "Do you mind if I smoke?"
Read the following two excerpts:
I don't know of any member of the press who has taken notice yet of one particular guiding principle in the merger agreement, though I can assure you that many thousands of Western voters already have. The new Conservative Party is committed to seekingA balance between fiscal accountability, progressive social policy and individual rights and responsibilities.
Fancy that! They took the "Progressivity" out of the Progressive Conservative name and installed it under the hood instead. I'm pretty progressive myself on social policy, but I never asked to have my views implemented by means of a swindle.
Now the other:
On the other other hand, the agreement-in-principle between the two parties confirms that the “progressive” bit has just been moved into the shadows, where it can operate more stealthily. As its first “founding principle” states, the Conservative Party will be guided by…A balance between fiscal accountability, progressive social policy and individual rights and responsibilities.
Pretty darn similar, eh? Similar idea, similar analysis, similar wording, even. It's definitely not plagiarism, which I think of as the copying of text. It's just that these two commentators are expressing the same criticism in an eerily similar way.
Item #1 was published on October 17th on Colby Cosh's personal website. Item #2 was published on October 18th on Mark Steyn's personal website. (No permalinks -- somebody get that man a CMS!) I know Mr. Steyn is a big print journalist and stuff, with a column in every paper and several books to his credit, but surely he's been around the internet long enough to send poor ol' Colby a link, right? (Cosh himself is too polite to notice the striking similarity of these two paragraphs when he links to Steyn's article yesterday).
I simplify grossly, of course. Steyn is a hell of a prose stylist, while Colby is still developing his style. And the follow-on analysis that Steyn presents is first-rate and (as far as I can tell) not cribbed:
The biggest issues in Canada arise from the attempt to find a “balance” between “progressive social policy” and “individual rights and responsibilities” – and, given that the fellows attempting to find the balance are the purveyors of progressive conventional wisdom, generally speaking they come down on the side of “progressive social policy” and against the individual every time, at least if the individual is a practicing Christian, gun owner, a landed immigrant who wishes to open a bookstore or buy a radio station, etc. That formulation, right up there in paragraph 1, is deeply disquieting for those who believe individual rights are in a far weaker state in Canada than they ought to be.That's national-level commentary -- best of all, it has an eastern perspective -- whereas Cosh wanders off into the personal. And in right-wing politics, the personal is definitely not the political.