Apathy Sketchpad

Working in a pub, I can safely say it’s had no effect on business. Last night, I was working til 1am because we had so many customers. I’m proud of the fact that a lot of the smokers seem to be doing so well without having the need to have a cigarette every thirty seconds.

This, however, can not be said for one of my collegues. I arrvied five minutes before my shift was due to start, and she immediately put me on the bar because she “hadn’t had a fag in over an hour”. Poor girl.

The second argument falls flat because a bar is a business and not a private residence. A pub landlord isn’t holding private parties in his home, he’s providing a service to the general public. I can see how it might apply to private clubs (so long as they’re run by members and don’t make a profit), but not your bog standard George and Dragon down the road

I don’t know; the case isn’t so much that they’re private residences as it is that they’re private property. Okay, so the public are allowed in, but only at the landlord’s discretion. They can throw out anyone they want to. If they don’t employ anyone then there’s very little distinction between that and having a party where anyone’s invited and drinks can be bought. I’m sure there’s a distinction but it’s hard to articulate exactly what it is.

As far as I’m concerned, though, in real life the trump card against this argument is the employees: their rights are paramount because they don’t have the option of leaving.

Surely the same argument could be made about your local Starbucks – it’s open to the public but the manager can still throw people out at their discretion (and more and more pubs are chains these days anyway: Weatherspoons, Slug and Lettuce, All Bar One… At the end of the day, if you run a business by allowing people into your property to pay for a service you provide, you can’t have it both ways and say “It’s my private property, I’ll do what I like.” Some guest house owners made a similar argument when they wanted to be exempt from laws prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. It wasn’t accepted.

Well yes, I agree, though I’ve never really thought about it.

The guest house thing is an interesting point: when you, say, take an object to a till in a shop they can refuse to sell it to you quite legally. That is their right. But discrimination law says they can’t refuse on certain grounds — arguably forcing them to sell their own property against their, albeit stupid, wishes. There’s an interesting and difficult moral question over whether it’s acceptable to force such principles upon people who might genuinely think than homosexuality is wrong and their guesthouse would be better off without it.

I agree that if you’re charging people for something you have a moral duty to do so in a fair way (even if this does mean charging different amounts for different people, say for insurance), but (having never considered this question until now) I don’t think that it’s always right to make this a legal obligation. (Honestly, I think if a company decided not to trade with homosexuals, the market would bankrupt that company in a matter of weeks.) I think it definitely should be a legal problem, though, if you advertise at all: if there’s a sign saying “Food, Real Ale, Sky Sports” and when you get there you discover that you can’t use it because you’re gay or don’t smoke or something, then that’s at best false advertising. Also I think that sometimes you have to bend strict absolutist morality for the greater good, and society still hasn’t reached the point where discrimination rules can be safely done away with (although we’re far better at it than, say, the Yanks).

Luckily, though, in real life the people who hate all gays are, almost by definition, morons, and as such they try to argue that any attempt to stop them refusing service based upon sexuality is discrimination (usually religious), thus signalling their support for discrimination rules and therefore undermining their whole case. Which amuses me greatly.

The other big problem with the guesthouse exemption case is that virtually all businesses are private property. If you exempt one you have to exempt them all, and a rule from which everyone is exempt would seem slightly pointless. They should have simply argued against the rule as a whole. Then they might have had a point.

Smoking bans are a good example of governments
forcing directives onto it`s citizens, rather than objectives.They haven`t legislated in clean air , just smoke free air.If clean air was truly the goal, a standard of air quality
could be set, that all employers would have to adhere to,in any manner they saw fit.This would provide all employees with clean air,all
employers with options on how to provide said
air, as well as eliminating “the level playing field” argument.Whether a huge resturant chain
or a mom-and-pop tavern,everyone is currently required to provide it`s patrons with safe food and water.So, make them supply clean air as well.If an open window and a squeaky fan does the trick,well,away you go.If , a trillon dollar ventilation system is needed to meet the standard, so be it.And if ( as many people claim) there`s no way to allow smoking and provide clean air,well,bye bye smokers.No matter how you slice it,an air quality standard
, not a smoking ban,is what really should`ve been introduced.

What if the air quality standards end up decreeing that exactly one person can smoke in any given bar? Do you think that would not lead to violence?

What about the local air quality immediately around that person — that’s going to be high above the limit, no matter where you set it.

What about the sheer simplicity of enforcing a smoking ban compared to the nigh-on impossibility of enforcing a clean air standard in any kind of a reasonable timeframe?

Clean air is the goal, yes, but you can achieve that goal with a smoking ban and achieve it much faster and more easily. That’s why we need a smoking ban even though clean-air guidelines already exist. You just can’t enforce them on this kind of scale.

Meeting the air quality standard should be paramount-how it`s met should be at the descretion of the owner.If only one person was allowed to smoke at any given time,the prudent action(I think anyway) would be deny every one the option of smoking. If, however, the owner wanted to allow only his favorite patron to smoke, or have a lottery system to determine who can or cannot smoke-so long as clean air was maintained- those choices should be up to him. Any negative fallout or violence that resulted would also be his responsility.

Any time a new law is introduced that prohibits
previously accepted behavior, violence can sometimes result. I remember when seatbelts and motorcycle helmets were first made mandatory. Most people were pissed off by the law, many ignored it and there were a few cases where people became violent when charged with the new offence.The current ban has produced similar effects.A bouncer was recently shot and killed for kicking some smokers outside and a deaf man in Wales was severely beaten for smoking in a bus shelter.
Some people, when they don`t get their way,turn violent.Worrying about the behavior, of the idiotic fringe when crafting laws, strikes me as a poor way to do things.

Similarily, creating laws based on ease of enforcement, as apposed to acertainment of
specific goals, strikes me as short sighted and downright lazy.If easy enforcement is desired, I would expect all cars to be equiped with a breathalizer and a governer.This would stop all drinking and driving and most speeding. No one , however, seems to be in favour of this.

Finally( and on this point I assume we`ll never agree) I don`t believe that clean air is the goal. It seems to me that smokers are being relentlessly hounded, in a slow and delibrate manner,in the hope that smoking will become so socially unacceptable,and, logisticly
impossible, that people will eventually just give up the habit. If , however, clean air truly is the goal, I don`t believe smoking bans achieve said goal.The company that I work for, gets steel plated and galvenized, and aluminum powder coated. The places that supply these services for us do not allow smoking yet still have the most vile air you can imagine. Smoking bans do nothing for these types of workplaces.

So if you owned a bar I could stroll in with a burning tyre and get the place closed down? Awesome. That sounds both practical and fair.

And creating laws based on ease of enforcement may sound lazy, but it gets better results and it saves massive, massive amounts of money. That money can pay for hospitals and schools and police and all kinds of wonderful things. Government is about priorities, not ideals.

And frankly your conspiracy theory about smokers is as laughable as your punctuation, and in any case irrelevant. Whatever the government thinks about smokers has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the ban is justified.

If I owned a bar it would be my responsibility to provide my patrons with clean air. Assuming your flaming tire would overpower any ventilation system I had in place, it would be my duty to prevent you ( or at least your tire)from entering.Similarily, it would be my responibility to ensure that nobody pisses in the deep frier, has a spank in the salad dressing, vomits in the gravy or shits on the meatloaf.No matter what senario you dream up the answer is always going to be the same-clean air is clean air.Approach it like we approach drinking water. Nobody seems to mind if our lakes and rivers are polluted, so long as the water is clean when it reaches their lips.

Smoking bans are being justified on grounds of public health. Second hand smoke is considered a health hazard to non smokers. Fine.What if it were possible to prevent the smoke from ever reaching a non smoker?Wouldn`t that,from a public health perspective, be acceptable? As it stands right now, people can`t even make the attempt.

Well, I’m fairly certain there are people who mind quite a lot if rivers and lakes are polluted, but come on. Do you honestly expect every pub in the land to employ bouncers to frisk people for cigarettes? They’re much smaller than tyres and faster to light.

One cigarette will push a bar over clean air limits, and ventilation can decrease that impact but another cigarette will redouble it. Your argument is pretty similar to someone saying “there should be a law requiring unicorns to wear corks on the end of their horns!” — sure, conceptually it’d be lovely to allow smoking as long as the air stayed clean, but that’s physically impossible. What is the point in legislating for physically impossible contingencies?

Seriously, you’ve just dodged the question: if I smuggled a load of cigarettes into your bar, say in my coat pocket, and lit them all, thus rendering your air filthy, is it right that you would be liable for any damages I cause in doing so solely because I am on your property? What if I stabbed someone? What if I slipped rohypnol into someone’s drink? Nobody would ever dare open a bar under those conditions! Nobody would even open a shop. Whatever minor short-term damage a smoking ban does to business, rendering the owners liable for patrons’ actions will put them out of business much, much more effectively.

I say that the landlord has a duty to stop his own emissions polluting the bar, and any emissions produced by the patrons are their own responsibility and they should be punished for it. Not least because they’re more likely to follow the rules if they are punished instead of publicans.