Apathy Sketchpad

On Saturday I got back from the Netherlands. They’re very nice.

Bit of a nightmare getting there: I was picked out at random by the metal detector and frisked, then I was the 25th person through the gate so I was questioned by the government survey woman. Then KLM lost my bag with all my spare clothes, although to be fair they did give me a little bag with an XXL t-shirt, a toothbrush, some other toiletries (including no soap or shower gel) and some detergent. To me, that was just mean. Then the train was rerouted, so a 2-and-a-half hour journey became a three hour journey. My one set of fitting clothes was becoming less and less suited for prolonged use. My bag arrived at 10pm the following day, with a voucher for €25 off any flight of €100 or more — which frankly is the second shittest attempt at compensation anyone’s ever given me (first place going to N at the National Express). Anyhow.

Actually, bit of a nightmare getting back, too. The plane was delayed for two hours because there wasn’t a pilot and apparently KLM don’t have anyone on standby. We couldn’t wait in the bar or get anything to eat or drink, of course, because Schipol’s security checks are after those things and they couldn’t be bothered checking us again. Then literally all the trains from Manchester Airport were cancelled for no stated reason, and the monitor that said where the bus went was broken. But at least I had my bag. Anyhow.

The Netherlands are of interest just now. While I was there I learned that I’d got there about a week before they caught up with other European countries and implemented a smoking ban, one year to the day after we did. This ban relates specifically to tobacco. It has to, because technically marijuana is as illegal there as it is here, and you can’t really ban something without first legalising it. It’s allowed in ‘coffee shops’, as there’s a long-standing policy of not enforcing the laws against it (if you follow the rules), because, well, because enforcing it is very expensive and clearly doesn’t work. (Personally, I’m not sure what exactly the aim of drug laws are in the first place: be it to reduce crime, or cut off funding to the suppliers — who are mostly pretty unpleasant, but then so are Nestlé and chocolate is legal — or to stop people taking it. But since the bikes I saw in Holland were left unlocked, and the locked ones I see in Manchester have no wheels, seats or chains, I’m pretty sure none of those things has happened.)

So given this very mature, liberal and pragmatic attitude, you’d think the Dutch authorities would say, perhaps, that tobacco is okay when mixed with marijuana in a licensed coffee shop. Okay, so perhaps people would go there just to smoke it, but is that a major problem? That’s exactly what happens anyway; the only difference would be they’d be smoking something legal.

No.

The Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority, which is responsible for enforcing the ban, said it had trained around 200 inspectors. “They can tell the difference between a mix or a pure joint from its smell and appearance,” said a spokesman.

I expect that was a pretty easy vacancy to fill.

So now mild joints are banned, and strong ones are allowed? You’re allowed to buy any strength joint you want, but you have to go home to smoke the mild ones? Smoking tobacco in a café is not allowed, but smoking cannabis is? Tobacco can be smoked in the street but not a café; marijuana can be smoked in cafés but not in the street? The whole thing is just surreal. I can see how they got there, but where they’ve got is mad in anyone’s books.

It might be time to tear up all laws and start again.

Dave Hitt is a very prolific pro-smoking crank who I wrote a long page about in the past. For the sake of completeness, I shall summarise it here: Dave Hitt emailed a lot of people who’d reported the dangers of passive smoking and asked them to name three people that it had killed, and then he wrote a webpage about it, which (implicitly) says that their failure to provide names shows that their numbers are wrong and reveals “blatant dishonesty”, when in fact it doesn’t*. I had a long email conversation with him in which he admitted as much, but didn’t alter his webpage*, and I held that his various carryings-on show that he is a twat, and so far I’ve not been convinced otherwise. My page was entitled “Dave Hitt Is A Twat”, and is now the second website returned by a Google search for “Dave Hitt” (with or without quotes).

More recently, he posted this on his website*. It’s a brief story about someone who asked a newspaper for the source of some numbers they’d printed and been told they were made up, and these closing comments:

Here’s a fun project for a rainy weekend. Scan the news for ass numbers. Pick one that seems really outrageous. If you like, you can do some research on your own to see if there’s any truth to the number, or even to find out what the real number should be, but that’s optional. Now send some e-mail to the reporters who wrote the story and any sources quoted in the article. Ask for specific sources of the numbers.

…

A while back I did just that with ten different nicotine nanny organizations and individuals. You can read the results here.

I took issue with this, because he didn’t do “just that” at all; he asked for a list of names, when the source of the numbers was most likely a statistical analysis*. He’d written a good post about an interesting story, and then spoilt it by trying to attach his own pet delusion to it — he wasn’t just passing on something he’d read and enjoyed, he was hi-jacking a well executed piece of investigative blogging to try and push his own, far less well executed, agenda*. So I posted on his page and said so. He replied to me, and said two things. First:

You claim “He repeatedly asserts that smoking is safe,” a comment I would never make. Every single nanny I’ve ever dealt with is an unrepentant liar. I’ll make you a wager, Andy boy: $100 American says you can’t find a single instance of me saying that anywhere on the internet. Is it a bet?

Now I did use those words in that order referring to him. Here is the entire paragraph:

Dave Hitt, in common with much of the world’s other anti-ban propaganda artists, believes that any statistical survey that produces less than a 100% increase in risk is inconclusive. Passive smoking does not double the risk of cancer, and as such no (properly performed) survey could ever prove to that standard it is dangerous. “Some risks”, to use his words, “are just too small to measure.” He repeatedly asserts that smoking is safe, implicitly on the grounds that nobody has yet managed to prove that it isn’t, and dismisses any study that suggests that is isn’t as invalid.

I think it’s safe to say that in context it is clear that by “smoking is safe” I mean from the perspective of people other than those doing the smoking. Hitt took that phrase out of context and only after I showed him an instance of him saying exactly what I said he said did he explain that he wanted me to prove he said that smoking is safe for the smoker, which obviously I couldn’t, but then I never said he’d said that, and then called me a liar for not being able to back up a statement that I didn’t in any meaningful sense make*. In the original Dave Hitt Is A Twat page, I criticised him for not having a public comments section on his site, and now he does, but after I disagreed with him three times he banned me from it, so what he has in actuality is a fake public comments system: it looks like people can comment, but any actual discussion is cut short*. That said, I just posted there anyway* and he appears to have made a less than thorough job of banning me. Possibly only I can see it in some kind of crazy Tachy Goes To Coventry system. I invite all of you to post on his blog as rationally and as often as you would like, though.

Here is the second thing he said:

When I started out the Name Three project I knew that if just one of these so-called experts pointed that out that statistics don’t work that way I’d be dead in the water. But none of them did. Not one! Why not, if they’re such experts in the field?

Well this I found interesting. This is a valid argument! At last! And I agree with him: the people he emailed should (unless they had some names, I suppose) have told him he was making an unreasonable request. But again, his “Name Three” page didn’t make that argument. I’d emailed him several times and I’d never heard this argument before. That is not the aim of “Name Three”. I know this not least because there’s nothing about it on the whole page, but I can be absolutely sure because he sent me several emails refusing to acknowledge that Statistics Don’t Work That Way. I suspect he’s making excuses. He said, and I quote:

Primary smoking can, and often is, blamed for specific deaths. So why should secondary exposure be exempt from the burden of proof?

So either he did know that Statistics Don’t Work That Way — and was deliberately using an argument he knew to be invalid* — or he didn’t know that Statistics Don’t Work That Way, and is now lying rather than admitting to having made a mistake and being expected to apologise*. I don’t think there’s any other way that things can be.

Dave Hitt, you’ll be glad to hear, Is Still A Twat.

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*This is the kind of thing a twat might do.

I’ve noticed that people who are usually perfectly rational have a habit of becoming dangerously insane whenever the talk turns to the smoking ban. But I’m also aware that there’s no particular reason why they should do that rather than me. So instead of trying to summarise, I’ll simply post exactly what I said yesterday and exactly what Martin said in reply, and let you draw your own conclusions.

What I Said

The simple fact of the matter is that it’s not healthy for a person to be totally incapable of going for a few hours without a fix of an addictive drug, especially when it’s one that fills the room with smoke, toxic or not.

What He Said

Back to addiction again. Similarity is food, insulin. You seem to be saying that addiction is bad in itself, with smoke (toxic or not) only an ‘especially’. Obviously a new meaning of the word ‘healthily’ I haven’t previously come across.

So who’s insane?

Today, in the course of another internet argument about smoking, someone (really) decided to suggest that smoking was perhaps not that dangerous or addictive — although to put this into context, their chosen avatar was a picture of Gollum from the Lord Of The Rings films, which I found pleasingly ironic. They suggested that smokers were being treated differently to people with different, equally bad vices, and their argument was that “there is no ’safe’ level of obesity”. Well, that’s as maybe, but there’s a safe level of eating food.

Anyway, the point is that I said, “yes, there’s no safe level of obesity, where obesity is defined as being unhealthily overweight”, to which someone replied that strictly the definition of “obese” is “having a BMI above 30″. Well I say screw that. I’m heartily sick of politicians and the media redefining words like this. I think it happens when a scientist hands them a report which chooses to define these words in these ways for the sake of readability, and then politicians read out a conclusion like say “x% of people are obese” without letting anyone know what the word “obese” actually means in this context, and the media publish reports that say “four pints is now a binge”, which is useful of them as it allows them to use the phrase “binge drinking” to refer to any decent night out. But scientists are always doing that: when a physics question says “smooth” it means “assumed-frictionless”; when it says “long” it means “assumed-infinite”, and so on; when Richard Dawkins says “wants” he means “is likely to act as if it wants”; when a physicist says “in general” he means “absolutely always“. But we don’t insist on using those meanings outside science, because that just confuses people. So we won’t mind if you use the word “theory” to describe a hypothesis (provided you don’t then apply it to the Theory of Evolution), and we won’t be upset if you use the phrase “quantum leap” to describe a very large change. (We will tell you off if you use “light years” as a unit of time, though, because that’s just plain wrong.)

And, no, four pints is not a binge, obesity can’t be determined by BMI alone, and any other specialist jargon you may know that just happens to share a name, pronunciation, and etymology with another, more common, word is just that: specialist jargon. In real, everyday life, words mean what people understand by them in the context that you use them*, and what a tiny number of specialists might use them to mean is irrelevant.

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*Although, I do think that where the majority of people misuse a word, we should at least try to correct them before we give up and redefine the word itself. Often there’s an existing word that means what they want to say and no convenient synonym for the one they’re misusing.

I’ve noticed that the search strings (i.e., what you type into Google or similar) people use to visit sites I run frequently have nothing at all to do with the site or its contents. For example in the last couple of weeks, I’ve had people arrive via. “people who have multiple religions”, “aa9b493913c7fa93440c96e2b97f4657ac066b0870c5f11fcb2de464244fed91952e8c9b04d2dcd2 1d6aafc23d3d8ead749f907b1a67af09c736d8c68304b1a1518492618b4d0e7aea650ac34593bfcb7 b18c38d3af9f6e4ebe10e20a952444d38a1eadb2ae63c4942745740e547568ead860a2906781e44″ (I’ve added a couple of spaces to that one), “meaning of idolate”, and a few other things I’m sure I’ve never mentioned.

I use Google Analytics for my webstats. It’s fantastically powerful, but it’s aimed more at businesses. It’s designed to help your site be profitable, and I’m given to understand it’s very good at that, but I use it more for seeing what parts of the site are proving popular and how people are finding them. For example, once a day or so someone looks up Dave Hitt on Google and I get a hit from that because my Dave Hitt Is A Twat page is the second Google result, except that for some reason I can’t work out, on Tuesday (the 22nd) I got 17 hits this way, and a further seven the next day. I see these strange exponential curves drop into my traffic periodically, such as the time I got twice as many hits one day because someone on b3ta linked to my Reverse Creationism cartoon, so I’m assuming that Hitt managed to worm his way into some publicity that day. Thanks to me and the great democracy of Google, roughly 25 of the people he reached have now read Dave Hitt Is A Twat and therefore got a more balanced opinion.

I am actually rather pleased with that: Hitt is almost universally used as a source by the anti-smoking-ban lobby (who, in the vein of the two abortion factions calling themselves “pro-choice” and “pro-life” as if anyone could reasonably be “anti-choice” or “anti-life”, I think I should probably refer to as the “pro-poisoning” lobby) and I like that there’s nothing he can do to stop Google showing everyone who looks him up exactly what I think of him.

But all of this is something of a precursor to my Idea. It’s an Idea which I feel sure wouldn’t work, but that doesn’t stop it being an interesting idea worthy of discussion. It’s an idea for a website, with no theme. It would have a forum, probably, and it would be organised kind of like a wiki. First, you register a fairly generic domain name; the kind that could really apply to any website, much like IGN or xkcd or elephant.co.uk have done. Then you put an introduction page up that does nothing but explain what I’m about to explain to you. Then you wait.

You also make sure your site is listed on Google. Just telling Google your site exists is generally enough to do this, but having a couple of links around the web helps too. Eventually, someone will stumble onto your page from Google, and when they do you’ll get a search string from them. Then you put up a page that addresses whatever you think that search string was looking for. So if they arrive having searched for “people who have multiple religions” you put a page up about those people, or, if they don’t exist, which I would have thought was a logical necessity but I realise that logic is not exactly one of religion’s strong suits, you put up a page about why they don’t exist. Then Google will index that page and you’ll get a little more traffic from people searching for things tangenially related to our polydeism page. Those people will also give you search strings and you add pages for those as well. Eventually you will end up with a website with a great many pages, drawing in traffic from Google. You could also drop the page with the lowest traffic, every time you add three pages, so your total content would always increase, and the average traffic per-page should also increase. (A special wiki-style CMS that logs search strings could handle most of this automatically, though obviously human input would be required to write the new content.)

This is evolution on the internet. Every page would pull in more visitors from Google, simply by increasing the amount of indexed text on your website, and the successful pages would spawn more children (as more people land on them and seed pages with search strings) and the less successful pages would die out. I wonder what kind of website you’d end up with.

You might end up with a very general Wikipedia style website. Or you might end up with a very thighly-focussed site dealing in great depth with one topic.

Or, you might never get more than ten hits. You just can’t say, on that crazy Internet. But I’d like to try it, one day.

I assume everyone here already knows that I think smoking in public is something that should be banned. Dave Hitt does not. But then, Dave Hitt doesn’t appear to think very much at all.

I found his website (The Hittman Chronicles — I swear, he calls himself “The Hittman”. It would be cute if he wasn’t a fully grown man) through a pro-smoking group’s website that I was looking to email because I’d seen their representative on BBC4 and he was demonstrably a moron. (He was consistently outwitted by a comedian. I think that politicians should be smarter than comedians but they persistantly prove to me that they are not. One wonders if we would be better off putting the comedians in charge for a while. The only problem is that of who’d do the comedy. Certainly politcians aren’t funny. Not on purpose, anyway.)

You may have noticed that both people I’ve mentioned so far who support smoking in public I have dismissed as morons. I want to mention that I don’t consider that they are morons because they disagree with me. In fact, it’s the other way around. They disagree with me because they are morons.

And now I shall prove that Dave Hitt is a moron. The page I was linked to on his website was this one. I don’t advise you bother actually reading it. That will just make you angry. I’ll give you the gist here: nobody can give me three names of individuals killed by passive smoking. Therefore nobody has been killed by passive smoking.

I touched on this issue before, but I thought it so clear why this argument is wrong that I left it to a six-word sentence in the comments section to explain it, but as at least one person is too stupid to understand it, I’ll spell it out more clearly. I spelt it out to him, too, and his response was to point out that studies of smoking were mostly inconclusive (and therefore, he presumably believes, any argument that reaches the same conclusion is valid). So I spelled it out again:

The “name three” defence is analogous to saying that someone who throws a six four hundred times in a row shouldn’t be accuse of using a loaded die because rolling a six is not that unlikely. Point to any given roll of that die and prove that it wouldn’t have come up six anyway. Can’t do it. But when you consider all 400 throws it’s obvious to anyone with half a brain that the die is loaded.

Whether or not the statistics show smoking is dangerous [the] argument is flawed.

You know what Dave Hitt said when I told him that? I swear this is a direct quote from his email which has not been altered to make him look foolish (in the same way that people don’t draw stupid moustaches on photos of Hitler):

That’s a semi-valid analogy. Yet, if SHS were so dangerous that it’s killed a million people in the past twenty years, why can’t the very people who make a living selling the dangers of SHS come up with three measly names?

Because there aren’t any, that’s why.

Clearly he has some kind of mental block, so I decided to remove smoke completely from the equation and try him on something he has no stated agenda in:

You appear to have once again completely missed the point of my email. I am left with no choice but to slowly and patiently explain it to you a third time. I shall try to use shorter words and an example this time around.

In Cornwall, the local granite pours radon gas into the air. This is radioactive. A study has shown that this causes about 1% of UK cancer deaths — about 1000 people per year. But since cancer doesn’t leave a calling card, it’s not possible to say which ones, becuase for any given cancer patient there is only about a 1% chance that it was caused by radon gas. (This chance is higher in places like Cornwall, but still not 100%.) For any given patient, the cancer is more likely to have been caused by something else. This means that it would be impossible to produce even one name of someone killed by radon gas. It would be impossible even to pinpoint the exact figure accurately. This does not mean the risk does not exist. It is a very real danger that kills a thousand people a year in the UK alone.

If you know as much about statistics as you seem (or claim) to, then you already know this and are refusing to acknowledge it out of sheer stubbornness, or possibly the fact that you don’t actually have any valid arguments to fall back on. It’s hard to say.

Your “people say passive smoking is dangerous but when I ask people to name three people it has killed all anyone can ever think of is Roy
Castle” argument is akin to saying “people say radon gas is dangerous but when I ask people to name three people it has killed all anyone can ever think of is Marie Curie”. It’s a stupid argument and you would be wise to abandon it.

And do you know what he said?

Ah, but does it? You have numbers to make that claim, but how accurate are they? How big was the sample size? Who paid for the study? Was it a
cohort study, a case control study, or a meta-analysis? Was the data gathered by survey or interview? Was it done in such a way that recall bias would be an issue? Was it repeated independently, with similar results? And most importantly, does it have an RR high enough to be concerned about?

He doesn’t quite understand the concept of an example, does he?

That’s irellevant. That study could be totally ficticious and still
serve as a good example.

And his response?

Wow. Again, just, wow. You think *making stuff up* proves things. No wonder you’re so gullible.

What an utter twat. And I consider that I’ve now proved he’s a twat.

For the sake of completeness, let’s have another proof:

Dave Hitt, in common with much of the world’s other anti-ban propaganda artists*, believes that any statistical survey that produces less than a 100% increase in risk is inconclusive. Passive smoking does not double the risk of cancer, and as such no (properly performed) survey could ever prove to that standard it is dangerous. “Some risks”, to use his words, “are just too small to measure.” He repeatedly asserts that smoking is safe, implicitly on the grounds that nobody has yet managed to prove that it isn’t, and dismisses any study that suggests that is isn’t as invalid.

So why does he get to make that claim when people who claim that it’s dangerous are expected to prove it? Well, he has a handy thing called the Burden of Proof.

The Burden Of Proof is a sort of logical-argument version of Godwin’s Law. Generally in my experience the first person to mention it should be excluded from the remainder of the debate. Here, he uses it to show that as the Smoking Is Dangerous camp spoke up first they should be the ones to prove their claim, and should be assumed to be wrong until they have done it. It should be clear to anybody with half a brain that who says what has no bearing on the truth they are trying to find.

And what the hell? One last proof:

Dave Hitt eventually admitted to knowing that the “name three” argument was invalid and continued to use it.

But that’s not the fun part. Oh my, no. The fun part is that he believes that valid conclusions can be drawn from invalid reasoning. I’m not limited by petty details like facts or logic or common sense. So let’s start the real Dave Hitt bashing…

Fact: Nobody I know can name three people that Dave Hitt has met and not immediately raped. Therefore there aren’t any.

Fact: Out of everybody that has ever met Dave Hitt, the number that actually like him is statistically insignificant. Therefore, it is unreasonable to assume that Dave Hitt caused them to like him. Probably they have confused him with somebody else.

Fact: Dave Hitt has a beard. Fact: At least three murderers had beards. Therefore Dave Hitt is a murderer.

Fact: CDs are a silicon based data storage medium. Therefore Dave Hitt is a twat. This argument makes no sense, but apparently I can still draw conclusions from it.

Fact: Nobody I know can name three of Dave Hitt’s brain cells. Therefore he doesn’t have any.

Fact: Well, you get the idea.

Look at my comments system, by the way. It’s good, isn’t it? You know what it does? It lets people post things onto the page itself, and I’ve never once deleted a comment for disagreeing with me. Dave Hitt’s website has his email address at the bottom. All emails go invisibly to him and he never publicly responds.

Essentially, what he’s doing is putting up a website full of lies with a “please give me feedback” link at the bottom, and then winding people up who exercise the option. What an utter twat.

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*This sentence was updated in July 2007 to give less undue credence to this idea, which, it has come to my attention, is basically lies peddled by anti-ban lobbyists and other propaganda artists. Also, I feel I should mention that Hitt’s new “mini-blog” has much the same open comment system as my blog has, although his “name three” page still does not. (Also, a brief but important update for the foreign or otherwise ignorant: smoking has in fact been banned in public places in the UK now.)

There is a lot of talk of late of banning smoking in public. People who oppose this ban are wrong*. I will now dismantle any argument you may have heard against the smoking ban:

1. If you ban smoking in public, you have to ban car exhausts

Not bad. However, there are four main flaws with this argument: if your car is modern, efficient and clean, car exhaust fumes are less toxic than cigarette smoke; cars tend to be used in well ventilated areas; car exhausts cannot be selectively aimed at people’s faces; and cars are useful rather than recreational (to the point where society would stand still if they were illegal).

2. It is my right as a human being to smoke

It is my right as a human being not to be given lung cancer by an idiot. My right not to die clearly takes precedence over your right to kill yourself. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. Your right to exhale carcinogens ends the exact same place. (I actually stole that soundbite from someone on TV who inexplicably replaced the phrase “the exact same place” with “at my place of work”. Nice soundbite, idiot.)

3. If you don’t like smoke, don’t go to bars where people smoke.

I see. I can, off the top of my head, think of three smoking bars I frequent called “The Oak”, whereas I know of precisely one non-smoking bar (and, for the record, very nice it is, too). I think I should be allowed to socialise without being given a choice of “Arcadia or cancer”.

4. It is part of our culture.

So is Marco from Big Brother.

5. Use the non-smoking area if you don’t like smoke.

Do you know how many pubs and bars have a permanant non-smoking area? I can think of precisely two, and that includes the non-smoking bar I mentioned earlier, and in the other you have to walk through the smoking area to get to the non-smoking area, or indeed the bar. (I can cope with that, but I’ve met the odd heavy asthmatic who couldn’t. I guess it’s excessive to cater to people with such specific disabilities everywhere.)

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Update, 20051027:
A comment on the BBC website states that “having a smoking section in a pub or restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool”. Genius.

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That’s all the invalid arguments I can think of in favour of public smoking for now. I suppose you can submit some in the forum and I can destroy those as well if you’d like.

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*Some people say it’s a matter of opinion, but more informed people know that some opinions (like, say, “Saturday Night Live is a clever and satirical look at modern life and everyone involved is a genius.”) are just wrong. Some things are better than others no matter what their fans think. They’re biased, after all — they’re fans.

I am of the ilk that would make it illegal to kill random strangers in the street. This seems pretty logical to me. I dont much care how you do it, if you want to shoot them, smash large metal objects into them, poison them, it should be illegal. Now, shooting people in the street is illegal. In America, though, it isn’t discouraged very well. Their constitution protects their right to carry a gun. Their National Rifle Association fights to keep this right protected.

Why? “Guns Don’t Kill People; People Kill People”, yes, I know, but I think people would have a rather harder job of it without the guns. Americans buy guns, keep them in unlocked boxes on a low shelf, then act all suprised when their two-year-old son shoots them. What did you think was going to happen? The argument for keeping a gun in the house it that it protects you from intruders, but guess what? The intruders have guns too. In fact, they are already holding a gun, whereas you have to go and get yours from Daddy’s Secret Cupboard. The simple fact is that more of the shots fired by these guns are accidents that hit family members than well-aimed shots that hit intruders.

Smashing large metal objects into people is also illegal, but again is not exactly discouraged. If you assume the metal object in question is a car, then it is perfectly legal to drive it around city centres at 30 miles per hour. This is, of course, understandable; they are tremendously useful and it would be insanity to ban them. It might help, though, to make them a bit safer. It is illegal, for example, to attach bull bars to the front of a car. The logic behind this is that if you hit someone, they make it far more likely that they will die, and the only benefit they bring is to make your car look cool. All very laudable, but a better idea would be to try to prevent the crashes in the first place. I’m talking about huge picnic tables bolted onto the backs of cars. Brakes and steering on the front wheels don’t work if the car has a spoiler pushing all the weight onto the back wheels. And the justification for these things? It looks cool. Blacked out windows that stop you seeing the outside world. Looks cool. Ban them. some people will think their cars look worse, other people won’t die.

Poisoning people in the street is not illegal. It is perfectly acceptable to blow clouds of carcinogenic toxins into peoples faces at random. I cannot understand why this should be. Smoking in public should be banned. There is not one single reason for it to be legal. This is not a grey area. If you want to surround yourself in toxic gas, stay away from me. If I want to go into the town centre, then kindly stay at home. I shouldn’t have to avoid you. There shouldnt be “non-smoking” areas. It should be assumed that it isnt allowed unless a sign says otherwise. To me, it’s just common sense. Somkers, of course, don’t see it this way. They say things like “it’s my right to smoke” or “second hand smoke isn’t harmful”. Yes it is harmful. Smokers die younger than non-smokers. Therefore, smoke is harmful. I very much doubt that the filter adds the toxins, so logically second hand smoke must be dangerous. And it is not your right to smoke around me, for that very reason. If it wasn’t already legal, it would never even occur to anyone to allow it. If you disagree, please feel free to debate the issue in the forum, but not in person, because I don’t want to be near you.