There are still a lot of people out there who truly believe that Tobacco Control is there to protect them from themselves and/or from smokers. They believe that what TC does is based on science, refuting all evidence that anti-tobacco is an ideology.
There are two possible explanations for such behaviour: utter ignorance and naïveté , and intellectual dishonesty.
In the case of intellectual dishonesty it is all quite linear: lead to “hate” smoking (although we did not even realize smoking was all around us 20 years ago), we do not care whether what TC says is false, as it is useful to us.
Those who instead refute the evidence that Tobacco Control is a fanatical ideology should read this piece by Michael Siegel. It is all there.
"One of the most basic principles I was taught as a tobacco control practitioner was that there is no merit to anything that the tobacco companies or their allies say. By the simple virtue of any statement having been made by a tobacco company or tobacco ally, it was automatically invalid. In contrast, I was taught that virtually any statement made by a tobacco control group had merit."
"In a showdown between conflicting statements between a tobacco company and a tobacco control group, it was unfathomable that the tobacco company could be correct. One did not even need to examine or analyze the statement at issue. Simply knowing the source of the two statements was enough to cast judgment. The tobacco control group’s statement was correct."
How sicker can it get? It is obvious that this ideology does not differ very much from what the Nazis taught their followers about Jews and “Kapital”, for example. We had – and have – the lesson of history, but we keep on falling for the lure like brainless fish in the sea.
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