gospelman":30fvmyqu said:
...it is now illegal to smoke inside a business, unless said business is posted as 21 and over. That is how Knox will be able to get around the restriction...Which makes it impossible for me to take my 17 year old daughter to lunch when they open. She really enjoyed going to Knoxville Cigar Company...she thought it was "cool" and I agree. I believe she would have enjoyed accompanying Dad for a nice meal with some good company.
I'm really excited about the new shop, but believe me: I understand and deeply feel the frustration and general "pissed-offedness" that the anti's have wrought.
Mike
Mike:
The only way around it here is to make one's establishment a "private club", or some other operation that is not open to the general public. In that case, only members can enter. If a business is open to the public, the almighty friggin' state has effectively decreed that its premises are "public property", in the sense that the owner loses a large measure of control over what people can and cannot do. The Marxists have thereby largely done away with the concept of private property. (All bow in Holy Reverence to the almighty state... :evil: )
That's the price we pay by appealing to the state as the source of "justice"...as though such idiocies as laws against discrimination stop people from hating one another. Now they're going to protect the "rights" of non-smokers at the expense of all those who otherwise are capable of making their own intelligent choices about smoking.
How did they pull off this broad-daylight hijacking of personal liberty? The same way they're doing it with all these Save the Earth superstitions—by invoking pseudo-science. In the case of tobacco, the crusading control-freaks bought a bunch of hacks to swear that their cherrypicked data on "secondhand smoke" represented the greatest health threat since the last scam they perpetrated. And of course they were hugely successful in their efforts to spin themselves as being compassionate. It's for the children...you know, all the ones that you and I heartlessly murder with our second-hand smoke day in and day out. The studies "proved" it.
Those "studies" have since been thoroughly discredited, but that doesn't matter any more. The Big Lie only has to work long enough to get the moronic majority (
OK..."moronic" is probably redundant) to buy into it, and that means just long enough to get some new command-and-control legislation on the books. After that, the truth doesn't matter. Once the state establishes its authority to control the lives of its citizens in some new and greater degree, it almost never surrenders it. Legislators generally are not in the business of repealing bad laws. They justify their existence by passing new laws. How? By increasing fear, anger, hatred, envy, and generally by setting up straw-man schemes that pit one segment of the populace (which they hope is in the majority) against another (which is always in the minority), and the "solution" is always the same: more coercive interference with the lives, property, and liberty of the citizenry.
Of course, the smartest politicians are careful to ensure that they don't piss off too many people at once. They achieve that end by carefully shifting their targets around. At one time or another, everyone gets the opportunity to be part of the "them" in the "us vs. them" ploy. For the antis, pipe smokers are "them" (bad guys), and everyone else is the "us" (good guys).
It always works the same way. The politicians stand back and let the squawkers draw up the battle lines, and then they jump in on whichever side looks like it's going to win. That call that "leadership". But in the final analysis, they always increase their power and measure their success by decreasing personal liberty, not by increasing it. That is all political laws can do.
Vito :joker:
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