Today, I had the very great pleasure of and honour of having a comment on the Guardian deleted. I was not in any way nasty nor did I swear. I did not name anyone nor accuse anyone of anything awful, and yet my comment was deleted because, apparently, I broke the rules.
The article upon which I commented was this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/dec/28/smokers-graphic-ad-campaign-tumour
It’s the one about the new advert which claims that “every fifteen cigarettes you smoke will cause a mutation in your body”. That claim is false. The reason that it is false revolves around the word ‘mutation’.
I have just counted the number of breaths that I have taken in the last minute, sitting quietly on the sofa. I took 16 breaths. In those breaths, were thousands of chemicals in minuscule amounts. My body is currently reacting chemically with those chemicals. It is dealing with them and extracting such useful chemicals as it finds. The rest, it will discard. I am also drinking a glass of beer and smoking a fag. It will deal with the products of those substances in the same way. That is how my body is designed and how it has been working for seventy three years. Those activities are perfectly normal activities and in no way involve ‘mutations’, UNLESS we define the word ‘mutation’ as any physical change at all in the cells of the body, in which case the word ‘mutation’ is almost meaningless, since cells are changing all the time. The only way for that sentence to make sense is for the word ‘mutation’ to mean some sort of permanent alteration, and, as far as I know, it has not been proven that smoking cigarettes causes permanent changes in cells.
But that was not what my comment was about.
I cannot remember the exact words, but this is something like my comment:
“From:
CEO,
English Tobacco.
To:
BBC.
ASH.
British Heart.
British Lung.
Royal College Physicians.
British Medical Assn.
We wish you a happy new year.
We wish to thank you for your efforts on our behalf over the last five years. Never in our wildest marketing dreams would we ever have expected to have our products promoted so widely. Never would we have expected to have smoking advertised on every doorway of every cake shop, every library, every school, etc in the country. We are especially grateful for your help in placing the visibility of our products into every doctor’s surgery and every hospital where people feel most stressed and in need of our products.
After decades of decline in demand for our products, you have arrested the decline. The enjoyment of tobacco is becoming fashionable again, especially among young people. You have saved us billions of pounds in advertising costs.
We note that 2.7 million pounds is to be spent on your latest TV adverts campaign and that it will run for nine weeks. Please be assured that we are more than willing to equal that sum in order to run the campaign for a further nine weeks.
Thank you again.
Yours etc.
I suspect that a Zealot ‘reported’ my comment because it was actually published.
They don’t like it up ‘em, do they?
30/12/2012 at 10:07
Now for a little science…..70% of your immune system is located in your intestines. In the USA, there are as many food related cancers as there are smoking related ones, yet you rarely hear any discussion about hydrogenated fats, chemical additives, preservatives, etc. If you look at any label on a processed food item in the supermarket, you will behold a litany of ingredients that are unhealthy and have been linked to cancer in various trials. Yet, our government, who takes such good care of us, allows these ingredients to be marketed and consumed. The public water that you drink is rife with cancer causing chemicals – allowable by the government. Cancer is an environmental disease, coming when outside agents infiltrate your body and your immune system is unable to respond properly. Each one of us has rogue cells in our system at this very moment. The trick is this…..take very good care of what you eat – after all, 70% of your immune system is directly related to your ingestion. And let that 70% take care of you. The fact that governments permit obsolete cancer care to continue, based on 1920′s science; that hordes of scientists and drug companies continue to make billions in profit on the back of ‘cancer research’, etc., indicates that the smoking/cancer problem is no more than politics at its very worst.
If governments were in ANY way concerned about the health risks of smoking, they would have demanded the reduction of the various chemicals that are used in cigarettes, and most certainly would not have approved the ridiculous FSC cigarettes, where we are now obliged to smoke carpet glue, as well. Instead they use scare tactics designed by political lobbyists, and respond in a ‘fascist’ manner when anyone dares to speak up to the contrary. As do their puppets….the newspapers!!
30/12/2012 at 11:09
We cannot allow these brainwashed creeps to take over, although to be honest, I think they already might have, while we were asleep.
Deleting comments that are too clever for them is just the tip of the iceberg with these blighters, imagine one of them on an NHS ‘death panel’, deciding who gets to live or die.
I imagine that that is one the prized jobs to aspire to in this control-freak paradise; bit like being in charge of a concentration camp in Nazi Germany.
02/01/2013 at 11:21
They have just started showing this advert in Ireland. And I must say while I was appalled at reading about this in your blog, I was even more appalled to see the advert. What BS!! Science has known for years that each and every one of us has rogue cancer cells in us AT ALL TIMES. It is only when our immune system is weakened, for whatever reason (and not necessarily because of any ‘mutation’) that cancer cells are allowed to grow. It is ‘science’ like this ad (actually, ‘propaganda’) that is so ridiculous. If they were so concerned about people’s health, they would just insist that tobacco companies stop adding all those ridiculous chemicals to the tobacco and cigarette paper. I now fully understand what you mean by ‘zealot’, as certainly, this advert is an indication of the emotional and inaccurate ‘zeal’ surrounding the anti smoking ‘movement’.