Posts

For this post, I’m going to bring in a very special guest. Most of you will know who this is, the southern candidate for Vapers In Power. Dear readers, I pass this page on to Liam Bryan.

My First Hustings

So, two days before I was really nervous - I mean, we’re a single issue party and I’d pretty much insisted that “Protect Our NHS” give me an equal voice. They didn’t want to at first, they said there wasn’t enough time for the “major” candidates as it was. I think it was me suggesting I go as a member of the audience that swung it.

Advocacy. Such an interesting concept isn’t it? You have one group of folks saying one thing, and another group saying the opposite. Before social media there were unending group meetings, PR, debates and all that jazz. True it was much slower to get the points across, but that didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things as it gave each side a lot of time to come up with something ‘better’. Not to mention getting the face time to get the point across.

Today was meant to be the day when something erupted from California. There were two options on what it could be, either the classical “e-cigs don’t aid cessation” stories where some pseudo-scientist deep in the bowels of UU pokes a few buttons on Hex, sends the antz scurrying to come up with a catchy click worthy headline.

That one did pop up briefly. It is still being touted around but not as loudly as the other “story”.

Who is the biggest liar of them all?

Pithy intro, must work on that. But this is a blog it’s meant to entertain (somewhat) and inform (kind of). Not to mention I am a completely random individual so don’t judge. Anyway I digress, and that’s before I start.

In case you missed it on twitter today, our mutual frenemy has penned another e-cig article. He has written a few, here, here, here, here, here, and his most recent one here. Unfortunately, the term investigative journalism seems to have escaped his notice as the vast majority of what he writes, and how he writes it comes across as decidedly negative. That is of course complete at odds with his claims of ‘balance’.

Today we saw the release of the manifesto for the Liberal Democrat Party. Oh my word. The manifesto is a delightfully dull read (that’s an hour of my life I’ll never see again), but the part that I want to take a closer look at is this bit.

Support effective public awareness campaigns like Be Clear on Cancer, working closely with charities to raise awareness of the signs and symptoms of killer diseases.

Well so much for not writing another difficult post. This is another one of those that has been at the back of my mind, more so since the start of the month.

I started this blog back in October 2014. Initially, it was just my virtual dumping ground for me to let off some steam after reading all the bullshit being pushed about e-cigs. It has since become something much, much more than that. I changed my writing style a little for the first truly public post (Why I Vape), since then I’ve strived to balance the content of my posts so they aren’t all along the same ranty theme.

Seems to be a relatively benign introduction, doesn’t it? After all, we do have rights. Just as we had rights when we smoked. We are after all human beings with rights and privileges within our respective societies.

Trouble is, this particular ‘group’ are anything but benign.

Looks pretty enticing doesn’t it? The site goes over pretty much all the legislative bullshit ranging from taxation, through bans, marketing and sales, right up to regulation. The site encourages the user to sign a petition. Fortunately for me, I use a pretty large high-resolution monitor so I caught the site footer immediately.

This blog is generally, by and large aimed at picking apart press releases, poking fun at the anti brigade, and of course my own muddled thoughts. I also like to try to entertain my readers when I can.

I’ve thought long and hard about this post. Ever since putting up my thoughts on the TPD and what it means for me personally as well as what it will mean for everyone.

Ah social media. Both a boon and a burden. I had the dubious pleasure to be introduced to another anti group yesterday which set me to headbutting my desk repeatedly. I posted a (relatively) short blog yesterday which covered some of their tactics.

Unfortunately for them, the ever lovely big*sparkles*Shannon, found this little gem buried in the rough.

Cue more head/desk action on my part. Given the diabolical nature of @sacstand I just had to have a nose around, just to see what other mischief these folks were up to. It does seem that the entire site went up in November 2013, so it is pretty old and doesn’t appear to have had any updates to it. Either that means they can’t be bothered to maintain it, or they believe that the information contained on the site is sufficient to secure more funding.

Within the realms of the so-called ‘public health’ arena, there is always an agenda. More often than not, those agendas may actually prove to be beneficial to the actual public. But that’s in terms of actual medical professionals, the boots on the ground. When it comes to the other entities claiming ‘public health’ agendas. Not so much.

For years, smokers have been a target for a whole variety of campaigns to try to get them to quit smoking, but the smokers weren’t the original target. When it became clear that smoking was actually causing a relatively substantial amount of harm, those in gubmint decided to try to do something about smoking. Getting folks to cut down or give up the habit entirely seemed to be the whole idea. Anti-smoking. Cue a myriad of campaigns aimed at informing the public of the dangers of smoking. To be fair, the initial thrust did have a pretty big impact as the general public didn’t really know what potential harms smoking caused. Well and good, the Anti campaign worked, smoking rates dropped, uptake dropped. But not significantly.