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More like this please!January 5th, 2010 |
 28 comments to More like this please! |
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No trapeze acts? This is an outrage !
I think it’s particularly clever that, in the illustration, the puff of smoke looks like a question mark! I mean, really, I think that is so subtle!
Not exactly civil disobedience is it.
Civil disobedience is great when you have nothing to lose and no easy target to attack. For a business to refuse to comply, they simply fine you until you no longer have a business. This however complies with the letter of the law but does not just accept it meekly.
This sign does not allow the business to appear to be endorsing what it is required to do and moreover it makes it clear this is an imposition. It turns an advertisement for the power of the state into an protest against it. I commend them for this.
Noted, Perry, but it is rather a disappointment to see pillaging and rollerblading on the list – but then, most people have long underestimated the level of familial bonding it can bring!
What – pillaging whilst rollerblading?!
Joking aside, civil disobedience is a tactic with some successes to its’ name, but, so far as I am aware, only when practiced by very large numbers of people simultaneously and with – as Perry says, nothing (or little) to lose. A pertinent question is knowing when enough people are up for it and sufficiently committed – if the answer is only ever hundreds of thousands of poor, hopeless or near-starvation people, then ….. bugger. Another pertinent question concerns the morality or otherwise (and of course political exposure) of those whose rule is broken by acts of civil disobedience. Ghandi was standing against the British, not twisted, evil creatures like Yezhov and Stalin. Are today’s politicians (and their lesser acolytes) really evil (i.e. derive their morality from a collectivist metaphysic) or just cynical and essentially nihilistic? That question goes directly to the chances of winning a civil confrontation with the government. Let’s not be in any doubt about the potential power of civil disobedience however – it kicks every other non-military tactic right out of the field of play.
In the meantime, every little helps – and this little effort is not to be frowned upon. The owner of those premises has his own values to look after and he is perfectly entitled to do so without apology to ubers like me looking down my nose at him with an “it isn’t exactly civil disobedience is it?”…
As it happens, I also have quite a lot to lose from coming off second best in a confrontation with the government. That doesn’t stop me highlighting this as the most powerful non-military tactic however.
Even better is “Thank you for not smoking, . . . “
A few of these skidding around London wouldn’t go amiss mind.
Superb! Made my day.
I’m a little puzzled – is the owner saying that he wishes the government would stay out of his business (literal and figurative) so that he *could* rape, murder, pillage etc., as well as smoke?
I think not, PaulH. Wasn’t it a vicar who put this up on his church?
May his sermons endure for ever.
PaulH: to further elucidate RW’s point, the vicar is making a snarky remark to the effect that while you’re not supposed to be rollerblading, raping, murdering, pillaging and so forth either, the government does not *require* you to put signs up explicitly explaining such.
Possibly because people are expected to be mature adults and understand this as given. However, when it comes to smoking, apparently people are children. And need to be patronised as such.
Mind you, strange things can go on in churches. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms (1979 edition) has this example of a limerick:
A vice both obscure and unsavoury
Kept the bishop of Leicester in slavery.
Amidst terrible howls
He deflowered young owls,
In a crypt fitted out as an aviary.
I see this practice is not mentioned in the list. Why not, eh?
It would help to know when the sign was from – I can find very few references to it, and the only date is that it’s sometime before mid-2008. That’s less than a year after the start of the smoking ban in England. So at the time it was a pretty reasonable requirement to put up a sign telling people they couldn’t smoke in a public building, as that was a new thing (and a church isn’t obviously a public building).
Now clearly most people don’t smoke in church anyway (though I’ve seen it happen, and I’m very rarely in a church). And the only positive about still having to display the sign today is that it reminds people of the nanny state they live in. But this just doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me, at that time.
Then you clearly have not understood the sign. The law is an unreasonable imposition of what people can do on private property, thus requiring people to advertise the law is also unreasonable.
Mike, is that one real?
They have even demanded that such signs be put on churches – leading to church people asking for an excemption.
This misses the point – just as Church people asking to be excused from obeying the “anti discrimination” regulations does.
Either it is right for the state to violate the freedom of people (by telling them they have to have ugly signs on private property – or by telling them who they must employ) or it is wrong.
It can not be right to tell a company or a secular charity want to do – but wrong to tell a church what to do.
Paul Marks: Which may be the case in most countries indeed, but in the USA there is a clear presumption of separation between Church and State (and hence the churches there – as well as the synagogues, temples, shrines and mosques where applicable – can indeed ask for exemptions without arguing the ‘rightness’ of it).
Of course, the same is asked for in Australia (exemptions from various stupid Acts and Bills), so maybe Commonwealth countries also have an unwritten agreement of such separations as well.
A bookshop in Sussex has a large NO SMOKING sign on its door, prefaced by this:
“We are required by law to display this ridiculous sign in a prominent position. Failure to do so would result in a fine of up to £1000.”
For the record: (1) I don’t smoke. (2) I can’t imagine what kind of nutter would light up a fag* in a bookshop. (3) My asthmatic husband is pleased that he can now enjoy a pint in the local pub without the fear of being unable to breathe. However, that’s beside the point.
* fag = cigarette
They forgot loitering, bare knuckles brawling and humming the tune to “MacArthur Park.”
@Perry – I entirely agree with your point, for private property. And as soon as churches renounce their charitable status I’d support their right to remove these signs. But I don’t pay for other people’s private property based on their choice, hence it’s not really private property.
Oh, one proviso on that – as an employer they either need to comply with the law on smoking (including the sign), or they must allow any of their employees to spray deoderant, air freshener, etc. around at will in their workplace as well.
The fact they manage to avoid tax does not mean you are part owner of their property or are somehow subsidising them… why does someone paying the state less tax alienates the right to own their property? By that notion, we are all just vassals paying our overlords not to drive us off the land they permit us to work and if we don’t pay without mitigation, the lands are forfeit (sadly this is not far from the truth in some ways).
Almost everyone with significant assets finds ways to keep the predatory state from taking as much as they otherwise would, so presumably that is also not really “private property”?
Actually it *is* subsidizing them – there’s a total bill that needs to be paid, and I have to pay my share plus a bit of theirs. I just looked it up, and that’s the dictionary definition of a subsidy (definition 2, to be precise, after making direct payment to the person subsidized).
The difference between people of means minimizing their tax bill is that they’re taking legislation and perverting it to shelter their assets and income. Now good for them, as far as I’m concerned, but that’s very different from taking the express intent of the legislation to make me pay some of their share.
Nope. What if you didn’t pay “your” share? Which bit of what the state spends is hypothecated to PaulH? More importantly why does it “need” to be paid when so much of what the state does is unfunded even with fiat money anyway? What this suggests to me is not that some church who has cunning protected itself from predation should be paying more tax but rather you should be trying to pay less.
Why are you so happy to surrender where the intellectual and political battles take place to the people taking your money? Do you actually accept the vast expenditure of the regulatory state is perfectly legitimate? If so, well fine, I can see why you want others to pay more but then in my view you are then part of the problem… but if you think otherwise, then the problem is not churches paying less but rather you have no means to stop the state taking ever more of what you earn. And you don’t seriously think churches paying more will induce the state take less from you, do you? is there really any meaningful link?
Perry: The issue that it boils down to, at the end of the day, is the kind of property ownership you have (most people think of it as land/real estate ownership, but the principles are similar for all property).
The most powerful (and hence least likely to be granted) is allodial title, which grants you absolute rights. If you have allodial title, no one can take it away from you by any legal means at all. And only governments have lands with allodial title (I understand that Texas grants such titles as well, but how this works I don’t know).
But in every other form of ownership, this is not so. Otherwise, how is it possible for the government to seize or confiscate your property? How can your unclaimed monies in the bank revert to the State if you don’t touch it periodically? How can you die intestate and the government swoop down to take a chunk of your property (or levy estate and death taxes)? How can eminent domain be exercised seemingly at the whim of any large company?
In Red China, the Commie Party owns all the land in the country. Hence, if Shanghai wants to build a highway through farmland, the people either move or die when the bulldozers drive over them. But you know what? At least there, you don’t have any higher expectations, because you know it up front!
It really frosts my chops that when a leasehold term expires, you have to renew the leasehold by basically buying the bloody property again… and possibly at prevailing market prices!
How is it possible? Guns. They use force.
That is the difference between a lease and a freehold.
Gregory – you misunderstand me.
I am not saying that the state should be allowed to boss about religious people and organizations about.
I am saying that the state should not be allowed to boss about nonreligious (or even antireligious) people or organizations either.
If a private place of business (or an athiest club or whatever) does not want a “no smoking” sign on their wall that is their affair – and if politicians or civil servants tell them different, then the politicians or civil servants should be told to go away.
“But the majority of people have a right to boss the minority of people about” – as a libertarian I do not agree with that.
However, it is not really “the majority of people” at all.
There are not normally public votes on these things with both sides being put their case.
The establishment (the Economist magazine and so on) HATE such public votes (which “undermine representative democracy” – i.e. the ILLUSION of democracy) as much as they hate freely elected judges.
Everything must be decided behind closed doors by “enlightened experts” who then transmit their “Progressive” policies to the media, the politicians (of all parties – candidate selection sees to that) and civil servants.
The same old game as in Plato’s Republic or Francis Bacon’s “The New Atlantis”.
Just with a bit of fake “democratic” clothing to decieve people.
And as such things as the (much hated by the establishment) Tea Party movement show – the people are no longer decieved.
At midnight from the crypt of St Giles
Came cries which resounded for miles
Said the vicar, “Good Gracious,
Has Brother Ignatious,
Forgotten the curate has piles?”