Racehorse: "What I can't figure out is that the majority of people here refer to themselves as tea party types or Libertarians. Yet, this stuff goes on.......
It's not just
vaping......."
I know why. But to get into it in here invites tangential conversations that are both infuriating and futile. It's odious, noxious and incessant and has deeply irritated a LOT of people. They've left this part of the forum, or don't bother to speak up. This allows that contingent to somewhat control the underlying
political narrative here, and to imagine that opposition to the regulation of ecigs is only coherent and defensible as a right-wing "libertarian" cause. They really don't get it, won't get it, and that's the way it is.
They also won't acknowledge that that's the case.
Since they're on the right side vis a vis vaping, I bite my tongue much more often than not. I'm an old lefty activist and can soldier on with anyone who supports a cause I care about. The constant jabs and stereotyping doesn't bother apolitical persons in here, and that's fine.
If a TP person who bought that whole package except for gay rights, who was passionate about gay rights, were to wander into a forum in which socialists had seized that issue as emblematic of their whole agenda, it'd be a similar discomfiture. All political groups define "rights" only around their particular preferences, and always at the expense of other rights. To pretend otherwise is smoke and mirrors.
Just remember that quitting smoking is not a partisan project, that it's fair to assume that if we're at all representative of the general populace here then the majority of us here are actually not sympathetic to right wing libertarian ideology, that that contingent habitually and casually demonizes and misrepresents anyone not in their camp, in here as elsewhere, and, as one person (a very bright and articulate activist for this cause, who quit the forum) said, they're constitutionally unable and unwilling to stop pressing their whole package of talking points, and assume that everyone who disagrees is either a moronic political illiterate or a witting tyrant.
Sad that the old hatred of hippies, with attendant WAY off stereotype, and that whole musty cultural divide, should emerge in here too, though. I had to require myself to delete a very lengthy rejoinder. To somehow imagine those prim and authoritarian ANTZ as ex-hippies gave me a wondrous good laugh though; laughter is saving.
