Among robes and white coats
is undisputed that no one has the right to impose on others a habit injurious to health. However, the initiative to regulate smoking in public spaces President Vázquez and Minister of Public Health, Ma Julia Muñoz, seems to point to something more than health care for the smoke. Vázquez statements that "lung cancer kills three Uruguayans a day," merely reaffirm what it is not so much to bring justice to non-smokers after centuries of subjection to the neighbor's smoke but appeal to smoker's fencing reducing the areas where you can practice so pernicious and reprehensible habit, while closing the door on any aspiration for a serious debate on the legalization of marijuana.
If the measure is intended to protect those who do not want to smoke and are forced to do so, Vazquez should have specified how much is the genocide of non-smokers and not to those who most likely chose to smoke despite being aware that harmed health, to the point of being willing to pay with his life the pleasure of giving a pernicious habit.
Ni Ma Julia Vázquez Muñoz and seem to wonder why these Uruguayans were forced to die of old age. Based on the premise that all human beings are forced to live so be able to stay in this world as long as possible and, based on the questionable idea of \u200b\u200buniversal validity, regulate universal validity. However, neither the State nor science can have input in determining what is appropriate or inappropriate management of life and health of an individual.
The measure goes beyond protecting the health of the healthy and pointing to the enclosure and deterrence of repression from those who refuse the health model that determines the health biologist in terms of length of body as machine, it seems evident when one analyzes the "solution" the problem of wayward smokers: in the case of public places where the individual is not eligible if you attend or not attend, is applied correctly, the ban, while in places where the individual will voluntarily intends to isolate smokers included in an airtight air extractors. The possibility that the owner of a private institution can determine which services are provided and what type of clients runs his proposal and the user to choose which environment is submitted, it is beyond discussion. Is more effective to isolate the "sick" to announce at the door that the place is open to smokers and that the user decides whether to risk his life or not, remaining a hours in an environment polluted by choice.
Apparently, not so much to bring more freedom to the oppressed restrict passive smoking as those who, by pernicious habit, not only cause major medical expenses to the state but who are examples of antisocial behavior, individualistic, anti-economic and even suicidal. However, in the center of the debate on the prohibition (of snuff and other drugs) should prevail an ethical question about the economic: what right does the state protect individuals from harm done to himself themselves? John Stuart Mill, in his essay "On Liberty" argued:
"The only reason for which power can be exercised as of right on any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient reason . This can not be compelled to do or not do will be best for referring him or make him happier, or because, in the opinion of others, to do or not to be wiser, or better. These are good reasons to express disagree with him, or reasoning with him, or to persuade, or to ask him to do or not do, but not to force or threatening to harm if not acting in accordance with these opinions. On his being, on your body and mind, the individual is sovereign " control the powers trying to exert on the individual's freedom to determine their state of being attached to the church-state on a crusade of domestication has changed the prize offered to those that fit the proposed model. Where the Church offers salvation, the modern state provides health, long life and (conveniently) production.
Or Fernando Savater points in "The content of happiness"
"Just as salvation, health is the goal of human life on Earth, both of which are goods that assumes that the man must pursue, even inadvertently, unless perversion evil of the will or mind (crazy), in both cases there is a body of specialists who are dedicated to concrete ways to achieve them and to condemn any individual heretical initiative, both are ultimately imposed, for the benefit of all, by official institutions designed to prevent and punish the misconduct temptations. Traditional religion, using as an ideological tool theology of salvation, aspired to establish in this world of a theocracy, the secular statist utilitarianism, using medical dogmatism, has succeeded in imposing modern what Thomas Szasz calls a 'therapeutic state'. (...) From the point of view ethical-if only the central dogma terminologically-therapeutic state is that it is bad since it goes against the health and well as the favors. " Thus, and according to Thomas Szasz, Savater called to distinguish between doing something for someone and do something to someone, commonly presented as interventions for the sake of someone you are handling about it.
"The only form of resistance to this claim is misleading: do nothing for my well without my prior request." So, one wonders, for example, what right does the IMM to fine those who choose to drive without a seatbelt or a motorcycle without wearing a helmet alone, when life is endangering itself. With the same approach should be fine any risky behavior to one's health, paratroopers and skaters chase, apply severe penalties to distracted, go after the fat, sedentary, the mere insomniac.
In August 2003, the musician Brian Eno, wrote an article in 'The Observer' in the wake of the book "Weapons of Mass Deception by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. It referred to the changes in the forms of government control of citizens:
"When I visited Russia in 1986, I made friends with a musician whose father had been the personal doctor of Brezhnev. One day we were talking about life during 'the period of stagnation 'of Brezhnev-era. 'It must have been strange to live completely immersed in propaganda,' I said. 'Ah, but therein lies the difference. We knew it was propaganda, 'replied Sacha. That's the difference. Soviet propaganda was so obvious that most Russians did not pay attention. They assumed that the government acted in its own interests and any message that came from it came biased, so do not take into account. (...)"
Eno notes that social control has become more sophisticated and insidious, so that deserves a new name. It's not propaganda, is prop-agenda:
"No es tanto el control de lo que pensamos, sino el control sobre qué cosas pensamos. Cuando nuestros gobiernos quieren vendernos un curso de acción, lo hacen asegurándose que sea la única cosa en la agenda, la única cosa sobre que todos hablamos."
El anuncio de la reglamentación sobre el hábito de fumar no resultaría especialmente llamativo si no coincidiera con otros temas de la agenda presidencial, que en los últimos meses parece regirse por las preferencias personales del primer mandatario antes que por el programa de un partido político. El traslado de la estatua de Juan Pablo II, el anunciado veto a la ley de salud reproductiva y la presente reglamentación seem to have come directly from life adventure of Vázquez. Perhaps this is because the plethora of biographies of the President in bookstores, in the light of recent presidential initiatives any political analyst would be tempted to check your oracle.
Unfortunately, redefining the concept of health, stimulate debate, educate, so that as citizens we are free to choose not appear to be responsible in the government's immediate agenda. The randomness of that agenda would be nothing more than anecdotal if there was a constant that unites each of the items listed: the unilateral imposition of an idea that is presented as indisputable. In the case of regulation against snuff (even accepting that public health is reduced to the clean air we are forced to breathe) and assuming some consistency in the presidential concerns, after 15 years in government, should have appeared an army of inspectors to monitor were met with the maximum permitted gas emissions and monitoring system should not be alone in the streets, but included in the "today" and merely useless deadweight Computest as if something that "smoke" in Uruguay and that affects people without distinction and without choice, are motor vehicles, especially buses and taxis, under direct supervision (and grant) municipal. Just go to a village fair and take a look at the fleet of trucks with Computest approved until 2008, to suffer an uncontrollable fit of laughter.
Brian Eno's article ended:
"When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. As he explained, was not because they wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how to recognize when they were lying to me. I hope that writers such as Rampton and Stauber and others may have the same effect and help to remove culture of lies and deceit that is being done to our political regimes. "
The triumph of the left is mostly , the culmination of a process of citizenship learning to recognize when you were lying or manipulating. Do not pretend to forget it now.
Postscript UK
A few hours after writing the post, I found a November 2004 edition of the very liberal "The Economist" whose lead article entitled "No smoking, hunting, sugar, salt, fat ... " and deals with the new government bans Tony Blair. The article begins:
"Enjoying yourself? Well, you'd Better stop then. This week is Banning week in Britain."
On the issue of health (ya que la prohibición de cazar es solo respecto a la salud de los zorros) el argumento es similar al del post de más arriba:
"The question of just how much should be done reaches right down into the principles underpinning liberal democracy. According to those principles, the government is entitled to interfere with people's behaviour only in so far as it affects other people. Otherwise, well-informed individuals should be allowed to make their own choices. If they want to harm themselves, that's up to them.
That's why the government has tried to sell the smoking ban in the way it has. Passive smoking, it argues, kills other people. Yet the numbers involved are tiny..."
Pero, as the title of the article indicates (by including fox hunting), "The Economist" suspicion that what the Labour government seeks to erase the boundaries of class in Britain. While prohibited from leaving the country rich to practice their favorite sport aristocratic, try, through regulations, improve quality of life of the poorer classes, which concentrates the highest percentage of smokers and addicted to junk food: life expectancy of a British upper class is 7.4 years longer than in a lower class, 42% of unskilled workers smoke, versus 15% professionals, 28% of lower-class women are obese, versus 14% of the upper class and so does children, who eat 50% less fruit and vegetables in the lower classes.
I think it is good that the democrats intend to change the numbers a bit, perhaps as the government tries to do Vázquez.
The question is whether this change in living conditions are to live a miserable life but longer or you will be accompanied by other changes. Many argue that the episode of the statue of Pope is that Vázquez's government expects to receive help from the Catholic Church to support the Emergency Plan. Last there is not much difference between bowing to the IMF to do Wojtyla before, although some prefer to pay with money than with ideological concessions.
