RE: Re: Pleasure

["Lisa & Ian Murray" <seamus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Colin Danby wrote:

 >Cigarettes are a cheap luxury which a lot of people enjoy.  Things fried
 >in lard taste good.  Why should a progressive agenda try to suppress, or
 >even discourage, cheap, almost-innocent pleasures?  Why do we have to
 >assume that people are stupid?  Why are we even worried about these
 >kinds of choices?

 Because "we" want to give the right ammunition when they say that the
 left is full of prescriptive prigs. Because "we" know best.

 Doug
************
The costs of cigarette smoking ain't cheap. And those who claim nobody knows
best think they know THAT is the best and then go on to prescribe social
atomism for the rest of us. Are pork chops a cheap luxury? How about a
newspaper? I thought one of the pillars of anti-capitalist thought was that
prices don't represent the total costs. Or are "we" too separating
micro-causation from macro-consequences. No one's calling for hair-shirts,
but "sin" ain't cheap, that's why they call it "sin". Rather than forbid,
why can't we think of better "sins" folks will really want to get "addicted"
to. Dare to imagine a society where all the cigarette smokers HAD to smoke a
joint each time they wanted to light up. Society would be far funnier
[accident increases notwithstanding] for about six months to a year till
"demand" dropped and, we would have the added benefit of  the former tobacco
farmers making a bit more cash. We could dump lung cancer research etc.
etc....There are a bunch of budding lefties in Kentucky, Iowa and all the
other places farmers in North America risk their ass to grow stuff the Right
is in love with forbidding. As Barbara Ehrenreich said about the Michigan
Militia, "where was the left with the leaflets and fliers"?

Ian