UK leading the way on this draconian bullshit as usual.
You know its bad when your hope rests on big tech throwing down the gauntlet.
You know its bad when your hope rests on big tech throwing down the gauntlet.
Their recent smoking ban -- which is sure to make cigarette smoking cool again with young people -- was a joke. This hyper-surveillance measure is a lot less funny.
That's about to be turned on its head. Banning smoking will make it seem edgy, transgressive, and alluring. Still worse, banning it only for people below a certain age will make it seem mature and sophisticated to those below the cutoff. The forbidden fruit.
The UK Govt couldn't possibly devise a better way to popularize cigarettes with young people. And they'll create a nice little black market, to boot.
or to put it another way --- the phenomenon you point to is real but completely swamped by the more direct impacts
In the UK, however, the way to bet is that the government enforces the ban with maniacal zeal, so smoking rates will probably go down slightly in the near term. (For better or worse -- usually worse -- the UK has more state capacity to enforce a ban than the US or indeed the vast majority of other countries.) But smoking will become, once again, a prestigious activity. All the cool kids will smoke, if only for the social signaling benefits. Over more than a decade, youth smoking rates might surpass what they were before the ban.
In a post-911 world, the people leading this country still leading by fear.
Weren't the Tories going to get the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights? And thus remove the possibility of appealing the the European Court of Human Rights.