[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by evollove

So, what are the benefits?

If we're taking a cavalier, "Life's short, we all die, have fun" attitude, I don't understand why you made the choice you made.

that's not my attitude at all! and i already mentioned the benefits over a couple of pages!

but damn, maybe smokes don't actually help with reading, after all. oxygen deprivation > nicotine stimulation.

TRY THE PATCH.

[evollove]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

but my tongue is not all red and fucked, and i can breathe better, and i'm not coughing all the time. also, smoking is supposed to be bad for boners.

This?

[evollove]

I'm confused. Dead battery is freaking out. I have been too, so I join in.

Then everyone seems to be saying don't sweat it.

That's all I've understood so far.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by evollove

See, I'm a nervous smoker.

But whenever I've tried to quit, I go fucking homicidal when I'm not suicidal. Bad for everyone.

I can't win.

the benefit for you then is non-criminality. i'd rather be out of jail and smoking than imprisoned.

but…. i never got that way though. i didn't "project" my craving psychologically--- i felt it in the flesh as a physical thing, and i confronted it directly and sucked it up. withdrawal is different for everyone i suppose.

sounds like you're gonna need to schedule a vacation. i can't imagine quitting in an office. i would probably kill people then.

maybe it's the office that's the problem.

try the patch maybe? for sirius. at least till you can get away.

[dead_battery]

the "enjoy" attitude is pure ideology. our society, like rome when it turned into a decadent dystopia and was destroyed, now has only one commandment - ENJOY. and we all conform to it totally, and we get aggressive when anyone dissents. EVERY FUCKING DAY some redundant cunt is sneering "ITS JUST ENJOYMENT" over and over again.

i feel like fuck you you piece of inhuman shit, but i also feel like trying to resist this injunction is doomed and dangerous and impossible. i am also the inhuman piece of shit who wants to consume myself to a sugary cancerous death in the middle of all this decadent nihilism. its pure contradiction.

enjoyment is used to justify the literal HARVESTING of bodies by commodities that are engineered for maximum addiction. its used to justify everything bad about us. on the one hand the only purpose of life is death, and so enjoyment in consumer societies is a kind of freedom from all sorts of evil and dangerous alternatives. on the other hand, we're all dupes that are basically collaborating with our own nazi prison guards who are making lampshades out of our skin - or money out of our lungs. same principle really.

thats why this "personal choice" shit is so evil. we know from neuroscience that we basically have no free will or intentionality, but that it evolved as a way for us to take social responsibility of behaviours, which obviously is a vitally important tool that has lots of benefits and survival mechanisms built into it.

so we kind of psychologically abuse ourselves en mass with this constant affirmation of our will in a supernatural sense. like we literally exist in this space where reality is not happening, and we can make causal deliberations a priori. therefore we can just "decide" not to smoke, and when we finding ourselves smoking in spite of this, well, you've only got yourself to blame. better try harder and buy more shit. communicative capitalism wants your story of personal determination.

but the fact is that cigarette is an object that exists on an equal footing with you. you only have the barest hallucination of what your brain is doing, introspection occurs after the fact. your brain has already made its decision before you're consciously aware of it

ive literally spent years now locked in a death spiral with cigarettes, thinking about them every second of everyday. my day is basically smoking. everything else is barely important. either trying to quit or failing and feeling guilty. my health is getting worse.

on the one hand, why the fuck not smoke myself to death? on the other i have other things i want to do. i want to never think about these things again.

and i'm trapped like this, with all the millions of other isolated individuals. locked into our own lonely fucking deaths.

its not just cigarettes and narcotics. junk food is literally engineered to addict you. society destroys you then profits off your suffering by selling you medication. its one big orgy of bodies cannibalizing each other for profit. we're all trapped in it and we can't do anything but collaborate with it.

its capitalism at its most evil. and rich people dont give a shit.

its been proven that the most moral people are the poor. the rich just see the world as relations between objects. they profit off this system and dont give a shit about what goes on below, or they make careers out of pretending to give a shit.

we shouldnt HAVE cigarettes. and alcoholics should have screening for the genes that cause it, and society should just refuse to sell to them. we should organize this so that people arent destroyed by these drugs. but under capitalism we can't. it's not a fantasy that people that fuck with the corporate agenda in a large enough way - journalists etc. - will get threatened and sued and destroyed. they risk being murdered. that's not conspiracy theory. that's fact.

it really is evil. thats the word for it. evil.

holocausts weren't just a nazi thing, they were happening ALL THE TIME throughout history before the nazis. i think the reason we don't have them today is because they aren't as profitable as the slow murder of addiction.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by evollove

I'm confused. Dead battery is freaking out. I have been too, so I join in.

Then everyone seems to be saying don't sweat it.

That's all I've understood so far.

it's an internet conversation. it's not linear.

db's struggles reminded me how much i loved tobacco. tobacco gave good head! then she gave me chancres! so i dumped her. but the head… the head was fantastic!

[evollove]

Plus I live with a smoker.

Yeah, I have no problem with nicotine per se. Just the cancerous way I get it into my bod. Patches, gum, lozenges...one or more of these will probably become a part of my life at some point.

Okay. Nothing will change in the near future. I'm done freaking out. For the moment.

(On the other hand, a talented prostitute this weekend would do me a lot of good.)

[evollove]

Originally Posted by dead_battery

on the one hand, why the fuck not smoke myself to death? on the other i have other things i want to do. i want to never think about these things again.

For whatever it's worth, even if that's nothing, I hear you loud and clear.

[Rob Instigator]

Originally Posted by evollove

So, what are the benefits?

If we're taking a cavalier, "Life's short, we all die, have fun" attitude, I don't understand why you made the choice you made.

And Rob, fun stats, but 500,000 smokers die each year. My number's coming up. I can feel it.

is this half million smokers dying in just the US? Use rational thought. smoking affects heart disease, lung disease, and a lot of things that can kill you. It is not just lung cancer, which was the point of my post.

If 500,000 smokers die each year then at least 1 million NON smokers die each year. Only about 20% of the population smokes. I'd like to see where you found this data.

[evollove]

My ass.

No, it's a stat I've come across a few times in various places. Maybe the numbers have changed in recent years.

BTW, only 20% smoke? That ad campaign really worked.


edit:
Center for Disease Control stuff:

http://www.cdc.gov/Tobacco/data_stat...acts/index.htm

[Rob Instigator]

I smoked for 10 years, pack and half a day of REDS, or whatever cheap substitute I could get that was full flavor.

I quit because I got tired of having shortness of breath and paying what amounted to, (in 2003) to $3,000-$4,000 a YEAR on cigarrettes. (with the rise in taxes and the more than doubling of cig costs, it would cost about $11,000 to smoke that much in a year now. INSANE.

I am a libertarian when it comes to personal choice. We should all be free to do what we want with our bodies, and ingest what we want, and suffer the consequences.

remember that it is not tobacco per se that kill;s you, but the more than 300 different chemical additives put in cigarrettes to flavor the tobbaco, to make it burn FASTER so you have to buy more, to create "smoother" smoke particles, etc. That shit will kill you far sooner than tobbaco itself.

It is no one's business, much less any government, to tell you what you should ingest.

[dead_battery]

i just cannot stop. the desire i have to stop is unbelievably strong.

its been proven that some people have genes that make them statistically unlikely to quit, and those without these genes can easily quit and have no problems.

we're advanced enough to understand this, so where are the screenings that prevent another life being ruined by alcohol or tobacco?

the right wing scum would get massive grants from corporate assholes to promote their "free choice and responsibility" agenda if we pushed too far against the profits of these fucking pieces of fucking shit. i wish i could form a terrorist cell and deliberately infect the tobacco company owners with lung cancer.

[Rob Instigator]

Originally Posted by evollove

My ass.

No, it's a stat I've come across a few times in various places. Maybe the numbers have changed in recent years.

BTW, only 20% smoke? That ad campaign really worked.


edit:
Center for Disease Control stuff:

http://www.cdc.gov/Tobacco/data_stat...acts/index.htm

do you really think half of americans smoke?

[Rob Instigator]

Percentage of U.S. adults aged 18 years or older who were current cigarette smokers in 2012:7

• 18.1% of all adults (42.1 million people): 20.1% of males, 14.5% of females
• 21.8% of non-Hispanic American Indians/Alaska Natives
• 19.7% of non-Hispanic Whites
• 18.1% of non-Hispanic Blacks
• 12.5% of Hispanics
• 10.7% of non-Hispanic Asians (excluding Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders)
• 26.1% of multiple race individuals

Notes:

• Current smokers are defined as persons who reported smoking at least 100 cigarettes during their lifetime and who, at the time of interview, reported smoking every day or some days.

[evollove]

I believed you. I was just surprised.

I remember when I was a kid, it was weird when an adult wasn't a smoker.

[Rob Instigator]

so 42 million adults smoke. around 400,000 die each year from smoking (which includes many who do not currently smoke but who smoked in the past)

it is far far less than the number of deaths attributable to alcohol, yet when the US tried banning that it got us organized crime, which has never left.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by dead_battery

we know from neuroscience that we basically have no free will or intentionality, but that it evolved as a way for us to take social responsibility of behaviours, which obviously is a vitally important tool that has lots of benefits and survival mechanisms built into it.

right-- it's not that free will doesn't exist, it's that it's LIMITED.

you can't quit smoking and go on a diet and exercise and work on a big project deadline or final exams and deal with a hostile work environment and relationship failures all at the same time. it's fucking impossible. there is only so much self-control available during the day (you have more when you're fresh, less when you're tired, which is why people tend to gorge themselves with pizza in the evenings).

this "free will" (or whatever) requires judicious management so that it can hit the critical points of the enemy instead of punching everyone everywhere all the time. automate most things and focus on the one thing.

this is of course not a cure-all. life is still fucked in millions of ways. but it's a way to manage the small portion of things one can manage.

and of course changing your environment helps a lot. it's much easier to quit smoking in boulder than in las vegas. the "individual" is overrated.

[dead_battery]

rob your thinking on this is wrong. its not about "telling you" what to do. that's authoritarian fantasising. its the male fantasy of supernatural will. its a power trip. and its bullshit.

we have hard data to prove that its bullshit, and that there are genes and neuro-bio configurations in which you the body will do a certain thing. free will is a chimera.

its fucking simple for me to say "i just wont drink alcohol anymore." and i dont! i rarely even think about it. theres a 12pack of beers downstairs and its sat there for months.

but alcoholics? its not the same for them. their brains and bodies are different. i cant transpose my neuro/bio set up as the default setting for humanity.

[Rob Instigator]

free will is real, whether you choose to think so or not. Otherwise no human advancement would ever occur.

addiction is addiction. No matter the substance or activity. Studies have shown that among drugs, nicotine is the single hardest drug to kick, harder than heroin, harder than crack.

I did it though, and I am glad I did.

I did that shit cold turkey.

your free will decides whether you start smoking or not, but your genetics determine how fast you are addicted. it all goes hand in hand.

[Rob Instigator]

I wold never tell someone to quit. It's their life to live as they see fit.
I help those who are quitting, and I never ever throw their addiction in their face.

Like all things, there comes a point where the benefits are outweighed by the negatives.