7 ms·
Smokers have not experienced persecution. Please use this word more carefully or we dilute its meaning. The shaming of smokers has little in common with what Je
by flexie 9y ago
Smokers have not experienced persecution. Please use this word more carefully or we dilute its meaning. The shaming of smokers has little in common with what Jews, homosexuals etc have had to endure. Smoking has not been made illegal, smokers are not imprisoned, smokers are not attacked and beaten up on streets. Smokers live in the same communities as non-smokers, are friends with non-smokers, study with no-smokers, work with non-smokers, date non-smokers, marry non-smokers.
The inconveniences and at times rudeness experienced by smokers doen't constitute anything that resembles persecution.
- gras 9y agoWhat persecution of Jews has occurred in Western countries in the last 50 years? "Anti-Semitism", which has basically come to mean "any criticism or expression of dislike of any Jews or anything related to Israel"?
- throwanem 9y agoHomosexual smoker here. Can we not do oppression olympics today?
- flexie 9y agoNobody is doing Oppression Olympics. There is zero oppression of smokers, as in absolutely none.
- bogomipz 9y agoNot everyone is a native English speaker. Perhaps you could be tolerant of that?
- flexie 9y agoMe neither.
- bogomipz 9y agoWell then perhaps you can step down off your moral soapbox and stop telling people when and when it is not OK to use certain words. There is nothing in the article which even remotely trivializes past transgressions against Jews, Homosexuals or anyone else. And your implication that there is is fucking absurd.
- flexie 9y agoWhat is absurd is to talk about persecution of smokers.
- bogomipz 9y agoAnd nowhere in the article if you bothered to read it closely does the author claim smokers are persecuted. The only place that word is used is in the following statement: "... they are bound by a shared sense of shame and persecution" Notice the phrase "A sense of"? A "sense of something" in the English language means a "feeling of" or a "semblance of" something not the thing itself. This is quite distinct from claiming that something is a fact or a reality. Other examples are a "sense of peace" which doesn't mean actual peace exists or of "a sense of stability" which doesn't actual stability exists, only a sensation of them. The article is interesting because it makes observations about a support group for a habit this is very personal and popularly maligned and that has resonated with people. And that is very obviously the point in that article. You for some inexplicable reason have decided that the most salient part of the post is that it somehow trivializes crimes against humanity.
- coldtea 9y ago>Smokers have not experienced persecution. Please use this word more carefully or we dilute its meaning. The shaming of smokers has little in common with what Jews, homosexuals etc have had to endure. And what Jews in the 40s had to endure has little to what a gay person in e.g. Idaho in the 80s and 90s had to endure, which was 100 times lighter. It's still persecution of sorts though. We shouldn't trivialize a word, but we shouldn't leave some words just for the hardest of cases either.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]