26-12-2010, 07:42 PM
David Guyatt Wrote:I disagree. This is a question that should be answered openly and without reservation, simply because you are representing views that could, reasonably, be said to reflect those of big tobacco. It is certainly not a smear to ask this question. Nor have I heard the argument before that a straight-forward question is typified an "insinuation".
In the last analysis, a question as to your "bona fides" needs to be answered fully, fairly and honestly, or else other readers will assume that you are hiding connections that damage your argument. This is human nature.
I recommend you proceed accordingly.
Lastly, it isn't even remotely possible that big tobacco is the "poor cousin" in all this. It is not short of money. Not by any measure of extreme wealth.
The fact remains that the historic lawsuit brought against them was enfeebled - out of the pubic eye - by all sorts of appeals and other legal impediments since the judgement was handed down. Big tobacco has not paid a fraction of the hundreds of billions awarded to the plaintiffs. And it was overflowing with unimaginably vast pools of funds prior to that. Billions of people still smoke, primarily now in LDC's - which big tobacco targeted after the lawsuit, confident that non-Europeans, (Southern Hemisphere peoples) wouldn't have the ability to defend against the power and advertising of a largely unregulated strum und drang onslaught unleashed by big tobacco to garner a vast stream of largely untapped revenue in exchange for their carcinogenic laden product.
My views can NOT "reasonably, be said to reflect those of big tobacco," because Big Tobacco has never expressed these views, and particularly not where it would matter the most, namely in a court of law.
My views represent the interest that smokers and everyone else in the world has in legitimate, state-of-the-art science, rather than pseudo-science founded on lifestyle questionnaires, frozen in time to embrace only hypotheses involving chemicals and genes which were fashionable during the Third Reich, while ignoring the evidence implicating infection which has developed during the last 30 years.
Considering the tobacco companies' performance in the US, their moving into foreign markets is a sign that the anti-smokers are moving into those countries. And they'll perform their same fraudulent acts of theater there that they did here, so that the anti-smokers can win.
And, out of all the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been looted from smokers, not one cent has ever been used to protect smokers' rights, which have been grievously violated by the anti-smoker-controlled US government.