@Jude: Me neither, yet there's 20 pages of denial of how incomparable the omnibeneficial and unmissable car is to the evil of needless tobacco smoke. Lucky thing everyone in the world has the Basic Human Right to Own and Ride an Automobile.
That's an awful strawman and you know it.
I never claimed that people have an inalienable right to own a car, or that the world would come crashing down if we didn't have them.
I claimed that, the way first-world societies currently operate, gasoline is an important part of the economy. It's important for people to travel/commute, for shipping goods, etc. There is often not a suitable alternative to this, as alternative/renewable fuels aren't quite what they should be yet; it's not feasible for companies or individuals to ship things, commute, heat buildings/homes, or do a million other things without using fossil fuels. It would be nice if we COULD, and we can still CONSERVE them to a reasonable degree, but we can't just plain get rid of them all at once; we need to put more research into finding alternatives and making them economically feasible for the common person.
Aww man, but it's so fun to see people go all.. how do you youngsters say that.. RAEG!!
Especially because they know they're wrong. And can't stand analogies. And they are confronted with the fact that they're more zealous than the Jesus freak quoting bible texts at central station.
Yes, smoking is a bad habit, we all know it, and we all know that there are more bad habits in the world (such as driving a car *snicker*), and we all know that people complaining about other peoples bad habits have no right to do so if they have bad habits themselves.
So I guess we're done.
You're not even making sense.
I'm not being "more zealous than the Jesus freak quoting bible texts at the central station". I've met that guy, and I'm not him.
More bad habits existing in the world doesn't mean that you can excuse whichever ones you want. Yes, everybody has some bad habits; that doesn't make them inexcusable. At least bother to read ChairmanPoo's link. "You have bad habits, so any argument you make against my own is invalid" is completely silly and would effectively mean that nobody can criticize anyone for anything, which is absurd. An argument against smoking is just as valid whether the person has no bad habits or a ton of them, and regardless of which ones he has.
Anyone who's actually talked to me at length knows that I like analogies and actually know how to use them. That's why I'm arguing against yours; it relies on similarities between smoking and car-usage that aren't even true. The analogy would make sense if it were perfectly feasible for everybody in the US (or whichever country you choose) to never use a car or use gasoline in any way, but it just
isn't. I live in one of the most dense states in the US, and even here, public transportation is absolute trash. I've taken the buses here before to get to class, and sometimes it would take me upwards of two hours (that's four hours per day of just commuting), and sometimes wouldn't run when I need them at all, and not everybody can live within walking/biking distance of everything unless you actually want to invent SimCity2000-style arcologies and place them around overnight for all of us. Oh, and the buses still run on gasoline.