Incandescent.

For some people every concession granted to them and every victory they score is never enough, and this is particularly true of the Righteous. Well before the smoking bans, which aren't bans so much as restrictions on the use of private property, they got tobacco ads progressively removed from TV. Then it was the print media and hoardings, and then overt sports sponsorship. And when they'd achieved an almost total ban on any promotion of a product that is perfectly legal to own, use and sell they started looking at the loopholes. Nothing less than total victory would do for them, or they might have felt somewhat disheartened as they turned their attention to drinking and eating. So where logos were still allowed in place of actual brand names they demanded that this too must stop, thereby making certain transactions between one particular type of business and any others illegal - a bank can write a cheque to a racing team to get its logo on the side of the cars, but the same transaction by a tobacco firm became illegal. Smoking in films and TV programmes, where logos are usually hard to make out and often entirely fictional anyway, has almost gone and still they are not satisfied. Evidence of smoking in art and well known photos has been going down the memory holes lately, and now they're concerned about smoking on the internet.

The tobacco industry may be using websites such as YouTube to get around a ban on advertising cigarettes, a study says.

Note the important word there: 'may'.

Researchers in New Zealand studied the video-sharing site and found a number of pro-tobacco videos "consistent with indirect marketing activity by tobacco companies or their proxies".

They say governments should consider regulating such content on the net.

As if the fuckers aren't tumescent with eagerness to do that anyway.

Tobacco companies have always denied using the net to promote cigarettes.

Though why they shouldn't be able to do so is beyond me. As I've said a zillion times before, either ban smoking and live without all that wonderful tax revenue that every fucking government in the world is addicted to - and to a much greater degree than any smoker is to nicotine - or leave the industry and their customers the fuck alone.

No, I don't like the smell of cigarette smoke much either, but since my legs aren't just fucking painted on I'm comfortable taking a step or two backwards and not making my smoking friends feel like shit. Why can't the banstubators do that?

Amanda Sandford, research manager at anti-smoking group Action on Smoking and Health (Ash) said the study's findings were "disturbing but fairly typical of tobacco industry activity".

Angry Exile, an expat blogger who cares deeply about personal freedom, said that ASH's response is "disturbing but fairly typical of tobacco control obsessives and other authoritarian cock slots."

"As soon as one avenue of promotion is closed, companies will seek out alternative means of promoting their product and will do anything to get round advertising restrictions," she told BBC News.

"As soon as one avenue of free trade and individual liberty is closed, ASH and other bansturbators will seek out alternative means of restricting these legal products and will do anything to make smokers and tobacco firms look like scum," he told anyone who'd listen. And that might even be being a little economical with the facts (my emphasis):

But Catherine Armstrong, a spokesperson for British American Tobacco, one of the firms studied in the report, said it was "not our policy to use social networking sites such as Facebook or YouTube to promote our tobacco product brands".

"Not even the authors of this report claim we have done so," she said. "Using social media could breach local advertising laws and our own International Marketing Standards, which apply to our companies worldwide.

So the study didn't actually say they were using online media to advertise, but it seems to me that ASH want to try and make the connection in people's heads anyway. They really are unbearable cunts.

And being unbearable cunts, this is especially for them.



Declaration of interest - I am not a smoker, having given up a few years ago. I have never worked for or received money from any tobacco firms. Quite the opposite in fact, since I gave them plenty of money when I did smoke. All the same, I'd rather their company than that of ASH and the other ban happy illiberal fucktroons that infest what used to be a free society.

PS - I should have fucking expected it. Quit smoking ads come up on the YouTube ads. Why can't they... Just... Fuck... Off?