Sunday 1 April 2018

Juvenile Nonsense

It pains me to write this but it's fair game considering I've had the same back the other way in the past.

Simon Clark posted an inane and, sorry to say, embarrassing article yesterday where he tried to insinuate that pro-snus advocates have been lackadaisical in publishing a rebuttal to the stupid scaremongering about snus in football.

According to Simon:
It's not easy, I know, getting your voice heard in these circumstances. You should try however and it's now 48 hours since the Mail published its 'investigation', plenty of time for pro-snus advocates to issue a statement (or statements) of their own.
Simon, of course, is paid to do his job. There are no paid advocates of snus in this country and this was the Easter weekend.

He tweeted at 10ish yesterday and then wrote an article at 2:16pm.

The accusation is that those defending snus are somehow lazy in not being more active in getting a counter-argument out there. As he said here.
Nevertheless, if I was a snus advocate I know what I'd be doing this weekend. I'd be on the phone to a national newspaper offering to write an article that defends not only snus but nicotine in general.
Now, I'm struggling to understand why he didn't send this to the people he is targeting considering he has all of our contact details easily to hand. He certainly has mine, and I know he has many others too.

So why did he take such a juvenile approach? The ban on snus is being challenged at the ECJ so those advancing that opinion should be supported rather than be subject to childish point-scoring.

He's completely wrong anyway because if he'd bothered to contact anyone about it - as in, if he cared about the campaign - they could have told him that things were in hand. He could have even contributed. The NNA published a press release just 45 minutes after he posted his blog and anything published at the NNA site has to be approved by the board. It contained - as he would have noticed - 13 different links to back up a commentary. If the NNA did that on the back of Simon's article they would surely be absolutely superb at reacting quickly. More worthy of praise for amateurs rather than sneering remarks, I'd say.

In answer to a tweet replying to him, he tended to suggest that this PR was only as a result of his tweet and blog, except that it was nonsense. So I told him in the comments on his blog that I'd read a draft of the PR on Friday night so his article was fatally flawed flim flam. His response was "if you say so".

Erm, yes I do say so because I was at the house of a trustee of the NNA on Friday evening and read a draft. I write for recreation about issues such as nicotine, smoking and other assaults on our liberties by the nanny state. It would be a surprise if we didn't talk about the ridiculous moral panic over snus.

Oh yeah, we also wrote an article for Spiked that night. That was nothing to do with Simon either.


Yes, you owe an apology, Simon. Man up and do so. 



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