Good day my fellow smokers. As some of you may already know, I am a Gymnasium (High School equivalent in Austria and I am in my senior year) student. I am also a member of the school senate. I happen (well, I’m actually glad of this honour) to face the challenge of repelling an anti-smoking motion this Friday (Feb 25th) and I’m starting to prepare my arguments and I’ll do a few mock debates. It would be great if you, the smoking community, could list the arguments the smoking Nazis usually use and what can be done against them. Never say we’re helpless 
Of course, I have to specify the circumstances for any useful advice:
First of all, Austria is not what you’d imagine. It’s a tiny (but beautiful) German speaking country neighbouring and envying great Germany. It is romanticized by most tourists but we are backward in several aspects of our thinking. First of all, we are almost blind followers of authority, be it political or of the academia. Teachers are better than students, PhDs. better than MAs, Kant is God in any discussion, and so on. I’ll have to see that I will be academically bullshitting at my best this Friday. The better side of the medallion, however, is that we stick to the old. You can get alcohol in Austria with 16 and even hard liquor should you be in Vienna. The legal age of tobacco purchase is 16, too. (Mind purchase, because upon your parents consent you may even consume these goods earlier.) In the aspect of time-honoured, socially accepted drugs and potentially harmful food, Austrians are not liberal, but rather staunchly conservative.
Of course, Austria is not untouched by the globally surging activism against smokers. Smoking has been banned from schools. So it happened too that my school was smoke-free for a while. But last year our school was full of scandals of teachers and the headmaster misconducting, with me raising awareness of the faculty’s misdeeds to add oil in the fire. To appease the enraged students until summer break, they allowed us to smoke in a sunny, wind-free open-topped area within our school. The teachers and headmasters never planned to keep this allowance longer than to this point of time, but they couldn’t anticipate that a drink-sodden Burns and Pushkin-quoting punk-pipester and Asian like me would be elected student rep either. So here’s the strife.
The senate consists of 3 representatives from the teachers, the parents, and our side, the students. The parent reps are mostly failures and moralists, with a cheap job, no life, and too much time in their hands, mostly ugly wenches, you get the picture. The teachers, many defeated and with inferiority complexes, try to implement authoritarian and controlling policies, making the student’s life hell. They cooperate with the parents and exchange favours. The other two student reps are a combination of cowardice and opportunism. One of them is a guy with a measure of political understanding and wit and still in his junior year. He’ll probably cooperate with me for his reputation’s sake when he sees my plan. The other is a neo-feminist girl in her senior year, too. She is held in check because she is graduating and depends on her grades. Therefore she will try her best to sabotage me to gain the teacher’s favour. She’ll definitely be against smoking, although it doesn’t concern her. The headmaster participates in the discussion, mostly in favour to the teachers, and while he cannot vote, he does exert an influence of the students.
The thing is, to pass the motion and anything else, each house must give two yeas of three. If I lose the argument badly, the fellow man could support me, but is more likely to backstab me under “the serious and lengthy considerations” to appeal to the teachers. In fact they’ve already tried to kick me out of the school senate.
And one final thing is the Smoking Permits 16+ sophomores need to enter the smoking area. Most have lost them because the teachers stopped looking after them, but I’ve urged them to acquire a new one. This will motivate my headmaster and teachers to honour our age-old agreement to base our solutions on compromise rather than legal facts, so I expect no legal trouble with that matter. (The teachers usually don’t give a shit on the school laws anyway and exploit the incompetence of the school board to terrorise and indoctrinate us students.)
That being said, how should I proceed in that matter?
I already have a few ideas. Firstly I’ll ask for a more regulated form of speaking to respect the strong sentiments of all parties. I’ll make sure no one cuts my speech and take away alot of force from the opposition which will struggle to complete a full sound argument and will meet sarcasm and unfair debating with utmost contempt. I can go as far as saying “I wouldn’t pay a tenner to fake the college degree of yours”.
What I’ll also do is refusing to believe that there is any scientifically documented harm caused by smoking in moderation, requiring at least one source be produced, and that it doesn’t count to put a rat in a smoke-filled room for two months or more, and play the lone defender of science and reason.
As for the kids argument which will undoubtly be used against me in one form or another, I can only imagine taking the bull by its horns. I will refuse to let the concern for the younger students affect their future rights, claiming that a temporal state of a person cannot affect his or her future as a mature person with any moral justification. I will denounce the argumentation as an underhanded weapon used by anti-smoking groups all over the world to rob the free man of his rights. This is the hardest trick to pull, so it must come prepared.
Please share your hard-won experiences and rhetorical skill on that matter.
Of course, I have to specify the circumstances for any useful advice:
First of all, Austria is not what you’d imagine. It’s a tiny (but beautiful) German speaking country neighbouring and envying great Germany. It is romanticized by most tourists but we are backward in several aspects of our thinking. First of all, we are almost blind followers of authority, be it political or of the academia. Teachers are better than students, PhDs. better than MAs, Kant is God in any discussion, and so on. I’ll have to see that I will be academically bullshitting at my best this Friday. The better side of the medallion, however, is that we stick to the old. You can get alcohol in Austria with 16 and even hard liquor should you be in Vienna. The legal age of tobacco purchase is 16, too. (Mind purchase, because upon your parents consent you may even consume these goods earlier.) In the aspect of time-honoured, socially accepted drugs and potentially harmful food, Austrians are not liberal, but rather staunchly conservative.
Of course, Austria is not untouched by the globally surging activism against smokers. Smoking has been banned from schools. So it happened too that my school was smoke-free for a while. But last year our school was full of scandals of teachers and the headmaster misconducting, with me raising awareness of the faculty’s misdeeds to add oil in the fire. To appease the enraged students until summer break, they allowed us to smoke in a sunny, wind-free open-topped area within our school. The teachers and headmasters never planned to keep this allowance longer than to this point of time, but they couldn’t anticipate that a drink-sodden Burns and Pushkin-quoting punk-pipester and Asian like me would be elected student rep either. So here’s the strife.
The senate consists of 3 representatives from the teachers, the parents, and our side, the students. The parent reps are mostly failures and moralists, with a cheap job, no life, and too much time in their hands, mostly ugly wenches, you get the picture. The teachers, many defeated and with inferiority complexes, try to implement authoritarian and controlling policies, making the student’s life hell. They cooperate with the parents and exchange favours. The other two student reps are a combination of cowardice and opportunism. One of them is a guy with a measure of political understanding and wit and still in his junior year. He’ll probably cooperate with me for his reputation’s sake when he sees my plan. The other is a neo-feminist girl in her senior year, too. She is held in check because she is graduating and depends on her grades. Therefore she will try her best to sabotage me to gain the teacher’s favour. She’ll definitely be against smoking, although it doesn’t concern her. The headmaster participates in the discussion, mostly in favour to the teachers, and while he cannot vote, he does exert an influence of the students.
The thing is, to pass the motion and anything else, each house must give two yeas of three. If I lose the argument badly, the fellow man could support me, but is more likely to backstab me under “the serious and lengthy considerations” to appeal to the teachers. In fact they’ve already tried to kick me out of the school senate.
And one final thing is the Smoking Permits 16+ sophomores need to enter the smoking area. Most have lost them because the teachers stopped looking after them, but I’ve urged them to acquire a new one. This will motivate my headmaster and teachers to honour our age-old agreement to base our solutions on compromise rather than legal facts, so I expect no legal trouble with that matter. (The teachers usually don’t give a shit on the school laws anyway and exploit the incompetence of the school board to terrorise and indoctrinate us students.)
That being said, how should I proceed in that matter?
I already have a few ideas. Firstly I’ll ask for a more regulated form of speaking to respect the strong sentiments of all parties. I’ll make sure no one cuts my speech and take away alot of force from the opposition which will struggle to complete a full sound argument and will meet sarcasm and unfair debating with utmost contempt. I can go as far as saying “I wouldn’t pay a tenner to fake the college degree of yours”.
What I’ll also do is refusing to believe that there is any scientifically documented harm caused by smoking in moderation, requiring at least one source be produced, and that it doesn’t count to put a rat in a smoke-filled room for two months or more, and play the lone defender of science and reason.
As for the kids argument which will undoubtly be used against me in one form or another, I can only imagine taking the bull by its horns. I will refuse to let the concern for the younger students affect their future rights, claiming that a temporal state of a person cannot affect his or her future as a mature person with any moral justification. I will denounce the argumentation as an underhanded weapon used by anti-smoking groups all over the world to rob the free man of his rights. This is the hardest trick to pull, so it must come prepared.
Please share your hard-won experiences and rhetorical skill on that matter.
