by hilbert42 | 2025-09-10 16:08:02+00:00
France's attitude to smoking has obviously changed in recent years along with much of the world, ipso facto, earlier this thread was mentioning that Japanese cigarette vending machines now require ID before purchase. That trend of making it harder to access tobacco products seems to be occurring everywhere, but as you indicate not every country is changing at the same rate or to the same degree. As a nonsmoker, I welcome that trend and wish it would progress at a faster rate (but as I'll mention it can also have its downsides).

I've not been to France for well over a decade so I've no personal feel for the current cultural mindset so in my ignorance "frowned upon" seemed a way of extrapolating with only limited information. I thus cannot say whether I've an inverted view of French opinion, what I can say however is that my opinion was formed from multiple press reports that many in France were outraged and that some politicians were even calling for a change in the law to stop any repetition (as I've mentioned, I'm not au fait with subsequent events).

As a fan of Tati films of course I'm hyperbolizing to a degree but it's not anti-smoking vandalism that's my main point. The issues are complex so I have to be careful what I say here, I cannot give a long explanation on HN to cover every nuance; and paraphrasing is dangerous, when doing so issues can become black and white when in fact they're various shades of gray.

The best I can do here is to say that the Hulot's pipe issue is symptomatic of a bigger problem in society(ies) where after a problem or issue is identified there's often an overreaction that's not necessarily beneficial to the outcome, it can not only slow down solutions but also it's likely to create a very charged and ugly political environment.

There are many instances of this, nuclear power and accidents, Montreal Protocol/CFCs, Plastics/pollution, CO2/fossil fuels vs renewables vs climate change, fear of chemicals/chemicals in the environment, etc.—all matters I obviously cannot cover here in detail.

I will however come back to the smoking/tobacco matter for a moment. This controversy has divided societies to various degrees for decades, and much of the debate is emotional rather than rational (that said, I'm not suggesting for a second that smoking isn't dangerous, it certainly is). In some countries such as the US, UK and Australia (especially so anglophone ones) debate is no longer just that but rather has descended into a screaming match between sides, logic no longer reigns. Some opponents of smoking act almost to the point of hysteria when anyone with a cigarette comes near them but many of these very same people are quite prepared to sit near a camp fire or BBQ and not complain about the smoke—and in so doing they'll absorb a much higher dose of carcinogenic dioxins than they would from someone with a cigarette. As with those other examples, all too often emotions overrule facts.

Now briefly back to Tati's M. Hulot. When those films were made in late 1940s through to the '60s smoking was not only culturally acceptable but also it had a certain prestige and sophistication about it. Now that in many countries smoking is on the nose so to speak what are we to do? One obvious option is to ban these films altogether, or to give them an 'R' rating so only adults are able to view them. If this trend were to continue (which in my opinion is highly likely) then we could end up in a situation where we see people sneaking into movie theaters in the dead of night or in the case of online streaming viewers would have to first provide verifiable ID of proof of age. If alive today long-dead filmmakers of these once-deemed harmless movies would be horrified.

To some extent this has already happened, many truly classic Warner Bros cartoons of my childhood are now banned from television, same with The Three Stooges on grounds of them being too violent. That said, the hypocrisy is truly outrageous, these days there is any amount of gun and gratuitous violence on TV, in movies and online. Most find this acceptable, only a comparatively small minority of the population actually objects to the violence. So much for objectivity.

Moreover, I expect such problems only to increase. Recently, I've been watching TV soaps from the 1960s (on free-to-air TV) and frankly there are themes—both dialogues and images—that would not appear in TV programs made today, in fact I'm surprised they too haven't been withdrawn because of content that's 'unacceptable' to modern audiences (again, I cannot go into specifics for reasons stated).

The broader issue is how far do we go to protect society from not only itself but also from its past, and what effect does such action have on society? The extension thus is how do we measure whether interventions have positive or negative outcomes, or is often the case how do we quantify the actual damage when opinionated groups within society lobby government for laws that overprotect and mollycoddle citizens? Evidence is that in recent decades certain rules introduced to protect society have ended up making its citizens less resilient, moreover it wasn't necessarily obvious this would occur when they were introduced.

For example, rules introduced to protect the welfare of children have in recent years become so strictured that we're now seeing instances of negative outcomes, consequences are that some kids have become dysfunctional. Overprotecting kids out of fear for their safety has become so all encompassing that we're now witnessing all too many instances of kids being too frightened to leave their homes unless accompanied by an adult, isolation from the world around them has made them fearful of it. If you'd mentioned to anyone that could happen to kids when I was that age they'd have quickly retorted that you were bonkers.

That might seem a long stretch from banning M. Hulot's pipe from the Métro but it is not. Fact is, this is how the rot begins. As I implied, making the correct calls to protect society is both complex and fraught with difficulty. That's not to say we don't need them or that we shouldn't try because we definitely do need them. What we don't need are decisions made on the spur of the moment by the opinionated, rather we need to make time to develop well thought through strategies