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Why this site?

Harridan (n): A vicious and scolding woman, especially an older one.

Whatever compassion we may feel towards Seraphie, charged with managing the Beyle household and provided with little in the way of emotional or material recompense, evidence scarcely softens Stendhal's portrait of an ignorant, vindictive, mean-spirited harridan. -- Jonathan Keates, Stendhal

Over the past few years - more and more often - governments, organisations (often funded by the tax payer) and special interest groups (again, often funded by the tax payer,) are enforcing their views on others in ever more vindictive ways, "for your own good," or, more typically, "because we don't like it."

Be it tobacco, alcohol, sugar, salt or whatever happens to be the evil-du-jour, there is rarely anything which is enjoyed by a significant (but minority - less than 50%) part of the population for which there isn't a 'puritan' group willing to lobby governments for more and more controls, misusing statistics and using sub-standard research to justify forcing their views onto others, while gratefully accepting the taxes, of those they villify, to fund their activities.

This site aims to collate evidence of this misuse, and document the activities of those who purport to 'save us from ourselves' while they sit on their high horses, alongside those (non-tax-payer-funded, irritated, people or organisations) who take an active interest in pointing out problems of having governments fund groups that in turn lobby government to do the government's wishes.

Smoking

While it is widely accepted that smoking causes ill health to those who smoke, there are ever more shrill calls for controls on the pricing of tobacco, where it may be consumed, and in what form it should be sold.

Measures used to control tobacco are being used as a template to control other areas of life, despite claims from anti-tobacco groups to the contrary, claiming tobacco is unique and measures like banning, excessive taxation and plain packaging would never be used for anything else.

However, like smoking, but unlike second hand smoke, all the rules and regulations put into place do demonstrably kill and maim people.

Of course, there are also things that are (Almost) As Bad As Smoking.

Alcohol

Alcohol has been around for millenia. Some religions forbid it, the United States even had a go at prohibition where the government even went so far as to murder thousands of its own citizens in the name of 'scaring people':

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

The UK Government is currently (Mar '12) trying to push through a minimum price per unit of alcohol under the guise of 'preventing binge drinking' and the 'increased rate of liver disease,' despite the fact that the annual consumption of alcohol has been decreasing in the past few years, and trying to push people to go to pubs instead of buying their alcohol at the supermarket

Internet

Internet censorship and calls for a ban on internet anonymity - what more needs to be said?