{"id":18122,"date":"2013-01-22T21:27:48","date_gmt":"2013-01-23T02:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=18122"},"modified":"2013-01-22T21:27:48","modified_gmt":"2013-01-23T02:27:48","slug":"theres-an-old-joke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2013\/01\/theres-an-old-joke\/","title":{"rendered":"There\u2019s An Old Joke \u2026\u2026.."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>There\u2019s an old joke the right likes to throw around to demonstrate media bias vis-a-vis a faux news article, End of the World Coming! Women, Minorities, and Poor Hardest Hit<\/em>! Case in point, Rick Nauert, Ph.D. and Senior News Editor for several online sites, wrote an article in 2012 titled, Tall Task for Underprivileged to Stop Smoking<\/em>. He opined, \u201cWhen a smoker decides\u00a0to quit, the task is never easy. New research finds the task is doubly hard if you are poor and uneducated.\u201d Apparently, Researchers from The City College of New York followed smokers from different socioeconomic backgrounds after they had completed a statewide smoking cessation program in Arkansas where they found that \u201cunderprivileged and those from higher social economic backgrounds were able to quit (smoking) at about the same rate. However, as time progressed, a significant number of the underprivileged returned to smoking. Those with the fewest social and financial resources had the hardest time staving off cravings over the long run.\u201d<\/p>\n

So they could quit just fine, but lacked the discipline, I\u2019m sorry, finances to stay off of nicotine. Are we to assume that nicotine acts differently in poor people\u2019s bodies? Does the size of our bank accounts provide some sort of imperviousness to chemical addiction? \u201cAmericans with household incomes of $15,000 or less smoke at nearly three times the rate of those with incomes of $50,000 or greater. By six months post-quitting, the probability of their going back to cigarettes jumped to 2 & 1\/2 times that of the more affluent smokers.\u201d Don\u2019t you just hate rich people? They get all the brakes!<\/p>\n

In this study it is stated that stress is why many people smoke, but \u201cthose on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale suffer more hardships than those at the top, in the form of financial difficulties, discrimination, and job insecurity, to name a few.\u201d Do you discriminate against poor people? I don\u2019t. Are the researchers generalizing about poor people being mostly minorities? Sounds like it to me. Also sounds like a lot of lame excuse making as well. Besides, where\u2019s the stress in being fired from a crappy job and just going on welfare, staying at home, and collecting free money? If anyone is suffering from discrimination these days it is the 1%.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor people with lower socioeconomic status (SES), it can be tougher to avoid temptation as well. Lower SES groups, with lower paying jobs, aren\u2019t as protected by smoke-free laws,\u201d said the researchers, \u201cso individuals who have quit can find themselves back at work and surrounded by smokers.\u201d If I am reading that correctly, it sounds as though the poor are hurting one another\u2026or did I miss something? \u201cAlso, fewer of them have no-smoking policies in their homes.\u201d Now I see why there is talk within ranks of our government to begin legislating home-smokers<\/em>. After all, these poor schmucks clearly have no idea what is in their best interest; better if the government just tell them what to do, and make them do it. That goes for all of us, by the way. \u201cIf we better prepare people with more limited resources to manage the types of stress they have in their lives, we\u2019d get better results.\u201d That\u2019s right, we need yet more government intervention to tell people how to live their lives because, obviously, government bureaucrats and D.C. politicians know better than we do.<\/p>\n

APA Reference<\/strong> \u2028Nauert PhD, R. (2012). Tall Task for Underprivileged to Stop Smoking<\/em>. Psych Central<\/em>. http:\/\/psychcentral.com\/news\/2012\/01\/23\/tall-task-for-underprivileged-to-stop-smoking\/33978.html<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s an old joke the right likes to throw around to demonstrate media bias vis-a-vis a faux news article, End of the World Coming! Women, Minorities, and Poor Hardest Hit!… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18122"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}