While the era of smoking sections at restaurants precedes me…
Well that makes sense. It would have to, for you to think it was a good idea. I remember it, and it was gross. It kind of blows my mind, looking back, that we used to just accept it.
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The dramatic decrease in lung cancer deaths over the last couple of decades is one of the greatest success stories in the history of American health policy so of course some buttheads are trying to reverse the trend.
Thanks to the tobacco industry my kids’ strongest memories of their maternal grandfather will be as a cautionary tale.
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We should really bring back public places without restroom facilities. It’s my prerogative to shit in the corner, and how much cooler would your middle ages alehouse experience be if there were piles of human waste scattered about?
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It looks like this edgelord writer found the perfect venue to express her idiotic opinion. I’m sure she already has recycled hot-take articles lined up on the Russian invasion of Ukraine (“maybe it’s justified!”), the influence of Fred Rogers and Sesame Street (“destroyers of American children!”), the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” (“Potter was the hero!”), etc.
She’ll make the move to Faux News or perhaps Reason magazine in no time.
The tobacco industry remains the most historically toxic of all horrible industries all not only because of its repulsive and deadly product but because it created the template for propaganda and misinformation used by other destructive industries and organisations (e.g. fossil fuels and the GOP). Any shoddy tactic we see these creeps using has its roots in Bernays’ work for the cancer stick companies.
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If you’re under 30 or so then seeing tobacco use on screen in period pieces like Mad Men might seem exotic or even glamorous. If you have a living memory of the days when people actually did that then those scenes probably call to mind the smell of an indoor space where the stench of stale tobacco permeates everything, even when no one has lit up that day. Diners where everything tasted a little like cigarette butts. Hotel rooms that left your clothes smelling like toxic waste. The experience of slowly acclimating to the ever-present fumes until you’ve almost forgotten about them, then walking outside and having your system shocked into a release of endorphins just from that first lungful of fresh air.
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As we’re seeing with fascism, when one hasn’t had direct experience with free-for-all smoking or hasn’t had a rigorous education about it, one might not realise how horrible and dangerous and anti-human it is.
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Also important to point out here that indoor smoking bans are a labor issue at heart. Yeah, it’s gross to sit in a restaurant as a patron where people are smoking, but you’re only there for an hour or so, and could leave or choose another place. It’s the staff at these places who truly suffer. Waitstaff, dancers, baristas, bartenders and all the other workers at places it would be “cool” to smoke shouldn’t have to risk Lung Cancer as a job requirement.
There has to be another name for second hand smoke exposure that is so constant that the bystander actually ends up inhaling MORE smoke than each individual “first hand” smoker they encounter that day.
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I don’t know, that seems too complicated. England will have to re-invade both Afghanistan and China, prosecute a war of institutionalized addiction on their subjugates, wait decades for that to take hold and propagate throughout the world. I doubt the artists who created the old caricatures of Asians are even still working. The “enjoying a puff in a coffee shop” seems less logistically burdensome.
/s
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Same here. The smoking/non-smoking sections were always bullshit anyway, because there was rarely any meaningful boundary between the two. That imaginary line didn’t stop the cloud of filth from someone chain smoking four feet away from you behind a a three-foot room divider.
Although one of my favorite mom anecdotes on this comes from when I was in utero. While pregnant with me, she was seated at the end of a nonsmoking section, and the cigarette smoke from a nearby customer was making her feel sick. She asked him to put it out. He responded unkindly, so she took his cigarette out of his mouth and put it out in his drink.
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See also: vaccine skepticism.
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If you don’t like me using a fire extinguisher on your cigarette in your mouth in the restaurant, go somewhere else.
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So in this writer’s opinion, “cooler” means “filled and infused with revolting stench and littered with dirty ashtrays”. Yeah, no thanks.
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… remember, kids, smoking is cool 
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… of course, the non-smoking section was the innovation — before that, the whole world was the smoking section
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I’m all for legalization, but I’m very happy to not live in a world that smells of any kind of smoke all the time, like it used to be… Just like people forget how polluted the world was in the 70s, and so are in favor of rolling back environmental regulations, banning smoking indoors has made the world a much more pleasant place to be for everyone.
it doesn’t really work though. The whole place will smell like it, not just the room. 
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My parents both are from rural areas of NC that grew tobacco. My dad has told me stories of people having GTS. I can’t remember if he ever had it or not, but he did work plenty in the fields until he was into his late teens. His description of the times were pretty nonchalant. Of course when you only have a few pairs of clothes and have 10 people living in a 1000 sq ft house with one bathroom you kind of have to roll with what brings in the money? With the decline in the tobacco industry now all those fields grow either soybeans, corn, or wine grapes.
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Don’t waste the charge on a fire extinguisher on a single cigarette.
Ask for a glass of water (if you’re feeling generous, no ice) and use that to extinguish the fire. If it should happen to splash all over the face of the smoker, whoops.
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“Do you mind if I smoke?”
“No. Do you mind if I fart in your face?”
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