| > News to me. If that’s true, why do conversations about secondhand smoke involve so much rhetoric and so little science? If the fact that second hand smoking has been proven risky is news you to, even indoors, it means you haven’t even googled the question, and that you didn’t click any of the links at the top of this thread. The CDC page has a literal pile of primary source research and data. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/seco... Do you really want to know the answer to the question you asked? You can find the answers without talking to me. I fully encourage not reading the rest of my reply and just answering the questions you asked yourself with an open mind. Or is this about debating me with logic alone until I stop responding? Logic doesn’t compete with history. It’s irrelevant whether rhetoric is involved, but for the record the reasons rhetoric gets used sometimes is precisely demonstrated by your response to primary research: you didn’t believe it. Okay, if you discount the science, then maybe reason or emotion can work. If you discount reason and emotion too, then maybe you’ve decided and are closed to hearing any input on this topic? > If they should have that kind of right, they should have that right in respect to other sources of air pollution like cars or wood fires too. If it’s about risk… I agree with you, we should all have rights about clean air. But you’re now intentionally ignoring the reasons we already discussed. It’s was never about risk alone, it’s about risk vs benefit. Do you need to jump to strawman arguments after we’ve already covered this? Cars have high value in addition to their risks. Cigarettes have no value. It’s weakening your argument and leading me to believe you’ve simply decided that safety is not a valid concern and that you’re choosing to ignore facts. I’m giving you more credit than this, I know you know that cars have real utility and that cigarettes don’t. Your class distinction is a bit cringey and broadly speaking mostly false, I think you already know that too. > I think the fact that you go for a disgust-based argument is pretty telling I think the fact that you’re the one using spin framing and rhetoric here while accusing others of doing what you’re doing is telling. I didn’t go for a disgust based argument, I went for a safety argument. Poop is not safe to drink in any amount, my “moderately low risk” was a cheeky parallel to the smoking safety argument. Poop is gross, so I see why you’re trying to use that against me, but secondhand smoke is also gross. > this thread has really made me think about public officials’ eagerness to ban it. Why? Are you confusing what I’m saying with what the CDC says? Are you using my rhetoric to justify claiming that public officials are using rhetoric? Isn’t that jumping to conclusions? You still haven’t yet given a single reason why smoking should not be banned, despite the fact that it’s harmful to human health and harmful to the economy, and has no redeeming values. You’ve only expressed fear, doubt, and uncertainty as a response to both reason and primary source research, with only rhetoric of your own in response. |
There's certainly some interesting stuff there, but it's very clearly written with a heavy bias and very clearly not a primary source (indeed they state explicitly that their second-hand smoke estimates are based on unpublished data, which seems like a huge red flag).
> Do you really want to know the answer to the question you asked? You can find the answers without talking to me.
I am genuinely interested, just common-sense sceptical. Even heavy smoking is not that deadly (especially compared to something like cars - just looking at the impact on people I've known personally). The idea that there would be this huge mortality impact from the much smaller level of smoke exposure that second-hand smokers get just doesn't pass the sniff test. If I take the report you linked at face value, I'm supposed to believe that second-hand smoke kills fully 1/10th as many people as actual smoking - but most of the risks of smoke exposure are linear, and there's just no way that people are breathing in 1/10th as much tobacco as second-hand smoke as actual smokers do. So something stinks.
> Cars have high value in addition to their risks. Cigarettes have no value.
This is your fundamental assumption that's been going unspoken until now, and it's the part I'm taking issue with. Cars don't have a lot of value, IMO. And you're simply ignoring the fact that many people enjoy smoking, or you've decided it somehow doesn't count. It has a lot of value to them, that's why they do it.
Of course if you start by assuming that the value of smoking is zero then you'll reach the conclusion that the cost/benefit isn't worth it. But you could justify banning anything that way (I'm sure there's not a single thing in existence that has absolutely zero health risks associated with it). And I'm pretty sure the decisions about what things are zero value are being made mainly by classism (probably not intentionally, but just because the people who contribute to this kind of public health report come almost exclusively from a particular class).