Naomi Klein's book 'Doppelganger' is good on this topic...

When seatbelts were introduced to cars, there was a big movement against them. Some by car manufacturers to keep costs down, but a lot of backlash was from good ol' natural born idiots so contrarian and averse to change they'd let themselves die just to give a smug look about not doing what someone asked of them. The sort of dumbass who during the height of pre-vaccine Covid would drown in the fluid buildup in their lungs and refuse treatment because doing so would be an admission of fault.

These past 9 years have made me DEEPLY cynical about my fellow man. There is no bottom. No level of malicious stupidity is low enough. It's not even disappointment anymore, I'm resigned to it. Some people are so beyond hope, so beyond redemption, it's like trying to get a fucking deer to recognize itself in a mirror. Just ZERO awareness, no theory of mind, object permanence is a fucking coin flip. If it weren't for my principles, my absolute refusal to engage in dehumanization, I'd be tempted to write them off as another species just to cope with the dissonance that comes from seeing people acting that self destructive. Like it doesn't make sense. You'd expect at some point some form of pattern recognition and harm avoidance to develop. "Hey, putting my hand on the stove hurt. It hurt every time I did it. It hurt everyone I saw someone else do it too. I'm gonna put my hand on the stove and it won't hurt this time.".

There'd be motherfuckers on TikTok snorting lines of asbestos

Trumpers would start eating asbestos for breakfast just to pwn the libz

Hate to break it to you: https://www.archpaper.com/2018/08/epa-asbestos-manufacturing/

LOL, libs are trying to ban asbestos! They want us all to catch fire! Asbestos causing cancer is a conspiracy, do your own research. Besides, Ivermectin will cure any cancer caused by asbestos.

/s (because the USA is crazy and someone would really post this and mean it)

I used to live in a city called Asbestos, the mine was closed back in 2012 and older folks are still angry about it, they'll even tell you that the workers handling it weren't in worse health than anyone else in the city... The worst part is that it was banned in the construction industry 30 years prior, so they kept exploiting the mine only to export it to countries that hadn't banned it, even if it meant killing people there...

Depends who would ban it. From my life experience, we have one side that definitely would because they get mad at anything the other side. ANYTHING. While the other side is typically more rational and has critical thinking skills.

I was surprised to find out that people also were against seatbelts. Weird

My country banned smoking in all public indoor spaces almost 20 years ago. As a smoker at the time I thought it was ridiculous, felt that my rights were being violated and thought it would never last. The quality of life improvement it made is massive. Today I vape rather than smoke but wouldn't dream of doing either indoors or being where someone else is. It was 100% the right move. Not quite the same thing but you sometimes can't really understand the benefits of an alternative to the status quo, even if you understand it logically.

Contracting silicosis to own the libs. Then use some sort of donkey enema as a cure.

If CFCs were banned today you would see people spraying them in the air to own the libs, also spraying their children with DDTs because RFK Jr told them to

I’m in a comment war with a nicotine denialist on here now!

In the 90s, there were still tons of people angry about seat belt laws. It’s every American’s God Given Right to fly out of the windshield and probably kill someone else.

Hey guys! Today we will talk about Asbestos 🤯😵😱 Scary! I know!

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In 2018, the U.S. idiot-in-chief tried to bring it back again.

Here in Australia we just banned engineered stone because it tends to cause silicosis

And yep, lots of shitty business owners whined and a few shit customers on Facebook

Silicosis is what's killing people at the moment, and business owners in particular don't seem to care, despite the fact there's is alternatives

“Don’t Tread on Mesothelioma”

I'm a little surprised Trump hasn't signed the "Asbestos Fibers Are Our Friends" Executive Order.

There's still some pro-asbestos people, so it didn't go away 100%. I remember reading a completely mental Conservapedia article blaming 9/11 on not using asbestos.

People are just going to have to re-learn just how fucking scary the measles and polio are, I guess.

"When we had asbestos there was less autism. Big pharma teamed up with big construction to screw us up"

Asbestos must have seemed like a fucking miracle material. Suddenly, our tinderbox world was fireproof. You can build bricks, lightweight cladding, roofing and fences for houses, car parts, curtains, electrical switchboards and protective clothing out of it without the incessant fear of a house fire or clothing fire that was constantly killing people and maiming kids. It wasn't synthetic or petroleum based, you could just dig it out of the ground. Yeah it would absolutely have supporters. They would be dumb, but they would exist.

I remember my dad being angry that they were phasing out leaded petrol and he had to buy a seperate additive to put in the Datsun fuel.

The Dipshit tried to bring it back his last term. Guess which country is the top producer of asbestos?

In fact, the industry did sue and win a lawsuit in 1991 narrowing the range of asbestos compounds banned by the EPA. There have always been huge waves of resistance to every harmful compound banned by the government, from leaded gas to cigarettes to chlorofluorocarbons that harmed the ozone layer. The difference is that the present consolidation of wealth in the hands of a small group of billionaires, who control a consolidating group of media corporations, allows for unprecedented ability to control public opinion. Meanwhile, the amount of junk information floating around in social media, and failing public education, has disordered our systems of discourse. There is much more limited ability to vet quality sources of information, leaving people to worry more about fictional chemtrails than about the very real pesticides in their food

People would be making TikTok videos eating asbestos and cramming it up their bums claiming it cures COVID

I'm still in favor of asbestos. It's an amazing material for preventing fires AS LONG AS you never disturb it. The people that were most at risk of cancers were the people involved in the mining, manufacturing, and installation of asbestos products, but once the asbestos-containing products were installed, they were almost entirely safe for the occupants of the building. You could, in theory, largely mitigate the risks to the miners, manufacturers, and installers, but that is... Well, expensive. And people have a really bad tendency to ignore health and safety warnings when they're inconvenient. You see the same issue with quartz countertops; they're known to cause silicosis in people that are doing the cutting unless they do wet cutting for everything, and wear PPE, but a lot of people don't, because wet-cutting is messy and slow, and PPE is hot and uncomfortable.

There was a big movement in the late 90s to remove asbestos from old buildings; the current advice is to encapsulate it, and leave it in place.

At least using asbestos has some value. If we had not found alternatives we would still be using it. One reason measures were taken to improve safety in manufacturing rather than just banning from the get go was lack of alternatives. What im trying to say is pro-asbestos is not as coocoo crazy as anti vax and such.