Yeah, yeah, yeah...

Dying for big tobacco: omg what a tragedy
Dying for big oil: omg he’s a hero
Pick your corporate servitude carefully kids
- Dude, you finally made me understand.
  it's just big corporations fighting amongst themselves for available manpower and manlives. But still much better as the alternative, which is politicians fighting amongst themselves for manpower etc
  
  Politicians do it in public, corps do it in secret.

Wanna see me stick nine inch nails through each one of my eyelids?
- Copy me and do exactly as I did
  
  Pilot a drone and use it to blow up 9 kids

Image Transcription: Meme
Government: Tobacco is dangerous. You need to be 21 to buy it
Also government sending military recruiters to high schools:
[An image of a man in a red suit captioned with the text "Hi kids! Do you like violence?"]

And youth ain't gonna have the chance to drink until they turn 21 ffs.
- My parents would buy RTD spirits for my sister aged 15 when she was going to a friend's party or something. They're cops
- In certain parts of America.

Can't you, like, buy weed at 18? Or what about vapes? Plenty of literal children using those.
- There's no state that allows recreational purchase under 21. Vapes are considered a tobacco product regardless of nicotine content and also require you to be 21.
- Where I live weed is 21, tobacco is 18
  
  im guess im assuming you live in the us, but you might want to double check that.
  Tobacco sales to anyone under the age of 21 has been federally illegal since 2021.
  
  My state too, weirdly.
- All tobacco and vape got set to 21 and over where I live so just military and adult jail as benefits of turning 18 now.
  
  Voting?

Forever annoyed that my students have to get recruiters in our school to show up and try to persuade them to join ARMY, NAVY, etc.
🫠 Worst of all was when one of them showed up on International PEACE Day.

Tobacco is a shitty drug. We should ban it entirely and federally legalize another drug like cannabis instead.
- I’m all for legalising cannabis, but to ban tobacco seems pointless.
  I want to legalise or decriminalise drugs because it doesn’t work. Banning tobacco also will not work.
  Tax high - use money for education and healthcare.
  
  Ah yes. The poorest people are the smokers, let’s just make them more miserable. Sounds about right.
  You should work at a place that sells cigarettes for awhile and scope out the customers. I’ve seen people count pennies and cry because they’re hungry but they’d rather not experience the anxiety of nicotine withdrawal.
- Cause banning cannabis worked so well lol
- Prohibition of any drug is stupid. Especially a damn plant.
- Imagine looking at the war on drugs, prohibition in the US, etc then thinking "I think we should ban this drug that's already normalised and used by millions. Then nobody will use it and everything will be fine."
  It. Doesn't. Work.
  It especially wouldn't for something as addictive as nicotine and so trivially purchasable abroad and easy to import.
  Tobacco is already dying. Just let it continue to run its course.
- This is what I do not get. The effect is literally zero. You need to be addicted to even feel something, and then it is only not having withdrawal.
  
  The effect is fucking awesome... The first couple of smokes. Then it's only effect is getting rid of the headache withdrawals cause.
  
  If you've never been a smoker, maybe withhold your opinion on the effects?
- Obviously smoking anything isn’t good for you, but tobacco on it’s own isn’t that bad; it’s all the chemicals added that make it so shitty.
  However, unless you grow your own or know a farmer, good luck finding any pure tobacco.
  
  Tobacco on its own will cause cancer. Note how pipe and cigar smokers get mouth cancers despite taking only pure tobacco
  
  That is patently false. There is only one single risk factor for cancer generally that is bigger problem than smoking unprocessed tobacco - that is smoking processed tobacco. If you charted endemic cancer risk factors in order of risk, with smoking processed tobacco at the top, then smoking unprocessed/organic/raw tobacco would be about 5% away from the top. The next biggest risk factor would be obesity about halfway down the chart (close to smokeless tobacco products like dip, which has a higher specific risk for mouth cancers). Turns out lighting something on fire and inhaling the combusted free radicals is universally a terrible idea, who'd have thunk? Personally I'm amazed that this kind of misinformation still propagates, on Lemmy of all places, sixty years following the surgeon general's warning.

It should be pointed out that the vast majority of the military are in support career fields, not combat units. Also, the GI Bill absolutely makes it worth it.
- Yeah less than ten percent is combat trained and tasked and only a tenth of them (so 1% of the total) are combat veterans.
  Most of the people you've thanked for their service probably worked at a job that civilians do everyday like fixing things or doing paperwork. Just in a uniform.
  
  My primary job was a logistics account, but that meant I had to inventory high value items at Forward Operating Bases in Iraq and Afghanistan and I drove in a few convoys, only once anything significant happened.
- And the VA loan. That's how I got my house!
  Plus all the intangible benefits of being 'prior service.' Certainly has been useful in my real career.
  
  Generally speaking, a military career is the best means of advancement in social class for Americans. You'll easily move up the middle class and likely upper middle class or upper class depending on time served.

Yeah, but on the other hand: fuck tobacco, smoking and all drugs. Drugs are for losers.
- Yeah, but when you're stoned, you don't care if you're a loser. That's the point of getting stoned.