Aug 1, 2023·edited Aug 1, 2023Liked by Addison Del Mastro
I've been spending a fair amount of time across the border in Canada lately. One friend was commenting (she had moved from the US) how much a difference it made in her life to be able to pick out any sunscreen from the shelf and not have to look through the ingredients to figure out which ones had or didn't have chemicals associated with an increased risk of cancer. How that (and similar regulation) contributes to this overall sense of comfort and safety in her day to day. And to a sense that everyone is looking out for everyone else! Successfully!
Something some of your commenters seem to miss is that *many* countries (most at our socioeconomic level) have common sense regulatory frameworks to prevent grievous and unnecessary harm. We're the odd ones out.
The other thing that happens here, that opens a whole can of worms, is the association of unlike things with each other. Some people will say, for example, "Canada? Canada puts you in jail for using the wrong pronouns and kills off their old people and cuts off your bank account for opposing COVID over-regulation." And they kind of feel like somehow that's inseparable from, say, keeping dangerous chemicals out of consumer products.
I think this is the thesis of Thomas Frank in that book "What's The Matter With Kansas?" That whatever the merits of the more culture-war stuff, for a lot of Americans that stuff takes precedence over actual politics. So at some point you kind of run into very fundamental American attitudes and I - as a conservative-ish (but not terribly libertarian-ish) American don't quite know what to do there.
Exactly this. A lot of libertarian-ish conservatives will respond with something about personal responsibility. That's important but I don't think it applies here. The idea that there's something wrong with wanting certain basic things to do be done at the societal level is just living in a society.
(By the way, one fellow thought I meant ban the manufacture of wire brushes - what I really meant and should have specified was that I meant they should not be allowed to be marketed as grill brushes. I'm sure they have other uses where the loose bristle issue isn't a problem.)
Funny you should mention sunscreen specifically. The FDA bans the sale of sunscreens with bemotrizinol and other chemicals developed to improve the effectiveness of the product which are widely used in other wealthy countries. From an article in libertarian mouthpiece The Atlantic:
"In 2014, Congress passed a law attempting to speed access to sunscreen ingredients that have been in wide use in other countries for years, but it hasn’t really worked. “The FDA was supposed to be fast-tracking these ingredients for approval, because we have the safety data and safe history of usage from the European Union,” Dobos said. “But it seems to continually be stalled.” According to Courtney Rhodes, a spokesperson for the FDA, manufacturers have submitted eight new active ingredients for consideration. The agency has asked them to provide additional data in support of those applications, but none of them has yet satisfied the agency’s requirements." In other words, more people get skin cancer in the US because we are protected from safe products so fewer people use sunscreen than would use it if the regulatory framework were better.
Speaking as an actual conservative...I think it’s just that different people have different assessments of risk throughout life, based on their own previous life experiences, their current state in life, future plans, superstitions, whatever. Here’s my favorite example: during Covid, my husband, 2 year old son, and my son’s godfather, all went out to dinner one night at an outdoor restaurant. As we settled into our seats, the waitress came rushing out - apparently the host/seater person had seated us too early, and she had not had time to properly disinfect the table and chairs. Fine. She proceeded to drench the furniture in God-knows-what disinfectant. It was literally pooling up and then dripping off the arms of the chairs. My 2 year old climbed up into his chair, plopped his little hand right in a giant puddle of it, and as small children are wont to do, raised his hand toward his mouth. I leapt in with napkins, bibs, diaper wipes, anything to get that crap off his hands and and chair, and most importantly, keep it out of his mouth. Why? Because my assessment of the situation was that the chemicals he was about to eat were far more likely to do him harm than the chance of an errant COVID particle. As his mother, it’s my job to to make those assessments. Not yours. So reserve your judgement.
We don’t use a wire grill brush - we use a giant wooden scraper thingamajiggie, because nylon being what it is, I’d also prefer not to have melted plastic in my brisket.
I also don’t get on Ferris wheels, roller coasters, or GOD FORBID ski lifts. Who in their right mind would get on one of those idiotic contraptions designed for death? I don’t want to be within a mile of any of them, nor do I want any members of my family risking life and limb in this way.
I don’t eat ceviche, but I do drink raw milk. Why? Because my mother was raised on raw milk and she’s pretty darn healthy. My grandmother drank raw milk her entire life, including through three pregnancies, and I’m quite certain never spent so much as 2 seconds thinking about bacteria. But uncooked shrimp skeeves me out.
The bottom line is that people assess risk differently, because people are different. Condemning everyone who has a different risk tolerance than you, and suggesting that they be legally prevented from doing so, is...well first of all, not very nice. And second, what’s going to happen when it’s not you in power one day? Why does it bother you so much? I don’t want ceviche and ski lifts to be illegal, I just don’t want to be involved with them, same as I don’t want my child to be involved with buckets of disinfectant.
It doesn't bother me, and I'm not in power. Raw milk is something known to carry some risk of sickness (like sushi, or beef tartare, or oysters.) Athletic activities are known to carry some risk of injury. My real point is that nobody really buys a wire grill brush and says "I know this might perforate my intestine, but it sure does work!" There's a comment down below that captures my point perfectly, probably better than I did: that if a consumer product is on the shelf, you expect it to be more or less risk-free when used according to the instructions or expected purpose. It is not over-regulation for government to ensure that that is the case.
IOW, I would not support a ban of raw milk. I support things like cottage food laws that dispense home kitchens from the some of the regulations that apply to commercial food producers. I see those things from a libertarian-ish perspective of enlarging personal freedom, but I think the freedom to buy boiling-hot coffee or ingest metal bristles is just not the same thing.
The commenters are missing the best solution, stop cleaning with wire brush, and instead clean the grill when hot with half an onion, as is meant to be
"Why is it simply taken as legitimate that the wrong or dangerous choice is on offer in the first place?"
Because in the real world there are very few, obvious "wrong"/"dangerous" choices. Everything is a trade-off and acting like there are always obvious "wrong"/"dangerous" choices creates a lot of false binaries.
How few people have to injure themselves with a product before you would entertain banning it, regardless of its efficacy in doing something useful? How many people are injured or die getting out of bed every morning every year? If you get a hot coffee at a local, walkable, urban coffeehouse to-go you could spill it on yourself, and is that singular cup of coffee REALLY worth the hospital bills for those burns? Should coffeehouses be allowed the "wrong" choice, (obviously, given the *possibility* of scalding) of selling hot beverages to a public woefully ignorant as to the danger in which they are putting themselves? "If it saves one life..." only works in a vacuum. And yes, obviously I know that we already draw these lines as a society, the discussion is over exactly where and it always will be, the idea that everyone will at some point agree on what the obvious "safe" and "dangerous" things are is antithetical to a society made up of humans.
Aug 1, 2023·edited Aug 1, 2023Liked by Addison Del Mastro
I'm inclined to agree with Addison's original post, but this is also something. My first thought (because better women's health is often on my mind) is hormonal birth control. It's..... pretty clear by now that it causes both short-term and long-term harm in many women, messing with their hormones in ways that effect everything - their emotions, attraction preferences, physical health, mental health, breast cancer risk, future fertility, chances of getting underlying diseases resolved instead of covered up..... and yet many people either 1) don't know because providers are ill-informed themselves or simply minimize it or 2) people know and are willing to accept all these risks because that risk is worth it to them.
So for me, I'm like "Uh, this is terrible, why do people willingly eff with their whole bodies in this way?" and others don't see it as such, because it's a trade-off they're okay with. An example of how the "obvious wrong/dangerous choice" idea gets weird.
Someone mentioned above the harmful ingredients in, say, sunscreen. And this is another example of a carcinogen (among other things) that is just.... widely available. In more health-conscious spaces, these are risks that ought to be avoided. But I don't see hormonal contraceptives being more regulated (in fact, one is now over-the-counter). The dissonance in what should be banned or available to the masses is always going to be there. Because we can't always agree on what's "harmful enough"
Medication and consumer goods are rightfully regulated very differently! Basically every medication has side effects and it’s up to the doctor and patient to assess risk vs reward. I think the push to ban birth control is strange given we basically never talk about the seizures, heart failure, blindness and hearing loss caused by viagra. And definitely don’t talk about banning it!
All true! And I wouldn’t be for banning it. The thing with hormonal contraception that gets me is the explosive, widespread acceptance of something that we are only now seeing the research on how *terrible* it is in the ways I mentioned. Between that and women be so ill-informed about how their bodies actually should function in it's healthiest ways (which affect them mentally, too), I think generations of women have been screwed over by medical professionals when it comes to true heath. Doctors are given little to no training on women's cycles (and the effects on the whole person) in med school, from what I've heard from actual physicians. It's neglect and harm that's accepted as normal.
I completely agree that the medical profession doesn't take women & women's bodies nearly as seriously as they should, and it's atrocious how we fail to educate women about their bodies! If you haven't read Doing Harm by Maya Dusenberry I highly recommend it: https://bookshop.org/a/5644/9780062470836
I'm less concerned about birth control (although I think we should be approving male bc), but share your concern that we don't talk about it with the nuance we should. That said, it's scary times! It's terrifying to me that birth control bans are now being widely discussed. And I get the desire both to elevate the statistically unlikely risks and to downplay them.
The McDonalds coffee was found to be served at a temperature close to boiling, way above what you might expect "hot coffee" to be. Yes, it's absolutely a kind of corporate malpractice to serve a product at a temperature hotter than anybody reasonably expects it to be, such that a normal and expected user error can result in real injury.
Otherwise I take your point that what we consider safe and dangerous isn't necessarily fixed or even theoretically discoverable as something that can be universally agreed on. Still there are some things we do consider one or the other and I'm not sure we've had that discussion over this grill brush thing.
All of us in this thread are illustrating why the "reasonable person" test comes down entirely to what *you* think is reasonable.
I expect hot coffee served to me to be hot, so I make sure not to spill it on myself, it is not anyone else's responsibility to keep me "safe" (according to their standards, not my own, of course). I check products as much I reasonably can (according to me) before I buy them, use them, give them to family. Allowing our critical thinking skills to atrophy more at the hope that some bureaucrat will only approve the Good ThingsTM for us leads nowhere good, at least in my opinion. Perhaps it could in a society that was *gaining* trust in one another and our shared institutions, but in our society in which the opposite is happening and as people feel as though "discussions" like these are ceremonial and one-sided I don't see it gaining a lot of purchase, and probably creating a lot of backlash.
"I find it sort of strange that a product which can injure you simply in the course of normal use is sold everywhere"
But this is true of millions of products. Knives, bleach, stoves, law mowers, extension cords, rat poison, etc, etc. Not to mention cars. So it can't be the only justification for highly regulating a product. There are other means of causing change such as law suits against the manufacturers.
I agreed with your general points in this article and the previous one in the Bulwark, but I think the idea in quote above needs to be baked a bit longer.
Hmm. See, I think they're subtly different. A knife/bleach/stove/etc. - and yes, cars, which you know I agree with - all cause harm when a mistake is made, and their potential harm is pretty obvious.
I think "brushing down your grill with the brush" is the same thing as "spilling the bleach on yourself" or "slipping with the knife" or whatever the case may be. In other words, there is no way to use the product exactly as intended without it potentially injuring you. That feels like something that is true of very few products, when I think about it.
This world has gone MAD! What used to be logical, ethical, godly, etc. is rated bad. And bad is rated as good. The problem is spiritual, not physical. The more a human degrades from our Creator, the more debase they can get. Simply put. I really liked your article which denotes a society that has become 'reprobate' to anything that relates to 'sanity'.
Simple over-regulation. Ban grill wire brushes but what about other wire brushes? Ban those use cases as well?
I, like many, have wire brushes in my garage for other purposes. The grill wire brush likely came into existence because someone thought, 'well lets put a longer handle on this brush and dedicate it for grill use.' A simple invention, so, in fact banning has not prevented the use of wire brushes on a grill.
You mention refrigerators. This is clearly a different category item, as it is single use case. Also the latch is just a small part of the full product and the incremental cost is low.
One, I should have specified that I didn't mean to suggest banning the manufacture of wire brushes, because that didn't even occur to me. I was thinking of banning them from being labeled as grill brushes, implying that they're basically fine to use on a grill. I'm sure the bristle issue doesn't apply to other uses they have. The issue is the implication that they carry no risk to users in the context of the grill - certainly I had no idea this was a risk (and it is rare but very much non-zero.)
Two, the narrowness of the fridge issue does make it somewhat different. But the thing is that there were still people who opposed those changes in the same way people would oppose banning wire brush sales as grill brushes. So how narrow the issue looks to us now may be our perception, and at the time some people perceived it differently.
I've been spending a fair amount of time across the border in Canada lately. One friend was commenting (she had moved from the US) how much a difference it made in her life to be able to pick out any sunscreen from the shelf and not have to look through the ingredients to figure out which ones had or didn't have chemicals associated with an increased risk of cancer. How that (and similar regulation) contributes to this overall sense of comfort and safety in her day to day. And to a sense that everyone is looking out for everyone else! Successfully!
Something some of your commenters seem to miss is that *many* countries (most at our socioeconomic level) have common sense regulatory frameworks to prevent grievous and unnecessary harm. We're the odd ones out.
The other thing that happens here, that opens a whole can of worms, is the association of unlike things with each other. Some people will say, for example, "Canada? Canada puts you in jail for using the wrong pronouns and kills off their old people and cuts off your bank account for opposing COVID over-regulation." And they kind of feel like somehow that's inseparable from, say, keeping dangerous chemicals out of consumer products.
I think this is the thesis of Thomas Frank in that book "What's The Matter With Kansas?" That whatever the merits of the more culture-war stuff, for a lot of Americans that stuff takes precedence over actual politics. So at some point you kind of run into very fundamental American attitudes and I - as a conservative-ish (but not terribly libertarian-ish) American don't quite know what to do there.
Exactly this. A lot of libertarian-ish conservatives will respond with something about personal responsibility. That's important but I don't think it applies here. The idea that there's something wrong with wanting certain basic things to do be done at the societal level is just living in a society.
(By the way, one fellow thought I meant ban the manufacture of wire brushes - what I really meant and should have specified was that I meant they should not be allowed to be marketed as grill brushes. I'm sure they have other uses where the loose bristle issue isn't a problem.)
Funny you should mention sunscreen specifically. The FDA bans the sale of sunscreens with bemotrizinol and other chemicals developed to improve the effectiveness of the product which are widely used in other wealthy countries. From an article in libertarian mouthpiece The Atlantic:
"In 2014, Congress passed a law attempting to speed access to sunscreen ingredients that have been in wide use in other countries for years, but it hasn’t really worked. “The FDA was supposed to be fast-tracking these ingredients for approval, because we have the safety data and safe history of usage from the European Union,” Dobos said. “But it seems to continually be stalled.” According to Courtney Rhodes, a spokesperson for the FDA, manufacturers have submitted eight new active ingredients for consideration. The agency has asked them to provide additional data in support of those applications, but none of them has yet satisfied the agency’s requirements." In other words, more people get skin cancer in the US because we are protected from safe products so fewer people use sunscreen than would use it if the regulatory framework were better.
Macho morons have been convinced money is worth more than other people’s lives
Speaking as an actual conservative...I think it’s just that different people have different assessments of risk throughout life, based on their own previous life experiences, their current state in life, future plans, superstitions, whatever. Here’s my favorite example: during Covid, my husband, 2 year old son, and my son’s godfather, all went out to dinner one night at an outdoor restaurant. As we settled into our seats, the waitress came rushing out - apparently the host/seater person had seated us too early, and she had not had time to properly disinfect the table and chairs. Fine. She proceeded to drench the furniture in God-knows-what disinfectant. It was literally pooling up and then dripping off the arms of the chairs. My 2 year old climbed up into his chair, plopped his little hand right in a giant puddle of it, and as small children are wont to do, raised his hand toward his mouth. I leapt in with napkins, bibs, diaper wipes, anything to get that crap off his hands and and chair, and most importantly, keep it out of his mouth. Why? Because my assessment of the situation was that the chemicals he was about to eat were far more likely to do him harm than the chance of an errant COVID particle. As his mother, it’s my job to to make those assessments. Not yours. So reserve your judgement.
We don’t use a wire grill brush - we use a giant wooden scraper thingamajiggie, because nylon being what it is, I’d also prefer not to have melted plastic in my brisket.
I also don’t get on Ferris wheels, roller coasters, or GOD FORBID ski lifts. Who in their right mind would get on one of those idiotic contraptions designed for death? I don’t want to be within a mile of any of them, nor do I want any members of my family risking life and limb in this way.
I don’t eat ceviche, but I do drink raw milk. Why? Because my mother was raised on raw milk and she’s pretty darn healthy. My grandmother drank raw milk her entire life, including through three pregnancies, and I’m quite certain never spent so much as 2 seconds thinking about bacteria. But uncooked shrimp skeeves me out.
The bottom line is that people assess risk differently, because people are different. Condemning everyone who has a different risk tolerance than you, and suggesting that they be legally prevented from doing so, is...well first of all, not very nice. And second, what’s going to happen when it’s not you in power one day? Why does it bother you so much? I don’t want ceviche and ski lifts to be illegal, I just don’t want to be involved with them, same as I don’t want my child to be involved with buckets of disinfectant.
It doesn't bother me, and I'm not in power. Raw milk is something known to carry some risk of sickness (like sushi, or beef tartare, or oysters.) Athletic activities are known to carry some risk of injury. My real point is that nobody really buys a wire grill brush and says "I know this might perforate my intestine, but it sure does work!" There's a comment down below that captures my point perfectly, probably better than I did: that if a consumer product is on the shelf, you expect it to be more or less risk-free when used according to the instructions or expected purpose. It is not over-regulation for government to ensure that that is the case.
IOW, I would not support a ban of raw milk. I support things like cottage food laws that dispense home kitchens from the some of the regulations that apply to commercial food producers. I see those things from a libertarian-ish perspective of enlarging personal freedom, but I think the freedom to buy boiling-hot coffee or ingest metal bristles is just not the same thing.
The commenters are missing the best solution, stop cleaning with wire brush, and instead clean the grill when hot with half an onion, as is meant to be
"Why is it simply taken as legitimate that the wrong or dangerous choice is on offer in the first place?"
Because in the real world there are very few, obvious "wrong"/"dangerous" choices. Everything is a trade-off and acting like there are always obvious "wrong"/"dangerous" choices creates a lot of false binaries.
How few people have to injure themselves with a product before you would entertain banning it, regardless of its efficacy in doing something useful? How many people are injured or die getting out of bed every morning every year? If you get a hot coffee at a local, walkable, urban coffeehouse to-go you could spill it on yourself, and is that singular cup of coffee REALLY worth the hospital bills for those burns? Should coffeehouses be allowed the "wrong" choice, (obviously, given the *possibility* of scalding) of selling hot beverages to a public woefully ignorant as to the danger in which they are putting themselves? "If it saves one life..." only works in a vacuum. And yes, obviously I know that we already draw these lines as a society, the discussion is over exactly where and it always will be, the idea that everyone will at some point agree on what the obvious "safe" and "dangerous" things are is antithetical to a society made up of humans.
I'm inclined to agree with Addison's original post, but this is also something. My first thought (because better women's health is often on my mind) is hormonal birth control. It's..... pretty clear by now that it causes both short-term and long-term harm in many women, messing with their hormones in ways that effect everything - their emotions, attraction preferences, physical health, mental health, breast cancer risk, future fertility, chances of getting underlying diseases resolved instead of covered up..... and yet many people either 1) don't know because providers are ill-informed themselves or simply minimize it or 2) people know and are willing to accept all these risks because that risk is worth it to them.
So for me, I'm like "Uh, this is terrible, why do people willingly eff with their whole bodies in this way?" and others don't see it as such, because it's a trade-off they're okay with. An example of how the "obvious wrong/dangerous choice" idea gets weird.
Someone mentioned above the harmful ingredients in, say, sunscreen. And this is another example of a carcinogen (among other things) that is just.... widely available. In more health-conscious spaces, these are risks that ought to be avoided. But I don't see hormonal contraceptives being more regulated (in fact, one is now over-the-counter). The dissonance in what should be banned or available to the masses is always going to be there. Because we can't always agree on what's "harmful enough"
Talk about opening a can of worms! This is an excellent comment.
Haha - I could not resist.
Medication and consumer goods are rightfully regulated very differently! Basically every medication has side effects and it’s up to the doctor and patient to assess risk vs reward. I think the push to ban birth control is strange given we basically never talk about the seizures, heart failure, blindness and hearing loss caused by viagra. And definitely don’t talk about banning it!
All true! And I wouldn’t be for banning it. The thing with hormonal contraception that gets me is the explosive, widespread acceptance of something that we are only now seeing the research on how *terrible* it is in the ways I mentioned. Between that and women be so ill-informed about how their bodies actually should function in it's healthiest ways (which affect them mentally, too), I think generations of women have been screwed over by medical professionals when it comes to true heath. Doctors are given little to no training on women's cycles (and the effects on the whole person) in med school, from what I've heard from actual physicians. It's neglect and harm that's accepted as normal.
I completely agree that the medical profession doesn't take women & women's bodies nearly as seriously as they should, and it's atrocious how we fail to educate women about their bodies! If you haven't read Doing Harm by Maya Dusenberry I highly recommend it: https://bookshop.org/a/5644/9780062470836
I'm less concerned about birth control (although I think we should be approving male bc), but share your concern that we don't talk about it with the nuance we should. That said, it's scary times! It's terrifying to me that birth control bans are now being widely discussed. And I get the desire both to elevate the statistically unlikely risks and to downplay them.
Just came across another series you might be interested in here on Substack! https://substack.com/inbox/post/135970858
The McDonalds coffee was found to be served at a temperature close to boiling, way above what you might expect "hot coffee" to be. Yes, it's absolutely a kind of corporate malpractice to serve a product at a temperature hotter than anybody reasonably expects it to be, such that a normal and expected user error can result in real injury.
Otherwise I take your point that what we consider safe and dangerous isn't necessarily fixed or even theoretically discoverable as something that can be universally agreed on. Still there are some things we do consider one or the other and I'm not sure we've had that discussion over this grill brush thing.
All of us in this thread are illustrating why the "reasonable person" test comes down entirely to what *you* think is reasonable.
I expect hot coffee served to me to be hot, so I make sure not to spill it on myself, it is not anyone else's responsibility to keep me "safe" (according to their standards, not my own, of course). I check products as much I reasonably can (according to me) before I buy them, use them, give them to family. Allowing our critical thinking skills to atrophy more at the hope that some bureaucrat will only approve the Good ThingsTM for us leads nowhere good, at least in my opinion. Perhaps it could in a society that was *gaining* trust in one another and our shared institutions, but in our society in which the opposite is happening and as people feel as though "discussions" like these are ceremonial and one-sided I don't see it gaining a lot of purchase, and probably creating a lot of backlash.
I highly recommend checking this piece out about the McDonalds coffee incident: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/mcdonalds-coffee-lawsuit-stella-liebeck
"I find it sort of strange that a product which can injure you simply in the course of normal use is sold everywhere"
But this is true of millions of products. Knives, bleach, stoves, law mowers, extension cords, rat poison, etc, etc. Not to mention cars. So it can't be the only justification for highly regulating a product. There are other means of causing change such as law suits against the manufacturers.
I agreed with your general points in this article and the previous one in the Bulwark, but I think the idea in quote above needs to be baked a bit longer.
Hmm. See, I think they're subtly different. A knife/bleach/stove/etc. - and yes, cars, which you know I agree with - all cause harm when a mistake is made, and their potential harm is pretty obvious.
I think "brushing down your grill with the brush" is the same thing as "spilling the bleach on yourself" or "slipping with the knife" or whatever the case may be. In other words, there is no way to use the product exactly as intended without it potentially injuring you. That feels like something that is true of very few products, when I think about it.
This world has gone MAD! What used to be logical, ethical, godly, etc. is rated bad. And bad is rated as good. The problem is spiritual, not physical. The more a human degrades from our Creator, the more debase they can get. Simply put. I really liked your article which denotes a society that has become 'reprobate' to anything that relates to 'sanity'.
Simple over-regulation. Ban grill wire brushes but what about other wire brushes? Ban those use cases as well?
I, like many, have wire brushes in my garage for other purposes. The grill wire brush likely came into existence because someone thought, 'well lets put a longer handle on this brush and dedicate it for grill use.' A simple invention, so, in fact banning has not prevented the use of wire brushes on a grill.
You mention refrigerators. This is clearly a different category item, as it is single use case. Also the latch is just a small part of the full product and the incremental cost is low.
Two things:
One, I should have specified that I didn't mean to suggest banning the manufacture of wire brushes, because that didn't even occur to me. I was thinking of banning them from being labeled as grill brushes, implying that they're basically fine to use on a grill. I'm sure the bristle issue doesn't apply to other uses they have. The issue is the implication that they carry no risk to users in the context of the grill - certainly I had no idea this was a risk (and it is rare but very much non-zero.)
Two, the narrowness of the fridge issue does make it somewhat different. But the thing is that there were still people who opposed those changes in the same way people would oppose banning wire brush sales as grill brushes. So how narrow the issue looks to us now may be our perception, and at the time some people perceived it differently.