• vogo13@sh.itjust.works
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    20 hours ago

    From the wiki: “By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of injurious products which had been ruled permissible under the 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, the mascara Lash lure, which caused blindness, and worthless “cures” for diabetes and tuberculosis. The resulting proposed law was unable to get through Congress for five years, but was rapidly enacted into law following the public outcry over the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent.”

    I believe I’ve heard that the FDA was actually beneficial for capitalism as consumers would entirely avoid certain products out of fear, making it difficult to sell even legitimate goods.

  • neons@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    23 hours ago

    That’s not true:

    They exist because pure unadulterated capitalism WILL kill you, not would.

  • Taleya@aussie.zone
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    1 day ago

    It wasn’t chalk, it was borax. And that was because it neutralised the sour taste of turned milk.

  • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Someone somewhere recently pointed out that fascism tends to rear its ugly head every 100 years because everyone that experienced it last time has to be dead before it can happen again.

    Americans specifically have had it generally good for so long that anyone incapable of picking up and absorbing information from a history book, which is most Americans, simply don’t know how bad it used to be. So they fucking sleepwalk into fascism or allowing regulations to be rolled back.

    You’d think that having a written language to chronicle all our mistakes would ensure that we moved forward without repeatedly making those mistakes, but the catch is the majority of people have to read the fucking words for that to matter.

    • BlackSheep@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      Hence, the defunding of education, and specifically critical thinking. That is by design. You can’t easily control the population when they can read and think for themselves.

      • barneypiccolo@lemm.ee
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        2 days ago

        Exactly. Critical Thinking is the literally the most imoportant skill you cn learn. Critical Thinking is what allows people to recognize nonsensical propaganda immediately upon hearing it, and reject it.

        It worked for me back in the late 80s, when Rush Limbaugh got started. He had a very entertaining delivery, but I was easily rejecting his unsourced bullshit and blatant lies, while people were calling in praising him for “opening their eyes.” Dude, he’s entertaining, I get that, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t lying to you.

        • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          I was 12 or so when my dad started listening to Limbaugh. I had zero clue about politics, but I could tell the guy was a scumbag. So glad he’s dead. I danced a jig in my cubicle when I found out.

          • barneypiccolo@lemm.ee
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            1 day ago

            He used to support tobacco companies, was a tobacco cancer denier, and wanted to end the embargo with Cuba so he could get their cigars cheaper. His cigar habit ended up killing him prematurely.

            He deserved the cancer that killed him, but I wish his death had been so much worse.

    • SabinStargem
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      2 days ago

      I think it would help to have history-oriented comics and manga in schools. I learned to enjoy history, in no small part on account of Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe series. Making things approachable is how people progress from knowing nothing to being a college graduate.

    • Crikeste@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      When I told my parents how we got things like the 40 hour work week they were fucking mortified. Something seemingly so inconsequential, many people died for.

      • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Yup.

        People died to give workers rights and now we’re electing anti-worker presidents and giving those rights away. It’s sickening.

    • The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 days ago

      but the catch is the majority of people have to read the fucking words for that to matter.

      Hell, I’d even settle for more people watching classic movies and TV shows. People need to maintain some link to the past to see the mindset of those who lived through fascism, wars, etc. and absorb what a society that rejects those ideas looks like.

      Culture is a big part of our collective memory, and a society that can’t look back will just reinvent the same problems.

      • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        It would be cool if someone made a “transported through time” miniseries that showed exactly what living in that period with those problems was like. I think it could be very popular.

        • PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Watch the show Connections. It was made by the BBC in 1978 and does exactly this, but more science focused. The show holds up really well.

        • SabinStargem
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          I can see that being an isekai manga. Say, by the person who did Spice & Wolf?

          Oh, by the way, check out Barefoot Gen. It was written by a person who was a boy when the atomic bombs hit Japan. It covers the post-war period, including the corruption and day-to-day life of a shattered Japan.

    • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      Fun fact:

      The precursor to the FDA was created during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration. After the book was published, Roosevelt sent federal investigators to the Chicago slaughterhouses to validate the conditions detailed in the story.

      The investigators reported that the conditions were worse than described in the book. And that was after the slaughterhouse owners got wind that the feds were coming and had everything cleaned from top to bottom.

      Hard to imagine what “worse” looks like because the conditions detailed in the book are truly appalling.

      • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        Additional fun fact, The Jungle was meant to highlight the poor working conditions in slaughter houses, but the outrage was related entirely to the poor consideration for the meat that the public was eating.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 days ago

      Not sure if you intended this, but you can absolutely get what you wrote to work with the timing (and same rhyme sounds/pattern, basically) of the first few lyrics of Guns N Roses ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, with minor modifications.

      Welcome to the Jungle,

      where we play dirty games.

      Food safety sure costs a lot,

      so fuck the FDA.

      We are the people who hate fines,

      Whatever they may be.

      If you got no money, honey,

      We got your disease.

      etc.

      (Wonderful that some of the lyrics don’t have to change at all, nor really the chorus, yay internal bleeding.)

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 days ago

          I mean… the original song’s use of that phrase arguably references a woman basically being forced to give bjs to her dealer in order to get drugs she’s now addicted to…

          All of this is terrible!

          • SabinStargem
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            2 days ago

            Sad thing, that original song would still apply - but now for safe baby food, carrots, or maybe a sack of flour. A lot of people are going to do things that they never expected to do.

            We are going to live an cursed existence. 💩

    • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      Love the cover:
      The Jungle Upton Sinclair

      [Incidentally and entirely off-topic, it reminds me of the book(s) I’m reading right now: Josiah Bancroft’s Tower of Babel tetralogy - urban steampunk jungle, vertically]

  • psivchaz@reddthat.com
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    2 days ago

    My favorite “we had to regulate this” is coal mining. You see, the larger a coal mine tunnel, the more work and time it takes. So smaller tunnels will be more profitable. So in some places they preferred smaller women and children, so they could make make smaller, easier tunnels. This one I only ever found one source on, but supposedly one mine owner noticed that snags on clothing were slowing things down in the narrow tunnels so he insisted on sending them in nude. Nothing more capitalist than naked coal mining children.

    • Gloomy@mander.xyz
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      24 hours ago

      I realy would like to fact check you on this, but i will definitely not search for “naked coal mining children”. “Trust me bro” will have to do it for this one.

      • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        That miners often worked naked or partially naked is definitely true. That children, men and women worked together in mines is also true. If it’s legally allowed, then it’s going to happen basically.

        That there were owners who preferred children/women over men, is probably false. They will have tended to do different jobs in the mines, but I can’t recall having ever read anything about a mine that preferred to not employ any male miners.

        That the workers worked naked because of owner mandates is also going to be false, because those miners used to be paid according to how much they extracted, so there was no reason for the owner to have such a mandate. Instead it was the workers their own choice: some clothes hinder them in their work (heat, snagging, dust) + the job eats up clothes + they have to pay for their own clothes = they’re not going to be wearing many clothes at work.

    • arrow74@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      The fact that these fucks were not regularly dragged from their mansions and beaten to death blows my mind

      • neons@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        22 hours ago

        You’re not dragging Trump out and beating him to death. So why expect of your ancestors what you can’t do today?

        I’m not shaming nor advocating btw, just explaining.

        • arrow74@lemm.ee
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          22 hours ago

          I mean a single rich guy owning a mine in a time pre-internet seems a lot more doable than the literal most protected guy in the country.

          Plus my children aren’t literally dying in the mines

      • BearGun@ttrpg.network
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        2 days ago

        as humans, our arguably greatest trait is the ability to adapt to almost any circumstance. unfortunately that also often makes us accept unacceptable living conditions because changing them involves too high of a personal cost.

      • Test_Tickles@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        That’s because you view things like this as isolated acts done by a few people. But don’t forget, only 1/3 of US voters tried to stop a man who openly declared himself a fascist, had already had a direct hand in the spread of a world wide plague that killed millions.
        The “they didn’t know what they were getting into” excuse is no longer valid. And yet 2/3 of voters were fine with him being reelected . The reason those people weren’t dragged from their mansions and beaten to death was because of all the other monsters who were protecting them. The people who weren’t committing atrocities themselves, but benefited from it enough to help it keep happening.

  • nyahlathotep@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    they used to put brick dust in chocolate bars, and sawdust in bread

    edit: heck, they just caught someone recently intentionally putting lead in applesauce cinnamon that was used in applesauce, which has been used off and on as a sweetener since at least ancient rome, where a bunch of people went crazy and died from consuming a sweetener made by boiling grapes in lead pots

    • minkymunkey_7_7@lemmy.world
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      Omg is this the joke? Chalk in milk? So it took me 30 years to actually understand this Simpsons joke?

      The golden years writers were so genius.

      • GoodLuckToFriends
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        I thought the R was because it was from rats, and malk because they didn’t want it to be tested like milk is (it’s just a drink not milk, aye?) but maybe I’m not remembering the episode correctly.

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    Eventually we Canadians won’t even have to boycott American agricultural products, they just won’t be able to sell them to us because they won’t pass our safety requirements.

    • Who knew?@sh.itjust.works
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      I already subscribe to y’alls government emails about recalls, I suggest other Americans do too because many products are sold in both places, and hopefully it would be too expensive to set up two production lines, one for lower or nonexistant US standards and one for Canada. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en for 'muricans who are curious

    • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      This is already happening a lot. Take poultry for example.

      In the USA, you can chemically rinse chicken (usually in acids, but in the past in chlorine) so that it won’t have any Salmonella or Campylobacter bateria on it.

      The EU, you’re not allowed to do that, but you’re also not allowed to have those bacteria. That means you have to raise the chickens in a MUCH cleaner environment. The same goes for eggs, which you can’t wash, so they have to be clean from the farm.

      As a result, you can’t export US chicken to the EU, because it doesn’t meet the safety standards. And that’s about to get worse. You can absolutely export EU chicken to the US, but it likely won’t be competitively priced.

  • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
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    2 days ago

    Damn, just five minutes ago I saw this link shared in another thread:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swill_milk_scandal

    🤢🤮

    It took us well over a century to establish some sort of framework that makes such horrors almost impossible, but no, regulations are bad 🙄

    Same for workers btw. And cows. It’s not just about food security. That’s just easier to sell to a thoroughly egoistic constituency.

    • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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      There were no regulations that couldn’t ever n made unrefrigerated raw milk safe in cities at the time. You either sold milk from cows raised in the city itself(which means cramped quarters and disease) or carted it in on a wagon (which means unrefrigerated milk sitting for hours). Adding formalin likely made it safer, it was so dangerous. The scandal thing played like it was what they were feeding cows (we feed cows high protein spent grains today and it’s considered high quality feed), but the reality was milk in cities was always insane.

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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    2 days ago

    Everyone who wants to remove food regulations should just be shot. I’m so tired of these absolute fools that slept through 10th grade history trying to take us back to the gilded age.

    • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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      As someone who works in materials/workplace safety, I can absolutely vouch that there are stupid regulations that should be scrapped. I have no doubt there are stupid regulations in food-safety, because there are stupid regulations everywhere. Recently here in the Netherlands we changed regulations for toxic residu in soil to distinguish between “Things that are bad for plants and animals” and “Things that are bad for humans”. That made things more complex, but it also means you don’t have to wear a hazmat suit to protect yourself from a dose of zink that’s roughly equal to a multivitamin a day (which, funfact, will absolutely murder fish).

      But you know who shouldn’t get to decide which regulations are stupid? The people who stand to make money off of scrapping regulations.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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      It wasn’t even just 10th grade… I learned about this shit in grade school, then again in civics class in Jr. High. Then again in American History in high school. Anyone who doesn’t understand the risks here shouldn’t be allowed outside by themselves.

    • TassieTosser@aussie.zone
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      Just give them a state, ship them all there and build a wall around it. Like some sort of big libertarian hunger games.

    • lobut@lemmy.ca
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      it seems they need to be rewritten in blood … because people are so contrarian and formed social relationships based on questioning the basics and not understanding the answers.