If everyone is allowed to take their coughing children on airplanes, it's a detriment to my life quality. What's the difference? Why are ten coughing children without masks less lethal than ten adults smoking cigarettes?
And you’re comparing that with actual smokers who would actually light up at every opportunity.
Oh it’s “just one cigarette” that you would smoke right? Just one. Why are these unreasonable people persecuting you unreasonably for just one. Of course you wouldn’t smoke a second. Of course no one else would smoke one after seeing you.
In terms ten second-hand cigarettes damaging you on a flight, or ten coughing children, I don't understand how you think the smoke would be more dangerous. Cancer risk from smoke is cumulative, whereas risk from contagious diseases is immediate.
I take it you didn't live through the era of unrestricted tobacco smoking then. Smokers absolutely do not ask whether they can smoke unless they know they really shouldn't, but hope they'll be allowed to anyway.
Aside from that, it is obviously ridiculous to compare disease (which is rarely something one gets willingly, and cannot be stopped at will) with smoking (a wilful decision, and something that can be stopped at will).
Disease is an unavoidable fact of human life and children are a necessary piece of society, but tobacco is entirely unneeded.
[edit] Taking a break from the internet is never a bad idea, though. I could probably use one myself. I could use another trip. I do wish the alternative to staying home wasn't getting on a plane with everyone else's children... only slightly kidding.
That's not my experience, at all. In places where they are allowed to smoke, which used to be everywhere, they either take it for granted that they can smoke and just do it; or they 'ask' with something like "surely you don't mind" while already lighting their cigarette. And some of them do the same even in places where they're not allowed to, but fortunately that's a shrinking minority.