I got paddled once at school in 6th grade (this was in the '70s when they still did that shit). Two whacks for talking during class or maybe it was because my desk was messy. The teacher let me choose between two paddles (an evil all by itself) and I foolishly chose the one with holes drilled in it (which leads to greater whack speed and less surface area hit). She took me out in the hall and her first blow missed badly - hit me on my hamstrings behind my knees and they kept hurting for days. She said “oh that one doesn’t count” and hit me on my ass twice more.
Weirdly enough, she had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights era and played his “I Have a Dream” speech for the class (not on the say day as my paddling, though).
I worked for an Internet startup in the ‘90s and at one point we were sucking up to R. J. Reynolds’ venture capital division for more funding. This tobacco company had so much fucking money they had actually branched out into venture capitalism to do something with it. The VCs came to visit us one day; we were in a non-smoking office and these assholes spent the entire day literally chain-smoking in the meeting room. We had not much ventilation and the smoke was so thick you couldn’t see to the end of the hallway. I kept walking past the meeting room and loudly coughing and my bosses eventually sent me home.
We ended up not getting any money from them. The only good part of this story is that these guys have all surely died horrible deaths from cancer or emphysema by now. But in order to sell the lie that cigarettes aren’t harmful, these R. J. Reynolds executives had first convinced themselves of it. The human capacity for self-delusion is truly remarkable.