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It is a scenario playing out nationwide. From Oregon to Pennsylvania, hundreds of communities have in recent years either stopped adding fluoride to their water supplies or voted to prevent its addition. Supporters of such bans argue that people should be given the freedom of choice. The broad availability of over-the-counter dental products containing the mineral makes it no longer necessary to add to public water supplies, they say. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that while store-bought products reduce tooth decay, the greatest protection comes when they are used in combination with water fluoridation.
The outcome of an ongoing federal case in California could force the Environmental Protection Agency to create a rule regulating or banning the use of fluoride in drinking water nationwide. In the meantime, the trend is raising alarm bells for public health researchers who worry that, much like vaccines, fluoride may have become a victim of its own success.
The CDC maintains that community water fluoridation is not only safe and effective but also yields significant cost savings in dental treatment. Public health officials say removing fluoride could be particularly harmful to low-income families — for whom drinking water may be the only source of preventive dental care.
“If you have to go out and get care on your own, it’s a whole different ballgame,” said Myron Allukian Jr., a dentist and past president of the American Public Health Association. Millions of people have lived with fluoridated water for years, “and we’ve had no major health problems,” he said. “It’s much easier to prevent a disease than to treat it.”
According to the anti-fluoride group Fluoride Action Network, since 2010, over 240 communities around the world have removed fluoride from their drinking water or decided not to add it.
We need to stop letting the village idiots make policy.
We need to stop letting the conservatives make policy.
FTFY
You just repeated what OP said.
That would require a large community effort to resist occupation.
Yes we definitely need to get rid of this democracy thing /s
The first thing is not so much less democracy, but more participation. I'm definitely guilty of this myself, so not trying to be holier than thou preachy. Conservatives have been doing a concerted effort to take over lower level offices as well, school boards, municipal positions, etc. Part of the issue seems ro be the people who want to do this stuff often have an ulterior motive, and people who should probably be in these spots have a lack of interest.
Local office is pretty much shit. You get yelled at for whatever the crazies saw on TV last night, you can't fix anything, and everyone is angry about something.
Never doing it again.
The problem with our current democracy is that we haven't enshrined education as a right. Democracy works great if the population is informed and has critical thinking skills. In America, any stupid idea that becomes popular enough can become the law, because the population is too stupid to make pragmatic, evidence-based decisions.
If you want to protect democracy maybe don't defend the worst examples of it.
The christofascists are trying to destroy democracy. The village idiots are their brown shirts.
Funnily enough, the idiots do have a grain a truth here, that grain just happens to be an example of the internet's favorite, Dunning-Kruger.
Excess flouride does have profound negative effects on intelligence. Several hundreds times the levels you get positive effects for tooth health from, and thus well beyond the scope of flouridation programs. There are also other notable side effects from flouride toxicity, so it'd be quite noticable.
There are even several regions of America and China where they need deflouridation treatments for ground water, but the conspiracy types never seem to mention those.
They also don't seem to note that flouride toxicity, like lead toxicity, leads to both decreased intelligence and increased aggression.
How making the working class angry and dumb makes them easier for the owner class to control and profit from never seems to come up.
Lead exposure also causes reduced intelligence.
Leaded gasoline was still a thing when I was a kid.
Lead paint chips are delicious.
And those Stanley cups that suburbia is raging over, also contains lead.
You should probably read the whole thing, but, you know, the lead, I get it
Nice. I'm used to reacting to post headlines long since past.
Also lead.
Excess of ANYTHING leads to brain damage or death
Ask the folks at the Jan 6th riot. Trump played them all like fiddles.
Sure, but I don't think anyone is accusing Trump of being behind a flouridation conspiracy. It demonstrates rather that angry morons are rather easy to point at the government, which is why the government probably doesn't want a bunch of angry morons to rule.
Sure. I'm simply noting that whipping people up into a frenzy or panic is an age old technique for controlling large populations.
Or at this or that ethnic group or religious sect or ideological cohort, sure. You don't even have to be particularly conservative for this technique to work. Liberals fall for the Immigrant Caravan Invasion and Crime Wave panic stories and Pending Federal Bankruptcy and Communist Invasion stories as easily as any moderate Republican.
They do, if they want to export that violence overseas or inflict it on minority groups and women, as a means of social control.
And it isn't as though state officials are even all that rational. Certainly, Joe Biden's had no problem perpetuating a genocide overseas, despite his policy whipping up a bonfire of opposition at home and in neighboring regions. Neither do Vladimir Putin or MBS or Narendra Modi seem shy about stoking the fires of bigotry in their own countries, as a means of mobilizing large groups of people into parades of support for their rule.
Angry morons are a great source of cheap activist labor, whether you're storming the capital on Jan 6th or rallying Hindu nationalists to tear down a 600-year-old mosque in Delhi.