Boy, the GOP seems to have picked a real winner in Nevada:
At first, [Nevada State Sen. Sharon] Angle appeared to be a conservative beamed to us straight from 1932. She’s come out against the repeal of Prohibition (which she later retracted). She’s against Social Security and Medicare. If you pressed her, you’d probably get her to grouse that things have gone downhill since the 19th Amendment, or that movies lost their spark once they introduced sound.
But sadly, my theory that Angle simply came to us after accidentally stepping in to a time machine in 1932 has been disproved. It turns out that Angle also staunchly opposed fluoridation, because she’s at least strongly influenced by the Bircher conspiracy theory about how fluoridation is a communist experiment in mind control. This conspiracy theory dates back to the ’50s and ’60s, when the government mandated fluoridation. It appears that Angle is less a time traveler and more a grab-bag of a century’s worth of right-wing conspiracy theories and screwy ideas.
Fluoride. That’s a conspiracy that hasn’t been around since the halcyon days of the sixties. People were opposed to fluoride in water because the gummit was putting chemicals into our bodies, and this would…uh…something.
This was obvious, because government is the enemy, damn it! Surely the government wasn’t interested in lowering the incidence of tooth decay — if they had been, then mission accomplished — but instead the evil forces of the government were focused on…well, it didn’t matter what, because it had to be nefarious.
Between Angle wanting to bring us back to the dental care of the 1930s, and Rand Paul happy to resegregate what few Walgreen’s lunch counters remain, the Tea Party folks are sure busy building a bridge to the 20th century. Which is why, for all the angst about our country’s direction, I expect the fall to be better for the Democrats than the dire predictions suggest. After all, it’s one thing to vote against Harry Reid. It’s quite another to vote for someone who thinks we should repeal Medicare.
I don’t know anything about the lady, so maybe she is a complete nut.
But her objection to fluoridation appears to have be based on worries that fluoridation solutions contain lead, mercury, and arsenic. Perhaps her concerns are scientifically unfounded, perhaps not; many concerns about “toxins” are 100% pure nutball.
They don’t seem to be in the same category as the anti-communist worriers’ concerns from 50 years ago; indeed, opposition to fluoridation is collecting some fairly non 100% nutball support. Also, the Sierra Club endorses her concern about heavy metal contamination.
And we should repeal Medicare, and shift its funding to a needs-tested medical welfare program for the poor, aka Medicaid. Why do you support taxing poor young working people to pay the medical bills of wealthy elderly retired people? ;P
I can tell you, as someone who works with a US based Association of Dentists [name changed to protect the innocent], that she is actually one of legion — with these folks leading the charge.
It’s not exactly mainstream, but anti-fluoridation folks are not uncommon and pretty well organized.
Well, I’ve been to one world fair, a picnic, and a rodeo, and that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard come over a set of earphones.
Yeah the anti-fluoridation movement still exists. And while righties still make up a substantial minority, it seems to be mainly made up of certain types of leftists – the same ones who buy into anti-vac nonsense and electrosensistify garbage. For various reasons I’m too worn out to do research today even on the google level. I wonder if there is any difference between what kind of lunacy appeals to the right more than the left, what kind appeals to the left more than the right, and what kind really is not predicted by political slant. Even though there are lefty creationists and global warming deniers, these particular phenomenon are overwhelmingly rightwing. Even though there are rightie anti-vaccers and electrosensitity advocates, these are overwhelmingly leftie beliefs. (And to be clear, not all righties are AGW deniers, but the overwhelming majority of AGW deniers are righties. Not all lefties are anti-vaccers, but the overwhelming majority of anti-vaccers are lefties.)
Unverified hypothesises: Righty lunacy has large righty money behind it. Left wing lunacy has properous but not super-rich hucksters with really good understanding of how to guerilla market to lefties. They really know the buttons to push to reach a certain upscale lefty market.
Alternative: founder effect. Lunacy that starts left stays left, Lunacy that starts right stays right.
Factual counterpoint already mentioned to both. Lunatic viewpoint that moved from right to left. And does not (as far as I know) have big money or skilled huckster behind it.
When I’m less tired I will see if I can find some research on this. I’ve seen lot of stuff discussing the flaws in human cognition that make us all vulnerable to this stuff. But I wonder if the vulnerability differs between right and left.
While the ‘Communist’ angle is stupid, there is widespread opposition to fluoridation of drinking water from natural-health advocates (like me) as well as a growing recognition by mainstream dental professionals that it *does not* significantly improve dental health while simultaneously placing people at higher risk for life-threatening health problems: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/ontario-fluoride-may-make-minor-difference/article1535873/
As a chronically ill person who has just returned from a visit to an area of the country where fluoridation is not practiced, I experienced a major shift in my subjective health status between the two places, and am prepared to consider the theory that this was a factor. If I could afford to do so, I would always drink unfluoridated water.
I’m astonished that you think the anti-fluoridation movement is gone! I live in an area that has just started fluoridating the water of the biggest town (not my town, which is on bore water) and the bumper stickers, newspaper letters, protests and egging of dentists’ offices has been going on for over a year now. A lot of it is “won’t someone think of the children!” nonsense, but it comes from both left and right.
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After all, it’s one thing to vote against Harry Reid. It’s quite another to vote for someone who thinks we should repeal Medicare.
ATM, it’s looking like they’ll do both.
Environmental groups don’t think water flouridation is good for us. But it is also not a Communist conspiracy.
http://www.cleanwateraction.org/feature/opposewaterfluoridation
I live in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where the water is STILL not fluoridated, b/c the far-right and the far-left joined together to make sure it never happened. Meanwhile (I teach in the working-class university here) my students are, a good many of them, missing teeth and going without dental care. One of my students who is studying in our dental program wrote a paper about the appalling dental situation in the area — one dentist for every 3500 patients, outside the cities, kids in their teens who have never seen a dentist, twelve year olds who are already missing teeth (adult teeth, not baby teeth– but hey, at least we ain’t got no Communist fluoride in the water.
Or it’s not damaging our health either.
Not like rotting teeth. Those are jist fine.