since these chemicals accumulate in the body, if we're absorbing them from the environment they could reach toxic levels. but what if we don't measure toxicity just by death, but by worsening health? if i or my child has some mysterious ailment, how do we know it's not from PFOS chemicals, or many of the other synthetic chemicals industries have been pumping into our air, water, and earth for decades?

to wit: lead dropped the average iq of the americans since 1940: https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-sh...

how do we measure this kind of toxicity, except well after the damage is already done? if we know something is toxic, why don't we stop using it?

Not all of them accumulate, only those with a certain range of molecular weights and chemical signatures.

Because everything is toxic in large-enough quantities.

Threads like this always end up semantically identical to the Unabomber's manifesto. Sometimes that kind of throw-the-baby-out reaction is justified, as in the leaded-gasoline example, while sometimes it's not.

this is some real bad faith arguing saying my point is semantically identical to the unabomber manifesto. i really don't think it's close to that, since i'm not arguing for any kind of primitivism, nor for killing people to get there. and if you agree that this throw-the-baby-out reaction is justified sometime, maybe this is actually one of those cases?

the point of the article, and what i think you're ignoring, is the decades of cover-up by the corporate producers of these chemicals to protect their profits. that's not a good look if they're convinced their products are worth the damage

> Because everything is toxic in large-enough quantities.

We mostly don't take things in the large-enough quantities to make them poisonous. We cook on teflon for entire lifetimes, scraping food off of it, throwing out the pans when we visibly see the coating coming off.

> Threads like this always end up semantically identical to the Unabomber's manifesto.

No, they don't. But suggestions of regulation or political change somehow always get compared to terrorism.