I mean:
Next up is propaganda and filling Americans' minds with only what he wants you to know
No. "Propaganda and filling Americans' minds with only what he wants you to know" is what happened first using the internet to radicalize those without the wisdom to have seen this outcome.
And Idiocracy may not be so much an optimistic look at our future as the conservatives continue to implement their policies, as it is a cynical look at the results that conservatives implementing their policies have had on our present.
And things can get so much worse.
You are missing something. If you're this confused about a topic, you should at a bare minimum read the Wikipedia page.
The Wikipedia page you mentioned reading also points out that it's not only a US thing. Or even a water-only thing.
You don't have an argument yourself, you just wanted to share that you are pro some position.
If someone came in with a curious mindset, that'd be one thing. But this is someone walking into a room with an agenda (get rid of fluoride) and a shocking lack of knowledge about that agenda.
But since "Internet People Lie About Fluoride,"[0] why are you surprised? And that's nothing new.
Why? I have no idea. Perhaps cpursley[1] could enlighten us?
Because you're the "Internet people lie about fluoride" guy to a tee.
Have a good day!
It's funny you should mention that because now the Texas AG is staring to come after fluoridated toothpastes.
So rather than have them suffer with a lifetime of oral health problems, you can intervene in a transparent and cheap way to prevent these issues altogether.
The introduction of fluoride dramatically improved oral health. NYC has been doing it since the 1960s, so one would think we’d see evidence of the supposed negative effects.
And by your metric, should we also pump in vitamins and other substances that our bodies crave? Maybe the Fed gov't could just skip that and force drip IV everyone a compliance cocktail after their breakfast of USDA approved and SNAP subsidized Captain Crunch?
Something like 30% of people report not brushing their teeth at least once a day. Unclear if that means most of them brush every other day or some even lower frequency, but I’d assume if you report not brushing at least once a day then you likely aren’t brushing consistently every other day or something.
> And by your metric, should we also pump in vitamins and other substances that our bodies crave? Maybe the Fed gov't could just skip that and force drip IV everyone a compliance cocktail after their breakfast of USDA approved and SNAP subsidized Captain Crunch?
We already do this, all the time! Vitamin and mineral fortified foods are everywhere. Iodine is in a lot of salt. It’s a good thing, not something to be mocked. Most vitamins and minerals have minimal cost, no issues with taking “too much” of them, and have significant health benefits if you are deficit on that particular thing.
Gross, but that's their problem, not mine. There's a multitude of bad health habits, if we were actually serious, there'd be no soda or cereal on the shelves. But big ag and big health activity oppose that because they financially benefit from SNAP. Your fortified foods mention is an example of exactly how insane it all is (we subsidize the corn syrup farmers to produce garbage food and then give poor people money to buy it, instead of you know - real food).
This absolutist mindset is not helpful for making progress. People want tasty, potentially bad for them foods. You can have bad food that’s made up of “real food” just fine. Fortifying bad foods to make them marginally less bad is a good thing. Don’t let great be the enemy of good. Nobody is looking at a bag of chips and saying “well because it’s got added Vitamin A, it’s good for me now!” Instead, it’s just a silent benefit.
Again, you’re asking for behavioral change in humans by fiat. Fortification extends well beyond just adding vitamins to chips or junk food. It’s added in many basic building blocks (milk, and most flours and rice) because it literally is solving nutritional deficiencies caused by poverty. Nobody is somehow making purchasing decisions on junk food based on fortification content.
> Get the shit like food coloring and corn syrup out of our food.
Irrelevant to nutritional content, unless you mean overly sugary foods relating to corn syrup. Which, you can have the exact same health outcomes and hyper palatability by just using regular old sugar.
> Other nations do just fine with their food situation without all this made up nonsense and excuses like "fortified" food.
Other nations fortify their food too, including many “first world” countries. I don’t know why you think this is somehow a uniquely American thing.
They absolutely are. Food marketing and other tricks work, even on edjamahcated people. Think terms like “150% more antioxidants” and “100% natural fruit gummies!”
You’re looking for facts to stuff a straw man. There is clear, obvious correlation between fluoridation and improved oral health. They discovered this decades ago where it was observed that oral health was better in regions where groundwater was used and fluoride occurred naturally.
By my metric, we should take reasonable measures to improve public health. I don’t suppose you’re in favor of making dental care affordable to those who can’t afford it?
If you choose to align yourself with the pseudo intellectual descendants of the John Birch society to protect your “precious bodily fluids”, I’m sorry for you.
Not once have I argued against fluoride for oral care. But I don't want it in my DRINKING water.
> We add vitamin A & D to milk and bread.
Right, and our (American) "bread" and milk is not just bad, it's total garbage. I mean really really bad vs civilized countries.
Here's another solution: Just eat real food and brush your teeth with proper toothpaste. I know, shocking!
What’s your answer when the same idiots campaigning against fluoride decide that toothpaste is a problem? Or that the ADA is a scam and there is no proof that toothbrushing has any effect?
And what’s real food? That is a question that doesn’t have an answer.
Their teeth will rot out.
> And what’s real food? That is a question that doesn’t have an answer.
It's not fortified Captain Crunch.
google is free - it's not anyone's responsibility to educate you and answer your naive questions. and if did google and you're still not convinced, well then i'm glad you're not an elected official wherever it is you live (though if you live in the US i guess you probably voted for the current admin)
Actually, ironically, you end up being wrong here, though in less of an Idiocracy way and more of a Orwellian "news propaganda machine tricked you" way.
I can't believe these words have been said on HN.
I kinda see how you got there, but man.
This is the same guy behind Office Space and Bevis and Butthead. He's poking fun at out of touch intellectuals and consumption. Calling it pro-eugenics though...
It ended up with 11 deaths, thousands of injured, thousands of people were arrested hundreds went to jail. Look at Serbia, Greece, damn even Turkey seems to put a better fight lol
https://www.ledauphine.com/france-monde/2018/12/13/gilets-ja...
We need more angrier people.
France: 3M/70M ~ 4%
US: 2M/350M ~ .5%
The US needs roughly a tenfold increase in numbers to match France.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Quebec_student_protests
If the "terrified" camp is sufficiently large, their terror can be overridden with a sufficiently large swing in public opinion. They're potentially movable.
The true believers...not sure if anything can move them. If the "on board" camp is (nearly) all Republican legislators, then there is no path to impeachment.
It will be interesting to see how things evolve as the economic impacts of Trump's policies develop. That's probably the most direct path to the level of public opinion shift needed to make impeachment possible.
Assuming there will be a free and fair election in which the Democrats win, it would be a sensible move to repeal the Hague Invasion Act, ratify the Rome Statute and refer all of the 47th's admin's key figures there - that avoids any possible issues with the Supreme Court.
Additionally, it would restore a bit of global confidence in the ICC and America's credibility on the global stage as well... something sorely needed after not even a few months of this administration.
2.Even if it did pass, retroactively referring 47 there doesn't scream "law and order" to me, especially when there are actual laws being broken.
That was the case in 2002, back when the Supreme Court still worked and was reasonably respected, and Congress at least did lip service to follow its duties.
Now, the circumstances have shifted - the Supreme Court is seen as compromised as a result of the Trump appointments plus the corruption scandals surrounding Roberts. Therefore I'm not so sure that the Hague Invasion Act would remain if it were pushed to a vote in a future Democrat-controlled Congress.
> Even if it did pass, retroactively referring 47 there doesn't scream "law and order" to me, especially when there are actual laws being broken.
I agree, the normal course of action should be to put 47th and his goon(er)s through the regular American court system - but I am afraid that the legal system has degraded way too much over the last years from all the political appointments. That's why in Croatia and Serbia we had the ICTY established, there was no trust of fair trials.
Assuming that we continue to elect presidents, you need one to appoint an effective Attorney General (ie not Garland) and use these new king like powers of the executive to smash. The president was convicted of dozens of crimes, but nobody had the balls to throw him in jail.
You have to think about 2025 solutions. The die is cast, it isn’t 1995 anymore. Nobody is clutching their pearls because POTUS made a mess on an intern anymore. It’s a different environment and you’re going to have to have fistfights on the Senate floor if the congress is functioning.
A lot of what the 47th and people in his administration did are already punishable by law - alone the Signal affair or other violations of the Public Records Act.
It would not be a ex post facto prosecution, it would simply be a prosecution by a court of law that is reasonably free from corruption.
It’s all fantasy anyway.
Well, whoever succeeds Trump will have to go for drastic measures to restore global trust in the US. No way around that, the system is fundamentally broken and needs a complete and utter overhaul. If the Democrats have an ounce of interest in self-preservation, they have no alternative than to bring down all the hammers they can on the MAGA part of the GOP.
There is no current checks mor balances, a king runs America and Republicans smile because they are wearing the same color jersey and seem to think their longtime agenda is being implemented, when, no, a mafia is riding their agenda and party to absolute power.
And remember the furious response when Obama put his feet on the Resolute desk?
The absolute gall of the fiend!
It's going to be a long slow process of firstly making sure that all Democrats are actually anti-Trump through primary challenges, then trying to ensure a D sweep in the mid-term elections. I don't think there's much chance of anything before then.
If the sky is falling on everything he does, and you're wrong some of the time, then people will stop listening. There's plenty that this administration has done that is objectively horrible.
I don't think that there is much risk of foreign researchers moving to the US in the current climate.
The American education system was not mass producing incompetent retards before the DoE was established in 1980.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43893596
"Defund education"
Trump is abolishing the Department of Education, leaving it to the states.
The point is, if he arrived in Bangladesh instead of California, he would have accomplished nothing notable.
> [Americans] landed on the moon without a federal Department of Education
maybe you should check what the budget for NASA was during the space race and what it is now, considering also the news from 3 days ago about further budget cuts to the Agency.
Since the DoE was established, education has only declined versus the rest of the world. America spends more money for less.
And giving away the money? You’d lose all amenities of a school, the building, its land, the social benefits of school interactions, etc. Most importantly, you lose classroom management of a teacher, and the kids lose out big time.
A PhD tutor stood in front of determinedly mischevious children, most couldn’t last two weeks.
Still nobody putting up a meaningful fight. Your window is closing.