Posted by:
SL Cabbie
(
)
Date: May 25, 2015 10:39PM
Here Shummy, this Bud's for you...
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/science-doubters/achenbach-text>"Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?"
Borrowing from a scene from "Dr. Strangelove" about the "fluoride conspiracy":
>The movie came out in 1964, by which time the health benefits of fluoridation had been thoroughly established, and antifluoridation conspiracy theories could be the stuff of comedy. So you might be surprised to learn that, half a century later, fluoridation continues to incite fear and paranoia. In 2013 citizens in Portland, Oregon, one of only a few major American cities that don’t fluoridate their water, blocked a plan by local officials to do so. Opponents didn’t like the idea of the government adding “chemicals” to their water. They claimed that fluoride could be harmful to human health.
I had a few knock-down drag outs here on the subject of fluoridation. The reason that "anti-science" mantra sets off the road rage is those folks (the original John Birch Society founded by Pappy Koch and championed by none other than W. Cleon Skousen) were making the same claims. I think about that every time I go to the dentist.
Some folks appear to be immune to the lessons of history. A bit more from the article...
>"We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge—from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change—faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you’d think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative. And there’s so much talk about the trend these days—in books, articles, and academic conferences—that science doubt itself has become a pop-culture meme."
>"The trouble goes way back, of course. The scientific method leads us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing, and sometimes hard to swallow. In the early 17th century, when Galileo claimed that the Earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun, he wasn’t just rejecting church doctrine. He was asking people to believe something that defied common sense—because it sure looks like the sun’s going around the Earth, and you can’t feel the Earth spinning. Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant. Two centuries later Charles Darwin escaped that fate. But his idea that all life on Earth evolved from a primordial ancestor and that we humans are distant cousins of apes, whales, and even deep-sea mollusks is still a big ask for a lot of people. So is another 19th-century notion: that carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that we all exhale all the time and that makes up less than a tenth of one percent of the atmosphere, could be affecting Earth’s climate."
Play it again, Tom...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvlTJrNJ5lABTW, it was Will Bagley who turned me onto that song...
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/25/2015 10:43PM by SL Cabbie.