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Nietzsche's Toxicology
CETS writes "If it doesn't kill ya' it makes you stronger, so a little bit of a bad thing might be alright, according to Scientific American which has this article. " If dioxin and ionizing radiation cause cancer, then it stands to reason that less exposure to them should improve public health. If mercury, lead and PCBs impair intellectual development, then less should be more. But a growing body of data suggests that environmental contaminants may not always be poisonous--they may actually be good for you at low levels.""
I saw this on Penn & Teller's Bullshit. It was hilarious. Great show, btw. They were going around at a greenpeace rally and getting everyone to sign a petition to ban Dihydrogen monoxide(sp?) due to the dangers. All kinds of 'activists' bought it hook, line, and sinker.
:-D
It really showed that many people who consider themselves to be activists are nothing more than cheerleaders for a cause without doing any critical thinking or research about whose and what ideals they are supporting.
Know anyone like that?
Wort Wort Wort!
Every time this comes up I am amazed that it isn't completely obvious to almost everyone. After all, every substance known to man has the Goldilocks Property (too much is bad, too little is bad, so just right is best). It seems like everyone wants to pretend that they live in a world where things are either good or bad in-and-of themselves, when in fact nothing they have ever encountered works the way they are trying to pretend that everything does.
The only explanation I can think of is that it would be great for people who don't want to think, except that in a would like that people never would have evolved in the first place.
-- MarkusQ
It's been known for thirty or forty years that places with high background radiation (like Colorado, especially Pueblo and Grand Junction) have suspiciously low cancer rates, and that these cancer rates absolutely contradicted the EPA's most common assumption, of a completely linear dose-response rate.
There are many possible reasons for this; maybe Colorado just has a better public health system or healthier lifestyles.
One interesting thing about this is that, if hormesis is true, as it appeaers, then all those people who have spent a small fortune clearing radon out of their basemants may have actually increased their chances of cancer.
Even if Radon did protect you against cancer in low doses, the right thing to do would be to get it out of homes and then give it to people it in well-controlled doses.
It is quite ironic that people like you often call themselves "conservatives", but then want to subject the US population to historically unprecedented exposures to largely unstudied chemicals and radiation. The conservative thing is to avoid exposing people to new chemicals and radioactivity until we know for certain that it's safe.
This isn't really news -- except to the majority of people who listen to the ecological ideologues rather than checking out the actual data.
You are right: this isn't news. The only news is that ignorant politicians with a corporatist agenda use such obscure scientific tidbits out of context to argue that pollution is harmless.
Tell me something, how the fuck did humans live without toxic chemicals for the last 100,000 years then?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I agree with this (hell, how can't I? It's been proven) to some degree. It always drives me nuts when I see parents sheilding their kids from every sort of germ and such and fill them full of motrin at the slightest hint of a cold. Let them get sick. Let them build up their immunities. Let the body build resistance to it. It's only gonna happen by playing in the dirt, being outside, experiencing the world. Stop disinfecting the entire house. And as we've seen throughout history (and by some posts here), it's been a common practice to ingest small amounts of poison to build up the tolerance so if you were to ingest a "lethal" dosage for a "normal" person, you'd survive.
However...you are NOT going to catch me smoking cigarettes to "build up" my lungs, or drink gasoline, or take in any other number of highly toxic (and those weren't even "highly toxic") compounds to "get stronger". Yet...scarily enough, some people in society don't bother to use common sense and they'll just be a bunch of lemmings and do stupid shit and start drinking anti-freeze thinking it'll help them in some way.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
People with no chemistry background should be very rare in any developed country. If this is not the case where you live, congratulations, your school system is terminally screwed.
It is very likely that the interviewed 'activists' [...] unthinkingly said 'yes' to an interviewer asking if they wanted to sign a petition against a 'Very Dangerous Chemical'?
The key word here is `unthinkingly'. By using it you are agreeing that the people who agreed deserved to be laughed at.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named