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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