it's also a sad joke because... #fluoride and #drinkingwater freakouts are batshit #paranoia for morons from 70 years ago, 1950s #redscare #johnbirchsociety bullshit

they are mining old stupid crap that was lampooned before most of us were born

so our era is now:

yoke dum dums via #socialmedia for #political #power by pandering to their #ignorance and #indecency, #fear and #hate

this is our world now

😩

it's just so sad and stupid

this was settled before i was born

but they need to mine new material for bullshit means for political control, so they trot out the classic paranoia and ignorance

My dad was born in the late 40s. He had a junior high school teacher that would fit into today's conspiracy communities. Made an impression on him that followed him until he passed away at the age of 75.

The teacher ran the entire gambit of conspiracies.

The last time I talked in him shortly before he died a couple years ago, by then he could only look out the window and was bedridden, said, "I see they are seeding the sky today."

With that said, my dad still took illnesses, even COVID, seriously, vaccinated, same for all us kids. It did influence our childhood and to some aspect, our own quirks, esp related to germs. He hated Trump.

and we're all like that in a way

we all have our stubborn beliefs in spite of all facts to the contrary

your dad, you, me, all of us

what's interesting is how controversy on topics that many have issue with can be mined for power

society is being strip mined in this way by those who observe such topics, and work it for wedges and grudges

When we moved to Germany in 1980, my parents started giving me fluoride tablets because Germany doesn't put fluoride into the tap water.

They gave me too much fluoride, apparently, because it stained my teeth for a few years. But the stains vanished over time, and I've only ever had one cavity in my entire life, and that was in my early 40s. I'm almost 48.

If #Oklahoma removes fluoride from our water, we'll be looking into tablets.

It's about the dose. You absolutely can get too much fluoride and it can stain teeth

But this is true for everything we can put in our bodies

Too much vitamin C: kidney stones. Too much waffles: obesity. You can even drink too much water too fast and it can kill you

Absolutely every substance imaginable you can take too much of it and it can hurt you

But the trolls prey on the uneducated by telling you how much something can hurt you by only talking about large doses

Like "double the risk of something going wrong!" as a headline point. Especially effective with later-in-life childbirth, women freaking about having kids around 40 because of the risk of birth defects, then it turns out the "doubling" means the chances of birth defects go from 0.5 to 1%.

Scare tactics. Ugh.

People are bad at weighing relative risks

A covid vaccine can indeed harm you

...In a handful of cases out of millions

While covid can kill you, permanently debilitate you, make you gravely ill, kill your grandma because you gave it to her, etc

...In a minority of cases, but 100,000s of orders of magnitude more likely than any potential harm from the vaccine

Yet many people are scared of the vaccine more than the disease

A cognitive weakness