I like making fun of Kansas as much as anybody, and was all wound up with some snarky comments, but then I wondered: What* is* the matter with Kansas, anyway?
I’ve got a half-formed theory about ‘social heat’. Kansas only has ~3 million people, yet it is spread out over a large area. Like molecules of gas in a bottle, the less space per person, the less they bump into each other and share information.
Unlike regular heat, you’d have to add a factor for unique bumps- running into the same guy 5 times will provide diminishing returns in terms of new information being swapped.
It is just a sketch, but the theory suggests that Kansas has a low ‘social heat’. Take the ‘crazification factor’ as a given, say it is ~25% everywhere. Dumb ideas just well up from the populace. If it is trying to go through the legislature in a place like NYC, the idea is going to be encountered by tens of thousands of minds before the legislators even hear of it. In a place like Kansas where the social heat is low, a bad idea might wind its way through the system pretty far before enough people who know better run across it.
It doesn’t just apply to legislation, but bad ideas generally. People in areas with low social heat don’t get as much passive support from ‘background social encounters’ to whittle away their dumbest ideas.
Not sure what is the best way to address that, but flouride is not the problem.
Well shit, in high concentrations it’s lethal. But that’s the thing, as I’m sure you agree, and that’s why the woo persists. The one and only reason fluoride prevents tooth decay is because it’s toxic. But toxicity is dependent on dosage.
That’s a hard concept for some people (which again, is the source of the panic and the woo regarding F[sup]_[/sup]). A couple of years ago I was in a Home Depot and found a bottle of nitro pills on the floor. I went to the service desk to give it to them for the lost and found and somewhat unwisely said “somebody lost a bottle of nitroglycerin”. It took a minute to explain that this was a medication that somebody lost and not an explosive substance.
I’m not making fun of Kansas. I’m a lifelong resident, and am deeply distressed at what’s happening. It wasn’t always this way. Until the mid 2000s, this was by current standards, a moderate state that valued education, politicians tended to be educated, churches were community anchors, etc. Now education is increasingly looked upon with skepticism, lots of legislators have never been to college at all, and churches are institutions of politics. I was on my county’s Republican committee (precinct chair) for about 10 years, and watch as others on the committee who I knew as moderate politically and in religious faith, changed and became firebrands and extremists, because, I think, that became politically popular. I was forced off the committee, not because I changed.
I don’t think the “social heat” theory explains anything about the Kansas that I knew. Yes, bad ideas are floating to the surface now, but given this place’s previous stability, a small population doesn’t explain what has recently happened.
Well, no. It reduces the solubility of enamel and promotes remineralization by bonding with calcium and phosphate ions present in saliva. The resulting material is more acid resistant. It’s sort of like armor-plating your teeth.
Nothing against your general point, just nitpicking.
I live a mile away from the Robert Dole Center. In the mid 90s, I thought of Dole as a vindictive conservative curmudgeon. Nowadays, he seems like a socialist tax-and-spend fact-loving hippie. He actually helped to pass legislation during a Democratic president’s term in office! Back then, I wouldn’t have felt embarrassed to be a Kansan (I wasn’t a Kansan yet).
You know when fluoridation first began? Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie.
I first became aware of it during the physical act of love. A profound sense of fatigue… a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I… I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred. Women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women.But I do deny them my essence.
To nitpick your nitpick, science is still a bit out on that one.. Splitting hairs, though. Regardless of the mechanism, fluoride fucks up the bacteria that fuck up your teeth.
Ah well. I thought I’d try a different approach from the usual partisan point-and-laugh. Because, yanno, from the outside it kind of does seem like there is something going wrong, but it isn’t all that funny anymore, at least to me, even if it is happening to the dreaded conservatives in fundamentalist-land.
In case there are any youngsters who miss OP’s, BrainGlutton’s and Stranger’s reference, they’re referencing a famous 1964 documentary on the dangers of fluoridation. (For a good laugh – or cry – read the YouTube comments.)
The compassionate thing is to find some way to lead people back to understanding what is in their own best interest. Between lashing out at immigrants and minorities, gays, [del]liberals[/del] educated people, government and now tooth decay prevention, they’re going to hurt people that don’t deserve it.
Part of Brownback’s rhetoric is that ‘we tried the Blue State model already, and it didn’t work.’ Long-time Kansas residents in this thread point out that it used to be a pretty progressive place (plus a lot of fundamentalists I guess), but then people got disillusioned and went hard right. I bet a lot of Kansas are going to get sick of the current approach, but then a non-partisan message will probably be best.
I once saw a right-wing publication complaining that the EPA was trying to regulate flouride in high concentration industrial applications - after all, it’s in our toothpaste, so it’s perfectly safe!
It’s a variant of the “CO2 can’t hurt us, we breathe it every day” thing.
I lived in Kansas in the 80’s and have family there now. It is a fine state with fine people but there is something very, very messed up in Topeka. It’s like a whole nother world.
I think the matter is that Kansas is very rural and most of the residents would just like to be left the hell alone and so they vote conservatively on election day and then ignore the idiots in the capital the rest of the year. And those idiots, with no useful tasks to spend their time on, listen to the religious zealots that swarm around Topeka for some strange reason.
