Read this article about current protests in Venezuela.
Emphasis added. Maybe what them Kansans need is summa that “autonomous spaces for popular participation.” I.e., a grassroots left-populism based on “communal councils” that they run themselves. It’s not LW economic politics as such that they appear to resent, it’s elite politics, i.e., somebody else’s politics.
Except that two main centers of conservatism (conservatism with a religious evangelical/fundamentalist bent) are Johnson County and Sedgwick County, the two counties with the largest populations in the state.
Didn’t Kansans lose jobs over the past decades thanks to free trade agreements like what Clinton supported? Wall Street makes money investing in moves like this, but the laid-off workers just get the shaft. Maybe Kansans feel screwed. This kind of discontent might be harnessed by the community councils you mention to pull things leftward I suppose, but then again if they blame the left for their problems, good luck getting them to embrace lefty approaches to problems. I thought they had an axe to grind specifically with ‘the left’. And elites. And [lots of things]
Plus, Venezuela has 10x as many people as Kansas who, according to the World Bank, live on a per capita gdp of ~$12,000, compared to over $50,000 for the US. Kansas’ economic problems just aren’t the same as Venezuela’s, so transplanting techniques from one place to the other might not work. I mean, haven’t the social structures in both places evolved organically? Or are things in Kansas being distorted by our billionaire friends who sponsor Tea Party politics? Are Tea Party elites- other people with other people’s politics- capitalizing on anti-left animus for their own reasons?
That suggests to me an answer to the question, “What’s wrong with Kansas?” It says they’ve either been fooled into believing or just don’t understand that the solution to problems doesn’t lie in choosing correctly between ‘left’ and ‘right’. There’s a notion with a lot of people that if we approach every issue from the most rightward position possible, we’ll always come up with the best solution. One could contrast this with the approach of running the math on health outcomes with and without flouridated water and examining what concentrations affect IQ in kids and comparing that with the actual concentration in the water, but just not too loudly, I don’t want to be accused of being ‘elite’ with my fancypants reliance on data and precedent.
This is a familiar madness; the next question is, “Why does Kansas have such a bad case of it?” Why is their anti-left, gotta-run-to-the-right horror at the Socialist evils of a proven public health policy so much stronger than their power to examine the evidence in a politically neutral manner?
Sure, but free trade is generally a policy favored by conservatives and opposed by liberals (though there are certain strains of right-wingers who oppose it).
Clinton was an anomaly. Maybe Kansans can’t tell the difference though.
It is a policy favored by both neoliberals (e.g., Clinton and the DLC) and neoconservatives, and opposed by paleoconservatives (e.g., Pat Buchanan) and by left-liberals/progressives. Regular liberals (Biden, Pelosi, etc.) go both ways on it, I think.
Thanks for the elaboration.
I have been led to understand by multiple dentists that fluoride needs to chill out on your teeth for awhile to make any sort of difference. In other words, I’ve always thought fluoride had to be topical and that ingesting it doesn’t do shit. I’m not saying it’s hurting anything, much less IQs, but can someone explain (in terms a 5-year-old would understand) how ingesting fluoride is doing anything?
The mechanism is described here.
Substitute “Calgary” for “Portland” and I concur. We’re not known for our crunchy-granola-ness here, but apparently we have a full complement of junk-science-believing idiots.
From down here, Alberta seems to be a more shocking outlier in Canada than Texas is in the U.S.
Sadly, as far as Calgary likes to believe its advanced, what with actually electing a Muslim Mayor and all, this decision has always puzzled me. It came before I was paying attention, and it would be great if Nenshi could find a way to get it back onto the ballot next time, if only to give me the opportunity to see who the morons are that actually believe this junk science.
That’s only because Texas has so many other States to compete with for outlier status, like pretty much the entire Deep South, Arizona etc.
My husband had the dubious pleasure of debating former Alderman and former MLA Jon Lord over fluoride in drinking water online - he simply wasn’t interested in listening to the actual facts of the issue. He kept providing cites to debunked junk science articles that had sources like the great scientific minds Andrew Wakefield and Jospeh Mercola. As a public servant and policy maker it would behoove someone like Jon Lord to do better research than that, but he didn’t. Current Councillor Druh Farrell was the biggest supporter of taking fluoride out of Calgary’s water - we haven’t argued with her online, but I suspect she’d go to the bad same sources for her arguments.
From this article from May, 2013:
Colour me surprised. :rolleyes:
Well, if evolution were possible, we’d all have evolved to tolerate it, or even thrive on it.
We did, and then the Irish found an improvement.
Well, considering that Kansas Senator Pat Roberts doesn’t live in Kansas …
You blame him?