It's parroting some ignorant, racist propaganda

about how all those people out there are animals, not like civilized Westerners who don't behead people. (Unless a drone strike happens to knock off their head, you know? We always behead collaterally, so to speak.)

With most people who do this it's a psychological device for distancing oneself from the crimes of one's own culture, one's own nation. The U.S. government launched a war of aggression, destroyed one nation directly and helped destroy another (Syria had to absorb four million Iraqi refugees for years, and of course the faction that became IS were originally set up by Gulf States and CIA).

As a means of dealing with the situation in Iraq, the U.S. started a genocide among factions that it armed heavily. Now the latest round of ethnic cleansing is underway and Americans who think they're smart and enlightened tell themselves such stories to pretend they had nothing to do with it. It's all because of their religion, nothing to do with economics, history, imperialism, etc.

Karen Lewis vs. Rahm Emanuel - February 2014

Please look up privation.

Yes, offensive speech exists and can be very harmful to the people it targets. I do not agree with the OP as a general principle in all cases, but it does address an exaggerated style of being offended that has become very widespread, is counterproductive and distracting, and is actually abused by many to reinforce their own privileges. (See all the right-wingers constantly offended about things like insufficient displays of "patriotism" or "the war on Christmas.&quot

Nah.

Almost the only thing that knocks bikers over guardrails is automobiles.

Can we have a civilized talk about the U.S. water fluoridation industry?

Fluoridation of drinking water is not practiced in any of the world’s industrially developed countries outside the “Anglosphere” of the United States, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as about half of Canada and parts of the UK.

In matters of environmental issues as well as dental health, my default position is to accept the word of scientists, doctors and trained technicians and experts. In this case, for various reasons, I happen to prefer the word of the scientists and experts guiding policy in most of the industrial countries outside the United States.

(Necessary digression: NO! I don’t believe water fluoridation is a communist plot to poison our bodily fluids, or to prevent us from having dreams. In addressing the issue of the fluoridation industry I prefer to argue from evidence, and I haven’t seen evidence for any of that.)

The following chart shows tooth decay trends for “unfluoridated” and “fluoridated” nations since the 1960s, based on the United Nations World Health Organization country index for “DMFT” – a measure of the rate of decayed, missing, or filled teeth among 12 year-olds:



For decades the DMFT index has declined radically in all developed countries. It is true, as fluoridation advocates hold, that the period of fluoridation in a few countries has coincided with a dramatic decline in tooth decay in the same countries. It has also coincided with equally dramatic declines in countries that do not fluoridate. Some countries, such as East Germany and other members of the East bloc, fluoridated and then stopped, but the decline in DMFT continued there as well.

This evidence serves to falsify the hypothesis that water fluoridation was a major factor in improved dental health, and suggests that improved dental health results from other economic factors or public health policies. Fluoridation advocates agree that the supposed dental benefits come only from topical application, which almost everyone in industrial nations, including most of the poorest of children, already perform every day with a toothbrush and a tube.

The fluoride added to drinking water is a by-product of the production of fertilizers and refined aluminum, among other goods, and is classified as a contaminant by the EPA. The producers of fluoride wastes do not pay the full price for the cost of disposing of their pollutants, however. Instead, they are paid untold millions of taxpayer dollars by thousands of communities that then dump fluoride into our drinking water.

Best known among these producers is ALCOA, which during the period before and after the Second World War played the pivotal role (along with the Mellon fortune) in selling fluoridation as a practice that benefits public health. By the 1960s, the John Birch Society, also funded by big right-wing money (the Kochs, in fact), declared fluoridation to be a communist plot, as a consequence helping to discredit any discussion of the issue among reasonable, non-paranoid liberals.

So yes, I do believe that fluoridation of drinking water in the United States stands as an example of governments putting private corporate profits before the interests and rights of the public. It's hard to quantify all the different municipal funds going into the practice (and municipalities tend to obscure by offering statistics on the supposed savings due to the benefits), but it is likely in the low hundreds of millions of dollars per year, about a dollar per capita. I say we save all that public money and put it into programs for children in poverty.

Discuss.

(PS - In reviewing the above, I ran across this link to a 1999 statement in which the employee union local of the EPA headquarters took a stand against fluoridation policy. Remember when that was on the news? Ha ha. http://sdsdw.org/fluoride-facts/why-epa-union-opposes-fluoridation/)

How about a program offering incomes to all workers in the prostitution industry?

Jobs, or if unavailable, basic incomes enough for a person (and their live-in children) to have a roof with good food?

Wouldn't that be addressing the problems of coercion and desperation and associated criminality like human trafficking better than criminalizing prostitution, by whatever model?

I'll note that also in Sweden, which presents what's called the progressive model of criminalization, it is additionally the case that there's a real welfare system (as well as good public education and child-care), a durable safety net on which almost everyone can rely. I suggest this probably contributes more than does the criminalization policy to the better life there for those women who are engaged in the prostitution industry, whether by coercion or otherwise.

Yes, it's about power more than science, but what about the science?

The real science, as opposed to what the pro-GMO fakers and pretend "skeptics" say, already speaks to the problems of flooding the world with BT and the like. (Apparently judges in some places are starting to get it.)

Curiously they seem to have different forms of science in most advanced industrial nations outside the United States, especially the ones not blessed with a beautiful glorious Monsanto of their own.

Honest-to-God high-tech countries ban GMOs and seem to think really bizarre things, like that micro-evolution by artificial selection actually works -- by which I mean that over-applying pesticides, herbicides and antibiotics is a really bad idea that's likely sooner or later to fuck over monoculture agriculture, if not a few hundred million people in the process. But hey, who's done the controlled study of this?! We get to find out the shocking answer about whether the theory of micro-evolution works in an uncontrolled study using the planet as the test case.

As another example, a bit off-topic, it's also the case that in almost all of these countries outside the U.S., they have this weird, pseudo-scientific idea that fluoride is not a tasty medicine for which ALCOA should receive billions in payments in exchange for allowing everyone to apply it to their teeth via its ingestion in drinking water. They actually think it's a pollutant, and don't want to pay public funds to administer it to their reservoirs. (This is why, for example, Germany's so toothless and they can't afford a dentist. They're all barefoot over there, it's shocking.)

Why does the world hate science, LWolf? Is it because they hate America?

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Thanks for illustrating my point...

with your response, perhaps true (with regard to Hamas) but nevertheless entirely irrelevant to the issue of the Israeli aggression and war crimes against Palestinians (killing straight and gay ones in equal proportion, one presumes).

Or wait, are you advocating that like Israel in Gaza, someone powerful should relentlessly bomb the civilian populations of "Russia, Uganda, Iran, Zimbabwe etc" because their regimes are "virulent gay hating" and "there's no pass for sick gay haters"?

There's probably a reason your post makes no sense, like pinkwashing overall makes no sense. Because its only function is to use an injustice to distract from an entirely unrelated atrocity.

Support for Israel has a lot to do with oil...

and with the geostrategy of dominance, which is the real ideological construct within which "oil" and "Israel" can both be fit. It's about a vision for the region and the world, one backed by multiple interests.

The MIC is the biggest thing of all, as the industry executing it. It's not really "runaway," it's just acting as industries must under capitalism, grow or decline, eat or be eaten. The problem is the degree to which people accept its most fundamental premises: 1) it exists to defend nation against threat, and in its actions actually does so, and to do so must be allowed the resources and authority; 2) it's good to make money doing that as an industry.

Let's be civilized.

The "scare garbage" about providing a profit motive to third-party exploiters, defining new classes of criminal, increasing police power, filling prisons and pushing activity into "the dark" (where it is more dangerous and criminals can exploit it better) is not bunk. It is what happened already long ago with criminalization. So I suppose there's no need to fear things that at this point can't be happening in the future, since they're already so well established. Criminalization as it has been practiced has not addressed, but has mainly added to, the problems inherent in prostitution.

Even if I thought the solution you propose was reasonable, how is the solution tenable? I can offer sex for money, but I'm not responsible legally if someone takes me up on it, only my buyer is criminal? After they pay me, can I turn them in myself and testify at their trials? You say "solicitation" would be illegal (i.e., asking for it) but in common usage the word refers not just to asking for but also to offering something, with good reason. The existence of the offer is one of the essential conditions for creating the market.

Perhaps your proposal outlaws advertising, or obvious streetwalking, but there are always forms of marketing. So please clarify: Are you saying a prostitute can legally set up somewhere, making an offer and trying to persuade people to accept it (again, the common definition of "solicitation&quot , but anyone who then takes the offer is breaking the law? Can someone do this as a legal business? (For the sake of argument let's define this as a worker-owned cooperative with only equal worker-owners among the personnel.) They can run their own legal brothel and invite clients in, but then the clients are lawbreakers? Sounds like you could set up a brothel at the front door, leading to a police precinct at the back, and build a prison next door.

So please clarify how this proposal is supposed to work in practice.