Not in the political sense, mind you, jumped up Christ on toast no, but in the sense of I am for progress. This thread at JMPP about flouridated drinking water got me going again, and caused me to pen what I think are two of the most vitriolic comments I’ve ever written, this bit from the first one in particular:
Anyone with nostalgia for the past, or “natural” remedies doesn’t have a sufficiently high appreciation for how crappy the human condition used to be.
I hold that opinion very strongly. And, as if to prove my own nerdiness, this made me think of a scene from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Checkov falls and injurs himself while looking for the “nuclear wessles”, and is taken to the hospital…they’re going to drill a hole in his skull to relieve the preassure on his brain (a fairly standard procedure), and Bones refuses to leave Checkov “in the hands of those 20th-century butchers.”
It always makes me think about how I’m goddamn glad I don’t live in 1905. A century ago antibiotics, vaccines, organ transplants, skin grafts, and many other medical procedures that happen with stunning regularity today didn’t even exist. Not to mention that in 1905 there weren’t even that many people with cars: let alone life-flight, or MRIs, or CAT scans, or EEG machines. In 1905 most folks in the US didn’t even have a flush toilet.
Just the sheer progress we’ve made in my Father’s lifetime: Polio gone, small pox gone, even chicken pox. The sort of exponential technological growth in medical technology over the past 50 or 100 years is enough to stagger the mind, and it is extremely foolish to think we’d all be better off farming our own organic food and not getting vaccinated.
