Normally. I wouldn’t report on the ongoing hearings in the State Senate as to the possible health risks of the herbicide atrazine. After all, Senator Marty seems to be running a pretty tight ship down there and hearing scientific experts weigh the question as to whether the most widely used agricultural herbicide might be causing nasty health risks seems like a worth while activity. But then State Senator David Hann (R-Eden Prairie) went and released this wacky press release…
It begins like this: “It has been said that there are over 20 million Americans who believe Elvis is alive and pumping gas somewhere in Tennessee.” He then continues on to talk about people who believe in UFOs. It’s a weird opening, but this all has a point: John Marty is crazy. Why, might you ask? Well, let’s go to the conclusion:
In short, the greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. Authoritatively telling people they will die, or have a certain future of cancer, deformity or pain can in itself be highly destructive to human health.
Hey, know what else might be destructive to human health? Cancer, deformity and pain; which occurred in a great deal of the population exposed to radiation after Chernobyl. But, hey, it was probably all that info that did it.
So, let’s summarize. In order to debunk the necessity of looking into the possibility that atrazine has health risks associated with it, Hann compares it to the worst nuclear disaster in history. And then notes that all the information about health risks posed a health risk in of itself. If we follow the analogy that means that atrazine is similar to a disaster of the scale that could cause mass human suffering, but we shouldn’t look into it or spread that information because, well, it would really stress everyone out.
I’m pretty sure that’s not what he’s trying to say (read the whole release here to figure that out) but, man, he needs to think through his analogies a bit more before sending these things out.
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Good piece of writing, Matt.
Whew! From the sound of this, its some weird reasoning going on! Please not another Michelle Bachmann in the making.
Radical thinking! — KNOWLEDGE KILLS!
This guy is an embarassment.
Here he is, denying the causes of global warming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siXsIQgyn7I
I am not a global warming nay sayer and am more of an environmentalist than most of the Green Party folks I know here in Minneapolis but the press release wasn’t without a valid point or two.
It is not that knowledge kills but that incorrect or overstated information can be harmful. The complete ban on DDT did cause thousands of deaths unnecessarily in third world countries. The Chernobyl thing I don’t know anything about so won’t hazard a guess on what he means there. The Republicans have been using this tactic when it comes to terrorism, that the threat is real and any discussion of the matter is dangerous. There is a tendency to do the same thing by the left when it comes to the environment.
Hann’s press release was poorly done and a bit strange but that doesn’t make everything he says untrue. The core of the matter is really who is being asked to testify and are they presenting a complete picture. Neither the press release or this post answers that question.
What we need to address conservative concerns about human health scares are well controlled human experimentation. Perhaps we could create a Center for Experiments on Americans to run the lab trials. How many deaths will it take to satisfy the right?