"Well, whether it's better to fluoridate the water or not, ~half the world got the answer wrong. But the important thing is they didn't argue about it."
They do have a point. If you look at history, Americans do seem to have a bizarre habit of turning everything into a great controversy.
The British abolished slavery with a vote of parliament. The Russian emperor signed a decree, and freed the serfs. Compromised were made, compensation provided and people were made free. But for some reason, Americans felt the matter is important enough to start a civil war around it.
People complain about America being divided and both sides there being unable to compromise, but if anything, that's been the defining feature of the nation since it's creation. "Y'all should take a chill pill, this ain't that important" is a perfectly valid position to have.
> Americans felt the matter is important enough to start a civil war around it.
The answer was the same then as it is now: big business. Slave labor cash crops were central to the economy of the South. Great Britain was not dependent on it in the same way.
> The British abolished slavery with a vote of parliament
The situation was fundamentally different. Colonies that allowed slavery had no representation in parliament and the slave owners received massive “compensation” that the British people had to spend decades paying off..
Also AFAIK most slaveholders were living in Britain and just viewed their plantations as just another investment. There was very little ideological/“way of life”/racial supremacy stuff involved. So if some Liberals wanted to buyout their not necessarily very liquid “property” with cash they didn’t really have much reason to oppose it.
And then there were 5x more slaves in the US in 1864 while the population was only ~30% higher than that of Britain in 1830 (only if we don’t count the colonies).
Not sure how excited would the inhabitants of New England and other free states would have been if they were forced to buy out all the slaves in the country (if that was even an option).
Slavery for the British was a side note at that point while it was a fundamental component of the US economy.
Serfdom was fundamental to the Russian economy, but was abolished nonetheless. Alexander II forced the serfs to pay for their own freedom.
The idea that no compromise was possible sounds somewhat absurd since America did end the civil war with a compromise. "You can free the slaves, but then we oppress them for 100 or so years." Not that it was a good compromise or anything, but it does show that the civil war was fundamentally pointless.
Russia was a centralized absolutist empire. The Tsar could more or less do whatever he wanted as long as the army and some other elements of the bureaucracy supported him.
So it’s hardly applicable to the US (or Britain)
> end the civil war with a compromise
I’m not sure it’s was a compromise per se.
Most people in the north didn’t really actively support country wide abolition before the war (neither did Lincoln) nor were they necessarily particularly concerned about the treatment of the African-American population.
Opposing slavery is a very low bar. Most people in the free states were still deeply racist and segregation was effectively (while not necessarily legally) still a thing there. It only became a major issue in the mid 1900s.
England has 3 or 4 civil wars in it's history entirely focused on the matter of whether people should do as they're told and shut up. The usual result in those conflicts was a resounding victory for the "No" side.
What's rare is for a nation to have a civil war between sides that agree on almost everything, from the structure of the government to the economic system.
I'm not in the US but doesn't that downplay it a bit? Hasn't this been a contentious topic for some time? It's not like no one's been talking about it and Utah suddenly decided out of the blue.
> I'm not in the US but doesn't that downplay it a bit?
No, not really. There are a couple municipalities (Portland, OR, e.g.) that have famously not fluoridated their water forever, but for the most part this is not something most places argue about. UT is an exception.
The irony is that people on the Left will claim that red Utah is ignorantly making public health policy, while deep deep blue Portland is considered “progressive.” The public health “experts” are ripping into Utah but haven’t seemed to care about Portland. Perhaps because the public health people are mostly Democrat and care more about politics than actual health? I would love to be wrong — but why is Portland (and much of Europe) getting a free pass from the controversy, but a (relatively low population) red U.S. state isn’t?
Portland, Oregon is a city so the effects of their policies are a little more limited in scope. IMO if it really is a contentious health issue (well-founded or not, I guess people really do disagree about this issue) it is better to make the decision at the lowest level practical.
I think most cities manage their own utilities. So, Portland has to make some decision on this issue. Utah doesn’t, it was an active choice to intervene.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. What I meant was that it was my impression that the argument over fluoride has been going on for longer and is bigger than this one case. How and why the judge ruled and what the ruling was is tangential to that.
