„Snake Oil on the Shopping List? How
#Pseudoscience Ends Up in Your Shopping Cart.“
Today, Thursday, 04/24/2025, @owlsome_ovo will show us how pseudoscience works in #marketing and how it will even influence your #shopping habits.
Tap a cold drink of your choice, join us at @sitp and check out #twitch at 7 p.m. BST / 8 p.m CEST!
"Desperate for a new intellectual underpinning, neoliberals and libertarians sought refuge in the work of economist Friedrich Hayek, who famously argued in his 1944 polemic The Road to Serfdom that government intervention in markets is antithetical to individual freedom. But Murray, Rothbard, Hoppe, and others fatally twisted Hayek’s message, claims Slobodian, and took it so far as to argue that only Western countries are intellectually and culturally primed for capitalism.
The politics of this cohort, which he dubs the “new fusionists,” was rooted in “three hards,” argues Slobodian: “Hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.” They forged sordid alliances with biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and ethnonationalists, spouting pseudoscience about the link between race and IQ, a topic famously repopularized in the 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve, coauthored by Murray and psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein. They railed against lax immigration policies on the premise that they led to cultural decay. But perhaps most strangely, they ballyhooed the value of gold as a backstop against a looming economic cataclysm caused by incompetency in Washington. (Talk about apropos.)
In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Slobodian analyzes Donald Trump’s radical agenda through this new prism of neoliberalism. He also unpacks the distressing parallels between goldbugs and crypto bros, and details why the tech set has suddenly taken up with the MAGA right. Silicon Valley’s “willingness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Donald Trump,” he says, is indicative “of the embrace of an ideology that pretty frankly ranks human capacity along the spectrum of intelligence and IQ.”"
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-silicon-valley-neoliberal-roots
Measles is spreading. Here’s how to stay safe. - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/measles-is-spreading-heres-how-to-stay-safe/
"I think that my assumption was a triumphalism and a sense of victory after the fall of the Soviet Union. But the fact that the week of the Berlin Wall falling, they were already talking about new enemies —enemies that had gone underground in certain ways or transformed in ways that were elusive — was the beginning of the rabbit hole. Because once you accept the idea that Marxism and socialism have survived and yet have changed their face, then anything can be Marxism and socialism.
I think this is how we can understand the fixation of the right wing on things like what they call “cultural Marxism” or “gender ideology” as essentially the new enemy of humanity. Because the adversary continuously changes shape, it makes them open to endless reinterpretation. There is a paranoid quality to the term. And the paranoia doesn’t really have any bounds, as I show in the book.
So I think the narrative arc comes from a feeling on the part of the libertarians, and often the racist libertarians, that they can contain their enemy in new ways by pinning it down on hierarchies of intelligence or deploying the latest findings from genetics. But by the end of the book, with a chapter on “gold bugs” and the far-right obsession with gold, there’s almost a sense of desperation or surrender to the inevitable, a failure to contain their enemies and the idea of an impending collapse and inevitable apocalypse.
(...)
What I recognize is a sort of desperation and a kind of ungoverned willingness to reach for radical remedies in a time of great peril. And as I described in the last chapter, often the rhetorical technique of the gold bug is to predict a coming apocalypse and then immediately sell you the only means there is to protect you from the worst.
I think there’s that accelerationism visible right now on the far right, certainly in the United States."
https://jacobin.com/2025/04/race-science-neoliberalism-hayek-slobodian/
Economics is the worst of pseudoscience, especially since it is used everywhere to guide policy.
Economics has an assumptions problem. The foundational method of economic practice is to create models grounded in assumptions that are either not known, not knowable, or - incredibly - known to be wrong.
From https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces #economics #pseudoscience
@paninid fast forward to the present and scientists who barely study #philosophy label #metaphysics as #pseudoscience (forgetting what #PhD means), torment #logic for the benefit of "elegant" #math equations (e.g. antimatter, dark #matter), and design #AI #systems that weaponize #ethics as justification for #information #censorship (#ChatGPT "knows" but refuses to answer how to a hot wire a car or commit murder while claiming no #opinion, ignorant that words and actions are different)
As Robyn Pennacchia reports, RFK Jr. is commissioning a study of the nonexistent "link" between vaccines and autism.
And, unsurprisingly, to head that study he has picked a man who is not a doctor nor a scientist, one David Geier, who has been in trouble for practicing medicine without a license.
As with so much about the Trump administration, nothing to see here, more along.
#Trump #RFKJr #vaccines #medicine #research #disinformation #PseudoScience #science
RFK Jr's former nonprofit posted a fake CDC website that criticized vaccines.
Kennedy asked the Children's Health Defense to remove the site but only after the NYTimes contacted him about it.
Kennedy is currently using the CDC to waste resources on further studies on the long disproven link began vaccines and autism and, in the process, further bolstering antivaxxers' delusional hysteria.
On nonsense: Forms thereof, falsifiability, pseudoscience, bullshit, youth culture, and other craziness
I'd begun worrying about the resilience of truth and countermeasures to bullshit particularly online well over a decade ago.
This is an early compilation of heuristics and resources which came up in discussion elsewhere recently, and may be helpful to others.
Among conspicuous omissions, Aristotle's "Sophistical Refutations" (Sophistikoi Elenchoi in the original Greek), one of the earliest recorded (or surviving) guides to countering bullshit:
Delusion indeed.
Essential reading here.
Don’t drink raw milk…period.
#FactsMatter #Pseudoscience #Health #Science
https://vajenda.substack.com/p/gwyneth-paltrows-dairy-delusion
"The Right’s ‘Natural’ Meat Obsession Is a Regressive Fantasy" by @sentientmedia
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Another component for Kennedy of what constitutes “natural” is taking on things like red food dye, seed oils and ultra-processed foods — while promoting tallow, raw milk and grass-fed beef.
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https://sentientmedia.org/mahas-natural-foods-obsession/
Vegans often are faced with fallacious arguments, and one of the most common is the Naturalistic fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy
However, this is often a bad faith disguise. The use of naturalistic fallacies in these contexts, such as the claim that consuming animals is "good" because it's natural, is a disguise for another more insidious fallacy: the traditionalist fallacy or "appeal to tradition".
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition
The traditionalist fallacy is, in this context, the argument that "consuming animals is good because we've done it for thousands of years".
Traditionalism is heavily political, as the people are finding out again in places such as the US. It's sometimes known as "paleoconservatism", and it should be no surprise that the popularity of the "paleo diet" culturally connects to this.
Conservatives, ever since the rise of modernity (end of 'traditional' society, end of monarchism and feudalism) have been trying to reinvent the past through pseudointellectual and pseudoscientific efforts. This has been at the heart of incredible amounts of suffering and horror since then. I have some notes on that on my pinned thread: https://veganism.social/deck/@veganpizza69/110813538364525265
Bullshit & snake oil are not vegan.
The secret to a perfect morning routine probably isn't what you think
https://www.sciencefocus.com/comment/celebrities-influencers-daily-routines
We're often told all about the daily routines of 'rich and successful' people, but have you noticed how many of them are... bonkers?
I explain why for BBC Science Focus Magazine. What better way to start the week, eh?
"→ All of the above are repeated using this: Instantly, right now, every yoctosecond, safely, forever, always, 100% visible at a speed billion times faster than the speed of ultra high energy cosmic rays, SAFE, noticeable, mesmerizing, apparent, etc"
#Vitamins will not cure the #RFK #disease.
Jessica Glenza: RFK Jr sparks alarm after backing vitamins to treat measles amid outbreak: Health experts wary as US health secretary fails to endorse effective vaccines and instead calls them a ‘personal choice’
#measles #texas #altmed #pseudoscience #antivax
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/04/rfk-jr-vitamins-measles-outbreak
#ForcedSterilization is a worldwide problem!
As #Japan starts compensation payments, #ForcedSterilisation continues around the world
#NonConsensual #sterilisation of those considered genetically inferior persists in some parts of the world today
by Ewan Bolton, 18 February 2025
"Just last week, in the Miyagi prefecture of Japan, the local governor met victims of an official eugenics policy to apologise for the suffering they underwent.
"'On behalf of the prefecture, I would like to offer my heartfelt apologies for the immense suffering caused to the 900 (victims),' said Murai Yoshihiro while lowering his head.
"For many, the words 'forced sterilisation' bring to mind #NaziGermany and the devastating #eugenic policies pursued by #fascist regimes in the 1930s and 1940s. But the non-consensual sterilisation of those considered genetically inferior continued through the 20th century and persists in some parts of the world today.
"In January, victims of Japan’s forced sterilisation programme were finally able to apply for compensation for the first time. Between 1948 and 1996, at least 16,500 people were forcibly sterilised in Japan under the country’s #EugenicProtectionLaw. Nearly 60,000 more underwent #abortions without, or with only dubious consent. Most were mentally handicapped people or those with hereditary diseases.
"As Japan finally addresses this legacy, victims of forced sterilisation in #Peru are still fighting for compensation after 370,000 people were sterilised in what the UN has described as a potential crime against humanity. And in the #UnitedStates, #India, #China and parts of #Europe, non-consensual sterilisations continue to this day.
"As with the Nazis, almost all cases can be traced back to the discredited #PseudoScience of eugenics which was developed in the #UK at around the turn of the last century and had many supporters, including #WinstonChurchill.
"Japan’s Eugenic Protection Law was introduced in the wake of World War II. It granted medical institutions the right to administer sterilisations and abortions without the consent of patients. Of the 25,000 people sterilised under the programme, according to government figures only 8,000 gave consent. The legitimacy of the consent in these cases is disputed.
"A large number of the victims were children, some as young as nine years old. In Miyagi prefecture, in the northwest of the main island, more than half of the 859 sterilised between 1963 and 1981 were under the age of 18.
"At a press conference last month in Hyogo prefecture, a #DeafWoman, now in her 80s, described the emotional pain of being given an abortion without her consent. 'I was taken to the hospital, and I thought I would be going to the general medicine department. I was very surprised because I was taken to the gynaecology department … I am unable to forget what happened at that time'.
"In her prefecture alone, there are '14 or 15 other [#DeafPeople] who suffered harm' that are known about, 'but there are undoubtedly more', said Yoshimichi Hongo, chairman of the Hyogo Prefecture Association for the Deaf."
Read more:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/women-and-girls/as-japan-starts-compensation-payments-forced-sterilisation/
#WorldPol #reproductiverights #Fascism #BodilyAutomony #DisabledPeople #ReproductiveAutonomy #Sterilization #Genocide
Oil Execs/Trump Allies Attend Jordan Peterson’s ARC Conference
https://www.desmog.com/2025/02/16/leaked-oil-executives-donald-trump-allies-attend-jordan-peterson-alliance-for-responsible-citizenship-london-conference
* fossil fuel companies, religious right groups
* Alliance for Responsible Citizenship
Academic-censured, Canadian pseudo-intellectual / troll / climate denialist / transphobe Jordan Peterson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Responsible_Citizenship
The secret to a perfect morning routine probably isn't what you think
https://www.sciencefocus.com/comment/celebrities-influencers-daily-routines
We're often told all about the daily routines of 'rich and successful' people, but have you noticed how many of them are... bonkers?
I explain why for BBC Science Focus Magazine. What better way to start the week, eh?
