People who haven't experienced the "good old days" tend to harken back to them. Once commented during a Boomer-Bashing thread that our system is based on raising your family in your 20s, peaking in your 40s, and dying in your 60s. Lots of people began protesting that the last part was "inaccurate". So it's not surprising so many on the Right are believing various "you'll live forever with our program" crap.
We just never stop falling for "You will not surely die" and "You will be as gods". It's the very first mistake over and over again. Every new paraphrase seems to fool us
Yup. There is value in exercise for quality of life and some effect on longevity, but I remember my dad, always chasing the dream of immortality. An article in the paper said 'use olive oil and you will never die!' and he switched to olive oil. The the Canola oil publicists got an article out that said 'use canola oil and you will never die even less than olive oil' and he switched to canola oil. He's dead.
Guns are still in. Lower taxes are getting pushed forward.
But in general the laissez-faire program is a lot less popular with the Republican base these days. They're more downscale, so they benefit more from government programs like Social Security and Medicare, and everyone remembers the jobs going to Japan and then China and what it did to the Midwest. It's all about using the power of government to benefit the USA now.
When a government is running over $1.7 trillion budget deficits and paying out over $900 billion in interest payments, it is hard to argue for lower taxes. And everyone should remember that regulations come from screw ups in the past.
Lower rates are always a good thing, especially for things taxed twice or held long, as they encourage risk-taking and discourage cheating and corruption of law-makers.
I'm not pleased to pay 24% tax on 50 years of largely inflationary gains on my dad's building.
If one does not like paying taxes, then one needs to list the $1.7+ trillion in spending cuts that one would accept and that could survive politically to balance the budget.
No one is under any obligation to list budget cuts "that could survive politically" before objecting to tax increases. The objection is perfectly valid even if the likes of YOU can't stop sucking at the public teat.
First, I will take that as a no, one does not have a list of budget cuts that will balance the budget and survive politically. The easiest way to build public support for spending cuts would be to raise taxes enough to close the budget deficit. Make the voters pay the full retail price and the support for spending cuts goes up.
But that one wants to deficit spending means that one does not really want to cut taxes but just wants to push the taxes off into the future when someone else will be stuck paying for them. I believe that such selfishness is not good for the U.S.
You believe all sorts of stupid things, including that deficits are paid by future taxes. Deficits are in fact paid for by future inflation. There is no evidence whatsoever that support for spending cuts goes up along with taxes. Spending cuts merely mean that you lose votes among the tax eaters and maybe get booted from office. You of course don't have a list of budget cuts that will balance the budget and survive politically, but only have a prescription for me that doesn't apply to you. Or maybe you're either lying or delusional and have a list we can all laugh at.
Well, a large part of the issue is that between the ever-shifting "official" diet recommendations, the embrace of transgenderism, and the COVID fiasco, among other things, "official" medicine has done a good job of discrediting itself.
I think overall you get a lot further with drugs and vaccines than vitamin pills and testicle tanning. But when the guys (and now, particularly, gals) in white coats start taking a knee for Floyd and lying about the risks and benefits of cutting your kids' genitals off because they're afraid of getting cancelled, they tend to lose a lot of respect from anyone on the right.
I.E. I think you're wrong and this will end in lots of preventable deaths, but I don't blame you. :(
> I think overall you get a lot further with drugs and vaccines than vitamin pills and testicle tanning.
Well drugs are being massively overprescribed. The FDA has become anarcho-tyrannical, i.e., it takes a lot of time and money to get new drugs approved but everyone looks the other way while the actual tests are fudged. I personally know someone who left the pharmaceutical industry, and was left with an expensive degree he was never going to use, because he refused to participate in manipulating the results of drug trials.
They do manipulate the trials, and this is something to beware of. There used to be much more of a culture of objectivity on the government side, because they leaned left. (Remember all those liberals who told you to 'see both sides of the story' back in the 80s and 90s?) The left now believes in social justice instead of objectivity, so that's no longer the case.
My point is more that alternatives to medicine really aren't all that good. Certainly diet and exercise are important, but medicine will also tell you that. Usually when people get into 'alternative' stuff they get into random stuff like vitamin injections and taking deworming solutions for respiratory infections. I agree the FDA needs to be overhauled and this is one of the big things even the rationalists are behind.
I think there are liberals like that, none I know are online and all have made various concessions to wokeism (other than some boomers that flipped to Magaism and aside from being addicted to losing are some of the most unaffectedly based people I know).
The medicine thing is so polarized, it is insane to me. Some huge improvements, and some effective placebos or worse. All of them totally mainstream.
Western medicine is amazing. The problem is that most people, even doctors, don't know, or even reflect on, what it's for and what it can do. Once a field does a few incredible things (e.g. antibiotics, kidney transplants) it's natural to overestimate it.
We have a few tests and preventive measures that are worthwhile. There are a handful of conditions, that likely wouldn't get better on their own, and that we have good treatments for. The rest of it? Statistically if you insist that medicine fix every discomfort and guarantee you good health and long life, you are asking for trouble. I have a friend with a bad elbow and he wants surgery. It is clear the orthopedic surgeon doesn't want to do it and I tell him, if a surgeon doesn't want to cut, it means he's pretty sure it will be a bad result. But if this surgeon won't do it, my friend will keep looking until he finds one who will.
I Don't blame doctors for nutrition nonsense. They are as likely to parrot what they read in a magazine as their patients are and they are as subject to cognitive bias and wishful thinking on the subject as anyone.
> I Don't blame doctors for nutrition nonsense. They are as likely to parrot what they read in a magazine as their patients are and they are as subject to cognitive bias and wishful thinking on the subject as anyone.
I don't blame individual doctors either, I blame the people at the top of organizations like the FDA, USDA (why was the Department of Agriculture giving health advise anyway?), NIH, AHA, AMA, etc.
"Well, a large part of the issue is that between the ever-shifting "official" diet recommendations, the embrace of transgenderism, and the COVID fiasco, among other things, "official" medicine has done a good job of discrediting itself."
This is true. But since it's almost always used as a starting point to excuse the retarded ideas of the 85-IQ rightoids, (instead of a starting point to cure such ideas) I'm sick of hearing it.
"Due to being old, I’m less in touch with cultural trends than I used to be. But my vague impression is that New Age stuff has come back into fashion in recent years, especially among young women."
I'm going to call you out on your vague impression. New Right esoterica has tended toward Orthodoxy and Catholicism--the +Benedict and +Kyril kind, not the +Francis kind. There might be some Nordic pantheism in the mix too.
Are you reading Adrian Vermeule, Michael Anton, Christopher Caldwell, the pseudonymous ZMan, Christopher Rufo, the Chronicles guys, the still-around John Derbyshire or Ann Coulter or Jared Taylor?
Maybe you're referring to all that New Age touchy-feely stuff by real estate developer Trump, his VP and attorney/venture-capital alum JD Vance or Ron "Gov. Moonbeam" DeSantis? I don't know.
Ah, for the good old days of George W Bush's flinty realism!
I mean, the right has become a lot more antiscience these days. You wouldn't see Reagan or either of the Bushes cutting NIH funding. It was understood that science was part of the West's competitive advantage and we wanted to keep it that way.
A big problem is science has become a lot more leftist. They were trying to avoid politics (EDIT: in their actual work) until recently, but when they all came out for BLM in the pandemic that was kind of the last straw. You also won't see scientists who privately know better come out about the weakness of the evidence early transgender surgery makes kids feel better long term. There's also the fact that they were much more for masking and vaccines, which became a left-right thing only in the past few years with COVID.
I'm going to be controversial and say I think the right has taken the wrong side here. Science is one of the most effective things the West has developed, allowing it to conquer the rest of the world in the 20th century, is something the West more or less invented in its current form, and is how we keep ahead of the Chinese, who even if they didn't invent it are presently no slouches in this department either. I won't deny it's become annoyingly full of left-wingers, but if we start ditching vaccines for vitamin pills we'll just get hit with measles epidemics while they point and laugh from Beijing.
I see a contradiction in your framing, A.D.: "[People involved in science?] were trying to avoid politics until recently, but when they all came out for BLM in the pandemic that was kind of the last straw."
Were they trying to avoid politics before 2020, or was 2020 the last straw? That "last straw" expression suggests a slow build-up. As, for example, over years at least and probably decades.
I think it had been drifting that way for a while.
From what I can tell, scientists had leaned left for a while (they work in universities and don't make a lot of money after all) but tried to keep it out of their science out of regard for the old idea science is supposed to be about discovering the objective truth, and then with BLM and 2020 they finally gave in to the pressure from the humanities end of the faculty lounge.
I actually do think the right needs to figure out how they're going to do the life of the mind outside the universities, which are pretty much captured by the left these days. We actually do need scientific and technological research to keep up with other nations, and I've read enough writers to convince me we probably need someone to resurrect the traditional humanities as well (though that part's harder; you at least need to capture one major publishing house).
Remember the JFK and RFK assassinations in the 60s? The first of which kicked off the modern conspiracy-theory craze, the second of which also had suspicions of some kind of 'programming' going on?
*That was his UNCLE and his DAD*.
That would make me into a conspiracy theorist, too.
That's tough on a kid, losing your dad at age 14 in America's 4th most famous assassination and your uncle, your dad's best friend, at age 9 in America's most famous assassination.
I contradict you based on personal experience except you did specify boomers. I still wouldn't be confident. People stay relatively anonymous here but I've got the sense over the years that some extremely smart people lurk about these threads.
I didn't see where a boomer referenced his own childhood vaccine experience but I agree. Somehow the miracle of vaccines has lead to unquestioning acceptance of each new vaccine and I think few boomers realize how many children get these days. Vaccines are great in principle but we still need to weigh benefits against potential costs. Seems like once people were able to assure themselves that there were crazy anti-vaxxers out there, probably going to cocktail parties with the flat earth people, they could switch their minds off on the topic.
In defense of such people I will point out that the original sin of anti vaxxer theology is the MMR vaccine causing autism and that was a childhood vaccine of, well I was going to say the boomers, but turns out no, they missed that. So let's say the boomer's children.
I believe one should maintain an open, skeptical mind on these things. Someone on an earlier Sailer thread directed me to some antivaxx stuff. Things I was surprised by and changed my mind about- kids get a shocking number of vaccines now, there is an autism epidemic that is clearly not just an effect of increased awareness, injected vaccines don't make much sense for preventing respiratory viruses (I had to do a literature search on that. I was surprised how ineffective seasonal flu vaccines are...they kind of gloss over that in the public relations campaigns)
things I was not convinced of-vaccines are the cause of the autism epidemic.
That might have been me in another thread. I find the existence of a cohort that is happy to dabble in race science but considers vaccines sacrosanct a little…concerning. One might begin to suspect that old-fashioned racism is indeed an underlying motive.
Yes, to the latter, but I think most of the unquestioning faith in vaccines is down to successfully labeling anti vaxxers as conspiracy theorists. People cannot accept that as with all things in all fields, there are better doctors and worser doctors and better research and worser research. Accepting that a significant fraction of the medical literature is, for a variety of reasons, garbage, is...unsettling to them.
When science keeps itself to actually improving mankind like inventing open-heart surgery(not available until 1954) or making better cars or inventing air conditioning, it is doing great things. When science ventures into speculating on climate or any other mastermind problem-solving it risks credibility. Top scientists have mastermind personalities but often have arrogant, know-it-all personalities.
This is all true, but they're still inventing new drugs for cancer and Musk may actually send us to Mars. They can actually keep metastatic breast cancer in check for years in some cases. And we all have our complaints about the Internet, particularly social media, myself included, but we wouldn't be having this argument without it. (It got around the book and TV monopolies, for instance.)
I think the climate thing is actually one of those things the right has been wrong about and people still don't want to admit it. As John Derbyshire said, "Some things are true *even though* the Party says they are." Doesn't mean the right is wrong about everything (I wouldn't be here if I thought they were) or you shouldn't vote Republican if you think they're better overall, but I keep seeing a lot more hurricanes and hot weather than I did growing up, so I'm convinced the earth is getting warmer, and the CO2 thing seems plausible at least.
Personally, I don't have a dog in this fight; the right can be right on race and biological sex differences and wrong on climate and, now, vaccines. Truth is neither left nor right; Mother Nature, unlike many older women these days, doesn't have politics.
Climate modeling is a legitimate thing for scientists to do. The problem is that it became political. Once it became political the field selected for people with a specific bias and bias is no good for science.
That said, I do not read the climate journals, nor has anyone I have ever met, even those with strong opinions on the science of climate. We are all reacting to what journalists and our friends say about it.
For all I know, the average climate scientist has credible and skeptical beliefs.
Well, the one person I know who majored in climate science was originally going to major in math, but then discovered that college level math was actually hard.
Conservative economists like Thomas Sowell or Milton Friedman would point out that tax dollars are a terrible way to fund science or medicine. Opposing taxpayer funded grants does not make you anti-science. We actually have the other problem: public funding crowds out alternate funding from people with actual skin in the game and distorts the research.
I hate to say it but this really is an old-man-yells-at cloud column. "Those New Righters and all their pyramids and crystal-gazing hoo-ha and flimflammery!" Really? Like Ron DeSantis,Thomas Massie, Rand Paul, Christopher Rufo? Steve should be in full gloat mode right now. The conservative realism which he has always championed has triumphed over the neo-cucks and elected Trump twice, with the entire bolshevik Establishment and its functionaries deployed against him. DOGE is pouring sunlight on the gigantic grift that is the US federal budget. The cockroaches are terrified.
There's more alignment with iSteve: if Trump 2016 was the Sailer Strategy, Trump 2024 was the Sailer Strategy 2.0. Trump got ethnic minorities to peel away from the Leftist hivemind because it turns out latino, black, Jewish and Arab dads don't like being lectured by fat angry black women and BPD whites with purple hair either. Citizenism vindicated!
Honestly, I don't know why Steve isn't collecting vintage champagne and drunkposting every day.
Now let's turn to that government-funded science that is apparently a pillar of True Conservatism. Briefly there's the tranny butchery and brainwashing, the attempts to roll back the Industrial Revolution, the deliberate ignorance of human biodiversity and genetics, the outright Creationism and tabula rasa theories of human development. But the COVIDiocy, the Crown Jewel of Progressivist public science funding. Oh my.
For starters, there's a very good chance it came from a lab leak as scientists, using public funding, tweaked a common virus with an animal reservoir to make it more transmissible. We have to engineer the viruses to engineer the vaccines to protect us from the engineered viruses. Now that there's some Real Science, pardner! The NIAID should have used a computer-generated Burl Ives or Wilford Brimley to make soothing sounds.
The vaccines are "leaky," as the public health establishment finally admitted, after touting some putative number of 94.7425bazillion % "effective," whatever that means. The vaccines are also highly ephemeral. At one point they were recommending 4 shots a year. The "vaccine" had a marginal effect by giving a heads up to the immune systems of at-risk individuals like the elderly, obese (we've got a demographic bulge of both) and the immunocompromised. There was no suppression of the virus; there was probably Antibody-Dependent Enhancement. The health effect, such as it was, was private not public. We'd have been better served by focusing on ventilation, outdoor exercise, and getting Americans to lose twenty pounds each. I trust RFK Jr to make that his focus over the rogue bureaucrats at the CDC and WHO. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the ever-growing schedule of infant vaccines.
Here's some more Science you can trust: there are a number of replicated studies showing that access to doctors, access to medical insurance does not improve health. Preventative medicine is diet and exercise. I stress all this because the particular bee in Steve's bonnet over the New Right appears to be RFK Jr. There are personal, idiosyncratic reasons for this.
Anti-science? More accurately anti-government--as in government psychopaths using "the science" against everyone but themselves. U.S. government pretty much OWNS the big science projects at the big universities.
This vid was uploaded at bitchute 9July2021: https://www.bitchute.com/video/AkNgSbkEWRKL/ (Click bottom-right to skip ads) The presenter in the video produces documented U.S. Patent numbers with the names of those who were granted the patents on the virus and the vaccine which became COVID. The pandemic was\is a money-making death-scam.
The effective power of big media, big government and their non-stop full-spectrum propaganda is, to-day, clearly demonstrated by near-universal ignorance of the information in the video, now in the public record for going on 5 years.
Can you tell me where in the 2-hour video he does this?
BTW, I'm a big believer in the lab leak theory. I'm not saying science never does anything wrong--I absolutely think it's at least possible the 'gain of function' research backfired in a big way, and that was definitely a joint project of American and Chinese scientists. (Perhaps they didn't want to raise any concerns about the Chinese's ability to control the virus because they were afraid of being seen as racist--who knows?)
I just think we can't leave science to the private sector, because they sit on things and make them trade secrets in order to gain a competitive advantage. It's what a for-profit company is supposed to do, isn't it?
> I just think we can't leave science to the private sector, because they sit on things and make them trade secrets in order to gain a competitive advantage. It's what a for-profit company is supposed to do, isn't it?
That problem was solved centuries ago. It's called Patents.
The entire video is a clinic in how Big Pharma and Big Government work together. The presenter gives patent numbers throughout his presentation. I've checked his references. If you can't manage the whole thing, at least listen to the first 10 minutes. The presenter is in the business of knowing, not guessing. He has facts. No speculation. No supposition. No theory. Facts.
It isn't surprising that the vaccine would be patented but can you explain the virus patenting? I think you can still patent a synthetic organism under some circumstances but I don't get the implication here. Are you saying the COVID19 virus was patented before it was released into the wild? I have never heard that. Or are you saying that it was patented after the pandemic started and it was the sequence that was patented? I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court ruled you can't do that because it's a fact of nature.
I listened to the ten minutes and whether he is on to something or not, I cannot tell from what he said. He is listing patents that indicate that coronavirus research was being done more than 20 years ago and then declares that this means there is nothing novel about COVID19...ok maybe but that is not obvious from what he said. He needs to compare the gene sequences and he doesn't (at least not in the first ten minutes). He also says that Pfizer looked at the spike protein and a possible vaccine target in animals 20 years ago and therefor underpants gnome style it means that the COVID19 virus isn't novel? How does that follow? No one claimed, as far as I know, that spike proteins was new, it was just that this one had a new variant of it.
He also says that one of the patents was for an infectious non-replicating coronavirus that targeted respiratory epithelial cells as a delivery system for some kind of AIDS therapy (which makes sense) and then he underpants gnomes --see this is the invention of SARS! Really, SARS was 'non-infectious'? He might be implying that the sequence of the patented virus was nearly identical to SARS, minus maybe a mutation to make it infectious again, but he doesn't say it.
Make of it what you will. If you pay attention to the whole two hours, then whatever you may perceive as innuendo gets blown out of the water by hard, cold fact. The presenter in that vid is a serious man.
Late last year, the German dude hosting the video was tracked down in Mexico by European Union detectives, arrested, and shipped back to Germany where he is now incarcerated awaiting trial. He's a lawyer who took strong exception to the COVID scam and made EU look bad.
> I mean, the right has become a lot more antiscience these days. You wouldn't see Reagan or either of the Bushes cutting NIH funding. It was understood that science was part of the West's competitive advantage and we wanted to keep it that way.
The problem is that The Science™ abandoned science.
Here's how you can tell the difference:
If its operating principle is *nullius in verba* it's science.
If its operating principle is "trust the experts" it's Science™.
You forget the Orthodox woomeister Rod Dreher! He claims to be Orthodox, but he’s convinced that UFOs are really demons, and that the government is going to announce the existence of Higher Aliens to somehow get us to merge with AI and be subsumed by the occult. Seriously, I subscribe to him just for his hilarious flights of fancy.
I read Dreher as well. He's thought-provoking and usually right. But I skim his long UFO speculations. He's a bit nutty and admits that he may be a little mentally imbalanced. Artificial intelligence is a new terror on Dreher's horizon. And he believes men have flown in the past, citing a Yale professor who wrote a book about it.
Why not? Because you have an *a priori* belief that nothing like demonic possession can possibly be real, thus any account of it is *ipso facto* not credible.
I believe people called exorcists exist. I believe that they go to people’s houses and report certain experiences. But I attribute those reports to delusions and mental illness.
Clinical trials have methods put in place -- double blinds, specified end points, objective criteria for outcomes, rigorous statistical analysis -- that make their results less likely to be subject to delusion or wishful thinking. The experiments at the large hadron collider are subject to similar constraints that make their results more likely to be reliable.
This system is not perfect -- witness the outright fraud in Alzheimer’s research. But it’s the best method we have of actually figuring stuff out about the world.
Just today he writes about a two-hour therapy session that I've never heard of before. Good for him. I hope it works. But I don't know anyone like Dreher.
Rod had a major life event with his divorce from the mother of his children and probably has another two years before he's fully processed that. But he also has a long history of contempt for his family members and publicly throwing them under the bus in his writings. I've read negative comments by people who've met him at public appearances.
He fixed his kids private school teacher--at his ex-wife's urging--for the kind of opinions held by most iSteve readers. It was a nasty bit of passive aggression at some perfectly decent schlep who probably makes 40K a year. Rod has issues.
Right -- I had almost forgotten that doxxing incident. It didn't seem to be particularly edifying for anyone involved.
I want to not like Dreher, and I'm pretty certain I'd find him hard to deal with in person, but nearly every time I read something he writes I find either an idea or insight I've not seen before, but that makes sense, and/or something I've been thinking but have not quite articulated. He's an under-disciplined but gifted writer.
By the way, if you find a typo in one of your posts, you can always just click the three dot menu next to it, choose the 'Edit' option, and go back and correct it.
I don’t think Rod will ever “process” it. Rod would have to accept that he’s at least partly at fault, and he’s constitutionally incapable of that. And that’s particularly troublesome here, because it kind of all seems to be his fault.
The aliens (if we accept it as an analog for UFO) thing is pretty standard fair amongst Orthodox converts and others (and seems to have currency for folks like Landshark [Orthodox] and others [X @butt_watermelon]).
Some of these people are highly intelligent and insightful, though to what degree this is just a guise can be debated.
Dreher is a lightweight dweeb in comparison, but he is vaguely aware of the “discourse.”
I would call this a leading contender for most unfocused, unpersuasive, uninformative Steve Sailer essays ever. How this list of 60 years of recreational beliefs connects to today's conservatives is unclear. There are always some people that are intrigued by this stuff, some of which may be nonsense and some which has benefits (yoga, meditation, health food), and there's not much else to say about it. Oh well, everyone can have an off day.
The failure to mention specific figures of the moment, active in the Trump coalition or any the Trump coalitions, 2015 to present, is a weakness in this article.
You're referring to the Nordic pagan trend? There is a whole right-wing esoteric strain running through Papus in France and Evola in Italy through Germanic neopagans like Guido von List and esoteric Hitlerists like Savitri Devi on the Germanic end and David Parry and Gerald Gardner on the other--Wicca was *right* wing in the UK just as it was *left* wing in the USA, since all of the Celtic pagan stuff would be ancestral over in England. (There was also Aleister Crowley's enthusiasm for Hitler, though sadly the story Ian Fleming tried to get him to bring Rudolf Hess around seems to be apocryphal.) You may remember the 'meme magic' rituals by esoteric Trumpists back in 2016. Their ritual to bring a winter that would chase off all the immigrants from Europe through summoning Winter-chan was less successful. Gary Lachman's *Dark Star Rising* covers all this in detail through 2016, albeit from a leftist view. (Also, in rot-13 to avoid spoilers: Fbzrbar nyfb nfxf Iynqvzve Chgva jung ur jbhyq qb vs Pguhyuh evfrf.)
OK, why?
Well, Christianity's invented by Jews and tells you to turn the other cheek. Wotan has no such problem. So Germanic and, less commonly, Celtic symbolism and sometimes pagan religious practice has always been a thing on the online and sometimes offline far right. It's actually really hard to find Germanic symbols (runes, the Sonnenrad, the valknut come to mind) that *haven't* been appropriated by racialist groups at some point, which makes left-leaning Germanic neopagans (yes, they exist; see below) very sad.
If you search you can find quite a few Wotanist Twitter accounts with white-nationalist or similar politics. It totally fits the Germanic-against-Jewish-racial-struggle idea to be going back to older Germanic gods and rejecting Yahweh.
Ironically Christianity also gets rejected by left-wing young ladies for being too patriarchal; Barnes & Noble is full of books on witchcraft and has an increasingly wide selection of tarot cards these days. (Some with quite amusing themes like cats and yarn.) Also, with the obsession with cultural appropriation, if you're white and don't like Christianity Germanic and Celtic neopaganism is pretty much the only acceptable thing to do, because you don't want to be appropriating African, Native American, or Asian traditions. I wouldn't be surprised if it even scares a few lefties off Buddhism, which *does* welcome converts!
Magic aside, in the 70s 'natural living', rejecting science, and going back to the land had a strong left-wing tinge because you were fighting back against industrialized society, which was seen as allied with capitalism. Hippies were flower children, after all. But with the rural-urban divide becoming more politically salient in the 1990s, followed by woke capitalism (and in particular woke Big Tech like Google) and the leftist capture of academia reaching the sciences (which had very much previously seen themselves as above politics) in the 2010s, going back to nature and moving to the country became more of a right-wing thing. Look at RFK Jr (who to be fair has some serious personal tragedy behind his conspiracizing), ivermectin and antivax during COVID, and BAP's nude bodybuilding and Tucker Carlson reporting on 'broscience' and tanning your testicles. (Not to mention NIH funding cuts now.)
Thanks for making some of the points I wanted to make, along with a good catalog of woo-ists and woo-isms.
One overlooked cause of the recent upsurge in rightwing woo is that about eight years ago, in response to Trump's unexpected political victory, the social media platforms began purging rightwing political badthinkers. Prior to 2017, the online political right had existed in genial symbiosis with a number of more esoteric woo-ish accounts, though the political accounts were by far larger and more numerous. But after the political purges, all that remained was the woo (it was too esoteric for the censorship algorithms to notice and largely unparseable to human censors), so a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise have paid attention to it before were suddenly left with little else to engage them online, and as a result, new cadres of politically rightwing esotericists were born.
Now that a measure of online free speech has been restored, the political horse is being reunited with its now-enlightened spiritual rider, shining sonnenrad-halo rotating about his head.
And ironically, this cycle was initiated by the Left's effort to prevent specifically this result.
We are living in the very first few years in which it is actually sensible to fret that "the end of the world is nigh", which is pretty interesting.
Not just because of what it means for the future, but because it is a remarkable coincidence for everyone alive. For example, we're our reality a simulation, this would be the point at which it breaks.
I don't have much more to add on this topic because if it is, it is, but things are going to get feverish.
Otherwise, I wonder where I should be putting money. Should I spend it all like Aella because things are over anyway? Buy the most beautiful beach I can because that's one of the only truly limited resources? Or just chuck it in the stock market and live like normal thereby keepijg my options open?
I remember reading Kurzweil as a teen and thinking "well that's a long way away", but it's here now and I can only be grateful that I am a convinced optimist on how it will all go, even if I can acknowledge that's based on nothing but faith or even woo.
Is Aella spending all her money? I thought she was trying to sock it away for when she was too old for sex work. She knows she's going to get too old at some point--I've seen her draw the bar graphs of prostitute prices by age!
Buy some really good and carefully chosen real estate in a Red county in a Red state is my advice. But you can't even be safe in agriculture because some bureaucrat will catch a whiff of virus in your flock or herd and they'll all have to be destroyed.
I've read investment advisors who say the markets are too rigged by government and corporate insiders. I watch my holdings stumble along and wonder if I should just buy really nice firearms and ammo instead.
You are going to live in a world that's post-scarcity in terms of mass consumer products, entertainment, the building part of housing and the vast majority of services that people buy, or AI is going to kill you. One of those is going to happen.
It therefore seems, in the optimistic outcome, that the only things that will remain scarce are good neighbours and natural beauty, but maybe people won't care about those things in the avalanche of everything else being free? I don't know.
Sorry, I should have stuck with some phrase describing the end of humanity, rather than the dramatic "the end of the world is nigh". Nuclear warfare was never a threat to the existence of humanity.
Certain conservatives do think outside the box. Many homeschool parents, especially the mothers, have strong doubts about what big industrialized agriculture and big industrialized food are putting in the food of their children. I don't blame them. And I am glad Bobby Kennedy Jr. looks like he'll go after the pharmaceutical industry and industrialized food. Religious conservatives like Rod Dreher believe UFOs might be Satanic beings. Conspiracy theories are ripe on the religious right. I have one great pal from church who believes the world is run in secret by a wealthy cabal- he's partly right- but that Pelosi, Obama, the Clintons, the Bushes, McConnell, Schumer and the rest all have "handlers" that tell them what to do. Pelosi, the Clintons and the Bushes may be part of a loose mob but nobody is telling them what to do. I have one particularly nutty priest who told me with an earnest face that Biden and the Clintons were really dead and that people who looked like them took their place, like a bad "Lost in Space" episode.
This particular thread would be more interesting if everyone contributed stories like yours, i.e. of acquaintances who hold funny or unexpected views on things or famous people. For myself, I'm a quasi-hermit so I don't have too many. Most recently, I played golf in Santa Rosa with a friendly ex-hippie type, in his '70's, who believed that Kamala Harris was a "big-timer" in law because she went to Hastings (LOL).
It's different because heroin is clearly harmful. It's not just "some homeschool parents are AFRAID." Even then, many libertarians do argue that it should be a personal decision.
Junk food is demonstrably harmful and a public health concern so long as we're going to socialize medicine for all government employees, all military, the poor, and the elderly.
Plastics, like asbestos, are infinitely friable and showing up in tissues. Maybe they're inert, maybe they're not but I'm not sure I just want to take the petroleum industries word for it.
At the very least, it would be nice to have a debate over why photographs from the 80s and earlier show so many slim people.
Was food less abundant? Were calories more nutrient-dense? Is nicotine a good trade-off? Like I said it would be nice to see a scientific inquiry and debate rather than just taking the word of publicly traded companies and career bureaucrats.
Addicts inflict negative externalities on others. They poop in the streets, they go schizo and attack people, they traumatize their kids, steal from friends and family, show up at hospital ERs etc.
Let me condense my earlier comment. (It still has some fun rabbit holes for lovers of the weird.)
There's always been a big right-wing esoteric strain; Gary Lachman's *Dark Star Rising* covers it pretty well through the late 2010s. (He is a liberal, be warned.) The Nazis fooled around with this stuff; the original Wiccans like Gerald Gardner were British Tories (Celtic paganism is ancestral there after all); and in the first Trump election we had 'meme magic'.
OK, why?
Well, Christianity's invented by Jews and tells you to turn the other cheek. Wotan has no such problem. So Germanic and, less commonly, Celtic neopaganism has always been a thing on the far right. It totally fits the Germanic-against-Jewish-racial-struggle idea to be going back to older Germanic gods and rejecting Yahweh.
Ironically Christianity also gets rejected by left-wing young shes and theys for being too patriarchal; Barnes & Noble is full of books on witchcraft and has an increasingly wide selection of tarot cards these days. Also, if you're white and don't like Christianity Germanic and Celtic neopaganism is pretty much the only acceptable thing to do, because you don't want to be appropriating anything BIPOC.
In the 70s 'natural living', rejecting science, and going back to the land was 'left' because you were against industry, science, and business. Hippies were *flower* children. But with the rural-urban divide becoming big in the 1990s, followed by woke capitalism (esp. woke Big Tech) and the leftist capture of academia reaching the previously-apolitical sciences in the 2010s, going back to nature and moving to the country became more of a right-wing thing. Look at ivermectin and antivax during COVID, not to mention testicle tanning.
This whole thread of commenters seems off. They’re calling things woo woo but don’t say what they are and they mimic the left about “science” being the best in the west. Have any of them read, researched, or done anything during the COVID scam? If you’re on the right & that didn’t wake you up then nothing will.
I am not on the right but the covid juggernaut also felt to me like sanity dropping away beneath my feet. I would willingly read a substantive rebuttal of RFK Jr’s book but I just encounter mudslinging about him as a person. No argument that he would be a bad bet as a husband but the book is not about him.
A lot of people have put so much of their identity into being "pro-Science", they're unwilling to face the fact that our scientific institutions are hollowed out skinsuits.
The right is the counter culture today, so there is a rejection and over reaction to norms that were in place for decades that turned out to be wrong - and this is coupled with a decline in Christian religiosity that was been partly supplanted by a secular religiosity.
Health and diet are fair targets for this. The diet and food advice we received for the last few generations was disastrously wrong and unquestionably influenced by special interests rather than science. Same with pharma - while I am not at all opposed to the use of drugs when necessary, it's obvious that we are hugely over prescribed a constellation of medications. This is one of those crunchy issues where there is significant overlap between the left and the right.
Politically a lot of people desire a renewal, and stuff like diet and exercise are within easy reach of the average person as an outlet. Clearly there are BS fads as always, but in general a rejection of over processed food and an embrace of a variety of methods for movement and exercise is a positive thing.
Steve I like you but dismissing people's skepticism over the modern world as junk science isn't fair. Young people have watched health and longevity decline their entire adult lives. You cannot blame them for seeking alternatives
This should be Question #1, in my book. It's widespread (pun not intended, but hey), undeniable (visual evidence everywhere), and actively harmful.
Here in Hong Kong, there's food temptation everywhere; it's one of the world's great food cities. Contra the conventional wisdom, lots of the ubiquitous Chinese (and other Asian) food is calorie-dense, high carb, etc. And yet there are still very few obese people here.
So why not? The big difference that glares out to me is that, for the great majority of HK people, most of their meals are prepared from fresh, wholly-unprocessed ingredients. This means vegetables straight from the fields of Guangdong province, and meat from animals likely slaughtered the same day. Almost everybody here either goes to the market every day or two to buy ingredients, or sends their maid to do so.
And it's not just genetic, i.e. East Asian people are 'naturally slim'. I've learned to pick out ABCs (i.e. American-born Chinese) with excellent accuracy just by noting their typically 'thicker' look compared with HK Chinese.
Sometimes I think it's just differences in calorie intake, as dining on shared dishes Chinese style means you can stop eating when you're full instead of feeling like you've got to finish whatever's on your plate. But then I see people here chowing down like there's no tomorrow, and still not getting all that fat, and I do wonder if there's more to it.
Oh, and HK continues to have the world's longest average lifespan; it's now up at 85 or 86.
I got a little fatter in China, but that's because the beer was so cheap. Don't know how I would have fared with Cantonese food, which is really quite different from northern Chinese cuisine.
By my count, ~11 of the 12 proposed reasons are byproducts (or primary products) of modernity and The Science. Adding in your two proposals might make it ~12 of 14.
FWIW, I lost weight visiting China, probably simply because most of the food didn't appeal to me.
Other possible reasons, which are underexamined and will probably remain so due to no financial incentive in favor of examination and immense financial incentive against: microplastics, exponential increase in microwave radiation, fetal ultrasound.
I make that ~15 out of 17 lying at modernity's doorstep.
Obesity, mental illness, cardiovascular fitness are all worse for the general population. These would impair the ability to fight off opportunistic infections like covid. Elderly people's lives are extended marginally by a pharmaceutical simulacrum of a functioning human body and tube feeding and respiration.
Lifespan has recovered? Since when? I’d wager that every single one of the boomer brigade in this thread defending the status quo still consumes cable news.
Lifespan has increased slightly since lockdowns ended but is still in a downward trend and lower than it was 5 years ago.
you can see that life expectancy in the US has been going down since Obamacare, even though spending per capita is going up. It's better in other OECD countries, but still showing diminishing returns.
Whitney Cummings has a bit where she says she spent a long time getting guys to explain bitcoin to her and finally concluded "oh, it's astrology for dudes".
I think she's on to something, though I think it's more that stock chart analysis is astrology for dudes. It's all just churning the overactive human propensity to see patterns combined with wishful thinking and the desire to improve our physical and mental health.
It's always been here.
So women like astrology and yoga and wiccanism. Men tend to weightlifting, martial arts, stock charts hallucination and stoicism. One suspects we call it woo-woo when it appeals more to women.
I personally know some new-agey Trump fans. Actually, I've met quite a few up here in the Pacific NW.
There are basically three kinds of Christians up here:
Evangelical, Catholic and (Dutch) Reformed. Mainliners have merged with Progressives into a sort of post-Christianity.
If you come from the mainline tradition Christianity seems like a total failure because, well, rainbow flags are on all the churches. If the Dutch Calvinists, Roman Catholics and megachurches aren't your thing you might start looking further afield to fulfill spiritual needs.
Next thing you know you're practicing tantric meditation, following Q-anon and furiously trading crypto from your goat farm.
Culturally we've all been a bit tossed to the winds in recent times. There's a feeling of betrayal by institutions that failed us as well. I left the church of my childhood for a couple decades before returning -- I felt for a while as though it had dropped the ball and was useless. Eventually I realized that given what it was facing it had stood its ground admirably, but it's hard to see that amidst all the personal turmoil young people face.
It's also less corrupted by (a) actual pedophiles and (b) modern ideology. The people who want to be Orthodox are consciously choosing that because it's old (therefore authentic and likely conservative) and all the Greek liturgy is a barrier to entry for casuals.
Also, fewer pedophiles. That's what made Rod Dreher switch. That scandal really turned a lot of people off Catholicism left and right. Most conservatives have families and worry about that kind of thing.
People who haven't experienced the "good old days" tend to harken back to them. Once commented during a Boomer-Bashing thread that our system is based on raising your family in your 20s, peaking in your 40s, and dying in your 60s. Lots of people began protesting that the last part was "inaccurate". So it's not surprising so many on the Right are believing various "you'll live forever with our program" crap.
We just never stop falling for "You will not surely die" and "You will be as gods". It's the very first mistake over and over again. Every new paraphrase seems to fool us
Yup. There is value in exercise for quality of life and some effect on longevity, but I remember my dad, always chasing the dream of immortality. An article in the paper said 'use olive oil and you will never die!' and he switched to olive oil. The the Canola oil publicists got an article out that said 'use canola oil and you will never die even less than olive oil' and he switched to canola oil. He's dead.
Whatever happened to guns, lower taxes, and deregulation?
Guns are still in. Lower taxes are getting pushed forward.
But in general the laissez-faire program is a lot less popular with the Republican base these days. They're more downscale, so they benefit more from government programs like Social Security and Medicare, and everyone remembers the jobs going to Japan and then China and what it did to the Midwest. It's all about using the power of government to benefit the USA now.
When a government is running over $1.7 trillion budget deficits and paying out over $900 billion in interest payments, it is hard to argue for lower taxes. And everyone should remember that regulations come from screw ups in the past.
Lower rates are always a good thing, especially for things taxed twice or held long, as they encourage risk-taking and discourage cheating and corruption of law-makers.
I'm not pleased to pay 24% tax on 50 years of largely inflationary gains on my dad's building.
If one does not like paying taxes, then one needs to list the $1.7+ trillion in spending cuts that one would accept and that could survive politically to balance the budget.
No one is under any obligation to list budget cuts "that could survive politically" before objecting to tax increases. The objection is perfectly valid even if the likes of YOU can't stop sucking at the public teat.
First, I will take that as a no, one does not have a list of budget cuts that will balance the budget and survive politically. The easiest way to build public support for spending cuts would be to raise taxes enough to close the budget deficit. Make the voters pay the full retail price and the support for spending cuts goes up.
But that one wants to deficit spending means that one does not really want to cut taxes but just wants to push the taxes off into the future when someone else will be stuck paying for them. I believe that such selfishness is not good for the U.S.
You believe all sorts of stupid things, including that deficits are paid by future taxes. Deficits are in fact paid for by future inflation. There is no evidence whatsoever that support for spending cuts goes up along with taxes. Spending cuts merely mean that you lose votes among the tax eaters and maybe get booted from office. You of course don't have a list of budget cuts that will balance the budget and survive politically, but only have a prescription for me that doesn't apply to you. Or maybe you're either lying or delusional and have a list we can all laugh at.
Trump is planning to continue the tax cuts set to expire this year.
Lots of stuff getting cut already, some of it regulatory.
Haven’t heard anything about guns one way or the other.
Less trust of government includes being skeptical of government medical advise.
Well, a large part of the issue is that between the ever-shifting "official" diet recommendations, the embrace of transgenderism, and the COVID fiasco, among other things, "official" medicine has done a good job of discrediting itself.
See also Robin Hanson's critique of medicine: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/medical-doubts-opedhtml
There is a *lot* of truth to that.
I think overall you get a lot further with drugs and vaccines than vitamin pills and testicle tanning. But when the guys (and now, particularly, gals) in white coats start taking a knee for Floyd and lying about the risks and benefits of cutting your kids' genitals off because they're afraid of getting cancelled, they tend to lose a lot of respect from anyone on the right.
I.E. I think you're wrong and this will end in lots of preventable deaths, but I don't blame you. :(
> I think overall you get a lot further with drugs and vaccines than vitamin pills and testicle tanning.
Well drugs are being massively overprescribed. The FDA has become anarcho-tyrannical, i.e., it takes a lot of time and money to get new drugs approved but everyone looks the other way while the actual tests are fudged. I personally know someone who left the pharmaceutical industry, and was left with an expensive degree he was never going to use, because he refused to participate in manipulating the results of drug trials.
They do manipulate the trials, and this is something to beware of. There used to be much more of a culture of objectivity on the government side, because they leaned left. (Remember all those liberals who told you to 'see both sides of the story' back in the 80s and 90s?) The left now believes in social justice instead of objectivity, so that's no longer the case.
My point is more that alternatives to medicine really aren't all that good. Certainly diet and exercise are important, but medicine will also tell you that. Usually when people get into 'alternative' stuff they get into random stuff like vitamin injections and taking deworming solutions for respiratory infections. I agree the FDA needs to be overhauled and this is one of the big things even the rationalists are behind.
> Remember all those liberals who told you to 'see both sides of the story' back in the 80s and 90s?
No. I do remember a lot of leftist complaining in the 90s when Fox News started saying that.
> My point is more that alternatives to medicine really aren't all that good.
Some are, some aren't. Many "official medicines" aren't all that good either.
I think there are liberals like that, none I know are online and all have made various concessions to wokeism (other than some boomers that flipped to Magaism and aside from being addicted to losing are some of the most unaffectedly based people I know).
The medicine thing is so polarized, it is insane to me. Some huge improvements, and some effective placebos or worse. All of them totally mainstream.
Western medicine is amazing. The problem is that most people, even doctors, don't know, or even reflect on, what it's for and what it can do. Once a field does a few incredible things (e.g. antibiotics, kidney transplants) it's natural to overestimate it.
We have a few tests and preventive measures that are worthwhile. There are a handful of conditions, that likely wouldn't get better on their own, and that we have good treatments for. The rest of it? Statistically if you insist that medicine fix every discomfort and guarantee you good health and long life, you are asking for trouble. I have a friend with a bad elbow and he wants surgery. It is clear the orthopedic surgeon doesn't want to do it and I tell him, if a surgeon doesn't want to cut, it means he's pretty sure it will be a bad result. But if this surgeon won't do it, my friend will keep looking until he finds one who will.
I Don't blame doctors for nutrition nonsense. They are as likely to parrot what they read in a magazine as their patients are and they are as subject to cognitive bias and wishful thinking on the subject as anyone.
Alternative medicine, “health food”, and resistance to Big Pharma had been largely left/liberal preoccupations for decades, until November 9, 2020
Of it was drifting right long before then.
True, but that date was a major pivot point
> I Don't blame doctors for nutrition nonsense. They are as likely to parrot what they read in a magazine as their patients are and they are as subject to cognitive bias and wishful thinking on the subject as anyone.
I don't blame individual doctors either, I blame the people at the top of organizations like the FDA, USDA (why was the Department of Agriculture giving health advise anyway?), NIH, AHA, AMA, etc.
"Well, a large part of the issue is that between the ever-shifting "official" diet recommendations, the embrace of transgenderism, and the COVID fiasco, among other things, "official" medicine has done a good job of discrediting itself."
This is true. But since it's almost always used as a starting point to excuse the retarded ideas of the 85-IQ rightoids, (instead of a starting point to cure such ideas) I'm sick of hearing it.
Health food? LSD? RFK Jr.? Crazy stuff man!
"Due to being old, I’m less in touch with cultural trends than I used to be. But my vague impression is that New Age stuff has come back into fashion in recent years, especially among young women."
I'm going to call you out on your vague impression. New Right esoterica has tended toward Orthodoxy and Catholicism--the +Benedict and +Kyril kind, not the +Francis kind. There might be some Nordic pantheism in the mix too.
Are you reading Adrian Vermeule, Michael Anton, Christopher Caldwell, the pseudonymous ZMan, Christopher Rufo, the Chronicles guys, the still-around John Derbyshire or Ann Coulter or Jared Taylor?
Maybe you're referring to all that New Age touchy-feely stuff by real estate developer Trump, his VP and attorney/venture-capital alum JD Vance or Ron "Gov. Moonbeam" DeSantis? I don't know.
Ah, for the good old days of George W Bush's flinty realism!
I mean, the right has become a lot more antiscience these days. You wouldn't see Reagan or either of the Bushes cutting NIH funding. It was understood that science was part of the West's competitive advantage and we wanted to keep it that way.
A big problem is science has become a lot more leftist. They were trying to avoid politics (EDIT: in their actual work) until recently, but when they all came out for BLM in the pandemic that was kind of the last straw. You also won't see scientists who privately know better come out about the weakness of the evidence early transgender surgery makes kids feel better long term. There's also the fact that they were much more for masking and vaccines, which became a left-right thing only in the past few years with COVID.
I'm going to be controversial and say I think the right has taken the wrong side here. Science is one of the most effective things the West has developed, allowing it to conquer the rest of the world in the 20th century, is something the West more or less invented in its current form, and is how we keep ahead of the Chinese, who even if they didn't invent it are presently no slouches in this department either. I won't deny it's become annoyingly full of left-wingers, but if we start ditching vaccines for vitamin pills we'll just get hit with measles epidemics while they point and laugh from Beijing.
I see a contradiction in your framing, A.D.: "[People involved in science?] were trying to avoid politics until recently, but when they all came out for BLM in the pandemic that was kind of the last straw."
Were they trying to avoid politics before 2020, or was 2020 the last straw? That "last straw" expression suggests a slow build-up. As, for example, over years at least and probably decades.
Fair.
I think it had been drifting that way for a while.
From what I can tell, scientists had leaned left for a while (they work in universities and don't make a lot of money after all) but tried to keep it out of their science out of regard for the old idea science is supposed to be about discovering the objective truth, and then with BLM and 2020 they finally gave in to the pressure from the humanities end of the faculty lounge.
I actually do think the right needs to figure out how they're going to do the life of the mind outside the universities, which are pretty much captured by the left these days. We actually do need scientific and technological research to keep up with other nations, and I've read enough writers to convince me we probably need someone to resurrect the traditional humanities as well (though that part's harder; you at least need to capture one major publishing house).
This 👆. Especially the RFK Jr nonsense.
You know the thing I realized about RFK Jr.?
Remember the JFK and RFK assassinations in the 60s? The first of which kicked off the modern conspiracy-theory craze, the second of which also had suspicions of some kind of 'programming' going on?
*That was his UNCLE and his DAD*.
That would make me into a conspiracy theorist, too.
That's tough on a kid, losing your dad at age 14 in America's 4th most famous assassination and your uncle, your dad's best friend, at age 9 in America's most famous assassination.
There’s more science in one of RFKs books than all of the boomers in this thread have read in your lifetimes, combined.
It’s such a boomer move to equate your 3 childhood vaccines with the 80 that current children get and say “I don’t see the problem.”
Opining on things about which you are completely uninformed is unbecoming.
I contradict you based on personal experience except you did specify boomers. I still wouldn't be confident. People stay relatively anonymous here but I've got the sense over the years that some extremely smart people lurk about these threads.
I didn't see where a boomer referenced his own childhood vaccine experience but I agree. Somehow the miracle of vaccines has lead to unquestioning acceptance of each new vaccine and I think few boomers realize how many children get these days. Vaccines are great in principle but we still need to weigh benefits against potential costs. Seems like once people were able to assure themselves that there were crazy anti-vaxxers out there, probably going to cocktail parties with the flat earth people, they could switch their minds off on the topic.
In defense of such people I will point out that the original sin of anti vaxxer theology is the MMR vaccine causing autism and that was a childhood vaccine of, well I was going to say the boomers, but turns out no, they missed that. So let's say the boomer's children.
I believe one should maintain an open, skeptical mind on these things. Someone on an earlier Sailer thread directed me to some antivaxx stuff. Things I was surprised by and changed my mind about- kids get a shocking number of vaccines now, there is an autism epidemic that is clearly not just an effect of increased awareness, injected vaccines don't make much sense for preventing respiratory viruses (I had to do a literature search on that. I was surprised how ineffective seasonal flu vaccines are...they kind of gloss over that in the public relations campaigns)
things I was not convinced of-vaccines are the cause of the autism epidemic.
That might have been me in another thread. I find the existence of a cohort that is happy to dabble in race science but considers vaccines sacrosanct a little…concerning. One might begin to suspect that old-fashioned racism is indeed an underlying motive.
Yes, to the latter, but I think most of the unquestioning faith in vaccines is down to successfully labeling anti vaxxers as conspiracy theorists. People cannot accept that as with all things in all fields, there are better doctors and worser doctors and better research and worser research. Accepting that a significant fraction of the medical literature is, for a variety of reasons, garbage, is...unsettling to them.
When science keeps itself to actually improving mankind like inventing open-heart surgery(not available until 1954) or making better cars or inventing air conditioning, it is doing great things. When science ventures into speculating on climate or any other mastermind problem-solving it risks credibility. Top scientists have mastermind personalities but often have arrogant, know-it-all personalities.
This is all true, but they're still inventing new drugs for cancer and Musk may actually send us to Mars. They can actually keep metastatic breast cancer in check for years in some cases. And we all have our complaints about the Internet, particularly social media, myself included, but we wouldn't be having this argument without it. (It got around the book and TV monopolies, for instance.)
I think the climate thing is actually one of those things the right has been wrong about and people still don't want to admit it. As John Derbyshire said, "Some things are true *even though* the Party says they are." Doesn't mean the right is wrong about everything (I wouldn't be here if I thought they were) or you shouldn't vote Republican if you think they're better overall, but I keep seeing a lot more hurricanes and hot weather than I did growing up, so I'm convinced the earth is getting warmer, and the CO2 thing seems plausible at least.
Personally, I don't have a dog in this fight; the right can be right on race and biological sex differences and wrong on climate and, now, vaccines. Truth is neither left nor right; Mother Nature, unlike many older women these days, doesn't have politics.
> This is all true, but they're still inventing new drugs for cancer
Some of which might actually help the cancer without messing up too many other things.
Climate modeling is a legitimate thing for scientists to do. The problem is that it became political. Once it became political the field selected for people with a specific bias and bias is no good for science.
That said, I do not read the climate journals, nor has anyone I have ever met, even those with strong opinions on the science of climate. We are all reacting to what journalists and our friends say about it.
For all I know, the average climate scientist has credible and skeptical beliefs.
They used to believe in more research. Now the watermelons have taken over.
Well, the one person I know who majored in climate science was originally going to major in math, but then discovered that college level math was actually hard.
Conservative economists like Thomas Sowell or Milton Friedman would point out that tax dollars are a terrible way to fund science or medicine. Opposing taxpayer funded grants does not make you anti-science. We actually have the other problem: public funding crowds out alternate funding from people with actual skin in the game and distorts the research.
I hate to say it but this really is an old-man-yells-at cloud column. "Those New Righters and all their pyramids and crystal-gazing hoo-ha and flimflammery!" Really? Like Ron DeSantis,Thomas Massie, Rand Paul, Christopher Rufo? Steve should be in full gloat mode right now. The conservative realism which he has always championed has triumphed over the neo-cucks and elected Trump twice, with the entire bolshevik Establishment and its functionaries deployed against him. DOGE is pouring sunlight on the gigantic grift that is the US federal budget. The cockroaches are terrified.
There's more alignment with iSteve: if Trump 2016 was the Sailer Strategy, Trump 2024 was the Sailer Strategy 2.0. Trump got ethnic minorities to peel away from the Leftist hivemind because it turns out latino, black, Jewish and Arab dads don't like being lectured by fat angry black women and BPD whites with purple hair either. Citizenism vindicated!
Honestly, I don't know why Steve isn't collecting vintage champagne and drunkposting every day.
Now let's turn to that government-funded science that is apparently a pillar of True Conservatism. Briefly there's the tranny butchery and brainwashing, the attempts to roll back the Industrial Revolution, the deliberate ignorance of human biodiversity and genetics, the outright Creationism and tabula rasa theories of human development. But the COVIDiocy, the Crown Jewel of Progressivist public science funding. Oh my.
For starters, there's a very good chance it came from a lab leak as scientists, using public funding, tweaked a common virus with an animal reservoir to make it more transmissible. We have to engineer the viruses to engineer the vaccines to protect us from the engineered viruses. Now that there's some Real Science, pardner! The NIAID should have used a computer-generated Burl Ives or Wilford Brimley to make soothing sounds.
The vaccines are "leaky," as the public health establishment finally admitted, after touting some putative number of 94.7425bazillion % "effective," whatever that means. The vaccines are also highly ephemeral. At one point they were recommending 4 shots a year. The "vaccine" had a marginal effect by giving a heads up to the immune systems of at-risk individuals like the elderly, obese (we've got a demographic bulge of both) and the immunocompromised. There was no suppression of the virus; there was probably Antibody-Dependent Enhancement. The health effect, such as it was, was private not public. We'd have been better served by focusing on ventilation, outdoor exercise, and getting Americans to lose twenty pounds each. I trust RFK Jr to make that his focus over the rogue bureaucrats at the CDC and WHO. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the ever-growing schedule of infant vaccines.
Here's some more Science you can trust: there are a number of replicated studies showing that access to doctors, access to medical insurance does not improve health. Preventative medicine is diet and exercise. I stress all this because the particular bee in Steve's bonnet over the New Right appears to be RFK Jr. There are personal, idiosyncratic reasons for this.
Loved the Burl Ives/wilfrid Brimley reference.
Hear hear
Anti-science? More accurately anti-government--as in government psychopaths using "the science" against everyone but themselves. U.S. government pretty much OWNS the big science projects at the big universities.
This vid was uploaded at bitchute 9July2021: https://www.bitchute.com/video/AkNgSbkEWRKL/ (Click bottom-right to skip ads) The presenter in the video produces documented U.S. Patent numbers with the names of those who were granted the patents on the virus and the vaccine which became COVID. The pandemic was\is a money-making death-scam.
The effective power of big media, big government and their non-stop full-spectrum propaganda is, to-day, clearly demonstrated by near-universal ignorance of the information in the video, now in the public record for going on 5 years.
Rubbish.
Your claim of rubbish is the baloney of ignorance...studied ignorance.
Can you tell me where in the 2-hour video he does this?
BTW, I'm a big believer in the lab leak theory. I'm not saying science never does anything wrong--I absolutely think it's at least possible the 'gain of function' research backfired in a big way, and that was definitely a joint project of American and Chinese scientists. (Perhaps they didn't want to raise any concerns about the Chinese's ability to control the virus because they were afraid of being seen as racist--who knows?)
I just think we can't leave science to the private sector, because they sit on things and make them trade secrets in order to gain a competitive advantage. It's what a for-profit company is supposed to do, isn't it?
> I just think we can't leave science to the private sector, because they sit on things and make them trade secrets in order to gain a competitive advantage. It's what a for-profit company is supposed to do, isn't it?
That problem was solved centuries ago. It's called Patents.
The entire video is a clinic in how Big Pharma and Big Government work together. The presenter gives patent numbers throughout his presentation. I've checked his references. If you can't manage the whole thing, at least listen to the first 10 minutes. The presenter is in the business of knowing, not guessing. He has facts. No speculation. No supposition. No theory. Facts.
It isn't surprising that the vaccine would be patented but can you explain the virus patenting? I think you can still patent a synthetic organism under some circumstances but I don't get the implication here. Are you saying the COVID19 virus was patented before it was released into the wild? I have never heard that. Or are you saying that it was patented after the pandemic started and it was the sequence that was patented? I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court ruled you can't do that because it's a fact of nature.
I listened to the ten minutes and whether he is on to something or not, I cannot tell from what he said. He is listing patents that indicate that coronavirus research was being done more than 20 years ago and then declares that this means there is nothing novel about COVID19...ok maybe but that is not obvious from what he said. He needs to compare the gene sequences and he doesn't (at least not in the first ten minutes). He also says that Pfizer looked at the spike protein and a possible vaccine target in animals 20 years ago and therefor underpants gnome style it means that the COVID19 virus isn't novel? How does that follow? No one claimed, as far as I know, that spike proteins was new, it was just that this one had a new variant of it.
He also says that one of the patents was for an infectious non-replicating coronavirus that targeted respiratory epithelial cells as a delivery system for some kind of AIDS therapy (which makes sense) and then he underpants gnomes --see this is the invention of SARS! Really, SARS was 'non-infectious'? He might be implying that the sequence of the patented virus was nearly identical to SARS, minus maybe a mutation to make it infectious again, but he doesn't say it.
Near as I can tell it's all innuendo
Make of it what you will. If you pay attention to the whole two hours, then whatever you may perceive as innuendo gets blown out of the water by hard, cold fact. The presenter in that vid is a serious man.
Late last year, the German dude hosting the video was tracked down in Mexico by European Union detectives, arrested, and shipped back to Germany where he is now incarcerated awaiting trial. He's a lawyer who took strong exception to the COVID scam and made EU look bad.
> I mean, the right has become a lot more antiscience these days. You wouldn't see Reagan or either of the Bushes cutting NIH funding. It was understood that science was part of the West's competitive advantage and we wanted to keep it that way.
The problem is that The Science™ abandoned science.
Here's how you can tell the difference:
If its operating principle is *nullius in verba* it's science.
If its operating principle is "trust the experts" it's Science™.
You would have been better off supplementing with vitamin D than getting a Covid vaccine. That’s what the science says.
You’re undermining your own argument. “Science” doesn’t mean “vaccines”. It means following the evidence.
You forget the Orthodox woomeister Rod Dreher! He claims to be Orthodox, but he’s convinced that UFOs are really demons, and that the government is going to announce the existence of Higher Aliens to somehow get us to merge with AI and be subsumed by the occult. Seriously, I subscribe to him just for his hilarious flights of fancy.
I read Dreher as well. He's thought-provoking and usually right. But I skim his long UFO speculations. He's a bit nutty and admits that he may be a little mentally imbalanced. Artificial intelligence is a new terror on Dreher's horizon. And he believes men have flown in the past, citing a Yale professor who wrote a book about it.
Oh man, those are the best part. Sometimes I do dramatic readings of his demon UFO stuff for my wife’s entertainment.
His little passive aggressive digs at his ex wife are a little less entertaining. I can’t wait for her tell-all book.
I got his book. Has a lot of old-school stories about Catholics fighting demonic possession. Kind of fun, but not very credible IMHO.
> but not very credible IMHO.
Why not? Because you have an *a priori* belief that nothing like demonic possession can possibly be real, thus any account of it is *ipso facto* not credible.
You ever seen one?
From what I gather even the Vatican exorcist sees very few.
> You ever seen one?
You ever been to a clinical trial? You ever been to the Large Hadron Collider?
I believe people called exorcists exist. I believe that they go to people’s houses and report certain experiences. But I attribute those reports to delusions and mental illness.
Clinical trials have methods put in place -- double blinds, specified end points, objective criteria for outcomes, rigorous statistical analysis -- that make their results less likely to be subject to delusion or wishful thinking. The experiments at the large hadron collider are subject to similar constraints that make their results more likely to be reliable.
This system is not perfect -- witness the outright fraud in Alzheimer’s research. But it’s the best method we have of actually figuring stuff out about the world.
Just today he writes about a two-hour therapy session that I've never heard of before. Good for him. I hope it works. But I don't know anyone like Dreher.
Rod had a major life event with his divorce from the mother of his children and probably has another two years before he's fully processed that. But he also has a long history of contempt for his family members and publicly throwing them under the bus in his writings. I've read negative comments by people who've met him at public appearances.
He fixed his kids private school teacher--at his ex-wife's urging--for the kind of opinions held by most iSteve readers. It was a nasty bit of passive aggression at some perfectly decent schlep who probably makes 40K a year. Rod has issues.
*doxxed, not fixed
Right -- I had almost forgotten that doxxing incident. It didn't seem to be particularly edifying for anyone involved.
I want to not like Dreher, and I'm pretty certain I'd find him hard to deal with in person, but nearly every time I read something he writes I find either an idea or insight I've not seen before, but that makes sense, and/or something I've been thinking but have not quite articulated. He's an under-disciplined but gifted writer.
By the way, if you find a typo in one of your posts, you can always just click the three dot menu next to it, choose the 'Edit' option, and go back and correct it.
For some reason my devices only show an edit option on my original threads.
I don’t think Rod will ever “process” it. Rod would have to accept that he’s at least partly at fault, and he’s constitutionally incapable of that. And that’s particularly troublesome here, because it kind of all seems to be his fault.
The aliens (if we accept it as an analog for UFO) thing is pretty standard fair amongst Orthodox converts and others (and seems to have currency for folks like Landshark [Orthodox] and others [X @butt_watermelon]).
Some of these people are highly intelligent and insightful, though to what degree this is just a guise can be debated.
Dreher is a lightweight dweeb in comparison, but he is vaguely aware of the “discourse.”
RFK Jr. is crazy, full stop.
There are no full stops in science.
I would call this a leading contender for most unfocused, unpersuasive, uninformative Steve Sailer essays ever. How this list of 60 years of recreational beliefs connects to today's conservatives is unclear. There are always some people that are intrigued by this stuff, some of which may be nonsense and some which has benefits (yoga, meditation, health food), and there's not much else to say about it. Oh well, everyone can have an off day.
The failure to mention specific figures of the moment, active in the Trump coalition or any the Trump coalitions, 2015 to present, is a weakness in this article.
See my comments here: https://shorturl.at/xo0gK
RFK Jr comes to mind. I’m not a fan but he has a bipartisan following: the MAHA movement (Make America Healthy Again).
https://www.thefp.com/p/maha-rfk-trump-bari-weiss-calley-means-jillian-michaels
You're referring to the Nordic pagan trend? There is a whole right-wing esoteric strain running through Papus in France and Evola in Italy through Germanic neopagans like Guido von List and esoteric Hitlerists like Savitri Devi on the Germanic end and David Parry and Gerald Gardner on the other--Wicca was *right* wing in the UK just as it was *left* wing in the USA, since all of the Celtic pagan stuff would be ancestral over in England. (There was also Aleister Crowley's enthusiasm for Hitler, though sadly the story Ian Fleming tried to get him to bring Rudolf Hess around seems to be apocryphal.) You may remember the 'meme magic' rituals by esoteric Trumpists back in 2016. Their ritual to bring a winter that would chase off all the immigrants from Europe through summoning Winter-chan was less successful. Gary Lachman's *Dark Star Rising* covers all this in detail through 2016, albeit from a leftist view. (Also, in rot-13 to avoid spoilers: Fbzrbar nyfb nfxf Iynqvzve Chgva jung ur jbhyq qb vs Pguhyuh evfrf.)
OK, why?
Well, Christianity's invented by Jews and tells you to turn the other cheek. Wotan has no such problem. So Germanic and, less commonly, Celtic symbolism and sometimes pagan religious practice has always been a thing on the online and sometimes offline far right. It's actually really hard to find Germanic symbols (runes, the Sonnenrad, the valknut come to mind) that *haven't* been appropriated by racialist groups at some point, which makes left-leaning Germanic neopagans (yes, they exist; see below) very sad.
If you search you can find quite a few Wotanist Twitter accounts with white-nationalist or similar politics. It totally fits the Germanic-against-Jewish-racial-struggle idea to be going back to older Germanic gods and rejecting Yahweh.
Ironically Christianity also gets rejected by left-wing young ladies for being too patriarchal; Barnes & Noble is full of books on witchcraft and has an increasingly wide selection of tarot cards these days. (Some with quite amusing themes like cats and yarn.) Also, with the obsession with cultural appropriation, if you're white and don't like Christianity Germanic and Celtic neopaganism is pretty much the only acceptable thing to do, because you don't want to be appropriating African, Native American, or Asian traditions. I wouldn't be surprised if it even scares a few lefties off Buddhism, which *does* welcome converts!
Magic aside, in the 70s 'natural living', rejecting science, and going back to the land had a strong left-wing tinge because you were fighting back against industrialized society, which was seen as allied with capitalism. Hippies were flower children, after all. But with the rural-urban divide becoming more politically salient in the 1990s, followed by woke capitalism (and in particular woke Big Tech like Google) and the leftist capture of academia reaching the sciences (which had very much previously seen themselves as above politics) in the 2010s, going back to nature and moving to the country became more of a right-wing thing. Look at RFK Jr (who to be fair has some serious personal tragedy behind his conspiracizing), ivermectin and antivax during COVID, and BAP's nude bodybuilding and Tucker Carlson reporting on 'broscience' and tanning your testicles. (Not to mention NIH funding cuts now.)
So, whether left or right, there's woo for you.
Thanks for making some of the points I wanted to make, along with a good catalog of woo-ists and woo-isms.
One overlooked cause of the recent upsurge in rightwing woo is that about eight years ago, in response to Trump's unexpected political victory, the social media platforms began purging rightwing political badthinkers. Prior to 2017, the online political right had existed in genial symbiosis with a number of more esoteric woo-ish accounts, though the political accounts were by far larger and more numerous. But after the political purges, all that remained was the woo (it was too esoteric for the censorship algorithms to notice and largely unparseable to human censors), so a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise have paid attention to it before were suddenly left with little else to engage them online, and as a result, new cadres of politically rightwing esotericists were born.
Now that a measure of online free speech has been restored, the political horse is being reunited with its now-enlightened spiritual rider, shining sonnenrad-halo rotating about his head.
And ironically, this cycle was initiated by the Left's effort to prevent specifically this result.
Wow, thanks. That just makes so much sense. It's very obvious to the average person TrumpyGuy is a conservative, less so Sonnenrad14.
We are living in the very first few years in which it is actually sensible to fret that "the end of the world is nigh", which is pretty interesting.
Not just because of what it means for the future, but because it is a remarkable coincidence for everyone alive. For example, we're our reality a simulation, this would be the point at which it breaks.
I don't have much more to add on this topic because if it is, it is, but things are going to get feverish.
Otherwise, I wonder where I should be putting money. Should I spend it all like Aella because things are over anyway? Buy the most beautiful beach I can because that's one of the only truly limited resources? Or just chuck it in the stock market and live like normal thereby keepijg my options open?
I remember reading Kurzweil as a teen and thinking "well that's a long way away", but it's here now and I can only be grateful that I am a convinced optimist on how it will all go, even if I can acknowledge that's based on nothing but faith or even woo.
Is Aella spending all her money? I thought she was trying to sock it away for when she was too old for sex work. She knows she's going to get too old at some point--I've seen her draw the bar graphs of prostitute prices by age!
And/or find a willing Silicon Valley ah, patron.
Buy some really good and carefully chosen real estate in a Red county in a Red state is my advice. But you can't even be safe in agriculture because some bureaucrat will catch a whiff of virus in your flock or herd and they'll all have to be destroyed.
I've read investment advisors who say the markets are too rigged by government and corporate insiders. I watch my holdings stumble along and wonder if I should just buy really nice firearms and ammo instead.
You are going to live in a world that's post-scarcity in terms of mass consumer products, entertainment, the building part of housing and the vast majority of services that people buy, or AI is going to kill you. One of those is going to happen.
It therefore seems, in the optimistic outcome, that the only things that will remain scarce are good neighbours and natural beauty, but maybe people won't care about those things in the avalanche of everything else being free? I don't know.
> We are living in the very first few years in which it is actually sensible to fret that "the end of the world is nigh", which is pretty interesting.
Too young to remember the Cold War, I take it.
Sorry, I should have stuck with some phrase describing the end of humanity, rather than the dramatic "the end of the world is nigh". Nuclear warfare was never a threat to the existence of humanity.
Certain conservatives do think outside the box. Many homeschool parents, especially the mothers, have strong doubts about what big industrialized agriculture and big industrialized food are putting in the food of their children. I don't blame them. And I am glad Bobby Kennedy Jr. looks like he'll go after the pharmaceutical industry and industrialized food. Religious conservatives like Rod Dreher believe UFOs might be Satanic beings. Conspiracy theories are ripe on the religious right. I have one great pal from church who believes the world is run in secret by a wealthy cabal- he's partly right- but that Pelosi, Obama, the Clintons, the Bushes, McConnell, Schumer and the rest all have "handlers" that tell them what to do. Pelosi, the Clintons and the Bushes may be part of a loose mob but nobody is telling them what to do. I have one particularly nutty priest who told me with an earnest face that Biden and the Clintons were really dead and that people who looked like them took their place, like a bad "Lost in Space" episode.
This particular thread would be more interesting if everyone contributed stories like yours, i.e. of acquaintances who hold funny or unexpected views on things or famous people. For myself, I'm a quasi-hermit so I don't have too many. Most recently, I played golf in Santa Rosa with a friendly ex-hippie type, in his '70's, who believed that Kamala Harris was a "big-timer" in law because she went to Hastings (LOL).
This friend of mine is like a close cousin and I like him a lot. We love fishing together.
"And I am glad Bobby Kennedy Jr. looks like he'll go after the pharmaceutical industry and industrialized food."
You can just not put junk food in your mouth.
You could say the same for heroin but we still outlaw it. Not an argument.
It's different because heroin is clearly harmful. It's not just "some homeschool parents are AFRAID." Even then, many libertarians do argue that it should be a personal decision.
Junk food is demonstrably harmful and a public health concern so long as we're going to socialize medicine for all government employees, all military, the poor, and the elderly.
Plastics, like asbestos, are infinitely friable and showing up in tissues. Maybe they're inert, maybe they're not but I'm not sure I just want to take the petroleum industries word for it.
At the very least, it would be nice to have a debate over why photographs from the 80s and earlier show so many slim people.
"At the very least, it would be nice to have a debate over why photographs from the 80s and earlier show so many slim people."
People ate less food.
And smoked a lot more. I don’t know many smokers any more, but the ones I know are slim. Same with the guys that chew.
Was food less abundant? Were calories more nutrient-dense? Is nicotine a good trade-off? Like I said it would be nice to see a scientific inquiry and debate rather than just taking the word of publicly traded companies and career bureaucrats.
Recreational heroin should be legal for adults. THAT is an argument. The government has no business keeping heroin out of my body (my choice)
Addicts inflict negative externalities on others. They poop in the streets, they go schizo and attack people, they traumatize their kids, steal from friends and family, show up at hospital ERs etc.
Yes, that’s why they should be locked up, and never given Narcan — DO NOT RESUSCITATE
> "Pelosi, the Clintons and the Bushes may be part of a loose mob but nobody is telling them what to do."
How do you know?
Central banks run everything. It’s so obvious as to be boring.
Is this link to "Read the whole thing there." not working?
Yup. Use the link at the top.
Let me condense my earlier comment. (It still has some fun rabbit holes for lovers of the weird.)
There's always been a big right-wing esoteric strain; Gary Lachman's *Dark Star Rising* covers it pretty well through the late 2010s. (He is a liberal, be warned.) The Nazis fooled around with this stuff; the original Wiccans like Gerald Gardner were British Tories (Celtic paganism is ancestral there after all); and in the first Trump election we had 'meme magic'.
OK, why?
Well, Christianity's invented by Jews and tells you to turn the other cheek. Wotan has no such problem. So Germanic and, less commonly, Celtic neopaganism has always been a thing on the far right. It totally fits the Germanic-against-Jewish-racial-struggle idea to be going back to older Germanic gods and rejecting Yahweh.
Ironically Christianity also gets rejected by left-wing young shes and theys for being too patriarchal; Barnes & Noble is full of books on witchcraft and has an increasingly wide selection of tarot cards these days. Also, if you're white and don't like Christianity Germanic and Celtic neopaganism is pretty much the only acceptable thing to do, because you don't want to be appropriating anything BIPOC.
In the 70s 'natural living', rejecting science, and going back to the land was 'left' because you were against industry, science, and business. Hippies were *flower* children. But with the rural-urban divide becoming big in the 1990s, followed by woke capitalism (esp. woke Big Tech) and the leftist capture of academia reaching the previously-apolitical sciences in the 2010s, going back to nature and moving to the country became more of a right-wing thing. Look at ivermectin and antivax during COVID, not to mention testicle tanning.
So, whether left or right, there's woo for you.
Have you read _The Real Anthony Fauci_? Which parts did you find woo woo and poorly sourced if so?
It’s garbage.
So you read it, then? Which parts did you find poorly sourced and unconvincing?
This whole thread of commenters seems off. They’re calling things woo woo but don’t say what they are and they mimic the left about “science” being the best in the west. Have any of them read, researched, or done anything during the COVID scam? If you’re on the right & that didn’t wake you up then nothing will.
I am not on the right but the covid juggernaut also felt to me like sanity dropping away beneath my feet. I would willingly read a substantive rebuttal of RFK Jr’s book but I just encounter mudslinging about him as a person. No argument that he would be a bad bet as a husband but the book is not about him.
A lot of people have put so much of their identity into being "pro-Science", they're unwilling to face the fact that our scientific institutions are hollowed out skinsuits.
The right is the counter culture today, so there is a rejection and over reaction to norms that were in place for decades that turned out to be wrong - and this is coupled with a decline in Christian religiosity that was been partly supplanted by a secular religiosity.
Health and diet are fair targets for this. The diet and food advice we received for the last few generations was disastrously wrong and unquestionably influenced by special interests rather than science. Same with pharma - while I am not at all opposed to the use of drugs when necessary, it's obvious that we are hugely over prescribed a constellation of medications. This is one of those crunchy issues where there is significant overlap between the left and the right.
Politically a lot of people desire a renewal, and stuff like diet and exercise are within easy reach of the average person as an outlet. Clearly there are BS fads as always, but in general a rejection of over processed food and an embrace of a variety of methods for movement and exercise is a positive thing.
Steve I like you but dismissing people's skepticism over the modern world as junk science isn't fair. Young people have watched health and longevity decline their entire adult lives. You cannot blame them for seeking alternatives
Don't forget the obesity epidemic. That is mass-scale undeniable crisis of recent vintage literally staring everyone in the face.
If modernity and The Science are so good, why has it made everyone obese and diabetic?
This should be Question #1, in my book. It's widespread (pun not intended, but hey), undeniable (visual evidence everywhere), and actively harmful.
Here in Hong Kong, there's food temptation everywhere; it's one of the world's great food cities. Contra the conventional wisdom, lots of the ubiquitous Chinese (and other Asian) food is calorie-dense, high carb, etc. And yet there are still very few obese people here.
So why not? The big difference that glares out to me is that, for the great majority of HK people, most of their meals are prepared from fresh, wholly-unprocessed ingredients. This means vegetables straight from the fields of Guangdong province, and meat from animals likely slaughtered the same day. Almost everybody here either goes to the market every day or two to buy ingredients, or sends their maid to do so.
And it's not just genetic, i.e. East Asian people are 'naturally slim'. I've learned to pick out ABCs (i.e. American-born Chinese) with excellent accuracy just by noting their typically 'thicker' look compared with HK Chinese.
Sometimes I think it's just differences in calorie intake, as dining on shared dishes Chinese style means you can stop eating when you're full instead of feeling like you've got to finish whatever's on your plate. But then I see people here chowing down like there's no tomorrow, and still not getting all that fat, and I do wonder if there's more to it.
Oh, and HK continues to have the world's longest average lifespan; it's now up at 85 or 86.
I got a little fatter in China, but that's because the beer was so cheap. Don't know how I would have fared with Cantonese food, which is really quite different from northern Chinese cuisine.
Thanks.
> "So why not?"
In this thread, Hypnotoad666 and I explore other possible reasons:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/will-the-fat-become-the-next-identity-politics-sacred-cow/#comment-5145172
By my count, ~11 of the 12 proposed reasons are byproducts (or primary products) of modernity and The Science. Adding in your two proposals might make it ~12 of 14.
FWIW, I lost weight visiting China, probably simply because most of the food didn't appeal to me.
Other possible reasons, which are underexamined and will probably remain so due to no financial incentive in favor of examination and immense financial incentive against: microplastics, exponential increase in microwave radiation, fetal ultrasound.
I make that ~15 out of 17 lying at modernity's doorstep.
Health and longevity declined their entire lives? Care to back that up? Lifespan declined during Covid but recovered. I’d like statistics.
Obesity, mental illness, cardiovascular fitness are all worse for the general population. These would impair the ability to fight off opportunistic infections like covid. Elderly people's lives are extended marginally by a pharmaceutical simulacrum of a functioning human body and tube feeding and respiration.
Lifespan has recovered? Since when? I’d wager that every single one of the boomer brigade in this thread defending the status quo still consumes cable news.
Lifespan has increased slightly since lockdowns ended but is still in a downward trend and lower than it was 5 years ago.
I don't know if this is what SamizBOT was referring to , but if you look at the chart on this page:
https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low
you can see that life expectancy in the US has been going down since Obamacare, even though spending per capita is going up. It's better in other OECD countries, but still showing diminishing returns.
Isn't much of the US decline due to fentanyl ODs and black on black murder?
Whitney Cummings has a bit where she says she spent a long time getting guys to explain bitcoin to her and finally concluded "oh, it's astrology for dudes".
I think she's on to something, though I think it's more that stock chart analysis is astrology for dudes. It's all just churning the overactive human propensity to see patterns combined with wishful thinking and the desire to improve our physical and mental health.
It's always been here.
So women like astrology and yoga and wiccanism. Men tend to weightlifting, martial arts, stock charts hallucination and stoicism. One suspects we call it woo-woo when it appeals more to women.
I mean, why not just say "I don't understand Bitcoin. I don't understand that it's a store of value, similar to gold or silver.?" It's OK.
I personally know some new-agey Trump fans. Actually, I've met quite a few up here in the Pacific NW.
There are basically three kinds of Christians up here:
Evangelical, Catholic and (Dutch) Reformed. Mainliners have merged with Progressives into a sort of post-Christianity.
If you come from the mainline tradition Christianity seems like a total failure because, well, rainbow flags are on all the churches. If the Dutch Calvinists, Roman Catholics and megachurches aren't your thing you might start looking further afield to fulfill spiritual needs.
Next thing you know you're practicing tantric meditation, following Q-anon and furiously trading crypto from your goat farm.
How does "crypto" fit in exactly?
I'm not sure, but it's big in these circles.
Eastern Orthodox is gaining in popularity. It’s more exotic than Catholicism.
Ironic because the local Slavs are mostly going charismatic/Pentecostal.
People are looking for something different?
Culturally we've all been a bit tossed to the winds in recent times. There's a feeling of betrayal by institutions that failed us as well. I left the church of my childhood for a couple decades before returning -- I felt for a while as though it had dropped the ball and was useless. Eventually I realized that given what it was facing it had stood its ground admirably, but it's hard to see that amidst all the personal turmoil young people face.
It's also less corrupted by (a) actual pedophiles and (b) modern ideology. The people who want to be Orthodox are consciously choosing that because it's old (therefore authentic and likely conservative) and all the Greek liturgy is a barrier to entry for casuals.
Also, fewer pedophiles. That's what made Rod Dreher switch. That scandal really turned a lot of people off Catholicism left and right. Most conservatives have families and worry about that kind of thing.
Spot on about the yoga pants.