“Who knew?”? Every Jew who spent his summers at a Jewish Youth Camp (me), did a youth tour of Israel (me), or spent more than 5 minutes at a Jewish community center (again, me). Every Jewish woman I’ve ever known has had experience aplenty.
My shiksa wife on the other hand…
If we don’t get the fascists out of the GOP we’re doomed…
Bet a nickel this goober is a QAnoner, and one of the most dangerous kind of all. He is in a position of power. These people aren’t ‘representatives’, they are Law-Mongers dedicated to making life miserable for anyone not like them.
I wonder if the Certification Board in Kentucky knows about this knob’s spewings.
I was under the impression that some education in chemistry was needed to be a pharmacist.
As the legacy of You Know Who has shown, Truth is anethema to a good line of bullshit.
Either way, this tool needs to lose his certification to practice pharmacology.
Maybe they should take the citizenship test that immigrants have to take.
Fail it, & get barred from office, for life.
FTFY.
Not just here, but everywhere else, too.
The fascists are thriving off the uneducated and ignorant. It will be difficult to stop them when the US has plenty of education adverse rubes.
It isn’t an education problem or an intelligence problem. This is all motivated reasoning. People want to believe this stuff and will do so until society speaks up and says it’s not okay (at which point they learn to at least shut up about it). These people have all the same information as the rest of us, and most are not stupid. They simply choose beliefs and information sources that jive with their shitty feelings.
Not just, no. Part of the problem is thinking that they are just duped or evil masterminds rather than people for whom the cruelty is the point. Many people embrace fascism because they AGREE with it and want to live in a fascist country. They WANT to ethnically cleanse “their” land of the “wrong” people, not because they are uneducated, but because they agree with the aims of fascism. Pretty much every country on earth has a fascist problem, even countries with much better educational systems that ours. So, no if everyone understands the Holocaust, it will end fascism in America.
We know children are taught to be deplorable so childhood education is definitely a part of the equation, book banning anti CRT folks are at least partially focused on it.
I agree with you on motivated reasoning but society is already screaming “fuck these fascists” and it hasn’t changed their beliefs, in fact they know it is coming and use it to strengthen their resolve. That’s why my hope is on educated children with a broad experience of knowledge to help in their adult reasoning.
… added, and I’m not saying education is The Problem, but I do believe we need to spend more on it.
Spending more education is never a bad thing, for sure! Totally agree. I’d really like to see more emphasis on evaluating quality of sources, specifically. In this world where none of us can be experts on everything we need to know, we need to understand whom to trust to be experts for us. That seems to be something that half the population does very poorly at. When people are trusting shock jocks or Facebook memes over the FDA and the CDC, we have a pretty serious breakdown of the system.
Because they are not being held accountable for what they do. 
We should have pivoted on this issue after OKC bombing, but we continued to pretend like Muslims were the real problem, even back then, not white supremacists. Now we have a major political party full of white supremacists. Until we address that, this will continue to be a problem.
Yikes!
Yup. Just this week I was sent an “unbiased study” where the first sentence stated Obama was murdering eagles in California, and the bottom of the “study” included a donation button for a christian church in Florida. 
Of course that goes back to motivated reasoning and beliefs, but a lot of the country was taught using encyclopedias and not how to discern the information age.
It took some work to track down what real connection exist that twisted into this form. It turns out the parent company of the original developer of mifepristone was Hoechst AG. Hoechst AG was one of the constituent companies of IG Farbin. Given the scale of IG Farbin and the history of corporate mergers that is only true of most chemical advancements since the late 1800s.
Intertwined corporate histories are not surprising. This asshat’s claim that Zyklon B and mifepristone are the same compound is indefensible, though.
Clearly the real drug he’s dealing with is the bad faith he’s hopped up on; but this isn’t even a “don’t get the banal trade names confused/beware powers of ten” pharmacist problem; one of these things is a drug, the other is a fumigant pesticide that has never been represented or sold as having medical applications. Guy couldn’t direct you to the right aisle at the pharmacy(not that they sell hydrogen cyanide fumigation gear at CVS, but the mouse traps and the prescription drugs are definitely in different parts of the store).
Not that it’s relevant to contemporary pharmacy practice; but I don’t think that hydrogen cyanide is even one of the agents that had an interesting history as both a chemical weapon and an inspiration to chemotherapy research, like lewisite and the nitrogen mustards.
I think that having IG Farbin involved at some point is to chemistry what IBM being involved at some point is to computer science: a very safe guess; but so likely to be trivially true as to be practically meaningless.
A big “franchise” within that universe is “The Elders of Zion”. For most of my life, educated liberals and progressives in U.S. thought it was a ridiculous relic of the past, a safety neutered and thoroughly de-bunked and discredited museum piece mummy that could be joked about when it came up. But we’ve all discovered over the past several years that a shockingly large number arseholes like this have in fact been keeping it alive and thriving in slightly altered long after it was declared dead in 1945.
We’ve all heard that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”; but what’s a real shock has been the magnitude of the 'and those who have some distinctly dubious scraps of mythic history are just itching to double down on it" part that they didn’t tell us about.
Count me among the people who naïvely thought that particular patently silly conspiracy theory had been relegated to the dustbin of history. Little did I know people have been harbouring it all along. Or perhaps “resurrected it” would be more accurate.
I think what I’ve realized in more recent years is that conspiracy theories aren’t about information- they are a complicated stand-in for a person’s feelings about the world. That’s why you can’t debunk them with facts and why they never go away. Because people are still racist and afraid (despite how far we’ve come), these proxies for those hateful emotions are stood up all over again when the climate is amenable to them.
Similarly, in the queer community we’ve seen the return of “queers are child molesters”. That’s another one that I thought died off in the 1970s, but I think I heard a US politician say a version of it just the other day. Sigh.
For these reasons, I currently believe that we shouldn’t focus on “fixing” these beliefs in the short term. We need to shame them into silence with our majority voices of reason and inclusion (because these bigots are the minority) to keep people from acting on them. Once better norms are re-established, we can start the work of helping people like this get in touch with their feelings and why they are so angry & scared (and thus lashing out with flat earths and antivax and all the rest). We didn’t do that work over the last 40 years when things were fairly calm on this front, and we got TFG. We gotta tamp down this fire again.
Same here. I put time into studying the thing myself and I thought it was safely dead, an object of worship only for a handful of cranks and cultists. With few exceptions I think even the most politically and historically aware of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, will have to admit we underestimated it staying power.
One thing I also missed is how adaptable it was. I knew all about the Blood Libel, for example, but it was only until I started reading about Qanon that I realised that not only was it a new variant but that a disturbingly large number of Americans had accepted it.
I used to joke about the over-the-top and absurd claims of the “Protocols”. I haven’t since 2016.
I wish I could find it now, but somewhere I read a remarkable summary about how all this stuff always comes back to anti-Semitism. Even flat earth, anti-vax, wi-fi allergies and other nonsense. When you start interviewing those people and really getting to the roots of their fears, it ends up being about “the Jews” way, way more often than mainstream people realize.
