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I’ve always hated oz for his peddling of just about every quack nonsense to come on his show, from faith healing to magic to psychics to medicines that only work if you believe in them. He’s the biggest prick for how he misleads his rather large audience. With so much reach, he could have been a force for good, but he insisted does a ton of harm. I used him as a case study on the importance of scientific scepticism and the moral imperative for such when I used to teach future nurses and doctors. That actually caused some problems because some students were already against “western medicine,” despite my urging being for science and evidence based medicine. Some acted as though I was offending their freedom of religion.
It’s a little funny to see this quack failing at politics. His bs doesn’t fly when he has to win over the general public, and not just his usual gullible tv audience.
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"I have nothing against your religion. What you worship is entirely up to you.
But this isn’t religion, this is medicine, and medicine is based on science, and when it comes to medicine I have two words for you: prove it."
As Tim Minchin so memorably said: “You know what they call Alternative Medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.”
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I live in a jurisdiction where first cousins are legal, so I guess I’m in no position to judge.
All I can say is… If you met my cousins, you wouldn’t be tempted. So uh… Let’s call it a non-issue.
When confronted with this, I try to challenge people on what they think “western medicine” is. Usually when you drill into that objection, it turns out what they are against is big evil pharmaceutical companies. And yah- on that we can all agree. Big corporations exploiting the failing US healthcare system suck. That’s completely separate from “western medicine”.
Sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) this helps move the conversation forward a bit by separating the idea of evidence-based medicine from the big corporations that nobody likes. From there you can start asking things like, “how could you tell if acupuncture works?” before getting into all the thousands of studies showing it doesn’t.
People create these totemic, monolithic, false dichotomies in their heads, like “Western Medicine,” as though you have to accept all or nothing and it is indivisible.
The exact same thing happens with GMO. Arguably most people hate GMO, but don’t know a single thing about it. When you drill into the belief with them, it turns out what they actually hate is, again, big agribusinesses. That has nothing to do with the science of GMO and how it is helping feed the world (and has been for arguably the entire history of agriculture). Again, people have built up this giant false dichotomy that we have to choose between GMO with corporate seed patents, or Hippie Jane in her backyard farm. Nothing in between is acceptable. And of course, going all in on the Hippe Jane route would be tantamount to genocide because billions would starve, but nobody likes to talk about that part.
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… is one of the defining characteristics of conservatives, isn’t it?
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I remember when it was illegal to be a first cousin…
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Is that what the beginning of Exodus was all about?!?
TIL.
Also, you’re much older than I thought! 
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I don’t know. I come from a heavily medical family (2 dr.s, 2 nurses in my immediate) and they all look at the world through the lens of medical science, regardless of the issue. I can totally understand Oz from 8 yrs ago–when he was someone people thought of as a medical resource–defaulting to a doctor’s mindset.
And, fwiw, this question comes up in Dan Savage’s podcast/column every year or so: “I’m fucking a cousin and I’m conflicted about it” (dude wanting to stop and not stopping = conflicted in my book).
His answer is always the same: “gross, but probably legal and safe.” Which I think makes sense since it’s a fair guess that lots of the internal conflict probably comes from people thinking they’re breaking the law or breeding mutants.
As has been said here and elsewhere, there’s a lot of good reasons to detest this guy. But this one’s a big meh.
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I don’t understand the connection you’re making between “cousins vs. unrelated” and “consenting versus non-consenting”. If you’re saying rape is OK as long as the victim and perp are unrelated, I’m going to have to disagree.
You might be a redneck if…
You go looking for a date at the family reunion.
– Jeff Foxworthy
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