Originally published at: The cultish language of "wellness mommy bloggers" ("DO YOUR RESEARCH") | Boing Boing
…
12 Likes
Mommy blogger: don’t let your children eat at McDonalds because of all of the harmful stuff they use to clean their counters and cooking areas.
Same mommy blogger a few days later: who wants to see me push out a baby in the wildness while standing in a creek that’s filled with PCBs, bacteria that can give you the super shits, amoebas and various unfiltered pharmaceuticals and agricultural/human waste?
27 Likes
Said it before, and I’ll say it again.
40 Likes
confirmation bias says
15 Likes
Wellness mommy bloggers are basically the infantry of people like Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, every other fake doctor from Oprah, etc. The mommies take their orders from a select few misinformation factories, but are very effective at spreading it because they have “grassroots cred” and an underdog mentality.
It’s frustrating, and I think it all goes back to the mistrust of institutions that Republicans have been breeding in people for decades. Science and modern medicine are splash damage from those efforts, in my humble opinion. It’s also worth noting that these mommy bloggers are only arm’s length away from white nationalism. Likely their “loving husbands who are amazing fathers” are listening to Alex Jones, Jordan Petersen, and Joe Rogan.
47 Likes
“Do your research” is the ultimate thought-terminating cliché, because it claims to empower the recipient to draw her own conclusions based on her own critical thinking and evaluation of source material, but in actuality, “Do your research” demands the exact opposite: total conformity to the speaker’s viewpoint.
This is the most important sentence in the article, and generalises far beyond the author’s target.
42 Likes
That is a great line, for sure. Other key takeaways:
Endorsing pseudoscience is not equivalent to viewing Western medicine with a critical lens.
This point doesn’t get made often enough. There are plenty of legit criticisms to be made of Big Pharma, racism in doctors, and other aspects of the current evidence-based medical system. However to go hard the other way is to throw the baby out with the bath water and roll civilization back a hundred years for no benefit.
These mothers have the privilege to devote themselves entirely to exorcising their homes from anything not adequately “clean”; the privilege to spend hours on “nourishing the body,” “retraining the brain,” and “restoring vitality and resilience”; and sharing “uncomfortable truths.”
This is key as well. At the end of the day everything these mommies do is overdosing on privilege. They have money and time to indulge all this ridiculousness, and they all happen to be healthy already so they can tell stories about how their choice of yogurt or whatever is the reason for their genetic good fortune.
It’s a really great piece. Well worth the read.
36 Likes
Absolutely this.
And US healthcare instituitions (and pharma, etc.) are so thoroughly compromised/degraded by profit vultures that people’s day to day experience feeds the mistrust (justifiably).
And mostly male, mostly white centered research in “western medicine” has done women a disservice. Lot’s of horrorshow reading down that rabbit hole.
All of this lends credibility to the loons and grifters in the bloggosphere. Real sh!tshow.
20 Likes
This is not research, this is finding mis-information that agree with your fucked up way of looking at life.
16 Likes
Right – so called because you search, and then you re-search, and then you re-search, until you find the source that matches your belief.
(Apologies if I am unnecessarily laboring to un-subtle the intended joke.)
19 Likes
In every walk of life, language serves to define ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups.’
In this instance, the “do your own research!” trope serves both as an identifier, AND as a rhetorical device to shift any responsibility away from the utterer and on to the questioner.
In real life, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
7 Likes
Q: WHO were the ones that weakened FDA?
A: Whoever passed DSHEA (1994)
Q: And who are they?
A: Leader is Orin Hatch, (R-UT)
As for “do your research”, I saw this post from Edzard Ernst recently, and he probably swiped it off someone else:
26 Likes
I agree with everything except I feel compelled to say (wrongly or rightly) that I also suspect science was always a main target and in a way so was mass death a goal as a “punishment” for sin. It reminds me of a type of backlash from religious communities arising from the “threat of atheism” which is often framed as an attack from science on religion and family values. I guess I just mean I think this is actually a very meaningful reaction against science as a source of authority by… threatened authoritarians, which is how I definitely see the GOP and the portion of centrists who go along with them.
18 Likes
There are plenty of good reasons to keep kids away from McPinkSlime that don’t involve made up woo.
4 Likes
Yah I agree with that, for sure. I overly downplayed that in my comments. Tearing down science and replacing it with religion for easier control of the populace has been a goal of the Right for… maybe forever. The easiest way to control people is to convince them objective truth doesn’t exist and that therefore your emotionally-appealing simulacrum reality is as good as any.
12 Likes
It’s anti-intellectualism. Yankistanis have been publicly making fun of “eggheads” at least since the 50s.
The rethugs want to wipe out the intellectuals and any real culture. They’re just like chairman fucking mao.
4 Likes
In Britain they are all on Mumsnet, where they have been turned into an infantry of TERFs.
7 Likes
Maybe somewhen in a bright future somebody can base a philosophy of truth-finding on falsification, one day…
2 Likes
Descartes already did.
“I think, therefore I am” is soon followed by…
“I returned to an examination of the idea which I had of a perfect being, I found that that being contains the idea of existence in the same way as the fact the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles is contained in the idea of a triangle, or that in a sphere all the parts are equidistant from the centre, or something even more evident, and that, as a result, it is at just as certain that God, this perfect being, is or exists as any geometric proof can be.”
Which is followed by…“if there are still some people who are insufficiently persuaded of the existence of God and their soul by the reasons I have provided, I’d like them to know that everything else which they perhaps are more confident about in their thinking, like having a body and knowing that there are stars and an earth, and things like that, are less certain than God’s existence.”
And guess which god he arrived at in his pursuit of pure reason?
1 Like
And then Popper did it better…
4 Likes
