The prior poster said " there are legitimate reasons for a distrust in a scientific-economic complex that has steamrolled other values." Yes, a complex. Too much ‘science’ is owned and abused by corporations, and fraught with fraud, deception, and bribery. That’s why every assumption and conclusion must be tested and verified. And negative results shouldn’t be suppressed. And I hear reindeer on my roof already.
Yes, society is crumbling. We’re all doomed. Bummer.
You really must have read a different article. This article went on to talk about the fact that this stuff is being spread by grassroots activists, community-by-community, and that’s the biggest challenge, because it’s at the community level that measles pops up. It talked about specific political backers and legal developments, and it linked to articles about this year’s outbreaks, not ones in 2013.
Maybe you wanted this article to be a book, but it covers a lot of specific ground, even if it didn’t mention the names you think are important.
No. I read the article linked. Please stop insisting I didn’t.
The article linked, about the resurgence of measles, did not actually mention any of the people by name who are actively, currently spreading the antivax theories that are causing the spread of measles.
You’ve made it clear that you not only don’t care, but that you think naming responsible parties is dangerous because it conjures them up like scary demons. That’s fine. I disagree.
That’s not fair. I care a lot. Don’t take it personally. I just don’t think making an article that focused more on celebrities would have told a more useful story. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt that you hadn’t read the whole article, because you were making a few specific claims about it that weren’t true.
It names many people. Just not Gwyneth Paltrow or whoever you think it doesn’t. It’s a bigger story than what she said, and I think the article is better when it spends more time on what’s going wrong overall than making hero or anti-hero figures of the individual spokespeople. I also don’t think name-dropping all the pro-vaccine celebrities would be that effective in countering anti-vax nonsense.
But that might undermine the appeal to a mythical past where things were better, you might even say when America used to be great.
The important thing is that the sky is falling and its the result of moral failing by those people. Its not like if you look at this subject with less pearl clutching these will turn out to be the result of old biases that were already present and accepted at the time. And a 70 year project of fostering, feeding them and validating them through existing paranoia. Combined with erosion in regulation, public science and education funding. And media and watch dog failures to even gesture towards truth instead of spin.
Nostalgia is the most toxic impulse
-John Hodgeman
It would have been good if it had, at least, mentioned Pastor Kenneth Copeland, who is personally responsible for much of the spread of the resurgence of measles through telling his congregations not to get vaccinated. That’s not “name dropping”. It’s spreading ignorance. To an article about the spread of the disease, it’s at least as important to talk about as the Lancet article that inspired the antivax movement. Leaving that information out makes for an utterly useless article that’s spreading fear uncertainty and doubt.
For some wealthy people, yes. Peter Thiel is infamous for putting some of his billions toward the neoreactionary/“Dark Enlightenment” movement. Then there are the billionaires whose bug-out plans for societal collapse reflect a philosophy that the solution to climate change is a mass die-off of “undeserving” humans. Underlying it all is an ugly techno-feudalist bent.
Therefore, with this logic - Popular culture’s meshing with politics equates to the measles that is making society fall apart.
His “NASA” bit makes it clear this was recorded before the rise of the flat earthers.
I read a study years ago about the impact of TV on children. The one part that stuck with me was the theory that kids started believing they knew as much or more than their parents did, because they thought all information came from the same place. There was no consideration of life experience or wisdom gained through maturity. The kids were looking at TV more than their parents, while their parents watched the evening news and a few shows. I watched a lot of TV, but never thought I knew as much as my elders. I never believed any other kid knew as much, either.
I’ll bet there are similar studies about the Internet. Worse, there are more stories each week about young people who mock older people who don’t use tech, because they believe that means their elders are ignorant. We got lessons in logic and common sense, and I don’t know at what point in US history that became the exception instead of the rule. The various dangerous games (involving choking, ingesting large quantities of spices/fluids/household chemicals) reported on a regular basis now didn’t exist then, because no one would fall for it.
We don’t just need this education for children, we need a way to wake up a significant percentage of adults who somehow missed getting this foundation at home or in school.
I used to be an anti-Vax’er. They can be troublesome, annoying, and could literally have almost permanent damage on soft tissue like ear-drums.
Then my kid stopped playing and I pick up some good Jazz albums.
Oh, wait. I meant anti-Sax’er.
No, a percentage of the young people think their elders are stupid because they don’t/won’t/can’t (pick one or all) use the tech. By the same token, try to get a young person to do an oil change on a car, build a wooden fence from scratch on their own etc. Face them with their own inabilities and they may get the gist of having to learn something before being able to use the technology.
I was in a used book store in Sebastopal, CA yesterday, and started getting nostalgiac when I saw some alternative health books on the shelf that I remembered from the early 1970s. Then I remembered that this town has one of the highest rates in California of vaccine exemption, and got angry at my younger self for thinking of this stuff as harmless fun.
Do you blame O’Reilly? The place has been wildly morphed over the last couple decades. BTW I used to pedal into S’nastyhole. The bike routes have improved.
No; do they recommend against vaccines in Modern Vigour Vim?
One thing I usually find charming about Sebastopal is how little they’ve changed in the decades I’ve visited there, but maybe it is time to bid adieu to some of the new-agey stuff that is still so prevalent in the place.
If the blame for this problem can be laid at the feet of just a few individuals, then it undermines the idea that this is the end of civilization. Kinda like blaming Hitler for the death of 6 million jews, it oversimplifies things.
I didn’t say that, at all, really.
The blame for this problem can be laid, initially, at the feet of the fake doctors who published fake articles in The Lancet linking vaccination to autism. The idea spread and was picked up by both alt-right anti-government types as well as ultra-new-age health-cult types and spread, as the article says, through social media, podcasts, YouTube, etc.
But I think any article talking about the resurgence of measles that doesn’t at least mention the huge outbreaks of it that have been spreading outwards from the megachurches that preach anti-vax ideas, which has been well documented as a major source of this problem, is poorly written and researched. And if the author wanted to claim society is falling apart, well, the fact that churches are telling people not to keep their kids healthy is a pretty great point they could have made.
The problem is that this is a feature, not a bug. This is just what all children are like, how the brain develops and learns. As I age what I’m seeing is that so-called adults are really not that different from children at all. They are generally not egregiously stupid enough to eat tide pods and such, but still pretty darn stupid. Thinking “the earth looks flat to me, so it must be flat” is just a more complex version of not touching the stove. “Scientists” are just another version of parents. Human nature and behavior should just be a part of overall human education every year they are in school. It should just be built on year after year like mathematics.
But the strength of the scientific method and logic is that they can be cross-checked with other people, not in that they easily lead to good results. For an average person going with their gut will produce better results than attempting to use logic and science themselves. Science beats our gut feelings because it creates a common way of understanding what is right and that allows us to combine our work. I may be ten times as good at guessing as I am at reasoning things out, but guesses are individual and logic can be cross-checked with 100 people.
The problem is that system of cross-checking is itself political and subject to manipulation. If you don’t trust the scientific community to actually do the science right or to tell you the results factually, then you can’t rely on that collective reasoning and you are reduced back to gut feelings vs. your own reason without objective checks.
Science was implicated because the opioid crisis showed just how much people who we rely on to give us the best answers could be bought off with money. A few fancy dinners out to the right people and next thing you know you have nations full of doctors working on bad information. Unless you are going to start from scratch and invent fire yourself, science requires trust to work. We break that trust and science stops producing results.
I don’t think the phenomenon of elders complaining that kids think they know everything started with TV. Pretty sure you can find ancient Greek texts on that theme.
To me, this is all a recent phenomenon. I haven’t seen a child spontaneously develop what some describe as “know it all behavior” at a young age. Among some teens and college-age kids, sure. Chalk that up to rebellion and/or more exposure to knowledge beyond what exists at home.
I’ve got a lot of teachers in my family, and the ones who are still at it after 30-40+ years talk about how much the system has been undermined since they started. They definitely see a change in the parents similar to what you described. If a student isn’t doing well, they get defensive. Their child can do no wrong, and they think education is a passive activity. They expect the teachers to fill their little empty vessels with information, instead of encouraging their children to actively learn and respond to challenges. The percentage of students who never master the basics - reading, writing, and arithmetic is growing.
I just checked my state’s basic skills exam result website for grades 3 - 8. For math, among the youngest 54% are considered proficient or advanced (decreases to 31% by grade 8). Language starts at 64% and decreases to 62%, and science goes from 76% to 54%. In every category, performance gets worse as the students get older. It’s preventable, but parents have to be willing to fight against TPTB who only want to create more sheeple.
