Originally published at: Watch: Jordan Klepper speaks to anti-vaxxers in LA's "wellness culture" | Boing Boing
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Does anyone have the sauce? A proper link to the youtube video because it’s not available in Canada.
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Is it this one?: Jordan Klepper Vs The ‘Wellness’ Anti-Vaxxers Of California | The Daily Show With Trevor Noah - YouTube
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“Wellness” is one of those trigger words that let me know whoever said it doesn’t have any actual exprertise or education in medicine.
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Snake Oil Sales, always has been, always will be.
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To me wellness triggers more of a “yellow alert”, because real hospitals and medical clinics have been subverting the word to mean medically valuable health practices. I think they are trying to get more of the wellness Q-nuts to show up and receive actual medical care without stigma.
However, I’m not worried that these people won’t self-identify themselves. There’s still a whole pile of words that trigger red alerts, such as homeopathy, acupuncture, detoxification, cleansing, etc.
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Before trump came along I got the sense Republicans (like my parents) were all for vaccines. Especially older ones who grew up getting them as kids. I remember the swine flu sweeping through iowa a few years ago and no complaints when a vaccine became available. People just got it. i always thought of anti-vax people as the sorta lunatic fringe of the left actually. (Im pretty far left myself but I’m talking about this type of weird thing where some people embrace “all-natural” to the point where they disbelieve actual science). but then Trump made it political because his fragile ego didn’t wanna admit a pandemic happening on his watch. And here we are. Something that wasn’t really very political - especially on the right - became political.
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A lot of what I see connected to wellness out here in the Portland area is the extension of the medical centers and services industry. Yeah, there’s some granola types in there, but for the most part, it’s the hospitals that are like, “Okay, you’re not sick. But let’s get you even better at being well.”
Idiocy is bipartisan. Not equally distributed, mind you, but it has a seat at both tables.
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Trying to convince these Goopy type marks that science is a thing is about as fruitless a task as trying to talk reason to Qnuts or MAGAts. When they wax rhapsodic about whatever “natural” wellness woo they’ve been sold I nod politely as if to a slow-witted child, but inside I’m all…
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Well, this is depressing.
Although it also should be said that a number of “hippie” yoga wellness types who people previously assumed to be on the left have turned out, during the Trump era, to be raving fascists, so there’s that, too. (People tend to think of the historical hippies as left-wing, but the actual movement was apolitical, about dropping out of society, not engaging with politics at all. Modern “hippie” types seem to have even less connection to left-wing politics.)
Assuming the Goopy types aren’t Qnuts. There’s a surprising (to me, anyways) amount of overlap there. (Also, weirdly, I get the impression that although Q is explicitly a MAGAt thing, a number of people are getting into Q without first being MAGAts. Trump support ends up a side-effect of being pulled into the conspiracy theories.)
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I remember reading something (possibly even here?) about how wellness/antivax ideation was becoming a gateway into Qnuttery. The underlying urges–distrust of medical/scientific expert “elites” and government bureaucracy–aren’t all that different.
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Ironically, Trump actually boasted about the vaccine for months, it was always coming “very soon”, and would solve everything, and he probably believed that too because it’s what he wanted-- for the pandemic to be magically solved. Hydroxychloroquine or injecting bleach or a vaccine, whatever, just make it go away. He even tried to take credit for the vaccine.
The problem is bigger than Trump, he was just a logical end result of the “entertainment journalism” of Fox News and trollish contrarianism of Rush Limbaugh. If the masses of conservatives can believe that a birth certificate verified by the Republican governor and Attorney General of Hawaii is actually fake, then they will believe whatever they want as long as it fits how they want the world to be. In that they are exactly like people who believe a coffee enema will enhance their health, and breathing techniques will ward off COVID.
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I always liked the saying “The left wing has a lunatic fringe, but the right wing is a lunatic fringe.”
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I don’t find being stupid to be all that surprising of a symptom to arise when people are already bad at thinking critically.
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Most of those were the left wing of capitalism, rather than the left wing. The left tend to be pro-vax, as it is antisocial to spread disease. There are some antivax leftists, but they tend to be the fringe of the fringe, people like anarcho-primitivists (there were no vaccines in pre-agricultural times), hardcore anti-capitalist individualists (You can’t tell me what to do!), and whatever Piers Corbyn is (I don’t even know where to start).
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This suddenly made me think of my cousin, a small-town, uneducated, meth-addled a-hole who, I found out a few years back got big into conspiracy theories. Recently I saw a letter where he scrawled something about how his critical thinking had improved - and I realized he had confused his buying into conspiracy theories with developing critical thinking skills.
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What’s sad is, in many cases conspiracy thinking sort of emerges out of a partial and incomplete understanding and application of critical thinking skills.
It’s that old saw, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
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Thanks. I think. I lasted about 30 seconds in the interviews, then had to go away.
Yeah i guess a lot of the people I’m thinking of lean more independent or libertarian these days. Actually I don’t know anyone personally so I might be creating imaginary people in my head in which case I have no idea where they fall politically. Ha.
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