One of my things is basic science literacy and the demolition of stupid, harmful, ridiculous conspiracy theories and flim-flam. I don’t care if people pick up a four-leaf clover or if they have a pair of lucky underwear. I don’t care if people are religious or not. None of that bothers me as much as people who actively discourage others from seeking something like chemotherapy or vaccination. Don’t get me wrong, it’s one thing if someone is 90 years old, has a cancer with a low survival rate, and chooses to forgo treatment except for palliative care. What I’m talking about are the people who advocate “natural cures” and deliberately undermine the current scientific understanding of pathology and treatment. Any and all challenges to their claims are met with the charge of conspiracy: That there is a deliberate concerted effort to hide real cures and promote illness. As if world leaders and Pharma executives never die of cancer or other diseases.
People who claim they can cure cancer with special secret gimmicks are scum. They are below scum, there is a special place in hell for them where they are constantly filled with the false hope that they will escape hell before they are plunged deeper into it. Then the process repeats, forever. To be clear I’m not talking about doctors who give a good prognosis for certain kinds of lymphoma or cancers that can be excised. I’m talking about the people who prey on the desperate.
This is why I feel compelled to inject myself into conversations that I might otherwise be wholly uninterested in until someone uses the word “chemicals” to mean “miasma.” Back in the bad old days before medical science was anywhere near what it is now, people didn’t know what caused disease, but they connected it with filth, and odor, and the emanations of this “miasma” (literally, “bad air”) were responsible for disease. That’s what the word “chemicals” is to a lot of people. It is almost the same nebulous concept: a foul wind blowing high around the world, striking people down. And so all you have to do to avoid death is avoid “chemicals.” Much like people of the past who perfumed handkerchiefs to hold over their noses, and prepared aromatic poultices to wear around their necks, the people of the present shield themselves from villainous chemicals with organic produce and “all natural” cleansers.
But of course, a chemical is simply stuff, and stuff is simply chemicals. If you can smell it, taste it, or touch it, it’s a chemical. All of which are bad for you in some quantity. Even the ones we need kill us in normal everyday quantities. Oxygen ages you, from before you are even born. Arsenic, the poisoner’s handmaiden, is something all human beings require in trace amounts to survive. Even with this knowledge there is so much we still don’t know about the way the body processes iron, the manner in which we use energy, and the ways in which we perceive with our senses, that is all connected to a very real, very different, conception of “chemicals.” It is this “stuffness” of the world around us that dictates our every waking, sleeping, and dying moment.
So simply saying that chemicals are killing us, and never once mentioning the ways in which they’re saving us, or even are us, is not just unfair, but perpetuates an ancient myth: That you can escape misfortune and death by lifestyle and talismans alone. This belief kills people before their time. Of course, they were going to die anyway. I guarantee you will die, and your children and their children and so on. And it will always be chemicals that do the killing, to some degree. The only question is: Which chemicals, when? The answer that too many quacks and nincompoops give, perhaps unwittingly in some cases, is: The chemicals your disease produces, sooner rather than later.
The chlorine atoms on the PCBs that leeched into the local water supply from an old transformer that was never disposed of properly will kill you, but not before a different set of chlorine atoms already saved you. The chlorine atoms that saved you from the poisons unleashed by water-borne bacteria that would otherwise thrive in our water supplies, did so when you were young and until you could grow old enough to read this post. And not before yet another set of chlorine ions gave up their protons, so that you could digest food for energy. But, you will hear people talk about chlorine in Splenda being one way the insidious but nebulous “chlorine industry” tries to work toxins into our lives.
Meanwhile, fire is yellow-orange on our planet. It’s probably other colors on other planets where flames are possible. It’s this familiar orange because our planet’s crust is contaminated with sodium, most often in the form of sodium chloride. Our bodies reflect this, having evolved to utilize the more common elements. So it came to pass that the very first “chlorine industry” was the collection of salt from the seas and from rocks and caves.
So I do get sensitive about people talking about these things without nuance or an appreciation that the world we live in is deeply complex, often in ways that we do not understand. It was only relatively recently that we truly began to understand the natural world and develop a reliable method to interrogate it. The way forward is to confront our ignorance, not to create new and senseless bogeymen. Preserving the environment and safeguarding our health requires us to understand chemicals, not to be afraid of them. The more we understand matter and the laws that govern it, and more we reject outdated notions of illness and disease, the more we can move towards a healthier and enjoyable future for everyone. Who knows? If we keep at it long enough, there might be a version of the future where humans are dancing carelessly around a reddish-purple bonfire, by a green sea, on a distant moon.
Agreed 100%, from the top of your post to the bottom.
But especially…
YAY, I get to repost my favorite news clipping of all time! This is the lens through which all polling needs to be viewed.
(ca 1992, recent polling similar)
This just in: Earth revolves around sun!
CHICAGO (AP) More than 450 years after Copernicus proved the Earth revolves around the sun, millions of adult Americans seem to think it’s the other way around, a researcher reported yesterday.
On very basic ideas, vast numbers of Americans are scientifically illiterate," said Jon Miller of Northern Illinois University, who conducted a nationwide survey for the National Science Foundation.
In the July telephone survey of 2041 adults 18 or older, people were asked about 75 questions testing their knowledge of basic science. Miller said.
Asked whether the Earth goes around the sun or the sun around the Earth, 21 percent replied incorrectly. Seven percent said they didn’t know.
Of the 72 percent who answered correctly, 45 percent said it takes one year for the Earth to orbit the sun, 17 percent said one day, 2 percent said one month and 9 percent didn’t know.
The responses indicate that about 55 percent of adult Americans, or some 94 million people, don’t know that the Earth revolves around the sun once a year, Miller said.
My other thing is shitty scriptwriter tropes like time travel, evil twin and insomnia plots. They’re irresistible crack for writers out of real ideas, production money, or both.
…and she woke up, and it was all just a dream…
Intellectually lazy, just like when fantasy writers write themselves into a corner and have to get their hero out of a jam, because nothing ever bad happens to the hero, so poof! magic!
That’s why Heinlein was so radical when he killed the hero of Podkayne of Mars, it just wasn’t done, especially in a YA! It’s what made Walking Dead compelling for a while, they seemed unafraid of killing off anybody.
Eh… After it was revealed they won a Grammy for an album they didn’t actually perform on, I went out and got a Milli Vanilli poster. You gotta admire something like that…
This brings up another thing of mine - the idea that majority-rule democracy is always right and always the best way to make decisions, despite the obvious fact that most of us don’t know crap about most things. Not that democracy is all bad, but it’s often advocated without reason or thought more like a religious faith than anything.
Like all systems of government, democracy has extra requirements.
Communism requires that everyone play fair.
Feudalism requires adequte crops and a lot of serfs.
Democracy requires a well-educated electorate.
Your humours are obviously out of balance.
I go to the pot shop, and sometimes see on packaging “No crazy chemicals”, or something like that. “100% chemical-free?”
I’ll sometimes give the salesperson a hard time. I’ll say “What does ‘no chemicals’ mean?” And they’ll give me something like, “this is CO2 processed. None of that butane or aldehyde stuff.” I’ll reply “and the THC? It gets me high without THC?” Blah blah, THC is a chemical. “No chemicals” is meaningless bullcrap. Or “Is it natural to put mars’s atmosphere near the center of Jupiter? Because that’s what CO2 processing is. You crush CO2 down until it’s a liquid, then use it as a solvent just like butane.”
Which is why the Founders created a Republic rather than a Democracy. Just look to Californian or British plebiscites to see why. Where a Republic can runs off the rails is when the uninformed believe the equally ignorant can best represent them. (Need I say more?)
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