It really bothers me that people still use the term “snake oil” in such a pejorative way. It may not be a miracle cure, but snake oil is rich in Omega 3 fatty acids and has an array of anti-inflammatory properties. Most Americans would be far healthier if they had a tablespoon or so each day.
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The purpose of all the horse dewormer mockery is to shame idiots into getting vaccinated and being slightly less idiotic about this one issue. Anybody capable enough and willing to understand the drug’s marginal efficacy in limited situations is already vaccinated and doesn’t need that lesson.
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They should just metaphorically apply the term chiropractor to the entire field of con artistry. They’re trying to cover it all, anyways.
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Yeah this. The only point is being able to say “the 1 million Americans
who died should have taken ________. A million Americans wouldn’t have died if Biden would have authorized __________.”
I was just having a long Covid discussion with someone and this came to me as well. Are we looking at a post summer uptick this year?
I sometimes take a peek at this directional covid map from ESRI:
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=c6ba9c02006948b9bdc1d66436fa5d29
Which summarizes both rates and trend by county.
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i am aware of the non-gmo non-vaxx naturopathic etc left wing, and to me they also did not seem as extreme, but i am not well versed in this. i guess i’ve never been aware antifa protein pills or survival kits. i know some of my friends got the vaccine/autism misinformation thrown at them during pregnancy, and my current coworkers bought the china study vegan diet hook line and sinker. if i had to guess different sides hate 5g for slightly different reasons. it’s all rooted on fear, but lowgrade compared to fear of immigrants or gun rights? on some level people think rogan is leftwing because of bernie, even though he clearly isn’t consistently only left or only right. idk.
the krugman opinion is instructive in the sense that there is a grift motive here intertwined with political, and this time it’s actually deadly.
Depends on what the variant situation is like imo.
That’s about what the CDC recommends:
- Fully vaccinated people should be tested 3-5 days following a known exposure to someone with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 and wear a mask in public indoor settings for 14 days or until they receive a negative test result.
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There are different profiles of anti vaxxers because there are different psychological drivers of the behavior. The deplorables are the biggest anti vaxxer group because they are the largest group with unified behavioral drivers (reactively resisting when told to do something, feeling pleased when their actions upset “the libs”, viewing everything as a consumer experience where they decide if they want something and the customer is always right). The fact that vaccine hesitation is to a large extent partisan is a fact, Republicans > Independents > Dems is an observable trend in polls.
There is a broader theme to anti vaxx attitudes that cuts across political groups and that is rooted in a deep psychological desire to have a secret, special something that is not available to the general public. This is the source of much of the non-deplorable anti vaxx attitudes, or anti scientific attitudes in general among people with privilege. A Steve Jobs type gravitates to “alternative medicines” because in every other sphere of his life his wealth bought him special access to very limited privileges that were not widely available. Of course in the face of cancer he would assume there is something better than the chemo and surgery they give to plebes!
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That there are snake oil salesmen who use new-agey marketing for their snake oil isn’t really a rebuttal of how the right wing political and media apparatus is awash with con men, and has been for decades.
The article from Rick Perlstein is easy to miss in VFS’s quote there, but it is an article that, if DVaut wasn’t the first to post it way back when, he was at least a big proponent. It’s from 2012, and the opening that talks about Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan spewing a fountain of lies seems positively quaint nearly a decade later.
By then, though, it was too late: Viguerie had captured some 12,500 addresses of the most ardent right-wingers in the nation. “And that list,” he wrote in his 2004 book, America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Over America , “was my treasure trove, as good as the gold bricks deposited at Fort Knox, as I started The Viguerie Company and began raising money for conservative clients.”
Fort Knox : an interesting image. Isn’t that what proverbial con men are always claiming to sell?
The lists got bigger, the technology better (“Where are my names?” he nervously asked, studying the surface of the first computer tape containing his trove): twenty-five million names by 1980, destination for some one hundred million mail pieces a year, dispatched by some three hundred employees in boiler rooms running twenty-four hours a day. The Viguerie Company’s marketing genius was that as it continued metastasizing, it remained, in financial terms, a hermetic positive feedback loop. It brought the message of the New Right to the masses, but it kept nearly all the revenue streams locked down in Viguerie’s proprietary control. Here was a key to the hustle: typically, only 10 to 15 percent of the haul went to the intended beneficiaries.
Following the standard scare-mongering playbook of the fundraising Right, Weyrich launched his appeal with some horrifying eventuality that sounded both entirely specific and hair-raisingly imminent (“all-out assault on our traditional family structure”—or, in the case of a 1976 pitch signed by Senator Jesse Helms, taxpayer-supported “grade school courses that teach our children that cannibalism, wife swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior”; or, to take one from not too long ago, the white-slavery style claim that “babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood”). Closer inspection reveals the looming horror to be built on a non-falsifiable foundation (“could become”; “is likely to become”). This conditional prospect, which might prove discouraging to a skeptically minded mark, is all the more useful to reach those inclined to divide the moral universe in two—between the realm of the wicked, populated by secretive, conspiratorial elites, and the realm of the normal, orderly, safe, and sane.
Weyrich’s letter concludes by proposing an entirely specific, real-world remedy: slaying the wicked can easily be hastened for the low, low price of a $5, $10, or $25 contribution from you, the humble citizen-warrior.
These are bedtime stories, meant for childlike minds. Or, more to the point, they are in the business of producing childlike minds. Conjuring up the most garishly insatiable monsters precisely in order to banish them from underneath the bed, they aim to put the target to sleep.
In this respect, it’s not really useful, or possible, to specify a break point where the money game ends and the ideological one begins. They are two facets of the same coin—where the con selling 23-cent miracle cures for heart disease inches inexorably into the one selling miniscule marginal tax rates as the miracle cure for the nation itself. The proof is in the pitches—the come-ons in which the ideological and the transactional share the exact same vocabulary, moral claims, and cast of heroes and villains.
There may be con artists who target the left, but that is not at all analogous to how right wing media, politicians, and other power brokers are all pushing anti-intellectualism and anti-expertise as both a means of securing political power and a means of securing personal profit.
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Steve Jobs might not be the best example. The statistics sucked no matter what approach he took.
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The thing with him is like, even if you think you’ve figured out the “one weird trick”, ffs do the chemo/radiation and eat your dumb fruitarian diet or whatever.
I’d try to convince these dummies the same thing, hey why doncha own the libs by getting the vaccine and eating your horse paste and fish tank cleaner on top of it, so you’re like 99.99999998% protected and throw that in their face.
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I mean the Dems are a little more subtle in their grift but it’s the same end game. How much money did Amy McGrath and her thousand grifting associates raise from fools who bought the snake oil that she had a chance against Mitch McConnell in kentucky.
That’s so bush league compared with right wing grifts. She pocketed so little of that compared with right wing PACs and such.
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Serious question: Are you just deducing grift based on the longshot nature of her campaign, or is there actual evidence of grift? Was the Harrison campaign in SC also grifty? I’d say it was nearly as futile.
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Shit is getting real between the FDA and the administration:
Huge lol at this:
A former senior FDA leader told Endpoints that they’re departing because they’re frustrated that CDC and their ACIP committee are involved in decisions that they think should be up to the FDA. The former FDAer also said he’s heard they’re upset with CBER director Peter Marks for not insisting that those decisions should be kept inside FDA. What finally did it for them was the White House getting ahead of FDA on booster shots.
The nerve of those bastards at the CDC… sticking their nose in on checks notes treatments for raging pandemics. Stay in your lane!
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the big difference is that in the movie people wanted forsythia when there wasn’t a vaccine available. once the vaccine was produced everyone got that and the forsythia grifters got got
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I mean, it did seem like a confusing fuckup for the WH to tell people to go get the vaccine before the FDA had approved it.