‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline
One minute you’re doing the downward dog, the next you’re listening to conspiracy theories about Covid or the new world order. How did the desire to look after yourself become so toxic?
Grifters, con-artists and fascists all use the truth to sell a lie. The truth is that we have been steadily raised on a diet of mass produced garbage, optimised purely for profit while disregarding all public and environmental welfare in its construction and delivery. The lie is that the grifters, con-artists and fascists are not just doing the exact same thing to the extreme.
They offer what they call good, wholesome and honest solutions to contrast with the big globalist elitist fat-cats selling expensive unnatural poisons. But natural or synthetic, poisons can kill you the same type of dead.
Donald Trump successfully sold the slogan: Drain the Swamp
as long as the "truth" they're advertising is scary and misunderstood somehow, they can sell anything while they're pandering to the listener's ego.. this is Alex Jones' entire ethos..
Pandering to egos, or what I see more frequently, predating on fears. I run my own email server, partly because I enjoy watching the diversity of spam and trends, partly so i know what new scams to look out for. I receive far more "drink this to cure your disease once a day!" types of emails than I do "smoking hot babe wants to send you a message" types of emails.
I like to pretend it's a 5D chess long con (it's not, but pretending is fun). It's much easier to scoop off the scum when it floats to the top, and trump got a whole bunch of them to take the mask off so they can be arrested for treason.
Similarly it's fun to pretend Apartheid Clyde went full fascist so that neonazis would replace their coal rollers with low-poly 90s video game pedestrian crushers to own the libs.
It makes sense that the people who will believe one category of such "simple and easy explanations and solutions" will also believe other categories of "simple and easy explanations and solutions" - believing crystals will help you tune your soul to feel better might not at all be the same thing as believing all the problems of society are due to people with the least power in it (immigrants, the "lazy" poor) but it certainly is the product of the same kind of cognitive take on the World and emotional desire for understandable "explanations" and silver-bullet "solutions" so the path from one to the next is way shorter than it might seem if all one looks at is the information space rather than the psychological and intellectual characteristics of the "believers".
Or to put it in cruder terms: both kinds of outlook in the World appeal to the the same kind of sucker.
I think it's important to realize that almost everyone is at least occasionally a sucker. There's a grift that targets basically every personality type. There's grift for health conscious folks, for worried parents, for 'I'm so much smarter than others', for gamers, for outdoorsy types, there's something for everyone. If you aren't careful you'll be laughing at the other 'idiots' while you yourself fall into a different trap.
Honestly once you start paying attention it's really scary how many different and seemingly totally unrelated topics can be used to pull people into facism. So many times I've clicked on a different YouTube video or something and then all the sudden my feeds been taken over by right wing bullshit.
People refuse to try to address that sort of wooly thinking when it is low stakes then when it becomes high stakes act shocked to see the people around them acting irrationally. One's hypothetical friend who refused to take the vaccine because they thought it had a mind control chip in it and died as a result invariably was previously banging on about how their acupuncturist was going to help them win the lottery and people simply indulged them because "what's the harm in them having funny beliefs about things?" The only time you actually could get through to people around you about these harmful ways of thinking is when it's about things that don't really matter much. If you wait until it's life or death it's too late to get though to them.
The truth is that we have been steadily raised on a diet of mass produced garbage
This is the lie though. It's the "widely believed fact" that makes it easy to accept the other lies.
Most of our food is just "fine".
Nutritional content of grains, fruits and vegetables has declined over the past 70 years
The world is decidedly off-track to reducing Sodium levels in foods by 2030, salt is considered the leading dietary indication for non-communicable disease. I think we're off-target for all the diet-related sustainable development health goals?
And this is before more localised issues like food deserts, natural disasters, recommendations influenced by industry, etc. Or even other issues like additives, factory farming, sugary drinks being cheaper and safer than the water supplies...
Don't get me wrong, many of us have access to a much larger variety of food from across the world, if we can afford it, the fortification of many foods helps maintain some forms of nutrition, and regulations have made a lot of our food safer. But overall, our produce is worsening in quality and the cheaper per calorie/time foods are what people are forced to eat, and it is killing them.
But I also meant less literal forms of diet too.
yes if you eat only a high sugar and fat diet you will die a premature death, but honesty it's still probably healthier than the diets of our 200,000 year old ancestors (I asset confidently with no evidence).
I'm just assuming that when any type of farming was a rare occurrence, disease, malnutrition and poisoning were much more common.
For every complicated and difficult question there's a simple, and above all, wrong solution.
This exact thing happened to my Pilates teacher of a decade. We used to joke about all the woo. Then she somehow discovered Josh Rogan and things began to go downhill. What if Trump is right about this one thing? Aren't there two sides to everything? When covid hit she went completely down the rabbit hole, antivax, global conspiracies, the works. Just about everything in that article.
I considered her a good friend. She was the only one who brought flowers to my house when my mother died. I haven't seen her since early in covid, after the first lockdowns.
And I read another article about this same phenomena about two years go, which of course my google fu is too weak this morning to find. But the anecdotal point here is that this is not the first time people have noted this phenomenon.
"Thanks to hundreds of years of treating the male body as the default in medicine, we simply do not know enough about how disease manifests in the female body."
This is big one. I'm a woman who's been misdiagnosed for the simplest of things. Twice I've blown my ACL, and both times it took 6-8 months to diagnose ... even tho the first time I pulled the ACL right off the bone. My rotator cuff took 20 yrs. All because women aren't supposed to hurt themselves at work.
I'm sick of the BS
Yeah, people often talk about scammers and grifters and how "insert-ableist-slurs" and "gullible" people who believe them are, but none of those "I'd ever fall for that!!1" types ever look at why people were so easily convinced, what large chunks of care are missing in society that people have no choice but to be drawn to the "alternatives" no matter how bogus or even dangerous - at some point the system has let you down so dramatically that even if it did finally offer a solution, you'd have no reason to trust it.
The result of which is instead of trying to better the system so that fewer people get treated poorly or not at all, they just shift the blame to those who fell victim to the scan, and can pat themselves on the back for being "better" without actually doing fuck all but ridicule vulnerable people.
People like that are just as much a part of the problem - the grifters give them someone to ridicule and feel superior to, they pander to the ego of the "unconvinced" as much as, if not more, than to the ego of the people they're trying to scam, giving that (ego boost) up even if it is to do the right thing (but in favour of those these individuals see as lesser) just doesn't make sense to them.
It's such an exhausting problem that so many people hold society back from meeting everyone's needs, because society fails to meet everyone's needs and thereby creates people who hold society back from meeting everyone's needs, because...
It feels like being locked in a room full of people flinging shit at each other because they are mad that people won't stop flinging shit at them and everytime you try to gently suggest they all just stop flinging shit they just start flinging it at you until you shut up.
Not just medicine, also things like crash safety. Female crash test dummies just entered use in the past couple of years, and still aren't required.
Awful to hear about stuff like this, it continues to blow my mind how privileged men are without even realizing it.
That privilege had its price.
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Our medical knowledge didn't come from from doctors sitting down with pen and paper and figuring stuff out. It came from field research, trail and error on alive and dead subjects. Subjects that two world wars provided by the millions. It just so happened to be that those subjects were mostly white men between 14 and 50 years of age in dire need of medical treatment. Naturally our knowledge of male physiology skyrocketed during and after that period.
On the contrary, when it comes to psychology, men are light years behind women. While trying to """cure female hysteria""", we got a far deeper look into the function of our brains on the female side than on the male side. Even though most of these women took part as voluntarily as someone would take shrapnel in the war.
I'm trying to say that it's not just as simple as men or women have it better, it all boils down to historical availability of patients for research.
I started doing Yoga 25 years ago after fracturing a couple of vertebrae and needing to learn to walk/move again. It literally saved me from a life lead in an opiate haze to control the pain.
That said, this article comes as no surprise as there has always been an undercurrent of of bat-shit crazy control freaks in the "alternative movement".
Are you trying to tell me that easily manipulated mindless clowns flock to fringe conspiracies and bullshit pseudo-science filled snake-oil wellness programs?
Color me surprised!
The article threw out a lot of potential reasons but the unsaid part about all of them was that they wouldn't be an issue if so many people weren't so goddamn stupid.
Isolation?
Mistrust of the government?
Poor treatment of women's health?
In all cases, it takes two parts to drive someone to conspiracy theories. A catalyst like one of the above, plus fuel of pure goddamn stupidity.
I read it in its entirety.
There's so many pipelines out there
And curiously enough all leading to fascism.
Ted Stevens was right all along.
What isn't a pipeline to facism?
Antifascism? I hope?
You'd think so, but I knew a guy
It's complicated because some antifa are just a different bunch of mindless tribalists.
It really depends if you ended up antifa for social reasons (mainly being part of something) or for having thinked a lot about what are your principles and politics and figured out that haters have to be stopped early, before they get to the stage were they're hurting lots of people - the latter kind will likely also spot hate replacing reason in themselves and thus stop it before they hurt somebody who might very well be innocent.
Sadly a fraction of self-proclaimed antifa are just another hater mob, just raging against different groups of people than the fascists, which is how you end up with things like cruxifiction-by-social-media against people for the sin of not treating slogans as Sacred Truth.
… an almost infinite number of things?
I’ll start.
I think anything can be twisted into a pipeline to fascism if prominent people within a community are pushing it. Let's take My Little Pony for example. You would think that would be the last place for fascism to foment, but there are certain communities online that have pushed it in that direction.
Doctor Xavier's School for Gifted Children
Love and acceptance?
"Scratch a hippy, find a fascist."
