jenny mccarthy wants your kid to get measles: autism, vaccines, and stupid idiots

ah, here we are, check this:

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney

How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link.

— By Chris Mooney

They can make a special toy for autistic kids: "Ignore Me Elmo."

"A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." - Leon Festinger

my brother and his wife haven't vaccinated their kids, and it's so tough. i just don't even talk to them about it...

You...also don't take your kids to play there?

no, we do! i don't know, it's weird, they have a whole circle of people around them who don't vaccinate.

I guess if your kids are vacc'ed then technically they're prob safe but a whole circle of little germy breeding grounds who aren't vacc'ed seems like a petri dish for the re-introduction of scarlet fever or something.

yeah, that's what we figure. they go to a waldorf school -- i dunno if being anti-vaccine goes along with waldorf necessarily, but it seems to attract anti-vacciners. i dunno, my brother and his wife are very sensible people in a lot of regards ... just not this one!

dunno if being anti-vaccine goes along with waldorf necessarily

Yeah, don't Waldorf schools teach all kinds of mystical "science"?

I don't get how these schools have become prestigious, the sound really cultish to me.

they sound...

“To our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one,” says J. B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, a group that disputes vaccine safety

TS: Generation Rescue vs. Operation Rescue

Inoculations that make you irrationally angry

waldorf schools are for rich white people who want to pretend they live on the prairie. guess what, on the prairie, people died of the plague.

all of that sort of thing gets on my nerves to an incredible degree. I live in Berkeley where you can imagine there is a fair amount of this. in fact, there was an article the other day here: about the rates of vaccinations for kindergartners in the city (my son is starting kindergarten in september). they broke it down by school and the 'favored' private kindergarten (don't get me started on people who actually live in Berkeley who pay for private kindergarten to the tune of $17k a year when we have an incredible public school system) of many of his preschool mates has one of the lowest vaccination rates for incoming students.

sometimes I forget how real this shit, and talk about how stupid fuckin people who believe this are with friends who have just had kids or something, and, its only happened once so far, but a friend got really quiet at first then defended all the anti vac bullshit

not quite related but one time late at night a dude I knew started talking about how major governments have retrieved underwater alien technology for their own uses and I was like wtf who the fuck are you all of a sudden

yeah i have definitely had that moment where an otherwise sane-seeming acquaintance started going off on an anti-vaccine rant and it was like he'd grown another head.

Ugggghhh found self at bar with someone I've known socially for years but never gotten to be friends with, and I was like, aha, finally! time to actually get to know this v talented person, and he turned out to be a committed (lol) Libertarian. So...yeah.

One of the quotes I'm reminded of from that MoJo piece is that if you want to find the closest hotspot of science- and medical-denialism, head to the aisles of your local Whole Foods.

There's a slippery slope between "this food is healthy" and "this food has magical health powers" apparently.

* sips kombucha *

I actually complained to Whole Foods for selling homeopathic remedies - pretty unethical imo - and they sent me a stock response. Then I went to Rainbow Groceries in SF and realised how sane WF is (at least they don't sell homeopathic suppositories...)

*how sane in comparison, that is

i dunno if that slope is exactly slippery.

xps

seems like a well marked cliff to me honestly!

This also eventually leads into 'have your cake, eat it too' approaches. "It's all cacao and no added sugar in this chocolate bar so I can have four a day..."

There is a healthy/organic grocery in my neighborhood that I don't want to ever go back to because they have EAR CANDLES.

The lady at the cash register seemed pretty nice but I ended up having a short conversation with her because she mentioned her dating experiences (I have no memory of how this was a casual topic) and she seemed to be into the worst crazed scammers. Seemed kind of... ditzy? I just have this vision of the all-natural slightly dippy people being taken advantage of by assholes constantly.

Just remembered my complaint to WF about their selling homeopathic remedies was after reading their newsletter/coupons paper's advice about nutritional supplements "Choose those - such as ours - that are based on science with targeted ingredients in doses that studies have shown to be effective. Avoid those loaded with fillers, token amounts of beneficial substances or artifical colors, flavors and preservatives. Why pay for ingredients that aren't helping you?"

not quite related but one time late at night a dude I knew started talking about how major governments have retrieved underwater alien technology for their own uses and I was like wtf who the fuck are you all of a sudden

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Thursday, 21 April 2011 20:36 (55 minutes ago)

I wanna hear more about this!

of course i would

I know a few parents who have staggered their vaccines, but not much worse than that. Though one of them refused the chicken pox vaccine, stupid reasoning being, hey, we all used to get this. Except, maybe me, so thanks dicks, I had to go get a booster. Also, people do occasionally die of chicken pox, and those vaccines do wear off over time.

WF's war against HFCS had me convinced for a while, but now I've learned (or at least recognized) that many of the sweetener subs they enlist - like agave syrup - are just as bad if not worse for you (health-wise) than HFCS.

Chicken pox vaccine is pretty awesome, imo. I somehow made it to the age of 14 without getting the 'pox, and the vaccine had just come out in the US so I was lucky. My sister's doctor was kind of a jerk and was like "hey, she might just get it on her own, etc" and so she was nearly (or was) 12 and had to put up with a godawful preteen version of it. I still have no idea what the hell the doctor was thinking.

My grandparents have had breakouts of shingles, and I really shouldn't since that's the dormant virus becoming active. So, vaccines... GOOD

I made it to 24. Ended up with breathing difficulties that nearly sent me to the hospital and scars all over my forehead, arms, and chest. The next year the vaccine came out in the US.

HFCS is bad for you. so is agave because it basically is corn syrup. don't know of any other sweetener subs are bad for you though. this isn't really a 'non-science' thing though, I think medical and scientific opinion are all pretty much anti-HFCS.

it's funny how the anti-vaccine crowd kind of doesn't necessarily correlate with the climate change denial people when they are both anti-scientific in thought. although I guess anti-vaccine people correlate more with 'all manmade things are bad' so are more likely to align with proponents of climate change.

- All sugar bad in large quantities
- Some don't taste "as sweet" so they add more of it
- Just stop drinking soda all the fucking time so you can recalibrate your taste buds

Oh man have you guys heard the "store-bought bread has evil shit in it" people? A distant friend commented on facebook about some bread she threw out for the birds still looked the same a couple days later and she smelled a conspiracy

What irks me about this isn't even the child abuse aspect of it, it's the danger to other children and to ppl w/compromised immune systems.

i haven't heard that in particular about store bought bread but I will say that about 90% of it tastes like crap. It definitely doesn't taste as good as it did when I was a kid. I'm not sure why.

there are plenty of decent store bought breads; they're just more expensive than locally made breads.

this dumb bullshit about not vaccines is for latebloomer, I don't know why I'm posting it, I typed it I guess

It was me that underwater alien technology dude and one other friend sitting in that other friend's apartment late at night after going out to a show, and we were talking about how hilarious my friend's apartment was because his landlord (a USC professor) put a freaking little curved bathroom sink into his kitchen. I mean I still smile when I think about it because he can't even fit any dishes in it, and those that do fit fall on their sides and take up the whole sink, and its covered with 70s bathroom tile for some reason, like when I first walked into his apartment I was like "Holy shit is...is that a bathroom sink?" and he was all (in a soft voice because he's a soft spoken guy) "I...I guess so, I guess that's why it's so small. I never realized that" and I just started cracking up for a few days.

We were all sitting there, talking about that again, because that's usually the first thing we talk about when we're there, and suddenly alien technology dude was like "Have you guys heard about the alien technology people are all talking about these days." At this point I was extremely stoned and alien technology dude was not, so for a while, while he was talking, what he was saying was so out there, that I didn't even want to believe it was really happening, that a friend of mine could wholeheartedly believe this in all earnestness and that I didn't have any inkling about it.

So I silently listened wide-eyed to his theory that because there is life on Earth, there must be, there has got to be, advanced life in other galaxies, and, if you look at the course of human history, there have been so many major technological advances in a relatively short period of time that it is impossible for humans to have developed such technology on their own. Then he kept talking about the surface area of the ocean on earth and how if an alien aircraft fell somewhere where the masses would not know it would be the ocean. When I asked him if he was really serious about it, after I had turned this O.Rang album playing in the background off, because it wasn't helping anything at all, he said, "DO YOU HAVE AN IPOD?" and I was like "an old one yeah" and he was like "listen, do you really think man can make ipod, do you think everything humans have achieved is due to only mankind's work" I don't know how I changed the subject after that, but I think I was able to. I'd never seen this side of him, usually we used to just talk about how dumb lost was after every episode.

sorry for that post

don't apologize!

Not at all!

lol thanks for typing that out!

"...do you think everything humans have achieved is due to only mankind's work"

"Uh, dude just because you're dumb doesn't mean everyone else is."

What irks me about this isn't even the child abuse aspect of it, it's the danger to other children and to ppl w/compromised immune systems.

Yup. F these ppl imo

I didn't mean to imply that the child abuse aspect doesn't bug me, btw.

the part about aliens crashing into the ocean seems logical tho

anyway I'm in a lecture about ~autism~ right now and dude is basically saying that there's at least twenty odd genes involved in autistic disorders, and that several other developmental disorders are related. all this magic bullet stuff is the sad theater of ppl reaching for answers for something they don't understand

all this magic bullet stuff is the sad theater of ppl reaching for answers for something they don't understand

I think that's one of the reasons this stuff is still ongoing; it's a little bit harder to respond vehemently, even with some indignation, to someone who has an autistic child.