Covidiots in music

From .. The Cult?

That's the one

Dear me

Listened to an interview with Stig from Amebix (who denounced his brother's holocaust denial not long ago) and he said something to the effect that all of his friends who died during the pandemic "died from the cure," so that's another one lost.

Sounds like everyone else from the anarcho scene, bunch of glue-addled damage cases in my experience of being around some of them.

Hippies.

i feel obliged to stand up for the anarcho scene - plenty of anarcho pals are absolutely not like this.

still heartily disappointed by p. rimbaud though.

disappointing but not surprising how many people of crustier and hippier persuations have been sucked into this shit - would be bad enough if it stopped there but it almost invariably seems to lead them further right esp due to how online works- anything critical of the authorities can be hard to find outside these increasingly online subcultures and sadly a lot of these people are flakey or desperate or uncritical or alienated enough to fall or settle for this ersatz version of anti-authoritarianism which doesn't frankly take much intellectual effort to adopt since the conspiracy infrastructre is readymade and it doesn't demand any obvious action either (at least i hope not given the direction this shit tends towards)

some people i know have been surprised i'm not anti-vax because i seem like the type and my attempts at presenting anti-capitalist or anti-authoritarian ideas just sound like more conspiracy bullshit to them because of how thoroughly the language of resistance has been captured by this bullshit. it makes me sad

some people i know have been surprised i'm not anti-vax because i seem like the type

i got this quite a bit too. this time last year i had an event on which was the first time many people would have been together with other people since before the pandemic. even though it wasn't a legal requirement we strongly insisted everyone present a negative test on arrival and i was surprised by the number of people saying "you've lost the plot... / sold out to the man... et. etc.". it was thankfully only a small minority but i think your overall summation of why people in these communities may be more likely to get sucked into this shit is spot on.

OTM.

anything critical of the authorities can be hard to find outside these increasingly online subcultures

This seems like it could be part of the problem tbh

Booming post, Left

Agreed.

I’ve been talking about the connection between leftie hippie types and rightist conspiracy minded thinking for years— when i first posted about it on Facebook in 2015 or so, a number of people I know fessed up to being anti-vax, and I couldn’t believe that people I associated with could be so foolish.

Of course, as Left mentions as fallout, some of them became more and more right-wing over the years, and are no longer friends. Some of them changed, tho!

The anti-vax voices in the school sphere often seem to be the crunchy sorts as much as the more visible religious/right/loosely libertarian refuseniks. That's why whooping cough or measles outbreaks frequently seem to originate in places like Marin County as much as from, I dunno, isolated Orthodox Jewish enclaves. I suspect the reason these erstwhile hippies get sucked into right wing circles is because right wingers are the only ones that will host/pay/listen to their self-centered, ego-driven nonsense.

I’ve been talking about the connection between leftie hippie types and rightist conspiracy minded thinking for years— when i first posted about it on Facebook in 2015 or so, a number of people I know fessed up to being anti-vax, and I couldn’t believe that people I associated with could be so foolish.

it's definitely a thing. I think one of my first experiences of this in the community I live in was a noise dude objecting to water fluoridation as an authoritarian plot. ... and I grew up in a small town with a significant community of members of the John Birch Society, one of whom was a dude my dad would see regularly at the college library researching the evils of water fluoridation while my dad was tutoring students in remedial math. This dude had a son who got arrested a year ago for threatening violence against the County Health Official and belonging to white supremacist groups and owning a lot of guns.

I think some of it, sadly, has correlations with education and class backgrounds. Like, there are some definite shared beliefs I have with them, but there are often big differences in how we came to share those beliefs or how we cognitively understand them? There are also plenty of people from "good families" who went to "good schools" who are just stupid and/or awful.

Heck, doesn't Portland still refuse to fluorinate its water because ... reasons?

IIRC Ralph Nader has long been a vocal opponent of fluoridation, arguing that not enough research was done into its potentially harmful effects. To be fair, that might've been a sound position to take 75 years ago, but at this point it's just dense.

FWIW here's more on the subject in general: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/but-not-simpler/why-portland-is-wrong-about-water-fluoridation/

"not enough research" is the stand-in for "I dislike this abd can't elucidate why".

Same argument against GMOs.

When you ask how much more research would be satisfactory to prove its safe, they say "none. None more research."

(that isn't to say that there aren't things being done that truly haven't had enough cautionary exploration first, but every time that line gets tossed off, it's something that has been thoroughly researched

personally i think all of the scientists are "in on it"

Karl, follow the money and you will find the science -- at least that's what a meme I saw yesterday said

The fluoridation story is pretty fascinating and not as clear-cut as anyone would like it to be. Probably it's not doing any harm (you'd think we would know by now), but its benefits have also been exaggerated. The rise of universal tooth-brushing has almost certainly done more than anything else to reduce cavities and tooth decay, as lots of countries that don't do mass fluoridation have demonstrated.

https://origins.osu.edu/article/toxic-treatment-fluorides-transformation-industrial-waste-public-health-miracle

No dog in the fight but the one person who I knew who was anti-fluoride - she bought the Tom's toothpaste without the fluoride in it and was not avoiding it for what I consider the crazy reasons - rhetorically asked me why if fluoride was so beneficial, they didn't also put other beneficial chemicals in the drinking water, or vitamins, and I didn't have an answer for that. But that was twenty years ago and this is the very first time I have thought about it since so there is probably a very logical and scientific answer to this question

that is a good question

https://i.imgur.com/541sRoi.png

but let me ask THIS: who owns google?

*FOLLOW THE MONEY*

sorry paul, i realize now you're asking why they don't add other things to drinking water as well. it's harder to goog for that one

Yeah, I would think so. Especially if you don't want to accidentally introduce the most insane the internet has to offer to your browsing history

From the Straight Dope message board:
Why don’t they put vitamins in our drinking water?

A meaningful vitamin dose for an adult can kill a kid. Different people drink vastly different quantities of water

Other reasonable reasons suggested there too.

xp Ah, that makes sense! I actually had a doctor tell me once that I was taking too many vitamins because I was taking a multivitamin every morning and also supplementing that with additional vitamins for my veg diet, and vitamin D on rainy days.

Different people drink vastly different quantities of water

Does this suggest, though, that there is no such thing as a lethal amount of fluoride?

There are toxic doses of fluoride. But there's no way you could drink enough fluoridated water to even get close. Ironically, some naturally flouridated water does contain enough to cause toxicity. Leeches from granite rock, apparently.

Also eating lots of flouridated toothpaste can cause toxicity in children. Which is why you shouldn't eat toothpaste.

i found pointed out elsewhere that fluoridation of water also means regulation of fluoride in water, which matters in places where naturally occuring fluoride may be at higher levels.

Is there any way to get an effective (cavity-preventing) amount of fluoride solely through diet? Or is that unprovable? There are a lot of things our body needs that have no definitive minimum.

As an aside, another example of a “beneficial” additive program is iodized salt. (though I guess if you consider salt as a food product, you then get into vitamin enriched bread etc.)

(It’s also not strictly comparable to the public water supply, I know)

The primary value of fluoride appears to be topical rather than via ingestion. So it’s the water contacting your teeth that makes the difference, not fluoride in your digestive tract. I.e., fluoridated toothpaste or mouthwash will do more good than any dietary supplement.

The link I posted above covers the same points brought up by Ghost and Kim, but yes, fluoride MANAGEMENT is a more accurate description of what they want to do. It's not just blind addition. As mentioned, the mineral can naturally occur in water, even in excessive amounts that would be brought down to ideal levels.

IIRC there's been a movement in EU policy to scale back nutrient supplementation in food due to concerns that people are getting too much of certain vitamins to the detriment of their health.

What we need is just the tiniest hint of LSD in our water so we can all be microdosing 24/7 and occasionally tripping balls after you mow the lawn on a hot summer day.

https://frinkiac.com/video/S05E16/Wa9cgW5IqzAf3Zmi7X3hxoLjTMY=.gif

"not enough research" is the stand-in for "I dislike this abd can't elucidate why".

Same argument against GMOs.

When you ask how much more research would be satisfactory to prove its safe, they say "none. None more research."

going to disagree. for one, about 80% of the food we eat is already GMOed, even if it's not advertised as such. and a lot of it would look very different if it weren't GMOed (https://www.businessinsider.com/foods-before-genetic-modification-2015-8). it can also help with things such as food shortages and protect against pest interference (https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/gmo-pros-and-cons#definition).

yeah, it really depends on the modification and the food and how much of it you eat, variety in diet, etc.

fluoridation - classic or dud?

going to disagree. for one, about 80% of the food we eat is already GMOed, even if it's not advertised as such. and a lot of it would look very different if it weren't GMOed (https://www.businessinsider.com/foods-before-genetic-modification-2015-8🕸). it can also help with things such as food shortages and protect against pest interference (https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/gmo-pros-and-cons#definition🕸).

“GMOs are so great, they’re leading to complete lack of biodiversity, ruining native soils, and leading to superpests, all so Monsanto can sell more corn and soy to feedlots and gas companies”

Sorry for my tone in earlier posts, it’s just that most of the “solving problems of hunger” stuff has been proven completely untrue re:GMOs. The problems of selection pressure and superpests are well-known— farmers are often spraying harmful pesticides and using GMO crops, leading to even more robust pests. I am tired of “science” and “solutioneering” being used as solutions to problems when the real problems are uneven development and the dire need for degrowth across all sectors.

I think one of the advantages of adding flouride to water is that it helps childrens teeth develop before they appear.