SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the better-living-through-solopsism dept.
Papas Fritas writes:
Michael Schulson writes that if you want to write about spiritually-motivated pseudoscience in America, you can drive hundreds of miles to the Creation Museum in Kentucky but that America's greatest shrine to pseudoscience, the Whole Foods Market, is only a 15-minute trip away from most American urbanites. For example the homeopathy section at Whole Foods has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver.
"You can buy chocolate with "a meld of rich goji berries and ashwagandha root to strengthen your immune system," and bottles of ChlorOxygen chlorophyll concentrate, which "builds better blood." There's cereal with the kind of ingredients that are "made in a kitchen-not in a lab," and tea designed to heal the human heart," writes Schulson. "Nearby are eight full shelves of probiotics-live bacteria intended to improve general health. I invited a biologist friend who studies human gut bacteria to come take a look with me. She read the healing claims printed on a handful of bottles and frowned. "This is bullshit," she said, and went off to buy some vegetables."
According to Schulson the total lack of outrage over Whole Foods' existence, and by the total saturation of outrage over the Creation Museum, makes it clear that strict scientific accuracy in the public sphere isn't quite as important to many of us as we might believe. "The moral is not that we should all boycott Whole Foods. It's that whenever we talk about science and society, it helps to keep two rather humbling premises in mind: very few of us are anywhere near rational. And pretty much all of us are hypocrites."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13 2014, @05:13AM
Well, yeah, you could both say the Creation Museum and those folks at Whole Foods are both peddling pseudoscience, but one of them is not quite like the other. The Creation Museum has a rather clear religious agenda, and they have been attempting to push this agenda into the realm of public policy, which is arguably a violation of the First Amendment. While the vendors of the various products at Whole Foods do attempt to influence public policy to a certain extent, they mostly only do so to control the extent to which their products are regulated. The creationists, on the other hand, are attempting to influence public policy to the point of having their brand of pseudoscience taught in public schools in place of real science. That's on the level of manufacturers of homeopathic remedies and other weirdness attempting to influence public policy to make purchases of their products mandatory for all, and as far as I know none of them is trying to do that.
It's sort of like the difference between a plain bigot, e.g. Mel Gibson who has been frequently accused of anti-Semitism, and an activist bigot, e.g. Orson Scott Card, whose homophobia and activism against LGBT are well known. The former type is only harmful if you happen to get in their way, while the latter type is trying to actively change law and society in favour of their bigotry.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday March 13 2014, @02:06PM
It's sort of like the difference between a plain bigot, e.g. Mel Gibson who has been frequently accused of anti-Semitism, and an activist bigot, e.g. Orson Scott Card, whose homophobia and activism against LGBT are well known. The former type is only harmful if you happen to get in their way, while the latter type is trying to actively change law and society in favour of their bigotry.
And to be fair, Mel Gibson will probably only give you a hard time if he's drunk. The rest of the time he probably behaves just fine and keeps his bigotry in check or under wraps. Remember, alcohol is famous for lowering inhibitions. Most people probably have some bigoted views inside them, but their rational mind keeps that in check or at least keeps them from acting on them in polite society, just like other people avoid acting on various sexual impulses most of the time. But add in a bunch of alcohol, and suddenly those inhibitions are gone, and people act out in ways they normally wouldn't. And when they're a famous celebrity and act out in public and the press documents it, everyone knows and remembers, unlike if they just have an episode at home among family or friends.
Orson Scott Card on the other hand probably doesn't drink at all (he's Mormon), and he'll push his bigoted views on you at any time.
(Score: 1) by Ellis D. Tripp on Thursday March 13 2014, @10:15PM
, depending on how broadly certain passages end up being interpreted:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/23031/ [sciencebasedmedicine.org]n ers-as-pcps-under-the-aca-part-1/ [sciencebasedmedicine.org]n ers-as-pcps-under-the-aca-part-2/ [sciencebasedmedicine.org]
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/cam-practitio
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/cam-practitio
"Society is like stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you end up with a lot of scum on the top!"--Edward Abbey