The description @ezraklein offers here of RFK Jr. is fundamentally incorrect.

His beliefs are not driven by the idea that corporations are poisoning our health to line their pockets.

If that were true, he wouldn't like nutritional supplements, which are produced by corporations that are lining their pockets with the profits!

No, RFK Jr.'s worldview driven by two factors:

Contrarian anti-establishment thinking, and reverence for what's "natural". This is why RFK Jr. doesn't support nuclear energy, despite being an avowed environmentalist, and doesn't support lab-grown meat made by spunky independent start-ups, despite being an avowed animal rights activist.

And it IS why he supports cryptocurrency, somehow unconcerned about energy consumption or the possibility that crypto companies might be lining their pockets.

Crypto represents anti-establishment contrarianism, combined with a "natural" approach to currency (it is organic, bottom-up, by the people for the people, amiright?!).

So he likes it.

When I criticize charlatans in the health and medicine world (Oz, RFK Jr., anyone who writes a book about what They don't want you to know), I often hear this kind of response:

"What about the problems with Big Pharma and the money they're making?"

Which makes a lot of sense!

The problem is that the charlatans are generally uninterested in addressing the real problems with pharma $$$, and more interested in pushing their own simplistic nonsense as a solution.

Let's take vaccines. Any critic of pharmaceutical companies would understand that vaccines are not, in fact, a giant moneymaker for pharmaceutical companies. They're also good for public health! Here's a much less exciting, but much more important problem where pharma is unscrupulously raking in $$$.

When a drug patent is going to expire, they will make superficial tweaks to the drug, to secure a continued monopoly on its production. Targeting this incredibly terrible practice that stifles competition and raises drug prices would be great.

Why aren't people like RFK Jr. making this a central talking point? I'll tell you why: Because understanding and reforming Pharma is less a priority than making big sweeping statements about corruption and how They want to poison you.

prospect.org/health/2023-06…

I've been studying charlatans, con-men, faith healers, and snake oil salesmen for a very, very long time.

To people who haven't been conned, it can be very difficult to understand how it happens. Consider the guy below, who literally looks like Satan.

His name is Brian Clement, and he continues to convince thousands of people that he can cure their cancer using nothing but wheatgrass shots and crackpot diets.

So how does these people do it? And why are they never held accountable?

I'll explain, using the tragic story of an 11-yr-old girl who died because of Clement, as a case study.
First, you *have* to understand who these charlatans prey on:

People who are scared and vulnerable.

People who have been betrayed by authorities or the establishment.

People who have been disempowered.

That's why, when Clement visited Canada to sell people on his clinic, he would focus on First Nations people

After all, why would they trust the medical establishment or the government?

For over a century they were horrifically treated by the Canadian authorities. Children kidnapped and put into reeducation schools. Tortured and abused. First Nations culture was systematically degraded and erased.

On top of that, medical professionals sneered at indigenous medicine. Superstitious nonsense. Ignorant savagery.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people most excited to have the Bible — well, *a* Bible, more on that in a moment — back in schools are the ones least familiar with it.

You see, there's no way to get Bibles in school without flagrantly violating the Constitution.

No, not because of the "separation of Church and State." That's neither in the Constitution nor in American law. It was in a letter sent by Jefferson to a Connecticut Baptist association, and later cited in court decisions.

Great letter, wise sentiment from Jefferson, but not legally binding, and certainly not Constitutional.

No, understanding the reason this flagrantly violates the Constitution requires...a little knowledge of religion!

Let me explain: The 1st Amendment provides that Congress shall make "no law respecting an establishment of religion."

Yet there's no way to get THE Bible into schools w/o *establishing* a specific version of Christianity as the correct one.

That's because there isn't THE Bible. There's many.

Wondering why I'm skeptical of health influencers who "know the secret THEY are keeping from YOU"?

Okay, buckle up, and let me tell you about someone you've never heard of...one of the biggest health influencers of the 20th century.

Horace Fletcher, aka "The Great Masticator." When I say Horace Fletcher was big, I mean BIG.

All the famous people loved him: John D. Rockefeller (the Elon Musk of his day), Henry James, heck, even Mark Twain was into him.

See, he had THE secret to healthy eating. It was called "Fletcherism," and everyone swore by it.

There's been a LOT about why RFK Jr is a terrible pick, but I want to focus on something that is very concerning to me, but no one seems to be mentioning.

He appeals to a widespread, common-sense idea that the problem with our food is that it has "lots of artificial ingredients". Get the artificial ingredients out — no chemical additives! no food dyes! no high fructose corn syrup! — and our health problems magically resolve.

This is 100% incorrect, and fundamentally misunderstands the problems with our food system. Here's the truth: If people keep eating large amounts of highly caloric foods made with organic sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup, colored with beet juice instead of Red No4, our health problems will remain precisely the same.

You cannot engage someone if they use rhetorical techiques that foreclose on your ability speak, or theirs to listen. These include (🧵):

1. Asserting that authority depends entirely on identity, either professional identity (I have a PhD and you don't) or personal identity. 2. Framing any kind of response to an argument as defensiveness. In a personal relationship this borders on abusive behavior. Accuse someone of something, and then when they respond, ignore the response as "defensiveness".

In this single heartwrenching Reddit post you’ll find a microcosm of all the philosophical issues underlying mental health diagnostic categories. Start with the first sentence. Paraphrased:

“I am suffering. Why?!!!” The second sentence captures the essential meaning of a diagnostic category. Paraphrased:

“I need to know if my suffering is *my fault* or a medical condition.”

The more I notice it, the more remarkable I find the replacement of "good/wise/kind" with "healthy".

Everything is a "health" issue: personal worries, education, the justice system, housing — it's all "mental health" or "public health."

This conceptual monoculturing is bad. Living a good life is living a "healthy" life. A person engaged in unwise or immoral actions is "mentally unhealthy."

By extension, all approaches to fixing our problems are "medical interventions."

Should we have friends? Consult this study on how they affect mental health.

I don't understand how progressive Christians who call for "decolonizing" everything view their own religion, or Islam for that matter. The historical spread of these religions is inseparable from colonization, and their continued spread is textbook "cultural colonization". Judaism, by contrast, is not a "colonial" religion. Unlike Christianity and Islam, there was never a Jewish empire that spread religion through political conquest. There is no evangelical Jewish tradition. No indigenous religions were displaced by Jewish missionaries.

I think a defining feature of our time is "epistemic opacity."

First heard the idea from a historian of tech, who explained it with cars. In 1950, cars were all epistemically transparent to any skilled mechanic. Pop the hood on a car today? It's opaque. We live in a world of increasing epistemic opacity. Virtually everything in our lives requires a very, very complicated explanation, from the chain of production that gets us our food to the workings of our smartphones.

Epistemic opacity is ALIENATING.

I'm still thinking about the book I just finished, Coming Up For Air.

45 yr old insurance salesman, George Bowling, he's so bored, by his kids, his wife, himself, he wants to "escape" the rat race...and slowly you begin to see it's George, not the rat race, that's the problem. George is very observant, very cynical. For much of the book, it feels like he's right about how lousy his own life is—and, by association, the lives of all those who live like him. Zombies, idiots, no ambition, shapeless middle-aged bodies, dead to the world. Tragic.

In a complete change, I will be going from no restrictions on my classroom tech to a fully restricted approach, with exceptions only for disability or unique requests made directly to me.

https://twitter.com/BradWilcoxIFS/status/1666138839541219334

I once believed restriction was foolish and draconian. What changed my mind, in part, was *students* telling me they wanted restrictions in place, like Odysseus tied to the mast so he can’t visit the sirens (well the metaphor is mine, but the sentiment theirs).

We've watched too many f*ing movies where evil villains want to control everything ALL ELSE BE DAMNED.

So when people say "the billionaires want to control us and inject us with COVID vaccines" it sounds plausible.

Folks: All the rich people hated having society shut down!! Is it true that wealthy people want more money and control? Sure, of course. But they also want to enjoy themselves. No one—I repeat, NO ONE—enjoyed shutting everything down. (Well, maybe some hardcore introverts.)

There's no way. The man's entire perspective is dominated by the appeal to nature fallacy. This is why he has been so good on environmental law, but so bad on vaccines, and, in his opposition to nuclear energy, bad for the environment he wants to protect.

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1665460519719895042

Part of RFK Jr's appeal to nature leads him to a misguided belief that only "organic" solutions—eg, bottom up, pioneered by individuals, rather than top-down and institutional—are good solutions to problems.

This is deeply misguided.

"Magic" and "witchcraft" aren't "post-Christian" or "non-Christian."

Incantatory healing, speaking in tongues, and exorcism, for example, are all Christian.

The difference between those and "magic" is the purported source of efficacy. Superstition is what you don't believe in. I'm responding to the quote below in Ross Douthat's article.

IMO it's important to realize that *metaphysically*, there's not a huge difference between "magic" and lots of very standard Christian beliefs/practices.

Religiously? Sure.

The tyranny of scientific authority means increasingly impoverished forms of value. Valuable = material and quantifiable.

What if hiking, and marriage, and friendship, weren't good because they have "mental and physical and financial benefits," but just...good in themselves. When every activity must be seen as a means to a few very specific ends—health, wealth, longevity—we disenchant the world, and ourselves.

I've commented on this before, but I think it's an important, neglected question:

Many who are "anti-woke" criticize schools for indoctrinating children instead of educating them.

Which leads to the Q:

Is indoctrinating children bad, full stop, or only bad in public schools? Typically, arguments against indoctrination assume indoctrination is inherently bad.

Free thought is good, children should be allowed to choose their ideology rationally, neutrality is a virtue of education, etc.

But...that means churches and parochial schools are terrible!

Yesterday at the public basketball court with my wife and daughter. Older white man carrying an orange bag approached us. He asked me if I was receiving my mail, because his was late.

Then he said, "The mail is racist. Black people get theirs on time, white people don't." I asked him what he meant. He said that black mailmen were deliberately targeting him and other white people. I told him I thought that wasn't true. At this point he put a hand in his pocket, and we were all getting creeped out. My daughter took my hand.

Folks, it’s straightforward—if not easy—to use Twitter well. Here is a short list of flexible rules I use to make this a wonderful paradise I enjoy almost all the time: 1. Turn off notifications.

IMO panic over Musk reifies the Great Person vision of reality. Powerful/genius individual change history. But Bezos, Musk, the President, Nobel winners…they are avatars we use to make sense of the complex systems out of which they emerge, and by which they’re controlled. It’s like how people blame the President for high gas prices, or praise them when the stock market goes up. That’s not how it works, but we need a simple explanatory heuristic for these things, and a target for our emotions. It’s naive to think that without Bezos, no Amazon.