I have nothing against the message, but the messengers of the group do nothing to help their cause. If their cause is to move people away from MLMs (a worthy goal) but insist on going around and mocking people and attacking them, it does nothing to help their cause.
the AntiMLM subreddit is the PETA of the MLM world.
My goodness, that poor chicken.
I’m going to disagree with you in that their goal to eliminate the scams of MLMs is still worthwhile even if some of the exchanges they portray are especially cringe-inducing.
Sure I it too!
reported
I don’t really understand how this whole anti-science, pro-quackery took hold? I get the person with terminal cancer reaching out to a quack for a miracle cure, but when you have something curable why turn away from the medical treatment? Why so much doubt in medicine and so much faith in oddball stuff? It’s like we have a segment of the population that wants to return us to the dark ages.
There is some overlap in the gullible with being brainwashed as part of a larger cult like Mormonism or some other organised religion. Also MLMs, homeopathy, mother earth Gaia woo etc.
They want to be in control. Listening to a doctor in their “high tower” is like being helpless. Listening to somebody “down to earth” like themselves makes them feel like they have agency in their treatment. However wrong they might be.
I think there’s two elements. First the Internet means any narcissist can think they’re an expert on something after reading up on it for 20 minutes. Second, there are people making a lot of money of tricking others into buying into alternative medicine. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry and people seem to have fewer morals and ethics than ever before when it comes to the sanctity of truth and life.
We’re at a time where there is more information than ever before, yet willful ignorance seems to be on the rise. That tells you something about human beings’ relationship with oral testimony and information gathering, and the burden it places on individuals to be forced to investigate every claim on the internet collapses into a black hole of informational overload.
Unless people can “see it, taste it, smell it” they don’t believe it when they don’t have good reason to believe. They’re likely to believe in essential oils because oils are tangible and (in their minds) pure. The whole schtick is that these oils are uncorrupted, purified. OTOH, medical treatments are simply taken at face value, are often ineffective, work in mysterious ways, or often come with significant side effects that shows them to be more of a rock hammer than a laser scalpel than we’d like.
This is why Facebook is so effective and dangerous at spreading misinformation, because information spread by “trusted” sources is believed. You’re more likely to believe your father, respected coworker, business partner or other close relationship than distant journalism, and when they share a “vaccines cause autism!” memes and nonsense, ordinary people are more likely to believe them.
It’s interesting that both Christianity and (especially) Islam went through a period of collation and verification. Christianity early on weeded through the many books and decided which were to stay and which were to go. In Islam huge efforts were spent weeding out hundreds of thousands of unverifiable hadith once it became clear that any saying that could be attributed to the prophet Muhammed had legal, political, religious and social ramifications.
Arguably the point of government is regulation and (in some ideal future) what government is going to have to do is regulate the creation of non-truths and attributions, through some unknown mechanisms. If people cannot trust true sources of information because bad sources of information poison the well in some existential way, governments are going to have to step in and prevent this for the health of society.
This is a paternalistic point of view but not an undemocratic one. The whole point of civilization is specialization. We can’t be an expert at everything simultaneously. When you can’t depend on societies’ expertise because you’ve been convinced the experts are lying, or are false, or are deluded, we lose the leap of faith it takes to keep society working.
The irony is that the very thing that makes people not trust medicine - market driven economics that pushes profit above all else - is the very thing they’ll “defend to the death” in their bunkers. They can’t understand that the world without a functioning government regulatory apparatus is the very one where you don’t trust vaccines and medicine. But the less functional regulation is, the less they trust government and think it should be circumvented or ignored.
A lot of people are just plain stupid. Some are Seekers. After all, there’s a Seeker born every minute.
you sir, are making far too much sense there. Burn the witch!
All natural, no medicine!
Horrifying.
Darwin in action.
Anyone else worried that something they take for granted is actually incredibly dumb, but we haven’t realized it yet?
I mean, my kids got vaccinated, we have a great relationship with our doctor, we only use Essential Oils for cleaning and to supplement actually medicine (sometimes we use it for tummy aches or soreness, but I don’t think anyone will make a big deal about that).
But damn, if that person can be that stupid, what stupid things could I be doing? I’m not perfect. I have my biases. I don’t always get all the facts before acting. The news about Pharma companies and Pain killers scares me a bit.
Getting clear information is sometimes impossible, and I want to trust the government, but than you have things like Flint and Trump’s denial of climate change, and corporations lobbying for special interest. Besides your doctor, who can you trust and make your life easier?
Jesus. That’s a pretty clinical description of what must be about the worst possible way to die.
Life sucks.