My review of *More Everything Forever* by Adam Becker. Shorter: our tech overlords are actually insane. #AI #technology #pseudoscience #bookstodon
"Janyce Boynton spent time using these faulty communications techniques with nonverbal autistic children. One day, she realized that the technique she was using — facilitated communication, where a facilitator helps guide a student’s hands as they type — was so deeply flawed that she had subconsciously manufactured false allegations of abuse against a child’s innocent parents. In the decades since, she has dedicated herself to helping expose autism pseudoscience and help steer people towards more legitimate forms of communication.
It’s not a surprise then that Boynton has been critical of The Telepathy Tapes. On a YouTube channel dedicate to debunking autism pseudoscience, Boynton used part of one video that Dickens posted featuring a boy named Akhil spelling out messages with his mother. Boynton highlighted the video to show how Akhil’s mother can cue him about what letter to tap — which can risk robbing him of his voice in the process, as he is not typing out his thoughts but hers.
That was when the producers of The Telepathy Tapes issued a copyright complaint against the channel, resulting in YouTube delivering a copyright strike.
But the complaint was oddly sloppy.
(...)
Boynton teamed up with a California attorney named Pamela Koslyn to fight back, arguing to YouTube that the use of the clip falls under fair use. YouTube stated that The Telepathy Tapes had 10 days to sue in federal court for copyright infringement; if they didn’t, the content would be restored. The strike was removed and the video is back up on Boynton’s channel."
https://www.theamericansaga.com/p/the-telepathy-tapes-turns-to-censorship
#BestoftheLeft Edition #1712: "Eugenics Redux: A Gilded Age Ideology Brought Back for the Second Gilded Age"
Wherever you get your podcasts, or at https://www.bestoftheleft.com/1712
EDITOR’S NOTE: On the likely future of gene editing ethics
Support: https://bestoftheleft.com/support
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#podcast #progressive #progressives #progressivepolitics #politics #uspolitics #rfkjr #pseudoscience #science #geneediting #autism #disabilities
His book "A cosmic adventure" was one of my childhood favourites. And I have redoubled respect for him for publicly taking on the #pseudoscience of astrology and scientifically debunking astrologers' claims. That was another time and another country.
Très bon article de @franceinfo sur l’ineptie des géobiologues et leurs accointances avec l’administration. C’est sourcé et ça complète bien le boulot de G.Milgram sur le sujet.
https://www.franceinfo.fr/environnement/energie/energies-renouvelables/des-sourciers-imposes-sur-les-chantiers-eoliens_7261329.html
The wellness to right-wing pipeline is a real thing. For @nybooks,
Hari Kunzru writes about “Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat,” by @derekberes, @matthewremski and Julian Walker, and “Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New Order in Wellness” by Stewart Home. Both books lay bare the ascendancy of paranoia and pseudoscience [story may be paywalled].
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/05/29/doing-their-own-research-conspirituality-fascist-yoga/
Transphobia is pseudoscience, like Race Science is.
In the UK the BMA called the Supreme Court judgement "biologically nonsensical" and "scientifically illiterate"
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/roundup-experts-condemn-trump-pseudoscientific
#pseudoscience never submits to the rigorous scrutiny of science. If it did and survived, it would immediately transform into #science
@broadwaybabyto We had a complete victory on measles, then antivax spread like a virus and now we got measles back...
GG humanity
2/3
It's also important to note that fascists don't really have an ideology, so it's not useful to focus just on ideology.
In the rat race of the "law of the jungle", these proto and paleo fascists also focus on what's now called "biohacking". Well, the rich get real biohacking like that plant-based rich guy who wants to live forever, Bryan Johnson, and the rest get more and more pseudoscientific products; scams.
The thing with diets is that the if you're not getting acute toxicity or poisons, you don't really grasp how harmful it can be, especially if it's not found in long-term population studies.
It's such a pain in the moral ass. These meat clowns are harming themselves with their ignorance and LARP diets, and that forces me to figure out if I should warn them or if I should just let them earn Darwin awards. Either way, they are feeding a not-so-modern grifting economy, which spreads this contagion of foolishness to others.
First they came for trans people.
Then they came for autists.
https://people.com/rfk-jr-to-launch-autism-registry-using-private-health-records-11720156
A "national #autism registry" should alarm everyone. #sus
This is from the man who spreads the lie that "vaccines cause autism" (debunked here: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccines_and_autism>).
The same man who falsely claimed that autists never work or pay taxes. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/04/17/rfk-jr-autism-children/
I suggest to everyone in the US to get rid of #health trackers, smart watches, etc.
„Snake Oil on the Shopping List? How
#Pseudoscience Ends Up in Your Shopping Cart.“
Today, Thursday, 04/24/2025, @owlsome_ovo will show us how pseudoscience works in #marketing and how it will even influence your #shopping habits.
Tap a cold drink of your choice, join us at @sitp and check out #twitch at 7 p.m. BST / 8 p.m CEST!
"Desperate for a new intellectual underpinning, neoliberals and libertarians sought refuge in the work of economist Friedrich Hayek, who famously argued in his 1944 polemic The Road to Serfdom that government intervention in markets is antithetical to individual freedom. But Murray, Rothbard, Hoppe, and others fatally twisted Hayek’s message, claims Slobodian, and took it so far as to argue that only Western countries are intellectually and culturally primed for capitalism.
The politics of this cohort, which he dubs the “new fusionists,” was rooted in “three hards,” argues Slobodian: “Hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.” They forged sordid alliances with biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and ethnonationalists, spouting pseudoscience about the link between race and IQ, a topic famously repopularized in the 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve, coauthored by Murray and psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein. They railed against lax immigration policies on the premise that they led to cultural decay. But perhaps most strangely, they ballyhooed the value of gold as a backstop against a looming economic cataclysm caused by incompetency in Washington. (Talk about apropos.)
In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Slobodian analyzes Donald Trump’s radical agenda through this new prism of neoliberalism. He also unpacks the distressing parallels between goldbugs and crypto bros, and details why the tech set has suddenly taken up with the MAGA right. Silicon Valley’s “willingness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Donald Trump,” he says, is indicative “of the embrace of an ideology that pretty frankly ranks human capacity along the spectrum of intelligence and IQ.”"
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-silicon-valley-neoliberal-roots
Measles is spreading. Here’s how to stay safe. - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/measles-is-spreading-heres-how-to-stay-safe/
"I think that my assumption was a triumphalism and a sense of victory after the fall of the Soviet Union. But the fact that the week of the Berlin Wall falling, they were already talking about new enemies —enemies that had gone underground in certain ways or transformed in ways that were elusive — was the beginning of the rabbit hole. Because once you accept the idea that Marxism and socialism have survived and yet have changed their face, then anything can be Marxism and socialism.
I think this is how we can understand the fixation of the right wing on things like what they call “cultural Marxism” or “gender ideology” as essentially the new enemy of humanity. Because the adversary continuously changes shape, it makes them open to endless reinterpretation. There is a paranoid quality to the term. And the paranoia doesn’t really have any bounds, as I show in the book.
So I think the narrative arc comes from a feeling on the part of the libertarians, and often the racist libertarians, that they can contain their enemy in new ways by pinning it down on hierarchies of intelligence or deploying the latest findings from genetics. But by the end of the book, with a chapter on “gold bugs” and the far-right obsession with gold, there’s almost a sense of desperation or surrender to the inevitable, a failure to contain their enemies and the idea of an impending collapse and inevitable apocalypse.
(...)
What I recognize is a sort of desperation and a kind of ungoverned willingness to reach for radical remedies in a time of great peril. And as I described in the last chapter, often the rhetorical technique of the gold bug is to predict a coming apocalypse and then immediately sell you the only means there is to protect you from the worst.
I think there’s that accelerationism visible right now on the far right, certainly in the United States."
https://jacobin.com/2025/04/race-science-neoliberalism-hayek-slobodian/
Economics is the worst of pseudoscience, especially since it is used everywhere to guide policy.
Economics has an assumptions problem. The foundational method of economic practice is to create models grounded in assumptions that are either not known, not knowable, or - incredibly - known to be wrong.
From https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces #economics #pseudoscience
@paninid fast forward to the present and scientists who barely study #philosophy label #metaphysics as #pseudoscience (forgetting what #PhD means), torment #logic for the benefit of "elegant" #math equations (e.g. antimatter, dark #matter), and design #AI #systems that weaponize #ethics as justification for #information #censorship (#ChatGPT "knows" but refuses to answer how to a hot wire a car or commit murder while claiming no #opinion, ignorant that words and actions are different)
As Robyn Pennacchia reports, RFK Jr. is commissioning a study of the nonexistent "link" between vaccines and autism.
And, unsurprisingly, to head that study he has picked a man who is not a doctor nor a scientist, one David Geier, who has been in trouble for practicing medicine without a license.
As with so much about the Trump administration, nothing to see here, more along.
#Trump #RFKJr #vaccines #medicine #research #disinformation #PseudoScience #science
RFK Jr's former nonprofit posted a fake CDC website that criticized vaccines.
Kennedy asked the Children's Health Defense to remove the site but only after the NYTimes contacted him about it.
Kennedy is currently using the CDC to waste resources on further studies on the long disproven link began vaccines and autism and, in the process, further bolstering antivaxxers' delusional hysteria.
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