Some sort of trajectory happened over the past 15 years, where conspiracy theorists started out being correctly critical and sympathetic, although still nuts, and then became destructive and despicable
The chemtrails did it.
who are aware enough to realize they should take a critical eye to everything, but not very clear thinkers once that critical eye is gazing.
This is similar to "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." I think there's a level of skepticism that can be described as "Just skeptical enough to make yourself even more gullible."
This is the aim of disinformation, as opposed to propaganda - it's to make you devalue information in general. TBH I violently deny Jones ever did anyone any good - yes, he didn't like the Iraq war but he also associated Iraq war opposition with his own menagerie of tosh.
2 makes sense.
I'm researching supplements right now since I think I need to tune up my biochemistry for better post-exercise recovery. The amount of stupid woo out there is astonishing. So far I've figured out I might need more potassium, could use more zinc and maybe vitamin D, and that's it. All these "male enhancement" pills and stuff seem to be almost entirely bollocks. The only other thing I've found that's vaguely helpful is advice to limit consumption of soy products, as they can lower testosterone.
According to a woman talking to her apparently skeptical friend on the bus the other day, the key to post-exercise muscle building is to get protein in a great big can of protein powder and drink it right after you work out. If you want long enough to cook even eggs, the protein will come too late and your muscles will not get bigger.
I'm sure someone can devise a cardio workout that involves cooking eggs, so that when you're done with the exercise you can immediately eat the results.
You can buy pedal powered food processors (or at least the Whole Earth Catalog advertized them 40 years ago), so cooking while working out isn't implausible.
Cardio is different. This was for strength training. But, as the protein powder woman assured her friend, it isn't just for body builders.
6: You will need:
a large bag
6 ostrich eggs.
Hard-boil the ostrich eggs. Put them in the bag. Lift the bag up over your head 50 or 60 times. Eat the eggs.
I think that conspiracy theories are inevitable anywhere that you have inequality and a comparatively educated population, because you really do have a lot of people spinning and lying in order to maintain various kinds of power, you really do have a lot of secrecy and hidden information and you have people who are educated enough to understand that this is the case. But at the same time, there's no real structure that produces reliable information that is widely distributed and...not non-partisan so much as written without sneering and a lot of insider-markers.
I often reflect that my view of the world is so different from the majority's that it might as well be conspiracy theory. I'm not talking about anarchism, or having a particular view on, like, the Red Army Fraction, but about things that actually happened and are neither well known nor comfortable to fit within the usual narrative of American life. So for instance, American support for absolutely horrible regimes in South and Central America.
When I was younger and found out about this, it just turned my worldview upside down, and I could not help but tell people about it. And people didn't believe me. This was the nineties, so it wasn't in the news, and it was before the internet, so I basically had a handful of small press books and articles. And, as I say, people didn't believe me. They thought I was nuts. It wasn't even that they were like "well, we had to do this to protect the free world" or "I don't care, stop boring me", it was like "that didn't happen". Even educated people.
Now, of course, history has done what it always does, and something that was once unbelievable has become so widely accepted as to be banal. "Of course the US government collaborated in overthrowing one of the few governments that had real potential to be radically reformist and also stable and then helped install Pinochet, but that was a long time ago". We always go from "that didn't happen, stop lying" to "of course it happened, now it's too late, too bad" with no intervening "whoops we fucked up, what can we do about that".
It was the same with police brutality - I used to read a fanzine that collated all t he reports they could find about police beatings and killings, and once again, no one would believe me when I'd talk about it. Now everyone knows it happens, but it's just an inevitability.
But in any case, this type of experience gives me some interest in conspiracy theorists, because I too basically experience the world as "very bad things are constantly being done, everyone is either lying or willfully ignorant and no one will believe you when you point this out". I believe that the things I'm talking about are real and important, but every once in a while I wonder if I'm crazy.
I think that conspiracy theories are inevitable anywhere that you have inequality and a comparatively educated population
I'm not even sure you need a comparatively educated population - anti-semitism in mediaeval Europe and the modern Middle East come to mind.
I still think most of this is affective, not cognitive. People aren't really lying or willfully ignorant. They just don't like the people the bad things are happening to (or that they imagine the bad things are happening to) or do like the people who are doing the bad things. It's far easier to switch the facts to match your affective judgements than the other way around.
Frowner, what's fascinating about that is how completely different it is than my experience. I'm old enough that no one has ever denied to me that the US did that stuff, and, frankly, I'd probably never take seriously someone who did on any subject whatsoever. I mean, they government people involved were bragging about it while it was happening.
My sister seems to have become a 9/11 truther. I think it's more about entertainment with her -- it's fun the think everyne is lying -- and, of course, I can't get her to articulate just who did what and why.
My biggest frustration in that regard, though, is the people who say that Sanders would have won the nomination but for HRC and the DNC cheating. What exactly did they do and how did it affect voting in the South in March, I always ask, and the answer, if any, is usually something along the lines of 'if you believed in Our Revolution, you'd already know.'
Some sort of trajectory happened over the past 15 years, where conspiracy theorists started out being correctly critical and sympathetic, although still nuts
Really? Because 20 years ago it was all "Bill Clinton runs coke into Mena on behalf of the Zionist Occupation Government and MI5 killed Diana" if I remember.
This was the nineties, so it wasn't in the news
A couple of years ago I heard the song "Allende" by Moving Hearts (1982) and the opening verse immediately takes me back to listening to a lot of radio in the late 80s, early 90s.
The nighthawk flies and the owl cries as we're driving down the road.
Listening to the music on the all night radio show,
The announcer comes on says if you've got ideas I'll file the patent for you,
What's an idea if it's not in the store makin' a buck or two.
The chorus of the song is directly on-topic.
Its a long way from the heartlands to Santiago bay
Where the good doctor lies with blood in his eyes
and the bullets read U.S.of A.
And here is Dick Gaughan, from his fantastic 1985 concert album.
But, that might just prove your point. I'm not sure that getting one's news from left-wing songwriters is completely different from consuming conspiracy theories. But a lot of those songs from the 80s hold up quite well.
This reminded me of a Tom the Dancing Bug comic about the cure for all diseases having been discovered and how the pharmaceutical company was going to market it.
On topic. The performance enhancing drug that cost Lance Armstrong his titles has no effect. Except to cost you titles, I guess.
It turns out the real performance enhancement was inside him all along.
19: How is it legal that the whole book seems to be online. And how come I'm still reading it.
19: Very 90s, to be focusing on branding and not having the drug companies charging a reasonable sliding scale at 99% of income or something.
Sorry, but this post makes little sense to me. What are the two sides in "both sides" you are referring too? On one side, we have a site, InfoWars, that is clearly closely connected to the right. On the other side, we have ... I don't know? Some "Goop" and "Moon Juice" commercial entities (that I have never heard of) that do not seem to be connected in any way to the left.
Now if you are talking about individuals, sure, there are anti-science nuts on both sides. Many. But on one side, anti-science statements have become a major part of the party platform, on the other one, not so much. So, no, both sides do not do this.
I endorse 13 and 15. Everyone knew that the US supported corrupt oligarchs, and if you wanted to defend it, you said "because they are OUR oligarchs." The Clinton administration was accused, all over the nascent Internet, of literally every crime that came into anyone's head. The pro-Clinton side just denied everything, and the anti-Clinton side just repeated every accusation embellished and at higher and higher volume.
From the start of modern media (or whenever you want to say conspiracy theorists became a subculture) until Sept. 10, 2001, there was probably a lot of disagreement among conspiracy theorists, or if they agreed on something, they might not have cared about it equally. Montana militiamen probably didn't think the CIA introduced crack into black communities.
For like two years after 9/11, it was a weird era, for obvious reasons. Conspiracy theories were as objectively reasonable as they could be. This gave the congenital theorists one theory to rally behind. But eventually they had to decide whether they cared about evidence or not. Those who did, ceased to be conspiracy theorists, because it turns out that there's very little evidence of the strong version of Trutherism and stuff. Those who didn't wound up believing whatever they wanted in accordance to their prior prejudices.
A stopped clock is right twice a day, that's all.
13: I think the critical part here is that we're talking about stuff that happened in the fifties through the eighties and had been forgotten/minimized ten years later. If you were an attentive adult in the eighties, presumably you at least understood that the Right supported the Contras - but even in the eighties, people weren't making albums, etc, about US intervention in Central America because everybody knew about it, they were making those albums to attempt to inform people who did not know.
Consider how many people don't know much about what's going on right now. I've had a whole slew of conversations with smart, educated people who just aren't following the news that much, because they don't follow the news that much.
(I also just started reading Rebecca West's Black Lamb, Grey Falcon - boy, they don't make 'em like that any more, and I'm not sure whether to be glad or sorry - and she leads off with a conversation with a nurse in which the nurse appears largely unaware of major political developments of the last thirty years. Admittedly, I suspect West of embellishing a bit, and she has what seems to me to be an inexplicable faith in the diplomatic skills of Empress Elizabeth, but the anecdote about the nurse doesn't seem wildly unlikely.)
If you were an attentive adult in the eighties, presumably you at least understood that the Right supported the Contras
I agree with your larger point completely; that there are large gaps in the collective historical sense not because the information is unavailable but because people just don't talk about some things.
However this is also a good excuse to link to Corb Lund singing "Student Visas" (2007) about somebody he met who had been in Nicaragua on an off-book mission. Here is how Corb Lund introduces the song (in that house concert on youtube)
I was on tour with Fred Eagleston. A few years ago, I think we were in Alabama, and a guy that was a fan of Fred came up to me during Fred's set drinking beer and telling me his life story.
He was pretty screwed up. I think he was a special forces guy. He was about my age. He had a broken back and he was kind of unsettled. He sort of flip-flopped back and forth between tough guy bravado and really intense remorse for what he'd been up to. He was in Nicaragua. He kept telling me that he's not supposed to tell the story but he did anyway so I made a song out of it. It's a pretty worthwhile story.
I could have written Frowner's exact comment in 10, down to the part about Central America.
obligatory disclaimer: I should add, that I don't consider notably myself well-informed about us intervention in Latin America. My sense of that history is fairly vague and strongly influenced by songs and Doonesbury cartoons. But they're good songs.
As was I think common for most people my age, we had a high school principal who was a nun of Guatemalan ancestry and she made sure nobody who took religion class (which is to say everybody) didn't know exactly what Reagan was doing and why it was horrible.
As was I think common for most people my age . . .
"We're here, we were taught religion by a nun of Guatemalan ancestry, and we vote. "
29. I pretty much have found that most people pay almost no attention to history, especially not-recent history. If they don't pay attention to it, they don't talk about it. Because Zinn's "Peoples' History" is assigned reading (still, I think?) in many college classes, people find out about it at a late age and are shocked! shocked! that there is an alternative to the conventional view of US foreign policy (not to mention domestic policy).
I pretty much have found that most people pay almost no attention to history
Yes. When you put it that way it does seem obvious that even the well-known bits of history aren't known as history, per se, they're just part of the national iconography. People know that Nixon was a crook, Carter was ineffectual, Reagan was a cold warrior without thinking about what events contributed to those labels.
AIMHMHB, I still have my dad's original cassette tapes of Kris Kristofferson's Repossessed and Third World Warrior.
On topic. Maybe don't eat your placenta.
Honestly, I was shocked the first time I saw a placenta in the flesh. I don't know exactly what I had been envisioning, but it wasn't that.
I think you should give your placenta to vegans. They can't get ethical meat otherwise.
Honestly, I think paying a company to take your placenta, turn it into powder, and put it into capsules is kind of not in the spirit of the endeavor. Like growing your own organic tomatoes and hiring a company to spray your salad with RoundUp.
I'm going to need an onion, some butter, and a Lyft to Magee-Women's Hospital.
Top scientists and researchers agree: we are being hit by toxic weapons in the food and water supply
This quote from Infowars amuses me. Have they noticed that "top scientists and researchers" also agree that global warming is a thing?
Vaguely related: the promoter running the French festival has been arrested for wire fraud in new york.
My high school history teacher, who majored in Russian studies, told us how almost no one in the US knows that there were 10,000 US troops on Russian soil after WWI to fight against the Bolsheviks, but that all Russians are taught about it in elementary school. So when Russians casually mention to Americans how the US once invaded Russia the Americans think they're crazy conspiracy theorists. Probably it was more relevant during the Cold War, when everyone feared Russian invasion and the Russians said Well you already invaded us once.
Although perhaps Trump has made it relevant again.
46. "We," which is to say the Allies, tried to support the Kerensky government by sending aid and troops. Then after the Bolshevik coup, they tried to support anti-Bolshevik forces. Goal: keep Russia in the war. Result: quagmire and failure.
We didn't "invade" Russia, we assisted an ally. Once the Bolsheviks came to power, they of course considered it an "invasion," while the Allies considered it supporting the legit government, and eventually just opposing a government that was objectively pro-German from their point of view.
History is more complex than iconography.
But it's true that it was largely ignored by school teachers in the west, afaik. I suspect that's largely due to the "quagmire and failure" part.
39: Can't they eat animals that have been killed by other animals, like hyenas do?
48: I can't speak to all the details, but your recounting looks rather garbled. The intervention started July 1918, and continued clear through to 1920. Kerensky fled Russia in May 1918 at which point he had been fully out of power, I think mostly in hiding, for months. The Allies were backing the monarchist Whites.
I mean, I'm sure we aided the Kerensky government prior to that in other ways, but the intervention seems to have been a major escalating step. Wikipedia implies 7/2018 to have been the start of boots-on-the-ground, at least.
You know what, I'm pretty sure we've had this "US invaded/didn't invade Russia" argument here before.
Wikipedia implies 7/2018 to have been the start of boots-on-the-ground, at least.
That'll certainly make the mid-term elections interesting.
If we've had the invade/didn't invade Russia argument before, we could try something new. Maybe SWPL?
How could we ever forget the Czech Legion?
Heh. My first draft of 51 said July 2018 and I fixed it, then it slipped through in 52.
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Watching Helmut Kohl's requiem. I was raised Protestant and New World and resent every second spent on ceremonial, but sometimes you need the majesty. They had a ceremony in the European Parliament, coffin draped in the European flag. Bill Clinton is there, Trump isn't. Torches, watch them being passed.
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The "eat protein right after lifting" thing is standard advice
Whey protein is cheap and good for you
http://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/whey-protein/evidence/hrb-20060532
Creatine is also cheap and effective
http://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/creatine/evidence/hrb-20059125
If you read the effectiveness reports, the entry level lunkhead supplements are particularly good for the elderly
15: Weird, I just had a young Lebanese / Moroccan guy treat me to a stay in Cairo's airport lounge, multiple cigarettes, plus musings on who had killed Diana. (With Ajay's comment and this experience, that's two mentions in a day of a conspiracy theory I haven't thought of in years.) I didn't take it very seriously and asked "MI5?" and was sharply corrected. MI6 apparently, and because William and Harry couldn't have an Arabic sibling.
NickS and anyone else interested in music related to Allende:
I find Victor Jara's La Hierba De Los Caminos pretty devastating, given the history. Especially the aside at 2:14.
(Pretty sure I should have been going for a different adjective in 63 but have been travelling without sleep for 30 hr or so and am also somewhat btock to compound matters)
Couldn't MI6 use its stealth gynecologist to have tied Diana's tubes without her noticing?
62: That's what she said. My doctor just says "Do you even lift, bro?" and leave it at that.
She even specifically said "whey protein". It comes in big cans, for cheap because the Little Miss Muffet diet plan has lost popularity.
I never heard of creatine supplements before. I assume it's cheap since you literally piss it away.
"She even specifically said "whey protein". It comes in big cans, for cheap because the Little Miss Muffet diet plan has lost popularity."
Whey protein is a by-product of cheese production so has traditionally been real cheap.
Not having clicked through the link in 72 but seeing it to be YouTube, am I right in guessing it to be the M&W sketch on the subject?
Whey protein is a by-product of cheese production so has traditionally been real cheap.
Bad marketing. Marmite is a by-product of beer production but they still charge £2.40 for 250 grams.
62: Whoa. Whoa. I've been a gym rat all my life, and intermittently glanced at medical literature on protein consumption and muscle development. And it always said stuff like "Americans eat too much protein already". This is quite shocking. I'll have to look around a little, but sheesh, maybe I should get some supplements.
Re: America's bad deeds in Latin America, all I can say is, in the 80s we were listening to the Iran-Contra hearings on the radio and it was clear our govt was up to shitty, shitty stuff. E.g. the testimony about drug dealers landing at US bases and offloading whatever they wanted, so they could then load up on weapons, was pretty damning. I'm with 12: "I still think most of this is affective, not cognitive. People aren't really lying or willfully ignorant. They just don't like the people the bad things are happening to".
Similarly, growing up we all knew what a "throw-down gun" was, and it had the same level of truth-value as "cancer sticks". As in: "yeah, it happens, yeah so what?" Which is a way of saying "won't happen to meEEEeeeEEEEEeeee, and the people it happens to, deserve it".
Just a couple of days ago I was standing at the bus stop and listening to a fellow passengers relate to a relative that she had just spent $20 on a bottle of "iodine" from the Infowars website. And she didn't even look like an imbecile.
This seems like the kind of thing people here might like. It is sort of topical: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/liberal-fever-swamps/530736/?utm_source=twb
75: the idea of a "protein window" post exercise is highly dubious. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3577439/
Most people in the West who are not actually bodybuilders get plenty of protein in their daily diet anyway. If you're worried, just drink a pint of milk after exercise.
78: Oh, look at Mr. Lactose Tolerance here.
My son is seemingly lactose intolerant. My kids would eat pure carbo-load diets if I let them. My goto move with my daughter is to hand her glass after glass of milk, but with my son I don't have a good alternative. Maybe I should start him on protein powder.
79. Grill him a steak.
I don't know how old your kids are but pure carbo-load diets might not necessarily be so bad, provided it's temporary.
The amount of sheer unsubstantiated bollocks surrounding exercise and nutrition puts Alex Jones to shame. Eat a balanced diet, limit carbs, pop a supplement, and don't worry about it. IME when it comes to exercise the thing people neglect is hydration more than nutrition. Trying to optimize everything related to health is a fools game. The best you can do based on the evidence is sort of wing it because the evidence tends to be shitty studies with small sample sizes and half of them are pushing some kind of bullshit agenda. What's clear at this point is that refined sugars are of the devil and fats are not, the exact opposite of what we've been told since the 1970s. Until nutrition science gets its act together I'm going to go with eating as close to the way my ancestors did as possible and hope that my body is suitably adapted.
pop a supplement
A lot of doctors would say that that was bollocks too.
re: 78
One thing I discovered, when I was younger and doing a lot more strength training than now* I was surprised to see how much my protein intake fell short of the supposed recommendations.** That may be because while I eat meat, I'm not chucking down multiple 100s of grammes of meat every day, and I don't particularly like dairy stuff (cheese, whole milk, etc) so I don't eat much of that, except for the odd bowl of porridge or milk in coffee.
* now I do basically none at all, except for some small amount of stuff that supports some physio work I am doing. But at one time, I was doing strength training fairly regularly.
** although, googling, exercise nutritionists seem to be rolling back on those quantities, and for someone my weight, my protein intake is probably fine.
Oh, look at Mr. Lactose Tolerance here.
Soy milk? It's rather nice.
Body-building? Lactose-tolerance? Racist.
In the words of the Rev. Jesse Custer: "Why is it that the loudest defenders of the white race are always the worst examples of it? You! Where the fuck is your chin?"
82: I'm thinking multivitamin, not so much the woo stuff. It's easy to get a little off on all those vitamins and minerals.
My kid who's the militant vegetarian (although fine with other animal products, just not meat) developed a lactose intolerance this year so now it's basically all carbs all the time. We ended up at Ikea yesterday and at the restaurant all I could get him was a bowl of plain pasta with a side of fries. Now I'm understanding the attractiveness of classifying ketchup as a vegetable.
IME when it comes to exercise the thing people neglect is hydration more than nutrition.
Oh sure, spoken like someone whose pelvic floor isn't wrecked from childbirth. The real answer is that you need to dehydrate the fuck out before you exercise, and if the workout calls for jump ropes or box jumps, then you pee immediately before, and try coughing while you're on the toilet to get those last few drops out.
but then after, sure, have some water.
Have you done any pelvic floor rehab, heebie? Not that the dehydrate/pee strategy is necessarily bad, but it can be inconvenient.
Isn't the point of hot yoga/hot exercise studios so that people can't tell the difference between dripping sweat and leaking urine?
One of the things I discovered doing marathon kickboxing sessions, is that it's pretty easy to over-hydrate. And then wallow around all slow and uncomfortable. The temptation to gulp down water because you are sweating buckets, have a heart rate about 180, and can't breathe is high.
91: I'm actually fine - I was half-kidding. Xfit, for all its ridiculousness, is excellent for this sort of thing, and my youngest will be three in the fall. (Jumping jacks and jump ropes are occasionally a problem, and fuck it.) I was half-serious, however, that I really have said this to women postpartum who are just beginning to exercise again.
The linked Mayo article on creatine convinced me to order some. We'll see if I suddenly bulk up. I'm doing the ketogenic diet and lifting 3 X week. I'm not hitting the protein targets set out for lifting, but am losing fat/(slowly) adding muscle. I'll report back after a few weeks.
95: I'm doing keto and gym (shit-tons of core) too. I'm planning on adding yoga but first I need to get a couple ducks in a row.
I thought the point of creatine was that you don't need so many ducks.
The other group that would benefit the most from both whey protein and creatine supplementation are vegatarians.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1691485/
Vitamin supplements probably kill you.
I would not use them without getting a blood test first.
Whey protein and creatine are safe though
94: I figured that most of the exercises you'd be doing would be pretty helpful (squats), but good to hear!