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Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products

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171–180 of 221 posts

Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products

#171

The anti-authority/anti-expert theme in American politics isn't a left or right phenomenon. There's a fundamental breakdown in institutional trust within American society which is present on both sides, and the similar approaches to wellness are a vivid expression of this.

It's been well-earned. How many iterations of the food pyramid? How many times have we been told that X is okay, only to find out some decades later that X is in fact, not good for us? Flame retardants, can liners. Don't wear masks. Do wear masks. Okay, we lied, but it was for a good reason. This is safe for pregnant women. Then it turns out not to be safe for pregnant women, but they keep prescribing it anyway. Now that everyone involved is off the board and/or dead, we can admit it: we knew about global warming decades ago. Nobody got locked up for Tuskegee, the psychopath who tortured David Reimer and his brother was lauded as a visionary, and the inventor of the lobotomy got a Nobel Prize for this daring feat of psychosurgery ... just a year before the Soviet Union banned it on moral grounds. Feed some kids radioactive oatmeal, become the head of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Of course experts aren't respected. They've demanded it.

Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to understand how the link you provided supports your claim. What is the supporting text, and how does the quote from Goop above relate?

Sure it does: > "The desirable nutritional changes that occur during sprouting are mainly due to the breakdown of complex compounds into a more simple form, transformation into essential constituents and breakdown of nutritionally undesirable constituents. This is a reason why sprouts are also called pre-digested foods."[12]

> pre-digested foods

This implies that digestion does the same thing already and saves you a step?

Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The erosion of institutional trust became much more widespread post Covid. As it should have.

Why?

> Why?

Locking people down at home for over 2 years. Damaging an entire generation of young children in the process.

Destroying the economy in the process. Inflationary policies which lead to recessions and stagflation globally from which we still haven't recovered (and probably won't for the next 5-10 years).

Spreading mass fear and hysteria based on little empirical (and often contradictory) evidence.

Obliterating global travel and commerce.

Forced global-scale campaigns on live, involuntary human experimentation. Get the jab or stay locked up. Get the app or forget about going to work today.

Forcing people to wear thin pieces of cloth over their faces for no reason.

Silencing any critique and punishing any forms of noncompliance with heavy fines and incarceration (Djokovic is a threat to national security and public health).

Normalizing "asking difficult questions" as something only "conspiracy theorists" would do.

Installing anti-democratic laws and mechanisms which subvert the individual's right to free speech, gathering, movement, and control over their own body.

Bullshit and twisted statistics arbitrarily used as excuse for random decisions.

This list is far from complete...

Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products

#175
post #80

What does it tell us about the web that two websites that appear so different converge on the same business model? I guess it's hard to make money on the web.

Some kind of capitalistic horseshoe theory maybe? "Seeking max profits always leads to the same point, regardless of where you start."

More like "grifters and their marks have no diversity" in that, neither Alex Jones nor Goop are selling unregulated products for political reasons. They have cultivated an extremely motivated, more money than sense, gullible audience willing to eat up ANY nonsense you spout, no matter how self contradictory or evidently wrong to even the minimum of critical thinking, and are simply mining that self organizing gullible audience for profit.

Goop and Infowars are the same product, just in a different box.

Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products

#176
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more about the cult of personality of Alex Jones or Gwyneth Paltrow. They aren't buying products to be healthy, they are buying products to be more like/to support their favorite celebrities. While thinking about "blame", don't ignore that some people are working pretty hard to find & target these products to whales.

But who looks at Alex Jones and thinks "I want to have what that guys having"?

There is a, frankly insane episode of This American Life, where they take a look at one of the stories Alex tells about his childhood. The ending of it is remarkable: even though they are talking to people who know the story that Alex tells is false, absolute fiction... they still believe him on everything else.

> It kept happening. All these people who knew for sure that Alex had been a liar back in Rockwall. A lot of them believed that what he says on Infowars might be true. They have a reference for him, like Coach Randy.

It gives some insight into the personalities here.

The segment of the episode in question: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/670/beware-the-jabberwock/a...

Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products

#177
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who value fresh produce are going to go out of the way to get it. If enough people do this, environments will adapt to that demand. NYC Chinatowns used to be quite poor and discriminated against, but they were still able to establish their own supply chains that provides cheaper and fresher vegetables than anywhere else in the city because vegetables are a quintessential part of Chinese cuisine. Food deserts,…

I've been heavily involved in a city council before that was trying to attract stores (especially a grocery store), so I'm pretty familiar with how it works, and this mostly incorrect. In fact, people going out of their way to get the produce elsewhere works against a new store, because the stores see that as cannabilization should they open a new closer location. The decision to open new stores is mostly based on "n…

Dollar stores are the killer here. They can easily undercut regular grocery stores (low selection, low worker count) but they do not have produce sections. So people just give up the produce section to get all the other processed stuff cheaper.

Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products

#178
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At worst it's harming people with something poisonous or toxic.

Selling poison is illegal.

The FDA has found (after it was reported) homeopathic teething baby medicine where belladonna (nightshade) was claimed to be the homeopathic source but instead of being diluted to nonexistence like normal homeopathy there were dangerous levels of belladonna in the tablets. Unregulated supplements do not need to contain what they say on the bottle, and they can also contain things the bottle does not say they contain. That is legal.

Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

> Why? Locking people down at home for over 2 years. Damaging an entire generation of young children in the process. Destroying the economy in the process. Inflationary policies which lead to recessions and stagflation globally from which we still haven't recovered (and probably won't for the next 5-10 years). Spreading mass fear and hysteria based on little empirical (and often contradictory) evidence. Obliterating…

Fauci himself admitted last week that a lot of the policies he pushed for had no science to back them up. “They just kind of appeared” to paraphrase him. However when he was challenged on the science of those policies during that time, he called it “an attack against science.”

No wonder no one trusts the government anymore.

Re: Infowars and Goop sell the same exact pseudoscientific "wellness" products

#180
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So people who live in a food dessert secretly don't really want any vegetables?

If people in the area generally wanted vegetables, someone would sell them. So the most likely case is that the vast majority of people in food desserts don't really want vegetables.

That's just too black and white. The other replies to the comment I replied too have much better explanations than I could give as to why
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