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

People ARE individuals, on a physical level too. Modern medicine is notoriously bad at addressing this, and until the technology catches up the only alternative to people trying things on their own is state-mandated trials on vulnerable groups.

There are facts out there that can otherwise be kept private until subpoenad by court order, is that not special access to facts?

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...

> "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]

> "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] "The metabolic activity of resting seeds increases as soon as they are hydrated during soaking. Complex biochemical changes occur during hydration and subsequent sprouting. The reserve chemical constituents, such as protein, starch and lipids, are broken down by enzymes into simple compounds that are used to make new compounds." "Sprouting grains causes increased activities of hydrolytic enzymes, improvements in the contents of total proteins, fat, certain essential amino acids, total sugars, B-group vitamins, and a decrease in dry matter, starch and anti-nutrients. The increased contents of protein, fat, fibre and total ash are only apparent and attributable to the disappearance of starch. However, improvements in amino acid composition, B-group vitamins, sugars, protein and starch digestibilities, and decrease in phytates and protease inhibitors are the metabolic effects of the sprouting process."

Meanwhile sugary cereals like Heritage Flakes, and honey loaded granolas are what we think is healthy.

The decision to open new stores is mostly based on "number of daytime wallets in the area," which itself is mostly tied to the other existing businesses in the area. For example, for one major grocery chain, they wouldn't even consider it until we had 50,000 daytime wallets. For a commonly known gigantic home improvement chain, they wanted 100,000. It doesn't matter how badly people in the area want it. It just comes pretty mathematically with growth.

If you already have a grocery store that doesn't carry fresh produce, you can (sometimes) improve things by speaking with the store management, but beyond that you're pretty much out of luck unless you are willing to open your own store.

This is wayyyy too black and white. What is cheap and available is what becomes people's diets and historically folks are extremely creative with the stuff that's around. This is pretty much the entire story of culinary history and likely where all your favorite dishes originated. One of the reasons tea was so unbelievably popular in western Europe was because the staple diets of most folks was stale bread and people needed something to wash it down that didn't taste awful. Cheese follows a supply of milk and a demand to not have it spoil.

So you're right that just having the supply there doesn't work because there's no pressure to actually use any of it. The most economical foods by a wide margin non-perishables. When you get your CSA box you've already paid for the veggies so you're motivated to use them up before they turn but at the grocery store why would you even bother when you have anything else more important to do? If you were just handed a sack of apples you might find a way to use them all but "paying money to do more work" in an environment where every adult in the household works a full-time job, plus having kids or social obligations is quite the ask. Buying those apple bars is a much easier buy than fresh apples because they don't have an timer attached to them, you're guaranteed to extract all the value even when you're busy and not home for a few days.

And this isn't some new phenomenon, "cutting out work for wives and mothers trying to put food on the table every night" is an entire industry. Go look at any food ads from the 20th century.

Fruit is a tough one though: there are many hidden costs in providing it at scale. The 7 year waiting period is huge; add cost of the land, picking, transport, and spoilage. Fruit are fragile and stay fresh for a very short time.

There’s a reason fruit companies have tiny margins: here are the numbers for Fresh Del Monte: https://valustox.com/FDP

> 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...

I dunno, check out the Y axis on this chart the CBC posted: https://media.assettype.com/westernstandard%2Fimport%2Fweste...

I didn’t say that, nor mean it.

And just wow - never in my most pessimistic estimation did I imagine that my post would be interpreted as defending “dehumanizing, devaluing and hate”.

Having lived in different cultures, I have experienced that perfectly acceptable wording of criticism of an idea in one culture was interpreted as a personal attack in another culture.

So the same wording of a critique didn’t “scale” across those cultures.

In a smaller scale setting, there’s a much better chance to hit the right tone for the smaller audience, so the criticism doesn’t come across as hurtful.

> Please give us a historical example where "letting your hate flow" led to scalable mass changing people

I have to admit, I have absolutely no idea how you got from my comment to that sentence?

You generally have to take psych meds for quite a few days before determine their effect. If you take too little, you risk your mental health. Take too much? Have fun riding out Seratonin Syndrome!

Notice how a lot of desserts in the frozen section of your grocery store are labeled “frozen dairy dessert”. That is because those specific desserts are not permitted to be called “ice cream”, just like how oscillococcinum should not be permitted to be called “medicine”.

There’s a balance here, but oscillococcinum is not an edge case. It is pseudoscientific fraud.

I’m glad that this isn’t the Wild West of snake oil salesmen like we had back in the day. People used to really get hurt! I think more of these regulations would improve the situation even more—herbal supplements, for example, should be labeled with the quantity of ingredients more accurately—right now, it can be a bit of a crapshoot due to the variations between vendors or even between different batches from the same vendor.