Ls&Qs&Cs: Kids with Lice; Grifters; Moral Panics; USA #1; Backward We Go

Catching up on current links I’ve saved from web-browsing over the past few days.

First a Facebook meme: Kids with Lice

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Next, modern-day grifters.

Ars Technica, Beth Mole, 2 Feb 2022: Joe “just conversations” Rogan defends misinformation like a classic grifter, subtitled, “Money, misinformation, & snake oil: Joe Rogan has a lot in common with Gwyneth Paltrow.”

With expertise in question, the slippery slope into misinformation continued as both questioned whether evidence-based medicine and scientific consensus can even be trusted at all. “The thing about science and medicine is that it evolves all the time,” Paltrow noted. “Studies and beliefs that we held sacred even in the last decade have since been proven to be unequivocally false, and sometimes even harmful,” she added, without providing any examples of such disproven “sacred” scientific “beliefs.”

Rogan, too, made such a claim. “The problem I have with the term ‘misinformation,’ especially today, is that many of the things that we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact,” Rogan said.

In this world where conversations are always innocent, facts can’t be verified, experts can’t be vetted, and science can’t be trusted, there’s a lot of room to peddle unproven products and harmful misinformation. It’s exactly the world Paltrow and Rogan want you to buy into.

“I want to show all kinds of opinions so that we can all figure out what’s going on—and not just about COVID, about everything about health, about fitness, wellness, the state of the world itself,” Rogan said.

Comment: Rogan and Paltrow are wrong, which is why they cannot provide any examples. They want you to think all the science that underlies the technology that supports our modern civilization is all suspect. Think about that the next time you board a plane.

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Moral Panics

Salon, Thom Harmann, 5 Feb 2022: How the “critical race theory” moral panic morphed into book-banning frenzy, subtitled, “The attack on CRT isn’t about teaching history. It’s about the right’s desire to destroy public education.”

The key point here is that “moral panics” have alarmed conservatives for decades, over issues that come and go. The writer provides examples from previous decades:

• If you’re old enough to remember the 1980s, you can recall when Tipper Gore and James Baker’s wife Susan were worried that song lyrics were going to corrupt a generation of Americans (tell that to Ari Melber). Or the Satanic ritual abuse hysteria that ran for much of the decade.
• In the 1990s, after a young British girl died of an ecstasy overdose, there was a moral panic around “Rave Culture,” and much of the multi-million-dollar advertising campaign that kicked it off was funded by alcohol companies that saw the upswing in drug use by young adults as a threat to their bottom lines.
• Since then we’ve seen national panics that just happened to politically or financially (or both) benefit Republican politicians, ranging from Islamophobia to Donald Trump’s “birther” claims against Barack Obama to Southern border caravans to the “bathroom hysteria” directed against trans schoolchildren just a few years ago.

The panic over CRT will fade…

But don’t worry: It’ll be replaced by a brand new Republican moral panic that targets another convenient and vulnerable group.

Will it be Hispanics (ethnicity and language)? Sikhs (religion)? Lesbians (gender/sexuality)?

You can bet that today’s version of Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz are focus-grouping it right now.

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USA is #1!

Guardian, 6 Feb 2022: Vastly unequal US has world’s highest Covid death toll – it’s no coincidence

NYT, 1 Feb 2022: U.S. Has Far Higher Covid Death Rate Than Other Wealthy Countries

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Conservatives: Backward we go.

Washington Post, Lizette Alvarez, 7 Feb 2022: Opinion: It’s legislate-against-LGBTQ-kids season in Florida

Opening paragraphs:

What makes a good parent? For many of Florida’s conservative politicians, the answer appears to be simple: Parents should narrow their children’s view of the country and the people in it. They should teach that science, tolerance, acceptance and curiosity have their limits. And they should peddle a view of society safely wrapped in the gauze of the 1950s.

This was a time when LGBTQ people remained invisible in American public life so they could stay safe and navigate the corridors of the conventional world.

So, backward we tumble, again. In a state that once treaded lightly on divisive issues, many of Florida’s Republican politicians are now gung-ho, cranked up by culture warrior in chief Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). As Florida struggles with sky-high rents, a broken home insurance system and environmental woes — problems impacting daily life — too many lawmakers focus on inflaming emotions in pursuit of a political payoff.