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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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And does that follow for his discussion of distrust of the media, of Nature, of the institutions like the NIH? Does it follow for flippantly stating the CIA killed JFK and covered it up for sixty years?

Sure, this kind of hippie left think health authorities help the pharma companies cover up the “cure for cancer”, believe in chemtrails, have an extreme distrust for anything that comes out of a lab (including vaccines), and certainly believe in JFK and 911 conspiracies.

believe in chemtrails

If you don't believe in chemtrails, you don't believe in reality. It's just the conspiracy parallax, where chemtrails make you insane, but cloud seeding is just known technology. Guess what, all those kooks talking about chemtrails are right: people really are spraying chemicals out of airplanes in order to seed clouds and alter the weather.

have an extreme distrust for anything that comes out of a lab (including vaccines)

Extreme distrust is warranted when you are constantly lied to, especially in matters of public health. Those lies are obvious now, for at least one topic, and I see no reason to believe those same agencies on other matters when their credibility is thoroughly shredded. Yes, including vaccines.

You shouldn't trust pthalates or polyfluoroalkyl chemicals, both of which came out of a lab and are poisoning the environment. You shouldn't trust atrazine which is quite literally turning the frogs gay. You shouldn't trust neonicitinoid pesticides, either, or fire retardants in your furniture and on your baby's clothes.

I don't see why you are advocating for naive belief in labs.

and certainly believe in JFK and 911 conspiracies.

If you believe the Warren Commission report, then you're just plain gullible. Dulles, Hoover, and Johnson, among others, conspired to hide the truth.

All you've done is boo the hippies, but to my mind they're right often enough, and more importantly, they make a different kind of error. The authorities are more likely to tell me something harmful is safe, the hippies are more likely to tell me something safe is harmful. Those two types of errors do not produce the same outcomes.

But really, the fact that you're directing your scorn towards a known true and proven fact (cloud seeding aka chemtrails) makes me think you should be more skeptical of authority, and less reflexively skeptical of the fringe.

Cloud seedling doesn’t prove chemtrail conspiracy theories, which almost all allege some kind of poison / mind control / chemical to keep people docile is being dropped from the aircraft. Benign cloud seeding for research purposes (almost universally disclosed precisely because it’s completely legal and there is little widespread opposition to it) isn’t it.