In this context, for me, the trench is the Alternative Medicine section of Yahoo!Answers.
Why am I doing this? Do I really hate myself that much? Do I really think I can convert anyone?
I’m doing this because I am sick of sitting back on my laurels and pooh-poohing this stuff from my little private Skeptopia. Skeptopia is a land where many skeptics live. It’s a safe place where skeptics get together and pat each other on the back for being so clever. It’s not just here, most of the other skeptic forums and blogs have become Skeptopias. I’ve built my own Skeptopia here so I can talk about how clever I am, and if anyone flames me I can delete their comment and pretend they don’t exist. It gets boring sometimes, ridiculing dumb ideas and patting myself on the back is starting to give me shoulder cramp. In the end, how does it help anyone or change anything if I stay in my safe little world?
I was looking for more information about GNC’s iridology offer and I ran across this section of Yahoo! Answers and it was just the place I think I need to be. It’s not a site people go to in order to find answers refuting alternative medicine claims, it’s a place where they go to have them confirmed or to get advice. There is a lot of bad information going around there, from folk remedies to advice on the best chiropractic schools, but I noticed that there are a few skeptics too. People linking to quackwatch, people giving glib negative answers. All morning, I’ve been researching answers and trying to provide detailed, informed answers to questions by seriously curious people. It’s not the people who are already clearly wrapped up in alternative medicine that I target, it’s the people with serious questions who are just interested in learning more who I think need good information.
I don’t just tell people to go to a doctor. I don’t tell people that they are stupid or that such-and-such is simply nonsense. I try to provide simple explanations of the science involved and I make suggestions that they might be better off looking for other alternatives. Basically, I try to answer the question as best I can without judgment or prejudice
Maybe it doesn’t make a lick of difference. I’ll get back to you once people start rating my answers.
Politically, I constantly waffle between a desire for utopian anarchy, with no need for order because people will just respect each other, and a desire to have a governments that will take care of people with important benefits and services. I think this mindset is very American. When it comes down to it though, on a personal level I lean a little bit more toward anarchy. This is why I used to go to that nice little anarchist bookstore on Haight street. It’s where I first saw blueprints for intentional communities in a book. It’s where I bought Making Stuff and Doing Things (ostensibly as a gift for my cousin, but I took it for myself when he was done reading it), a D.I.Y. manual for everything from compost toilet construction to making your own cat food to making a secret stash box from an old 8-track tape. I don’t need to tell you how much I love this book. The D.I.Y ethic appeals to me on many levels. Not just the punk D.I.Y. ethic, but the more grown up, country housewife version (an example can be found at down—to—earth), and even, to a lesser extent, the popular culture Better Homes and Gardens, HGTV, Martha Stewart versions.
I don’t want to sound like a *cringe* hippie, but I really get tired of the consumer culture sometimes. I often long to get away from it. Living in an apartment in Braddon, so close to shopping areas, it’s hard to escape.
All I want is a small house, a big yard with a vegetable garden, a herb garden and a chicken coop. There will be a bike shed and a compost heap and a small play area made from recycled materials, and, if I’m lucky, the house will be recycled too. Like this one (-via Neatorama). In fact, why not expand this ethic to a community? A tool lending library, a bike sharing program and a neighborhood garden are easy enough to set up. A sewing circle devoted to re-purposing old clothes is a fun community building exercise and a local food co-op can save people money while supporting local growers and again, encouraging a sense of community. Why am I not doing any of this? I’ve got to go. There’s so much work to do.
I’ve become slightly obsessed with the Steampunk aesthetic. It’s a bit of a dystopian/utopian science fiction genre in which steam is the dominant technology. Lots of airships and locomotives. Think copper, brass and their lovely offspring, bronze. Lots of guages and rivets and fancy scrollwork. It combines a victorian aesthetic and Jules Verne-esque gadgets with a kind of rugged clunky, grease smeared sense of fun. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is often considered steampunk.
For a while now, I’ve been really into the 1950’s aesthetic. The early atomic age held such a sense of hope, we were going to go to space! There were all kinds of gadgets for the home! Women were women and men smoked pipes! I love the futuristic utopian 50’s thing. The future was right around the corner! I know it was all mostly cold war propaganda but, in spite of the constant threat of nuclear war, it was a happy time. (Not to mention, being a woman with a set of full hips, the 1950’s silhouette is extremely flattering to my figure.)
I tried to draw some similarity between the two aesthetics: Both were times when there was hope in technology. In one, there was power in steam. Transportation between continents was faster than it had ever been. The telegraph was making communication instantaneous. The railways were making crossing continents safe and easy. Minds were abuzz with invention and it seemed like the tide of new ideas was going to take off and the future was bright. In the other, there was the rocket, there were jet engines and we had control of the atom. There was plastic and cheap means of production. The luxuries of modern life were available to anyone. Every man had a home and every wife had a waffle iron. A chicken in every pot.
When I started searching for examples of these parallels, it led me to an interesting observation: many science fiction films made in the 50’s were adaptations of books written in the late 1900’s. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds. These futuristic visions of the steam era were reproduced in technicolor for audiences in the hopeful yet terrified 1950’s. Of course there are parallels between these two eras. Those parallels were being drawn at the time! (Link: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea trailer on YouTube)
All this time I’ve been feeling conflicted and it turns out there’s no conflict after all.
Last year I read The Science of Good and Evilby Michael Shermer. I’ve always been interested in human behavior, that is, why we behave the way we do, and I found the book to be a fascinating look at morality from a secular, scientific, evolutionary point of view. Humans are, after all, merely animals like any other, but with complicated behaviors that often seem difficult to predict. I think people, especially philosophers and religious folks, tend to think that because humans are capable of reason and intellect, we can somehow overcome human nature.
The problem with any utopia is that it fails to take into account actual human behavioral patterns. As I postulated when I was around 12 or 13 years old (and having my first “deep, profound thoughts”), in a perfect world, there would be no need for the words “thank you” or “I’m sorry”. The appreciation and remorse would be understood. In a perfect world, people would never need to thank each other, because people would simply always share. It would be the norm and so thanking someone would be redundant and pointless. In a perfect world, no one would intentionally cause anyone harm, so any harm done by another person would be merely accidental, and of course, they would be sorry and the person harmed would not be angry at them. However, we don’t live in a perfect world. People are jerks. People lie. People cheat. People steal. People do petty crap. People are sometimes lazy and sometimes selfish. It just the way we evolved and for a good reason. Read the rest of this entry »
There are some ideas that my hippie/utopian side really likes, but my skeptical side really distrusts.
For instance: wicca/nature worship. I don’t believe in any gods, but I like the idea of treating the forces of nature with respect. I also like rituals, incense, drums, naked forest dancing and pentagrams. I just can’t bring myself to perform any spells for any function other than focusing my mental energy on a goal, or marking a significant event. And also, it’s a little silly because there’s no such thing as magic.
Similarly, I love the idea of “eating raw.” These “raw food,” “paleo” and “live food” diets are appealing to my imagination and my sense of “nature worship.” Even since I read Clan of the Cave Bear, I’ve romanticized my hominid ancestors and thought the idea of roughing it when it comes to food is exciting. I met an extremely skinny artist once who told me he was a “raw foodist.” When I asked how that worked, he said, “It involves a lot of chewing.” I tried it for a couple of days, and he was right. Celebrities like Demi Moore adhere to a raw food diet with excellent results, and it doesn’t sound too unhealthy, at least when compared to Atkins or other fad diets.
One thing I’ve learned when researching raw diets is that people on it tend to be the kind of elitist, self educated, one-track-minded people I tend to dislike. There are also plenty of misconceptions put forward about what our ancestors ate, not to mention the fallacy that somehow because our ancestors did it, it’s better for us. And so I often give up researching, frustrated by stupidity, and move on. Read the rest of this entry »
So a few months ago I was reading a site about sustainable communities and I realised something: most sustainable communities are run by hippies.
Something that you should know about me is that I generally dislike hippies. I wrote about this in another blog of mine, and if I can find it I’ll repost it. It was pretty funny.
You see, there are a lot of things the hippies do right. For instance, hippies are generally concerned about the earth and are usually pacifists. I’m cool with that. Also, sometimes the drug thing is okay.
But I’m not here to rehash all the reasons I hate generally dislike hippies. I’m here to describe my utopia.
The site I was looking at (getting back on track here) suggested that to build your sustainable community you need to first sit down with all of the members of the community and set goals.
Since, so far, my community only consists of me, this is what I came up with (my skeptical utopia): Read the rest of this entry »
This is my blog. It’s called skept (as in skeptic)opia (as in utopia)
This is going to be a very sloppy entry since it is my first. Sure, it would be great to start off with a bang and be very showy with this, my 5th? 6th? attempt at a blog, but I’m not.
The mission statements for this blog are simple:
-To have a place to rant about skeptical topics.
-To have a place to ramble on and on about what my perfect world would be.
You are free to disagree with my view of the world, and I hope you will understand that I am free to mock you. It’s my blog and that’s my prerogative. So there.
However, if you share my view of a perfect world, I’d love to know. And perhaps you can help me make it so.
Lofty goals, yes. But this is just a first tiny step toward changing the world for the better, and isn’t that what we all want?
