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#pseudoscience

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Melbourne woman's body the second to be frozen by cryonics company
By Coco Veldkamp

The woman's body now lies suspended in liquid nitrogen at a facility in regional New South Wales, in the hope that science will one day revive her.

abc.net.au/news/2025-07-16/sec

ABC News · Melbourne woman's body the second to be cryogenically frozen by Southern CryonicsBy Coco Veldkamp

Melbourne woman's body the second to be frozen by cryonics company
By Coco Veldkamp

The woman's body now lies suspended in liquid nitrogen at a facility in regional New South Wales, in the hope that science will one day revive her.

abc.net.au/news/2025-07-16/sec

ABC News · Melbourne woman's body the second to be cryogenically frozen by Southern CryonicsBy Coco Veldkamp

So, one of my favorite silly #pseudoScience science fiction notions is that time travel has been discovered many times by human engineers.
But, the experimenters have only been able to move along the time axis, with space defined relatively by the gravitational influence of the sun and the galaxy, not the Earth.
This results in time travellers occasionally popping into regions of exceedingly empty space, where the earth was when they time jumped, and no means of surviving nor returning.
#sciFi

"Janyce Boynton spent time using these faulty communications techniques with nonverbal autistic children. One day, she realized that the technique she was using — facilitated communication, where a facilitator helps guide a student’s hands as they type — was so deeply flawed that she had subconsciously manufactured false allegations of abuse against a child’s innocent parents. In the decades since, she has dedicated herself to helping expose autism pseudoscience and help steer people towards more legitimate forms of communication.

It’s not a surprise then that Boynton has been critical of The Telepathy Tapes. On a YouTube channel dedicate to debunking autism pseudoscience, Boynton used part of one video that Dickens posted featuring a boy named Akhil spelling out messages with his mother. Boynton highlighted the video to show how Akhil’s mother can cue him about what letter to tap — which can risk robbing him of his voice in the process, as he is not typing out his thoughts but hers.

That was when the producers of The Telepathy Tapes issued a copyright complaint against the channel, resulting in YouTube delivering a copyright strike.

But the complaint was oddly sloppy.
(...)
Boynton teamed up with a California attorney named Pamela Koslyn to fight back, arguing to YouTube that the use of the clip falls under fair use. YouTube stated that The Telepathy Tapes had 10 days to sue in federal court for copyright infringement; if they didn’t, the content would be restored. The strike was removed and the video is back up on Boynton’s channel."

theamericansaga.com/p/the-tele

The American Saga · “The Telepathy Tapes” Turns to Censorship To Try To Protect Itself From ScrutinyBy Zaid Jilani

#Pseudoscience:

+ You don't actually have to know or learn anything
+ Many will believe you
+ You get to use big scientist words
+ You feel like you achieved something, you feel a sense of accomplishment

- You help spread potentially dangerous or hurtful beliefs and ideas
- You'll probably be taken advantage of by smart people
- People with an actual science background will never stop laughing at you

I don't know about others, but those cons definitely outweigh the pros in my opinion.

Continued thread

The plan:

STEP 1 (DONE)

Create a committee of at least 7 Representatives from 7 different EU countries to initiate the European Citizens' Initiative.

STEP 2 (NOW)

Once approved, collect 1 million proofs of support in the form of signatures of a petition around all of the European Union.

STEP 3

Defend the ban of conversion therapy before the European Commission.

Info and sign form: act.lgbt

#lgbtq #lgbtqia #trans #gay #lesbian #humanRights #pseudoScience #lgbtqi+ #europe

act.lgbtACTACT is a French Association fighting for a ban on Conversion Therapy in the European Union.

Ever read a scientific study with only 50 meaningful words in the Results section?

I just did.

"Cats spent significantly less time exploring and in proximity to the treatment garbage can than to the control garbage can. The latency to approach tended to be higher for the treatment can than for the control garbage can. No significant difference in the first choice between garbage cans was found."

On top of this, the sample size was 5.

Apparently "The Secret" is just the "law of attraction," a thing wealthy people have told less-wealthy people for the past 125 years: personal wealth is 100% due to personal choices, and if you're not wealthy--even if you're a refugee in Darfur--your life circumstances are your fault for not thinking positively enough? And tens of millions of non-wealthy people pay the wealthy people to tell them this, blaming themselves for not being wealthy, failing to see that the wealth of their life gurus came from convincing people like them to pay them for this?

I get why Oprah and other ultra-rich people like this "philosophy": it is Chicken Soup[1] for the Billionaire Soul, reassuring the rich that their wealth is evidence they are better people than everyone else, not a badge of unthinkable overconsumption. I don't totally understand why all the middle class people fall for it.

Sometimes my faith in the basic thinking processes of my fellow humans (maybe just Americans) takes a vicious body blow.

[1] The Secret is by the same dudes who wrote the literally hundreds of Chicken Soup for the Soul books.

Continued thread

The wellness to right-wing pipeline is a real thing. For @nybooks,
Hari Kunzru writes about “Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat,” by @derekberes, @matthewremski and Julian Walker, and “Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New Order in Wellness” by Stewart Home. Both books lay bare the ascendancy of paranoia and pseudoscience [story may be paywalled].

nybooks.com/articles/2025/05/2

The New York Review of BooksDoing Their Own Research | Hari KunzruIn August 2020 Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, suggested that Covid-19 could be a “plandemic,”

""Dr" Berg Tries The Carnivore Diet | Nutritionist Reviews "

youtube.com/watch?v=nLFVGSFO8n0

I was watching this more nutrition focused video by "GojiMan" on "carnivore" diet and couldn't help but notice the background racism being delivered by Dr. Berg.

It's the vague notion that, as he puts it:

<🖍️>
Not everyone does well on one diet.
🧬🧬🧬🧬🧬🧬🧬🧬🧬🧬🧬🧬
</🖍️>

While this seems innocuous or even progressive in some way, the fact is that all humans are all one species, an ape species, and the biology of using nutrients is fundamental and structural to life.

What "Dr." Berg's statement hides is the implication of "subspecies" of humans having very different biologies.

Think of some fantasy RPG or of LOTR where there are different "humanoid races" with different abilities (strengths and weaknesses); that is how "race realists" see the human world.

It's not an obvious connection, I know, but it doesn't take much to go from

"Oh, I'm a ✨special✨ who needs to eat this!"

to "Who else is like me?"

to "Huh, so is this my ~~racial~~ genetic heritage??"

to the beliefs about group characteristics.

It's "race science", which is an early pseudoscience that has been ridiculed for a long time, but still managed to sneak into modern discourse with different disguises. The more famous infiltration by this pseudoscience is within "IQ science", sociobiology and evolutionary psychology (more recent).

Racism is racism even when it's positive.

It's part of the colonialist (now capitalist) ideology, a way to rationalize social hierarchies down to the biological level, as if some groups are "born to rule" and others are "born to serve and do hard labor".

Thread: veganism.social/@veganpizza69/

Specifically this: veganism.social/@veganpizza69/