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"Desperate for a new intellectual underpinning, neoliberals and libertarians sought refuge in the work of economist Friedrich Hayek, who famously argued in his 1944 polemic The Road to Serfdom that government intervention in markets is antithetical to individual freedom. But Murray, Rothbard, Hoppe, and others fatally twisted Hayek’s message, claims Slobodian, and took it so far as to argue that only Western countries are intellectually and culturally primed for capitalism.
The politics of this cohort, which he dubs the “new fusionists,” was rooted in “three hards,” argues Slobodian: “Hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.” They forged sordid alliances with biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and ethnonationalists, spouting pseudoscience about the link between race and IQ, a topic famously repopularized in the 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve, coauthored by Murray and psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein. They railed against lax immigration policies on the premise that they led to cultural decay. But perhaps most strangely, they ballyhooed the value of gold as a backstop against a looming economic cataclysm caused by incompetency in Washington. (Talk about apropos.)
In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Slobodian analyzes Donald Trump’s radical agenda through this new prism of neoliberalism. He also unpacks the distressing parallels between goldbugs and crypto bros, and details why the tech set has suddenly taken up with the MAGA right. Silicon Valley’s “willingness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Donald Trump,” he says, is indicative “of the embrace of an ideology that pretty frankly ranks human capacity along the spectrum of intelligence and IQ.”"
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-silicon-valley-neoliberal-roots
Vanity Fair · Donald Trump, Silicon Valley, and the Neoliberal Roots of an Unlikely Alliance
Measles is spreading. Here’s how to stay safe. - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/measles-is-spreading-heres-how-to-stay-safe/
The Washington Post · Measles is spreading. Here’s how to stay safe.
"I think that my assumption was a triumphalism and a sense of victory after the fall of the Soviet Union. But the fact that the week of the Berlin Wall falling, they were already talking about new enemies —enemies that had gone underground in certain ways or transformed in ways that were elusive — was the beginning of the rabbit hole. Because once you accept the idea that Marxism and socialism have survived and yet have changed their face, then anything can be Marxism and socialism.
I think this is how we can understand the fixation of the right wing on things like what they call “cultural Marxism” or “gender ideology” as essentially the new enemy of humanity. Because the adversary continuously changes shape, it makes them open to endless reinterpretation. There is a paranoid quality to the term. And the paranoia doesn’t really have any bounds, as I show in the book.
So I think the narrative arc comes from a feeling on the part of the libertarians, and often the racist libertarians, that they can contain their enemy in new ways by pinning it down on hierarchies of intelligence or deploying the latest findings from genetics. But by the end of the book, with a chapter on “gold bugs” and the far-right obsession with gold, there’s almost a sense of desperation or surrender to the inevitable, a failure to contain their enemies and the idea of an impending collapse and inevitable apocalypse.
(...)
What I recognize is a sort of desperation and a kind of ungoverned willingness to reach for radical remedies in a time of great peril. And as I described in the last chapter, often the rhetorical technique of the gold bug is to predict a coming apocalypse and then immediately sell you the only means there is to protect you from the worst.
I think there’s that accelerationism visible right now on the far right, certainly in the United States."
https://jacobin.com/2025/04/race-science-neoliberalism-hayek-slobodian/
jacobin.comThe Method in the Far Right’s MadnessToday’s far right manages to combine the call for economic freedom with pseudoscience about natural hierarchies of race and IQ. Historian Quinn Slobodian explains how these ideas can be fitted together.
pseudoscience: 
Controversial admissions test which experts say lacks evidence
https://www.cbc.ca/news/gopublic/casper-test-medical-school-1.7507308
Critics say claims that Casper predicts student performance are unsubstantiated
![The company behind the test, Acuity Insights, claims the Casper helps schools predict which students will have career success by assessing "soft skills" f. empathy and ethics to judgment and communication.
"They'd say, 'This company that we're looking to invest in has a reputation of [not believing in] climate change,'" he said. "You're supposed to weigh both sides of the scenario."
Go Public has heard from 24+ medical school applicants who also have concerns.
"The process is unnecessarily opaque," wrote one, who said he'd taken the test five times before finally getting accepted to a medical school.
A student who said he'd taken the test four times wrote that it should "be abolished."
The company charges applicants $50 to write the test, and another $18 to submit to each medical school.
Applicants question training of people who rate Casper exams.
A recent online job posting by Acuity promised raters could earn $30 to $50 an hour.
The ad did not list any academic or professional requirements, noting that "applicants from all walks of life" were welcome and raters would get paid 65 cents for every written answer they assess and $1 for every video response.
Acuity told Go Public it monitors how quickly raters are scoring responses "to ensure they are spending an appropriate amount of time reviewing the context of each response."
But perhaps the biggest concern is criticism from respected academics who say there is no compelling evidence the test does what it claims.](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/337/025/490/360/170/original/30d925660b60fdb8.png "The company behind the test, Acuity Insights, claims the Casper helps schools predict which students will have career success by assessing \"soft skills\" f. empathy and ethics to judgment and communication.
\"They'd say, 'This company that we're looking to invest in has a reputation of [not believing in] climate change,'\" he said. \"You're supposed to weigh both sides of the scenario.\"
Go Public has heard from 24+ medical school applicants who also have concerns.
\"The process is unnecessarily opaque,\" wrote one, who said he'd taken the test five times before finally getting accepted to a medical school.
A student who said he'd taken the test four times wrote that it should \"be abolished.\"
The company charges applicants $50 to write the test, and another $18 to submit to each medical school.
Applicants question training of people who rate Casper exams.
A recent online job posting by Acuity promised raters could earn $30 to $50 an hour.
The ad did not list any academic or professional requirements, noting that \"applicants from all walks of life\" were welcome and raters would get paid 65 cents for every written answer they assess and $1 for every video response.
Acuity told Go Public it monitors how quickly raters are scoring responses \"to ensure they are spending an appropriate amount of time reviewing the context of each response.\"
But perhaps the biggest concern is criticism from respected academics who say there is no compelling evidence the test does what it claims.")
No, I do not owe the time of day to professional scammers who fleece the weak and fearful for profit and ego.
#quackery #wellness #chiropractic #homeopathy #pseudoscience #antivirus #antivax #openai
Economics is the worst of pseudoscience, especially since it is used everywhere to guide policy.
Economics has an assumptions problem. The foundational method of economic practice is to create models grounded in assumptions that are either not known, not knowable, or - incredibly - known to be wrong.
From https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces #economics #pseudoscience
pluralistic.netPluralistic: What’s wrong with tariffs (02 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Replied in thread
@paninid fast forward to the present and scientists who barely study #philosophy label #metaphysics as #pseudoscience (forgetting what #PhD means), torment #logic for the benefit of "elegant" #math equations (e.g. antimatter, dark #matter), and design #AI #systems that weaponize #ethics as justification for #information #censorship (#ChatGPT "knows" but refuses to answer how to a hot wire a car or commit murder while claiming no #opinion, ignorant that words and actions are different)
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[Unregulated] #Tasers & [pseudoscientistic] "#ExcitedDelirium": #LastWeekTonight with #JohnOliver (HBO), 20250330,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yd9nLQx3qQ
“Unraveling the pyramid mystery: claims of an underground city debunked”
Egyptian Streets · Unraveling the Pyramid Mystery: Claims of an Underground City DebunkedA recent study led by Italian researchers Filippo Biondi of the University of Strathclyde and Corrado Malanga of the University of Pisa has generated significant interest worldwide. On 23 March,
We live in a world where pointing out that #chiropractic is bunk #pseudoscience is seen as a hate crime.
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, has its billion dollar grant cut by Trump administration
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/03/28/g-s1-56881/vaccines-gavi-usaid-rubio
As Robyn Pennacchia reports, RFK Jr. is commissioning a study of the nonexistent "link" between vaccines and autism.
And, unsurprisingly, to head that study he has picked a man who is not a doctor nor a scientist, one David Geier, who has been in trouble for practicing medicine without a license.
As with so much about the Trump administration, nothing to see here, more along.
#Trump #RFKJr #vaccines #medicine #research #disinformation #PseudoScience #science
Wonkette · Anti-Vaxx Not-A-Doctor Picked To Head HHS's Vaccine-Autism 'Study'
RFK Jr's former nonprofit posted a fake CDC website that criticized vaccines.
Kennedy asked the Children's Health Defense to remove the site but only after the NYTimes contacted him about it.
Kennedy is currently using the CDC to waste resources on further studies on the long disproven link began vaccines and autism and, in the process, further bolstering antivaxxers' delusional hysteria.
CIDRAPFake CDC vaccine site linked to anti-vax nonprofit once headed by RFK
On nonsense: Forms thereof, falsifiability, pseudoscience, bullshit, youth culture, and other craziness
I'd begun worrying about the resilience of truth and countermeasures to bullshit particularly online well over a decade ago.
This is an early compilation of heuristics and resources which came up in discussion elsewhere recently, and may be helpful to others.
Among conspicuous omissions, Aristotle's "Sophistical Refutations" (Sophistikoi Elenchoi in the original Greek), one of the earliest recorded (or surviving) guides to countering bullshit:
redditOn nonsense: Forms thereof, falsifiability, pseudoscience, bullshit, youth culture, and other crazinessI've been musing over the nature of nonsense, pseudoscience, quackery, bullshit, and fallibility. A few references and digressions. ##...
Replied in thread
@andremachado
The only mystery is why this #pseudoscience is propagated.
Why doesn't everyone realize how crazy this idea is?
#Archaeology
Delusion indeed.
Essential reading here.
Don’t drink raw milk…period.
#FactsMatter #Pseudoscience #Health #Science
https://vajenda.substack.com/p/gwyneth-paltrows-dairy-delusion
The Vajenda · Gwyneth Paltrow's Dairy Delusion
Jason Pohl: Investigating the #psychedelic blue lotus of #Egypt, where ancient magic meets modern science: Online, products branded as the blue lotus promise calm moments and psychedelic trips. But they're far different from what ancient Egyptians consumed, a UC Berkeley student researcher says.
#ucberkeley #bluelotus #LiamMcEvoy #pseudoscience #Egyptology
https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/03/11/investigating-the-psychedelic-blue-lotus-of-egypt-where-ancient-magic-meets-modern-science/
Berkeley News · Investigating the psychedelic blue lotus of Egypt, where ancient magic meets modern science - Berkeley NewsOnline, products branded as the blue lotus promise calm moments and psychedelic trips. But they're far different from what ancient Egyptians consumed, a UC Berkeley student researcher says.