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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

The John Birch society was into weird ideas about health since the 1960s, I had a friend in the 1980s whose parents were Amway distributors and selling supplements who were introducing my family to anti-abortion and school voucher activists.

In Ithaca though we have a population of hypochondriacs who are notoriously left wing.

Alternative ideas about the healthiness of fats have circulated a long time

https://www.amazon.com/Fats-That-Heal-Kill-Cholesterol/dp/09...

is the first one I saw against ‘seed oils’, certainly alternative ideas about the healthiness of cholesterol and saturated fats have been circulating a long time. What is different is the polarization of the post-COVID environment but the polarization is such that you find people who don’t think we are post COVID.

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Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger is an absolutely brilliant read on why you see this kind of consonance between the fringe left & right (although fringe may not be the right word anymore):

https://bookshop.org/p/books/doppelganger-a-trip-into-the-mi...

One of the things that cuts the Democrats off at the knees is that the far left is even hungrier for “change” and “shaking things up” than Trump supporters are and doesn’t get any emotional satisfaction out of supporting the party of “status quo at any cost” other than the behavioral sink of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

European politics is itself in a death spiral of the center left and center right forming an emotionally false coalition whereas the AfD looks emotionally truer by the day.

A hundred percent, yes. The GOP learned they needed to activate their base during the Obama years - that led to the Trump takeover and a lot of the issues we're seeing right now, but the MAGA movement's fundamental allure is they're actually talking about problems in the country that are pretty apparent to people outside the professional class (there's an interesting civil war happening inside the GOP right now between the MAGA true believers and the people who thought they were riding the tiger, instead of just holding its tail).

The Democrats still haven't had that "come to Jesus" moment, as evidence by both the treatment of Bernie in 2016 and Kamala's total unwillingness to talk about any of the populist parts of Biden's economic policy (antitrust, pro-labor, stronger regulation, etc), and it's what's cost them the 2016 and 2024 elections - neoliberalism has failed, and the longer the Democrats pretend that's not the case, the longer they're going to be out in the electoral cold.

Ha, poor Naomi Klein getting confused with the other Naomi... I guess it was inevitable she'd write a book about it.

Yep, that's what started the whole trip. She quotes a tweet in it from someone in the middle of the pandemic about it: https://x.com/localnotail/status/1395393630022553602

"If your Naomi be Klein You're doing just fine If your Naomi be Wolf Oh buddy, big oof."

It’s not implausible that someone might go through a transformation like that, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldridge_Cleaver

That link led me to this fascinating reminiscence:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n11/elaine-mokhtefi/diar...

No! No!!

People really love the idea of a quick, easy fix; a single solveable problem that explains a vast swath of issues.

Like vitamin C to fix everything that goes wrong on long sea voyages, or removing lead and mercury from diets, avoiding alcohol and thalidomide during pregnancy, abstaining from cigarettes, removing cocaine from Coca Cola, or any number of other additives that are perhaps less clear cut: https://time.com/7210717/food-additives-us-fda-banned-europe...

Avoiding poison is a "quick, easy fix" to the consequences of that poison (or the opposite in the case of vitamin deficiency). Whether there's any reason to believe seed oils are harmful, I have no clue, but the idea that we could be en-masse consuming something harmful has dozens of precedents.

Those mostly each fix one specific thing with a clear mechanism.

Seed oil theorists will tell you they cause... a lot more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_oil_misinformation

> The theme of the misinformation is that seed oils are the root cause of most diseases of affluence, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and liver spots.

Vitamin C theorists would also have told you it cured the common cold, cardiovascular disease, cancer, HIV, and ameliorated the effects of chemotherapy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#History_of_large_dos...

I do not think it takes a decade-long longitudinal study to conclude that seed oils are not mercury or thalidomide.

"I do not think" is precisely when you need a study...

> the polarization is such that you find people who don’t think we are post COVID.

What does the phrase "post-covid" even mean in a population with actively circulating covid? I don't think such a concept is even possible at this point.

Accurately, post a set of cultural changes. Some variant of that virus will be going around until, maybe, there is a severe lockdown because of another virus but that won’t happen for another half-generation at least even if the new virus is The Andromeda Strain.

There is a population of people today though who have internalized the threat of COVID as a core part of their identity such as one of those Ithaca hypochondriacs that doesn’t get invited to parties because the only thing she’s wanted to talk about since 2021 is face masks.

> There is a population of people today though who have internalized the threat of COVID as a core part of their identity

I imagine if you have a reason to be that scared of covid (e.g. immunocompromised or -adjacent) to propose that someone exclude a threat to their physical health from their identity seems like an impossible ask. The risk isn't imaginary, and it's notably higher than the pre-covid world. There is no going back.

Not sure why it's so hard to grasp that COVID allowed certain demographics to see how little society actually has regard for them.

I have a lot of discussions of my wife where I take position closer to your side and she takes the other side.

My son lost two years of in-personal schooling which contributed to some serious problems he's had getting launched into adult life. The models that the education-industrial complex users, which I don't believe [1] tend to take the position that you can't get back what you lose when you lose something. My son is getting a lot of help from myself and others and I think he's going to do OK but you can't make the case that lockdowns were free or that people who had mental health vulnerabilities didn't take their own lives because of the effects of the lockdowns.

You'd better believe that many people think that people like yourself have very little regard for them. It's pretty easy to grasp if you understand just how poisonous political polarization is.

[1] ... or don't believe in letting apply to myself and my family

> In Ithaca though we have a population of hypochondriacs who are notoriously left wing.

I had the same group of people living and doing yoga in a castle near my mother's home, that i would have described as left-wing hypocondriacs, extremely skeptics of modern medecine. A majority voted "right-wing" at the last european elections.

So using left-wing or right-wing is not a good way to describe this kind of group. They clearly have a minority habitus that could push them to vote "left-wing" (as long a they are not in power), but also share an anti-science sentiment that can push tehm easily towards a populist right (populist != bad in my eyes, i do think populism in politics is necessary.

Yes I know the type. First and foremost, they are contrarian and "alternative". They always try to oppose whatever the majority is doing, even when it clearly is the correct thing (they are often anti-vax as well).

They usually are left-wing because they are often parasites who always take more than they give. They like being in a group or community but it rarely lasts and work over time because of how exploitative and dishonest they usually are.

I know some very interesting specimens and my mother is one of them; not entirely because she made a decent amount of money in a public career, but now that she is retired it has become a lot more apparent.

Those people are not left because of values/principle, they just go with whatever is the most extreme version of something that looks like it will benefit them. Which is why they will gladly vote far-right, if they can see the benefits. The rise of far-right populists that try to sell a version of collectivism not far removed from the far left-version is why it is happening.

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