WHO snake oil
Why on earth does the WHO do this?
[Ignore the first tweet.]
That crap isn’t a “first stop for health and well-being,” it’s just woo.
Tip Jar
Why on earth does the WHO do this?
[Ignore the first tweet.]
That crap isn’t a “first stop for health and well-being,” it’s just woo.
Why does WHO do that? It’s classic woke-ism.
Science, evidence, reason, objective knowledge, double-blind medical trials, and anything along those lines, are now “white” and “colonial” and are, indeed, hallmarks of “white supremacy”.
“Indigenous ways of knowing”, along with “lived experience” and the primacy of ones inner feelings, are to be lauded as equally “valid”.
All of this is state-of-the-art “anti-racism”. (And you’re not allowed to mention the obvious fact that, as with most “anti-racism”, adopting it is very much against the interests of people “of color”.)
It startled me initially how many health care people are willing to buy into this. Nurses seem particularly susceptible. My mother-in-law had a nurse tending her in her last year, and the nurse was anti-vax. She advised her daughter not to have the new baby vaccinated. My mother-in-law, to her credit, snorted ‘she might as well just take him and throw him in the lake!’.
All you have to do is drop the label “indigenous” or “traditional” on it, show someone not white in the picture and bam, instant woke.
In my environmental science program, there were several individuals, mostly younger, who seemed more interested in activism than science. They bought into every anti-science meme they could find (I’m not sure if they called them memes back then). The environmental philosophy department was even worse; there were none there who would support even the teaching of science.
Coel – Well that’s no explanation. Yes, there’s a huge strand of leftism that matches that description, but there’s certainly plenty of anti-science pro-religion yay tradition thinking on the right too. Anyway, has the WHO fallen into the hands of trendy purple-haired young people? If so, how, why, since when?
The authoritarian, male-dominated culture of professional medicine has fostered a substantial movement of impotent female resentment. Nurses are ripe for indoctrination in quackery. Therapeutic Touch is perhaps the most perfect example, as it was actually concocted from within the profession.
Of course we can only speculate as to why they do this*, but it seems to me that the WHO is more of a political orgnization than an actual science-based health organization. Yes, they do some good on distributing medicines, but their health information carries bias. Their carcinogenic substances ratings cause more confusion than clarification, as in the labeling of glyphosate as a “probable” carcinogen (which is where bacon is also categorized.) This may be done to satisfy some of the member nations where CAM is given higher credence than in others.
*our speculations reflect our own particular biases, of course. Being a practiced skeptic requires recognizing the weight your own biases carry in your speculation. As in whether or not one things that left and right are the exclusive provinces of woo. I’ll say no more on that.
I just started reading “The War on the West” by Douglas Murray.
It may contain some insight on why such BS is pushed.
@Ophelia:
Yes, there’s as much science-denialism on the right, but I think most IGOs, NGOs, large charities, universities, and the like are much more influenced by the left (Robert Conquest’s 2nd law, perhaps a consequence of capable left-wing-minded people heading for careers in the above, whereas capable right-wing-minded people head for careers in business, hedge funds, etc).
Institutions like the WHO suffer particularly from careerism (people with no real expertise in the topic being appointed, often by non-democratic governments who are more interested in promoting cronies) and entryism (activists targetting leading roles as a means to effect change, and then getting their way by yelling “racist”, “transphobe” etc at anyone who queries them).
Then, for an IGO like the WHO, there’s a strong current of anti-Westernism from governments around the world who resent the success of the West, and so will deplore “colonialism” and laud anything “indigenous”. Too often, these days, this is reinforced by people in the West wanting to plead guilty to the charges.
An example of the last would be the US Ambassador to the UN pleading guilty and self-flagellating over “racism”, despite the fact that, on all the actual evidence, the US today, and other Western countries, are the least racist countries there has ever been, anywhere.
Not sure I’d count Japan in that category but that’s probably inevitable with such an ethnically homogeneous population…
Coel – fair enough. Those reasons are at least plausible, mostly. I think you could stand to be a little more tolerant of the US Ambassador to the UN pleading guilty and self-flagellating over racism, given the realities of US history. Maybe it’s annoying to see people self-flagellating now but only a few decades ago in the US racism was embedded in everything and simply taken for granted. I remember it from my childhood. Is it really so terrible that we continue to talk about it?
@Ophelia,
If the US Ambassador to the UN had merely been issuing a mea culpa over racism “a few decades ago”, then sure, that would have been fine, indeed laudable. (Though, really, the history of most other countries is pretty much as bad or worse.) The problem was self-flagellating over how they were claiming things are now.
In all unpopular honesty, it’s also more than a little provincial for America to engage in self-flagellation over slavery and racism. I’ve seen too many people who genuinely believe(d) that slavery per se was uniquely both American and white to write off such rhetoric as benign.
A small logical, and ethical, point: The claim that most Western countries are ‘the least racist countries there has (sic) ever been, anywhere’, whether it is true or not (I happen to think it largely true), does not entail that no racism occurs in them, nor that instances of racism should be ignored. And we might remember that the existence of these ‘least racist’ societies has depended upon people struggling to achieve fairness & justice. I wonder on which side certain commentators would have been on fifty, a hundred, or 150 years ago? I wonder also why, say, the Windrush business in the UK, or Republican efforts to suppress the Black vote in many parts of the USA do not interest them. We do not live in a fantasy world, a perfected present where the ill consequences of slavery have somehow been magically expunged. There is a complacency, a refusal to face realities, in the view that we do live in such a fantasy present.
I also think that certain commentators should broaden their acquaintance, not necessarily personally, but at least with what animates the American & British extreme right as well as the self-righteous & Chomskyian left. The complacency and hypocrisy of certain British acquaintances of mine, who suppose that once the slave trade and slavery in the British Empire were ended, that was that and we should congratulate ourselves on our humanity, whereas those dreadful Americans – just look at them! They forget that their slaves were on islands thousands of miles away (out of sight and happily out of mind – so long as the money kept coming in) and did not form a large population within their own shores. They consider it bad taste to be presented with the facts of slavery, what it did for the British economy, and its continuing effects.
I find this debate, if you can call it that, infantile & ridiculous. It consists in reducing things to sentimental ‘woke’ lefties on one side, and complacent fools, virulent racists and the type of people who would no doubt be happy to be on the faculty of Prager University, if it existed, on the other. When a debate is reduced to this level, it becomes a face scowling at itself in a mirror. Why is it so difficult to recognise what happened in history, a history that does not magically stop at some (never specified) point and works in our changing present? Moral cowardice? Complacency? A desire not to be upset in any way?
One may certainly dislike Robin DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’ (I do), though its title certainly points to something (a craven distaste for recognising realities), but there are other books that certainly do put their fingers on realities:
Isabel Wilkerson: ‘Caste’
Eric Williamson: Capitalism & Slavery
Sathhnam Sanghara: Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain
Vincent Brown: Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
Padraic X. Scanlan: How Slavery Built Modern Britain
I recommend them all to those who want to get away from the sterilities of the present debate.
.
Also: David Oshinsky: Worse Than Slavery
Eric Foner: Reconstruction
Richard Rothstein: The Color of Law
Nullius @ 11 – Provincial? Really? Aren’t there obvious reasons for America to engage in what you call self-flagellation over slavery and racism? Calling it provincial seems like calling it provincial for anyone to apologize for anything.
[…] a comment by Tim Harris on WHO snake […]
Ophelia, sure, there are reasons to acknowledge and apologize for our history of slavery and racist oppression. There’re also differences between acknowledgement, apology, and beating one’s chest, crying, “Mea culpa! Mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa!” The way that so-called “apologies” tend to go gives me the impression that those making them are unaware of the history and current state of racism and slavery in the wider world. The apparent popularity of the notion that both slavery and racism are inventions of American/European colonialism suggests that my concern isn’t entirely groundless.
Now, you may accuse me of engaging in a bit of a distributed tu quoque “everyone else is doing it, so we’re blameless”, but I don’t think that’s what I’m arguing. I’m not saying that we’re without fault, merely that we ought not pretend that we were or are the worst offenders, because that provides cover for those who were or are as bad and prevents us from acknowledging such progress as has been achieved.
If you have a better term for this apparent obliviousness to the rest of the world and inability to calibrate to the global scope, I’ll happily use that instead.
Yes, true. Those hideous masochistic dinner parties for example.
Precisely that sort of thing, yeah.
Thank you, Ophelia, for the book titles – I already have, on your recommendation, ‘Worse than Slavery’, but haven’t got round to reading yet.
Incidentally, since ‘wokery’ has predictably been brought into this matter, I suggest that people should go over to the Lawyers, Guns & Money website and read ‘Barbarians at the Gate’ to learn about what De Santis & Christopher Rufo are doing to destroy New College in Florida.
I also wonder whether people would be be so ready to condescend to and play down, in the manner of Michael Flynn, the experience of Jews in the Holocaust and Jewish memories of the Holocaust, whether actual memories or stories that have been passed down to their descendants, in the way that they condescend to the Black experience. It all happened long ago, nothing to see now…
Donald Trump certainly knows how to appeal to the many racists in the USA in connexion with Black judges and prosecutors in his tweets:
‘… They never went after those that Rigged the Election. They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS.’
This has been taken up, it appears, by numerous right-wing & racist websites by people who know very well what DT meant by ‘RIGGERS’, who admire what they suppose to be his cleverness, and who are doxing and mounting a campaign to go after the members of the Grand Jury in Fulton County, whose names were listed on the indictment, and any other possible targets, notably Fani Willis, Alvyn Bragg, and Tanya Chutkan, who are black (and in two cases women), as well, of course, as Jack Smith.
No, things don’t look so happy in our local Peter Pangloss’s ‘best of all possible worlds’, a world in which the past can be safely dismissed as playing no part in the present. Somebody is going to get killed, and some are going to have their lives destroyed as the lives of Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss have been destroyed, something that doesn’t seem to matter to our Pangloss. And people frivolously chat about whether slavery was really so bad a thing at all, and pretend that it has nothing to do with the present.