I am not painting half the world anything. If anything, I am painting a select group of people not from the east, and trying to backdoor something in to the world in a way that doesn’t compute with anything intelligible. Two very very different things.
And even there, I just used “eastern mysticism” as something of an easy term for me to latch on to.
I am not concerning myself with the east at all. I don’t think about the east, nor do I know it. All I know is what tries to import itself into relevancy in my world.
I can’t approve of the broad brush with which you’re painting half the world.
Also, I just pointed that out because people are really focusing on tertiary things to the topic on hand, and it seems obvious that I have hit a “metaphyscial sensitive” spot - due to the nature of the thread going very “meta” and people wanting to talk about "real"Buddhism, kung fu,chi, or whatever - when these are words that I specifically stated can be substituted with the terms x,y, and z to really see what I am trying to get at.
I just threw the words around because they buzz around my head in real life more than other word like Trinity, God faith, prayer, or whatever when dealing with bunk medicine
vive, you should be a bit more specific, even though it’s obvious what you are hinting towards, which is white, liberal, yuppie New Agers who have uprooted traditional practices and put them through a bastardized Western lens and try to pass it off as something “true” - being medicine or otherwise, which is something that annoys me a lot, because I do have an interest in such metaphysical and traditional things. Yourself said you don’t have an actual interest in Eastern metaphysics and traditions, so maybe that shouldn’t have been the language of the OP? Anyway chi, meditation, holistic healing, it’s all there, and “real”, and works. It’s on perspective. The four yogas for example, the West took one of them and boiled it down to just some physical activity that’s out of context. Sometimes you can’t just substitute words without taking out the context, but again the interest of the OP wasn’t actually Eastern metaphysics and mysticism.
There’s a Rene Guenon quote that this thread reminded me of:
These lower forms of knowledge, so worthless to anyone possessing knowledge of a different and higher order, had nevertheless to be realized, but this could not occur except at a stage where true intellectuality had disappeared. Such research, exclusively practical in the narrowest sense of the word, was inevitable, but it could only be carried out in an age at the opposite pole to primordial spirituality, and by men so embedded in material things as to be incapable of conceiving anything beyond them.
Your interest is not metaphysics, you boil it down to a material aspect, and in doing so will not understand the metaphysical properties of said subjects.
I don’t think I hinted as much as I flat out stated in my first post (leisured class yuppies) what my target was - which seems to be lost to people. That stated it seems a bit beyond new wave and / or dirty dirty hippies anymore. People like LRC and suburban moms do it as well, so just yuppies in general.
I also specified in my second post I am not talking about lifestyle practices and diet. Which I would actually suspect the average person from Hong Kong may very well have better than a person from Houston. If yoga, meditation, daily tai chi routines, or whatever are part of a normal routine, I would bet these would fall into a “net gain” life style practice to overall health than what the average person does in Dallas (this is a very superficial brush).
That stated, that was never my point. I only brought in the concept of bringing in foriegn words as usually unecessary and a “red flag” indicator. I have said the same thing about the use of Greek and Latin words being used to backdoor idiocy in and use obfuscating myticism.
Well on a “meta” level I already claimed Stirnerite so there is that. But that is still no where near anything I am talking about. The topic is about the intelligability of medical interventions and the discontents methods of subversion. So in this, or any other conversation -there is a limit as what can be concieved while remaining near the point at hand.
EDIT:
Also I simply expect most people on this forum, and in most places I am in life to be closer to “atheism”..as that is what I am used to being around. So I don’t usually expect the spanish inquisition when I bring in metaphysical terms that are not my bag.
Orwell is always amazing, my favorite part was the naming of flowers “snap dragon” is a much better word. Mencken had similar sentiments in his book “The American Language”.
it wouldnt surprise me in the slightest if lrc was acting to subvert the hegemony of mainstream doctrine in the popular discourse. I’m not sure what you mean by “slippery,” and as far as the crankery or crackpot factor of any given idea, that would depend on the merits of that specific idea. I’m not sure how one is supposed to ascertain that without familiarity with that specific idea, which familiarity could begin because one’s curiousity was piqued by an article on lrc.
A homeopathic healer doesnt have laws that limit his liability like a pharmaceutical company, and there are many things that are forbidden to him because he is able to deviate from the approved mainstream medical doctrine. I also question your assertion that drug companies employ clear language when compared to homeopaths. In my opinion, its pretty clearly the other way around. You tell me which is more obtuse, “myocardial infarction” or “chi.”
I agree with this statement, if “intellectuals” is taken to mean people who have been ordained/approved by the establishment and “medicine” is taken to mean “folk medicine.” graduating from medical school is not a magic bullet, there are hacks and quacks a-plenty…but they have something to hide behind.
that article was an example of traditional medicine trying to integrate alternative therapies, basically trying to steal their thunder. A person with an m.d. has been selected, subsidized, approved, and ordained by the state. The same cannot be said of your average acupuncturist et al.
I wanted to bring this up earlier but it gost lost. So to whom it may concern:
There actually is an “alternative” amazing (and even holistic) approach to practicing medicine and increasing the quality of the totality of patient care. It’s a school of thought that has grown in leaps and bounds over the decades: it’s called nursing.
Of course it requires a lot of accountability, disciplin, putting ones money and body where their mouth is, transparancy, effort, time, compassion, and clarity than what I see from most alternatives.
Oh, and it is much less self aggrandizing than calling oneself a guru or “healer” or whatever. More work, less prestigous title, less thanks, more lives saved. Go figure.
I’m a medic. I also, without the slightest hesitation, do hepatits and flu vaccination at various events if I get bored. So that probably makes me an establishment baby murdering fascist to a select minority of people.
I thought maybe. I’m in medical, but on the administrative side. No patient care. I’ve noticed that people basically know nothing about their own bodies. I have a coworker who eats a bag of tootsie rolls a day but buys acai smoothies because they’re “so healthy” and blames her overweight issue on “solid food”. Public school health education: big time fail.
Wow good memory. I’m doing some pre-reqs for it, but i am not in PA school. It was suggested I get another degree to help prepare me to get some of the pharmacology down. That will help me be a more attractive and better prepared canidate for selection with nurses with masters degrees and more hands on ER work.
I was thinking about doing a RN bridge program so I could work both as EMT and ER Nurse, but that really is not worth the time and those programs are really really hard to find.
I don’t know if this mindset is more of a public school failure, or that general trend and attitude towards what I call “McDieting” - quick and glamorous fixes to what ought to be a lifestyle change. This would envoke roughly the same mentality I have with what I am calling homeopathic medicine.
I don’t see the public school failure part of this specifically though. Without thinking much about it I tend to think this is actually more of a “big pharma” and Hollywood type thing.
What I mean is Public School purports to be the means of standardizing the raising of intelligent kids across the country, and one of the elements they take on themselves is in educating them about their own health.
I like that, McDieting. Lots of “alternative” slop gets mixed in there, too. She’ll take the Super Food Of The Moment (in pill or powder form, of course) along with her potato chip breakfast, but if her husband wants pork chops and salad for dinner, she complains about him causing her to eat too much. And twice a year she pulls out that three day diet thing that circulates online, the one that says you have to eat exactly whatever it says, with the grapefruit and the vanilla ice cream.
She’s the one that a lot of those snake oil products gets sold to, she’s had it all. And to hear her talk to the other ladies in the office, none of the rest of them notice anything weird about her habits. They do almost the same way.
What I mean is Public School purports to be the means of standardizing the raising of intelligent kids across the country, and one of the elements they take on themselves is in educating them about their own health.
I’ve only been to a public school for collegeand k-4th grade. But from what I can remember, and this was before all these crazy alternatives became en vogue again (can you imagine what the 70’s were like?) the health classes and education were fairly sane and non politicized, other than maybe some excessive side effects of pot (which has become one ofthose straw men and over publicized things everyone likes to joke about now). They were, if I remember, about basic nutrition, avoiding dieting / anorexia / etc, basic exercise, avoiding harmful substances, how to do an abdominal thrust, CPR, rape and child abuse, and stress. I think they were tolerant towards various cultural differences as well without being preachy. I could be wrong, but that’s how I remember it.
The few times I have had to do anything at a public school from what I have noticed things seem fairly vanilla to me. And the two health teachers I know tend to speak of pretty “normal” topics in an even keeled way, at oleast on the subjects they talk to me about. I’m not saying the teachings were “correct”, or even anything but superficial - they were however non offensive, and treated as secondary things in school.
Now maybe that has changed now that food,health, medicine, etc have become extremely politicized and vulgar by both sides and “health class” is probably one of those secondary classes that runs the risk of turning into a progressive (or conservative) hippy agenda. I also have spent most of my time in the fairly sane Great Lakes region where, even here in Chicago, people aren’t that batty. No crazy Texas, Alabama, New York, Portland, or California mentality really dominates the overall attitude here (though there are apologists for such cultures).
Maybe we justhad different experiences, or I am misreading you? Can you please rephrase?
No! Just the same! And that’s what I mean. She went to the same kinds of schools I did. Supposedly someone told her those things too…but they couldn’t pay attention to whether or not she understood it.
Anyway, the content of lessons like that is not really the valuable part, because information changes, and that’s where the lady I know gets thrown. She jumps on board with every new thing her media outlets tell her about because she didn’t learn the basics, the ways of thinking that test new knowledge against the old, and can properly categorize incoming data.
It’s weird that physical education, art, music, grammar, and health are probably the most pragmatic and useful things one can focus on if one cares about some notion of “universal education” - yet are considered to be the secondary subjects.
That’s a whole different topic though on the uselesness of a broken down system.