Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen (About How Little The World Still Knows)

 

"You get your news from Chris Cuomo on CNN when he's married to a woman selling quackery out the back door." 

- The Crack Emcee, NewAge Poop 

 

"My wife is a wellness person, you know. She runs this business where she's learning about homeopathic and all these different things, so she's given me a ton of stuff. I don't even ask what it is." 

- Chris Cuomo, Democrat party royalty, supposed-journalist, and science critic

   

Take a moment to understand what Chris Cuomo can say, on American television, while talking to a Doctor and another journalist - and recieve no pushback. He's admitting he and his wife have a deep proclivity, not just for quackery, but for the Daddy of them all. Two people who are, both, living in a world of madness (being parodied above) while CNN helped them drag society further into it with them. 

I love the vague formulation, "She runs this business where she's learning about homeopathic," which is accepted - again: with no pushback - as though it's perfectly normal for a journalist's wife to be educating herself after she starts charging people for what she's selling (Chris Cuomo's wife is a grifter).

And what is she selling? "Homeopathic and all these different things". When a journalist should know homeopathy is water. "I don't even ask what it is" he says, instead, revealing his worth as a journalist. (His niece, Andrew Cuomo's daughter, also runs a NewAge podcast).

Dr. Oz's wife, Lisa, is also a "reiki master" and homeopath, so one can only assume he's a physician who also doesn't question what the missus is up to. 

RFK, Jr. was supposedly "vetted" by Congress, without a single question tying him to other quacks, or quackery.

 

Which brings us, once again, to the question: if "The Age Of Unreason" was declared by Frank Furedi in the same year Richard Dawkins exposed who "The Enemies of Reason" were (by that time, and specifically mentioning people into homeopathy) then, by now - 20 years after we haven't done a single thing to address a single issue raised back in 2005 - is it fair to say reason's enemies have won, and the west has legitimately gone insane? I mean, how could we ever stop something so few see (or ever saw) as a threat?

 

Take all the time you need,...

 

Great: This Man "Intuitively" Did This To Himself!

Oh, yea - someone's noticed the "current intellectual prejudices and old-fashioned appeals to revelation and dogma" that hound the rest of us through NewAge! How nice. The best question we have now is, why doesn't anyone else immediately notice this, and identify it for what it is, until it's analyzed by someone outside of the influence of NewAge thinking? Or put another way, are NewAgers just stupid?:

Tariq Ramadan’s The Quest for Meaning is very much a ‘spirit of the age’ book. One of the most influential intellectual trends today is to seek refuge in nature, to search for meaning not in the human-made world but in the natural or biological world. This can be seen in the current fashion for evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, behavioural economics and environmentalism. Another powerful intellectual trend is what we might call a twenty-first-century version of perspectivism, which one-sidedly emphasises the intuitive and contingent aspects of human experience. And The Quest for Meaning tightly embraces both of these fashionable approaches to the world.

Although Ramadan’s book is presented as a spiritual meditation on the problems of existence, it is actually an eclectic mixture of current intellectual prejudices and old-fashioned appeals to revelation and dogma.

All for people too dumb to identify them for what they are - say it with us:

NewAge prejudices and dogma.

Thinking So Weak It's Defined By A Rainbow

"The idea of hidden agendas has influenced discussions on the war in Iraq, the destruction of the World Trade Center, the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the outbreak of swine flu.

In previous times, such attitudes mainly informed the thinking of right-wing populist movements, which always saw the hand of a Jewish or Masonic or Communist conspiracy behind major world events. Today, conspiratorial thinking has become respectable; many of its most vociferous supporters are to be found in radical protest movements or within the cultural left. When, a few years ago, Hillary Clinton warned of a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ against her husband, then president Bill, it became clear that the politics of the hidden agenda had become part of everyday public life. Today, the anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation movement is as wedded to conspiratorial thinking as are its opponents on the far right.

Conspiratorial thinking is encouraged by a powerful cultural narrative that depicts people, not as the authors of their destiny, but as the objects of manipulative secretive forces. Life is interpreted through the prism of a Hollywood blockbuster, where powerful evil and hidden figures pull all the strings. The flourishing of this imagination springs from mainstream society’s own inability to give an authoritative account of contemporary events. Virtually every aspect of public life is contested today, and there is little agreement on what are the causes of our current predicament. This crisis of causality continually calls into question the official version of events. Of course, the official version of events often needs to be questioned, but not through embracing a simplistic conspiratorial worldview that blames small cliques of evil people for what happens in the world.

Conspiratorial culture communicates the idea that nothing just happens by accident: somebody is at fault. Fantasies about international terrorist networks, paedophile rings, corporate conspiracies to fool people about an impending environmental disaster and neo-conservative cabals compete with one another to gain public attention. Virtually every misdeed, it seems, is the outcome of a carefully worked-out plot. Conspiratorial culture helps fuel suspicion and mistrust towards public life. It displaces critical engagement with society in favour of a destructive search for the hidden agenda. It distracts from any clarification of genuine differences and helps turn public life into a continuous crusade to unmask the perpetrators of malevolent deeds. The media fuel this attitude by frequently arguing that what is important is not what public figures say but what their real agenda is. The media incite the public to look for hidden motives; that normalisation of suspicion and mistrust is the key accomplishment of today’s conspiratorial culture."

-- Frank Furedi, on how and why the cultish Democrats have handed the office of the American presidency to a communist crank, in Spiked.

The Power Of The "Progressive" Movement

"Religious leaders have been recruited to front this negative scare campaign,...This campaign,...relies on,...expanding the meaning of extremism. The term extremism tends to be used promiscuously today, to include anyone who does not share the cultural and political attitudes of the so-called,...mainstream,...to demonise,...anyone holding sceptical views,..."

-- Frank Furedi, explaining how Hope'N'Change™ work in the European Union - which is (not surprisingly) similar to how they work here - except, there, it's covered by Spiked!

It's Time To Start Smacking Those Hands Again

"Nag, pester, bug, torment, and punish,...issue fines against their parents and other transgressors."

-- James Russell, the author of "How to Turn Your Parents Green", which TMR noticed in an alarming Frank Furedi article on Pajamas Media.

Lost In Losing Your Way

"Secular thinkers often complain that morality has been hijacked by religious fundamentalists. What they overlook is that it is often the reluctance of secular intellectuals themselves to develop and express moral ideas that helps create the narrow equation between religion and morality today. Neiman argues compellingly that religion is not the source of morality but is merely one of the forms through which people can voice their moral convictions. Philosophical ideals about virtue and good and evil were explored by thinkers such as Plato without the aid of the Bible. Moral reasoning emerges through human activity, and it does not depend on the authority of any religious text.

Indeed, it can be argued that, both logically and chronologically, moral ideals emerged prior to their codification in religious texts. From a humanist standpoint, people do not require a God or a priest to instruct them on what is good and evil. In an interesting reinterpretation of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, Neiman argues that Abraham’s questioning of God’s intentions derives from his moral courage. She puts forward a provocative thesis: that the real dividing line is not whether you believe or do not believe in God, but whether or not you uphold the principle that ‘there must be reasons for everything that happens, and that those reasons are up to us to find’. And it is precisely a lack of respect for the value of reason that creates so much moral confusion today."

-- Frank Furedi, making each day better than the next, by reviewing Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity: A Guide For Grown-Up Idealists, on Spiked!

I oughtta know - I'm happily working for:

Abusing Those Who Could Hurt You (But Didn't)

"Looking back, I am struck by the shallowness of Sixties radicalism. Our ideas were relatively incoherent and unformed,... Many student radicals adopted an eclectic mix of future-oriented radical ideals alongside some backward-looking, anti-modern and anti-technology romantic sentiments,...What strikes me now, however, is the ease with which radicalism was able to proceed back in the late 1960s. The occupations and demonstrations we organised were part of what we labelled our ‘struggle’ – yet I can now see that very often,...we were kicking through an open door."

-- Frank Furedi, former Marxist (and the man who introduced me to the phrase Age Of Unreason) on his '60's radicalism