your science briefing for 04.16.2025

A reminder why "vaccine skeptics" are actually just anti-vaccine, period, untangling the messy, extreme politics of natalists, how Fox News ate America, and more...

For years on end, we were told that our brand new Secretary of Plagues and Inhuman Services RFK Jr. was not an anti-vaxxer but merely a skeptic that was in favor of safer, more thoroughly studied vaccines even as he spreads Nurgle’s gifts to the world. This is, to use a highly technical term from the pop sci community, absolute bullshit. Above all else, RFK Jr. has been against any and all vaccines, and given actual power, he just keeps on letting his anti-vaxx flag fly high, telling doctors that vaccines we’ve used for decades to control the spread of respiratory infections don’t work despite evidence to the contrary spread across hundreds of medical journals… (Stat News)

Of all the things to be nostalgic about, the internet seems like an absurd choice. After all, it’s pretty new in the grand scheme of things. But there’s a chorus of voices which say that massive, consolidated internet oligopolies turned the web from a wild place where we had millions of choices and ideas to ponder into a homogenized wall of text, images, and video that’s stifling us and our society. Their solution? Abandon them and embrace building a freer, wilder web. The real question though is if enough people will care to follow, or if they’re too numb and overwhelmed to try… (Noema)

extra: The Dead Internet Theory is no longer just a theory or a conspiracy. The web is really dying, or, at least the web we know and are starting to loathe. Come with me on a short tour of why, how, and the eye-watering costs of keeping this zombie going.

We already covered the looming population declines, people giving up on having kids under the strain of modern life, and the angry, aghast plutocrats demanding we begin cranking out more children because their financial future depends on growth, and the dystopia they have envisioned for us needs more bodies. But did you know there are full blown conferences to panic about the collapse of financial leverage dependent on infinite growth? And that instead of blaming absurd policies that have pushed us into becoming small cogs in extremely large systems meant to enrich a select few, they’re blaming, yes, of course, “woke” and social media… (Politico) and (Wired)

extra: A key recruitment strategy for natalists is the so-called NoFap to Nazi pipeline, in which young men are villainized for watching porn or masturbating, are hit with tons of pseudoscience about both, and indoctrinated with right wing conspiracies any time they predictably fail the group’s proscribed regimens for life.

Propaganda still works, even in the modern world. While it’s very difficult to blast your message out through mass media like in the past, you can still flood the zone. You just need a hook. In the case of Fox News, that hook was fear and outrage 24/7/365.25 on cable channels across the country and viral internet clips. And it worked. According to researchers, the more people watch Fox News, the more they vote Republican. It is, in fact, the most consistent and notable factor in any rightward shifts across the country between 2000 and 2020 based on 661,000 surveys… (PsyPost)