Tag: clickbait

(Note: today’s MM is not good content for video/audio, so text only today.)

Good morning everyone, welcome to the Morning Message, and let’s start today with yet another douchebag who wants you to think he’s like me. He isn’t. I’m not a clickbaiting douchebag.

This is “Brad The Rambler”

For those of you on audio, we have a screenshot of Brad – a guy who very much looks like the kinds of people who decided to start wearing flannel and growing goatees right about the same time he heard of grunge music, that is to say two weeks ago. Which pisses me off because all of those people try way to hard to look like I’ve looked since about 1988, and then people think I’m one of them, and that sucks. He’s lip-syncing terribly over a currently popular sound clip that says “Remember kids, the next time somebody says your government wouldn’t do that, oh yes they would!” Then they wrap it around half-assed BS like this, it gets nuked or muted by the algorithm because it’s disinformation, and now the WAKED UP SHEEPLE get to claim they’re being censored.

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!! EMBRACE THE TINFOIL HAT BECAUSE THAT MEANS YER AN INDEPENDENT THINKUR!

No, it means you’re an arrogant mark for yourself.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about his little bit of BS up there and get the truth of it out into the world. Not only is that truth worth understanding, but understanding how half-asses like this troll your attention away from people who actually bother knowing what the hell they’re talking about before they talk is also very much worth the effort.

For the benefit of the visually restricted, the caption on the video reads as follows: At the top, overtext reads “Did you know that Quaker Oats in collaboration with the US gov. and MIT fed radioactive oatmeal to mentally challenged kids while telling them they were part of a science club? They won a settlement of 1.85 million in 1998. Loyal to the foil.” Then the caption says “Remember the Fernald school and their part in the eugenics movement along with these terrible experiments that were done under the approval of the GOV…” and a bunch of clickbaity hashtags targeting the easily manipulated and not terribly bright.

This is one of those cases where someone is taking a kernel of truth, conflating it with a bunch of other kernels, and coming up with vapid clickbait bullshit that serves primarily to trivialize and humorize the thing they’re pretending to be angry about while also pandering to the literal tinfoil hat set.

Side note: If it’s supposed to be satire, it sucks, but I don’t think it is. When your “satire” is indistinguishable from actual kookery, it’s not satire anymore; it’s kookery. I suspect it’s supposed to be satire somehow because who seriously wears a tinfoil hat? But man…you sure can’t tell from the content.

There’s a clear, bright line between the mass of dumb clickbait like this and what I and other good-faith writers do, and that line is precisely the difference between acting in the interest of public knowledge and disclosure, and acting in the interests of stroking your own ego with bullshit while putting yourself off to other people just as gullible as you are for profit and social attention.

So let’s start with the basic facts:

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

There’s no question that the US government engaged in non-consensual testing of radioactive material on various human subjects over a period of decades, and that it was ethically obnoxious and tended to mostly target the poor, minorities, and those institutionalized with mental health disorders.

That said, this is not some groundbreaking revelation of government malfeasance. This is a clickbaiting douchebag jumping on a trendy tiktok audio with a half-assed lip-synch and a misrepresented bit of unpleasant historical trivia because he thinks he’s cool and smart but he’s really just another attention-mongering twat on TikTok who can’t get his facts right and doesn’t care what polluting the information stream with feces does to discourse.

He’s also got way more money in tinfoil than any reasonable person ought to.

First, the specific event he’s speaking of happened during WWII. That’s not an excuse for the horrible ethics involved, but it also tells us that this happened in a context when such things were normal and even considered laudible by the mainstream of science, medicine, and government at the time. Horrible? Absolutely. Relevant to anything in 2023? Not in the least. Certainly there’s no action or demand to be made of GOV or “Quaker Oats” here, and again it’s not a historical secret or something that’s just been sitting around unknown until Chad The Scruffy Dudebro ferreted it out.

Certainly the US government has done far worse before and since. One example that comes immediately to mind which first surfaced as conspiracy theory and proved true was the illegal, clandestine, non-consensual dosing of US citizens and military personnel with LSD and other substances under the MKUltra program, which ran from 1953 to 1973. The Tuskeegee Syphilis murders were conducted for another 25 years after the Fernald School experiments ended. In the Fernald case the radioactive material was “tracer” material – basically inert, like barium before an x-ray or that stuff they put in you for an MRI that makes you feel like you’re wetting your pants. They give someone a tiny bit of radioactive calcium via injection or in their food, then study their bodies to find out how human beings process radiation, how long it takes to leave the body, etc.

Now I want to be clear that we are talking about non-consensual human medical experimentation, which is unquestionably horrible. Problem with this asshat trying to make money and attention from it is that we knew about all of this thirty years ago. Two entire whole-ass congressional committees were assembled to look at the whole question, reports were issued, condemnations sent forth, and compensation made in many cases (but not all). The problem of medical experimentation without informed consent not only isn’t secret, it’s been an ongoing high-profile conversation for half a century.

Another problem is that in his arrogance-besotted rush to be Mr. Social Media Star he overlooks a ton of information about this case that is far more contemporary and problematic. For instance, the fact that ostensibly progressive and leftist governor Deval Patrick forced the closure of the Fernald facility against the explicit wishes of patients and their families (after two decades of high-quality reform). The reason given for this was that it was “too expensive,” which is disgusting to me. There’s no such thing as “too expensive” to keep innocent people who are institutionalized living with dignity. The 1993 class action suit resolution explicitly specified that the facility was to remain open and a “guaranteed level of care” provided “regardless of cost,” Patrick’s administration fought this order and continued working to close the facility, refusing to negotiate with patient families and advocates, in order to save money. That’s ugly and wrong.

To me, that is the real story here: that yet another progressive champion, when faced with a question of putting people over profits, chose profits. That “the government,” when called to account, passed the buck and protected its own while throwing its minor minions under a bus.

But our boy didn’t get that far, or even close to it, because he’s worried about attracting the attention of credulous, easily manipulated rubes with anti-government agitation and the pretense of some kind of insider knowledge of a big secret conspiracy. Another aspect of the story that Detective Holmes here overlooked is that while Quaker Oats and MIT were ordered to pay $1.8M in restitution, the government agencies and programs that drove the experimentation weren’t held liable at all and suffered no sanction.

This of course just feeds in to the idea that this was some kind of corporate experiment done with the clandestine cooperation of rogue elements within the government, rather than the truth: it was a federal program in which a single individual commissioned by Quaker was involved, along with a couple of students and professors at MIT. That they were involved is absolutely problematic; that they’re the only ones held responsible is stupid and deceitful.

That this chode is trying to drum this up like it’s something relevant today beyond being a footnote in the long history of covert power abuse by the US government in the 20th century remains the most problematic part of this.

What convinced me to deconstruct this is that it’s a bit more nuanced than the usual handwaving “GUBMINT EVUL” clickbait. It’s not that it didn’t happen per se but rather a) it didn’t happen in at all the way this dork is claiming and b) it’s been revealed, examined in great depth, publicized, and dealt with for three decades now. There’s a PBS documentary about it that’s old enough to vote, although regrettably it’s inaccessible online unless you’re affiliated with a college or want to pay $200+ for it…which seems rather exploitative itself, to me.

This is the equivalent of a TikTok video breathlessly exclaiming that OH MY GOT THE GUY WHO SHOT KENNEDY USED TO BE A MARINE! SURELY THIS NEWS MUST BREAK THE INTERNET!

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

That’s the result – a congressional investigation in 1994 complete with condemning final report, and that investigation was ignited by the awarding of a Pulitzer prize to the reporter, Eileen Welsome, who first uncovered the information that led to the disclosure of condemning details related to the program. It was first exposed in a science newsletter in 1976, and Mother Jones ran a story about it by Howard Rosenberg in 1981 which led to an even earlier congressional investigation and report, driven largely by congressman Ed Markey and resulting in congressional hearings in 1986. However at that time the Reagan administration refused to cooperate with the investigation.

The problem here is this chump is trying to further exploit and abuse these people by blowing it up into “eugenics,” which was never the purpose of the experiments, and by appealing to vapid, stupid “waah government” garbage that I’ve discussed the problems with many, many times in the past – primarily that it acts as a smokescreen to prevent us from asking whose government that was, who elected them, who trusted them, and who failed to raise an objection when the abuse was happening.

That tends to piss me off because now in order to get the facts right my dumb ass has to look like I’m defending non-consensual medical experimentation, which I’m not. It’s absolutely abhorrent that we as humans ever looked at one another as suitable for non-consensual experimentation because we were “other” – in the case of the Fernald school (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_E._Fernald_Developmental_Center), children with mental or behavioral dysfunctions. While it’s indisputible that the school’s namesake was a eugenicist, it’s very much disputable that this was in any way the purpose of the experiments conducted on their students given that the man had already been dead for a quarter-century by then.

The sensationalized implication of Quaker Oats amounts to their sponsorship of a single research fellow in all of this. This Hermoine-headed bloviating dumbass turns that into Quaker Oats just woke up one day and said “hey let’s inject a bunch of mentally challenged kids with deadly radiation for funsies! We’ll get the GOV in on it, they just love turning people into glowing green soup for no reason!”

I find the summary of the ACHRE to stand sufficient for a level-headed, non clickbait analysis:

“In 1946, one study exposed seventeen subjects to radioactive iron. The second study, which involved a series of seventeen related subexperiments, exposed fifty-seven subjects to radioactive calcium between 1950 and 1953. It is clear that the doses involved were low and that it is extremely unlikely that any of the children who were used as subjects were harmed as a consequence. These studies remain morally troubling, however, for several reasons. First, although parents or guardians were asked for their permission to have their children involved in the research, the available evidence suggests that the information provided was, at best, incomplete. Second, there is the question of the fairness of selecting institutionalized children at all, children whose life circumstances were by any standard already heavily burdened.”

Advisory Committee On Human Radiation Experiments Final Report

The Wiki points out elsewhere that by “low” they mean “less than the annual background radiation absorbed by a typical resident of Denver, Colorado.” – 330 millirems (3.3 millisieverts), for those keeping score at home. That’s about 3/4 of the exposure from a single mammogram.

If homey wasn’t trying to BS his way into cheap clickbait traffic he’d have done five minutes of work and found the REALLY outrageous stuff, like the case of Ebb Cade or the systemic forced sterilization – mostly but not entirely of poor, Black, women – conducted under the aegis of law in North Carolina. That was still happening until 1977, the laws empowering it weren’t repealed from NC law until 2003, and it had a hell of a lot more to do directly with eugenics than anything related to the Fernald School experiments.

So now instead of some shocking revelation of government abuse, what we’ve got is some sketchy dudebro telling the world what a genius he is because he stumbled over a Wikipedia article about some things that happened before most us and indeed most of our parents were even born, and he’s desperate for traffic so he’s gonna act like it’s any cooler for him to exploit these people by using them to troll for internet traffic than it was to exploit them by testing them to find out how the human body handles radiation.

Plus we’ve got a couple of added bonuses: by shifting focus away from the far more obnoxious practices in the South to these events in Massachusetts, we deflect the problem of racism – which was a key component of eugenics laws – completely out of the picture. Can’t imagine why a white guy would want to do that! It’s also a subtle play into the typical hyperdefensive line of “the North is more bigoted than the South” games played by southern bigots to minimize the intensely disgusting nature of their bigotry, and of course distracts from other issues as previously discussed.

LOOKIT MEEE I’M SOOOO SMRT N CLEVUR I FOUND THE BIG SECRET! No, chump, no you didn’t. What you did is find a seventy year old crime that was federally investigated thirty years ago and the victims compensated, and now you’re blowing it up because it’s obscure and you think it’ll draw attention to you as some deeply thoughtful and well-researched anti-authoritarian warrior because it’s not one of the more widely known abuses of government power in US history.

This is hubris on the level of Columbus “discovering” the Americas.

The reason for that is that all things considered it was about the least abusive and obnoxious of the abuses committed by the US government against their people in the mid-20th century. No injuries, no long-term damage found, no resulting health problems. The kids weren’t beaten or forced to grow tumors or forcibly sterilized against their will.

Certainly there’s nothing here that merits trying to validate a broad-stroke “anti-government” message in 2023, thirty years after the legal system already addressed the issue and fifty years after that process began, against a background of far more egregious and troubling abuses including some related directly to this incident that the clickbaiter doesn’t even touch.

It was a crime. That crime was punished and the victims compensated. One may certainly argue the value and propriety of that compensation, but acting like this whole thing is some deep dark secret that nobody knew about and now ol’ Inspector Bradget here is gonna tell you who’s behind the curtain is just the most outrageously self-serving bunch of bullshit ever.

This guy doesn’t give the first damn about abuse of power, institutionalized kids being abused, or revealing dark secrets of our culture; what he gives a damn about is whether he can con some freshman sorority pledge into sleeping with him because he’s oh so edgy and counterculture. It’s written all over his face and attitude, and mostly it’s written in the way he’s taken what could be a pretty decent story that encourages people to look more closely at their government and how they make political decisions, and turned it into a covert dating advertisement.

As a sidebar it’s a pretty good example of why it wouldn’t bother me in the least if TikTok and its analogs disappeared from the ‘net entirely. Issues like this aren’t made for 30-second explanations.

All of this took me about fifteen minutes to ferret out in Google searches enriched by prior education and reasonably well-developed critical thinking skills…and that tells me that rather than a substantive and meaningful effort to bring attention to an obscure violation of human rights, this author’s primary purpose is drawing attention to themselves, and that’s no more ethical, honorable, or even useful than the crimes they claim to be revealing.

Always check. Even my work – I’m not infallible either.