@RickiTarr 👏👏 👏

@RickiTarr

👍👍

@RickiTarr It's also a "the grass is always greener on the other side" thing. There is no ideal world, not even in the past. There is only our own will, how we choose to live, and the wisdom of finding balance. We sometimes forget that we are still a very young species and actually still inventing ourselves. Sad that we are already starting to destroy ourselves in this communal youth.

@RickiTarr
“You can’t get cancer or heart disease if you already died from falling on a stick.” Not a compelling argument.

@RickiTarr great rant! I feel the same way! My mother rolled her eyes when we told her we were taking my kid to get a flu shot. She’s all about natural healing. Eating garlic, onions, ginger and turmeric for every ailment. She means well, but it’s still a little frustrating.

@RickiTarr Tis not a "rant," tis a spirited call for sanity.

@RickiTarr I tell many of my patients "cavemen lived an average of 38 years, so your warranty is expired"

@RickiTarr Let's just shed this shell and crawl back into the primordial soup. Down with organs! Back to single cell society! If you're anything more than a chain of amino acids, you're doing life wrong!

@RickiTarr I went through a hippie phase when I was in my late teens/early 20s where I bought into that kind of junk. Like I thought all my problems would be solved if I could abandon society and live like the good ol' days. I don't even like camping though lmao idk what I was thinking. Not to mention I was wearing contacts and reading about it on the internet from inside a climate controlled house, mentally calm from my anxiety meds lol I wouldn't last a week out there!

@RickiTarr
From what I've seen most of the really vocal proponents of it are also trying to make a buck off of it. Give it five years and see if they are still living in a mud hut and shitting in the woods, or if they have a McMansion and six cars.

@RickiTarr I've been thinking about how fortunate we are to live with modern anesthesia and surgical practices, rather than the butchery of the 1800's and earlier.

@RickiTarr It's a pet peeve of mine as well. There's this notion that our ancestors pranced around in some woodland shagra la and that everything was in "harmony" with nature. Living on the land honestly kind of sucks a lot of the time unless you like being hungry and cold, with the uncertainty of where your next meal is coming from. Let's not forget in those days everyone else was also looking for their next meal and wouldn't hesitate to kill you for yours.

@RickiTarr I'd be dead several times over without modern medicine.

@RickiTarr
Makes me feel ranty, too.
Given my circumstances, thanks to modern medicine I didn't die of kidney failure in 1982
Or literally drown in my own body in 1991.
Hey, I could go on but we all know if it all went to shit and I couldn't get my meds it's game over in about a week. With no solution to that in sight.

@RickiTarr I think it’s the ghost of Dante

I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightfoward pathway had been lost. Ah me!

And then they take the Apple Maps shortcut through Hell

@RickiTarr
"[She chose]...to Return to Nature. (Six months later, sick of the rain, the mosquitoes, the men, the tent-trampling sheep who ate first the commune's marijuana crop and then its antique minibus, and by now beginning to glimpse why almost the entire drive of human history has been an attempt to get as far away from Nature as possible, Pepper’s mother returned to [her parents], bought a bra, and enrolled in a sociology course with a deep sigh of relief.)”
Good Omens, Pratchett

@RickiTarr wasn't this literally the cornerstone of the Khmer Rouge ideology?

@RickiTarr make America cenozoic again

@RickiTarr Partial describing MAGA rant seems to me. Never knew what MAGA was going on about? The good old days?

@RickiTarr The people who complain about how pregnancy and birth are too "medicalised" need to check out times and places without the obstetrics care we have today. The awful rates of death in childbirth, or from infection, the impossibility in most times and places of mothers surviving C sections, the effects of childbirth, like fistulas that women in advanced countries never have to suffer now (but too many elsewhere still do.) Ah, the good old days.

@RickiTarr Abso-friggin-lutely! Several people on this thread have mentioned the "lifestyle" industry which I think pushes a lot of this natural medicine stuff, plus the homeopathic crowd who I have always suspected were secretly afraid of doctors and dentists. Following well-researched health recommendations (peer-reviewed research, not some bozo selling supplements online) is just common sense. Maybe an apple a day really does keep the doctor away but I'm still going to get regular checkups!

@RickiTarr I know a guy who did this. He bought some lands in Appalachia and a couple of goats, then settled on it with his girlfriend. The GF didn't realize that he expected her to do all the work to maintain this little homestead, but quickly left after she realized he wanted to be able to continue living his cozy lifestyle of being catered to.

@RickiTarr my coronary arteries would have done me in already without this stent. I am 58 now got the stent in Dec 2019.

@RickiTarr I wouldn’t be able to feed myself without the benefit of modern neurosurgery so I’m feeling you on this 👍🏻

@RickiTarr Dude, I’d be fucking dead. I have a *currently well controlled* seizure condition, I’m waaaay past breeding value - fuck all that idiotic anti-medicine, counter progressive naïveté. Really, just no. (Rant for rant, @RickiTarr !)

@RickiTarr All true, all true. But the single biggest factor in increasing life span has been...wait for it...PUBLIC HEALTH. When we cleaned up the water and beat cholera, for example. BUT: the obvious line of attack for #Covid is exactly that: air quality. Mandate air purifiers/filters in schools, public buildings, theatres etc. Did we learn nothing from polluted water?

@RickiTarr there was an episode of one of those 80s Twilights Zone type shows in which they had a nicely pastoral community with horse drawn carriages etc, but futuristic medicine. This is what I want. Smaller, simpler lives with modern tech that actually helps humans live better

@RickiTarr

there is the counter argument that those people are self-selecting out of the gene pool, and perhaps we should respect that.

@RickiTarr honestly i thought you were in your thirties.

but also i'd be dead, probably stillborn, if we did that. Hydrocephalus requires brain surgery as treatment.

@RickiTarr I hear you on that-once I was talking to a woman who follows the 'paleo' diet and she waxed poetically on it for hours. I didn't bother to ask her whether or not the diet extended the lives of the original people who used to live that way. (Tip-it did not.) Me, I have one diet-Sea food. "I see food, I eat it."

@RickiTarr Some things are worth ranting about.

If people want to make an informed decision to forego modern medicine and take some "all natural" (but completely ineffective) potion instead, that's up to them.

But the people who sell that "all natural" crap and try to convince people that it's actually useful should be in jail, IMHO.

@RickiTarr I would have died at 46 from lymphoma, so give me everything that modern medicine has to offer.

And I've spent enough time camping to have no desire to make that a permanent lifestyle choice. So give me everything that modern plumbing has to offer, while we're at it.

@RickiTarr you're fine. It's one of my rants too.

@RickiTarr. Being indoors in bad weather is good but we do spend too much time indoors and sitting and that’s not healthy. Our bodies are not made to sit in front a screen for 12 hours a day.

Also, endless scrolling, social media-induced anxiety and depression…

Away to integrate the good parts of tech (medicine, communication, learning) with healthier lifestyles (more outdoor time, more in-person community time) is what we need.

@RickiTarr

NOOOOO!!!!! I don't think you know much about this subject.
SOME ideas the ancients had and still have are worthy of using today. I'm thinking of the ayahuasca experience, just for one example. It is mystical yes, & it delivers. Some people do it repeatedly, it works so well. (I think Sting did.)
I'm told the early sessions go thru your childhood, later ones are more spiritual.
The lecture on the Neanderthals vs. modern medicine is way off base. I'm sure Sting uses doctors.

@RickiTarr MOAR! WE NEED MOAR RANTY RANTS!

Seriously, this is great - unfortunately, I think the take-away from this will some people will start marketing their products differently - instead of "Live like a Neanderthal!" they will now be titled "Live like a *SMART* Neanderthal!"

It's like people following the Paleo diet - supposedly, proponents of the diet *knew* what humans ate over 10,000 years ago.

@RickiTarr

Neanderthals ruin everything 😂
People just need to use common sense, try to eat healthy and not worry about what some diet cult is preaching about this week.

Ever notice how cults sound a lot like #Republicans 😂

@RickiTarr
It's a weird knee jerk overreaction to very real issues with modern life.

Like yes, we should eat less shitty food and should turn off the TV and exercise more, but no, we shouldn't go back to subsistence living where we have to track animals through the forest for weeks to take them down and then eat them.

@RickiTarr “Nostalgia is the most dangerous of vices”

John Hodgeman

@RickiTarr I remember a human evolutionary biologist explaining, after being asked about paleo fads, that Neanderthals didn't have a diet; they literally ate whatever they could to not die, which, due to ease of immediate access and overall distribution, meant vegetables and seeds and plants. Also, a gourd aint' going to tear out your throat or take days to hunt, so much safer for life and survival regarding energy expenditure.

@RickiTarr@beige.party 💯👏🏼💯👏🏼💯👏🏼 👍🏼 ❤️ ​:ablobfoxbongo:​

People who think that life in pre-industrial, pre-scientific societies was so fucking wonderful should sell off all their shit, donate all their money to charity, then go live someplace like Borneo or Pitcairn Island AND TRY IT.

Or, you know, they could just STFU. I'd be fine with that, too.

@RickiTarr Rant! It's become the secular version of "Preach it!"

@RickiTarr

A man said he was against unnatural behavior, to which Terry Pratchett replied, "so you live in a tree and eat your food while it's still wiggling?"

@RickiTarr Yes, but we must live like Amazonian tribes or Neanderthals with clean water and modern medicine! 🧐

(I often suspect it's just a wish for a load less people, especially the ones with not-so-pale skin, so the pale-skinned ones can live their Amazonian Neanderthal dreams in luxury.)

@RickiTarr My response to folks advocating for these things is to be careful what you wish for.

@RickiTarr

People just hate having to work crappy jobs. You don't want to go back to nature, you want to join a union.

@RickiTarr

"Now, Jenny McCarthy is both a comedian and a playboy model. Two of my favorite kinds of people, but i don't go to her for medical advice."

https://youtu.be/Zq8WE8Hb96U?feature=shared

@RickiTarr

Remember that time in Battlestar Galactica when they found the planet and decided it was so awesome they were going to give up all their modern medicine and stuff, and live on the planet, and round up all their ships that had sustained them for decades and fly them into the sun and make stone tools instead?

@RickiTarr "You should eat a traditional paleo diet" they say, ignoring that agriculture has changed the shape of our mouths and that's why we have those "extra" wisdom teeth now, because we don't have to chew/grind tough foods nearly as much as our ancestors did

@RickiTarr
Totally get the resistance to holier-than-thou purists. Also, living in a tent in the woods, I feel more connected and balanced than I did with most modern conveniences. I still benefit from modern developments, but in general, for me now, less is more. Granted, my lifestyle is not for everyone, but it is for some of us. Also it’s my understanding that most native cultures, more about balance with all of life, consider themselves to have been better off before colonialist “progress.”

@RickiTarr That's a nice rant 🙂. Yes, modern medicine is great. It's why I didn't die in my 50's from my heart attack like my grandparents did. If living in a cave prolonged lives, that's what the wealthy people would be doing & they would already have the best caves. But they don't, they have lots of modern medicine at their disposal.

@RickiTarr As I put it earlier this year:

https://mastodon.social/@maxleibman/109634602025764806

@RickiTarr Amazon tribes are people that wait for packages with junk arrive at their door?

@RickiTarr Eating well means fresh veg free from pesticides etc, but that's mainly for richer people, or growing your own...very very time-consuming and that too presumes you have land to do that. Catching your own food...yeh, right...I do know how to do a bit of poaching and foraging...I had to learn on the hoof during a period of extreme poverty in rural France. All you can do is your best to stay healthy, fit and informed.

@RickiTarr

You go girl!

I'd like to thank Unions and medical organizations for much of what you noted

@RickiTarr I'm happier when I garden. I get antibiotics if I get cellulitis from a rose thorn instead of dying from the infection or losing a limb :)

Best of both worlds, honestly.

@RickiTarr

It's vanity and the purity impulse (moral reductionism plus decontextualization) combined with silver-bullet thinking (causative reductionism plus decontextualization.)

"I'm so clever that I can see the real answer and now *I'm* clear of the secret lie that's been right in front of you this whole time! I'm clean and I want you to be clean too!"

I think a lot of this sort of quackery in the US is because of our health care failures. People are desperate.

@RickiTarr Hi, You have made a good case for length of life but not, I think, living a life of quality or fulfilment. Healthspan not lifespan is a measure that is worth analysing. If a prehistory human died at forty knowing they have served their families and tribe (ancestors and the future) might that be a better life than one lived in despair, out of touch with society and effectively a slave for Google, Meta et all?

@RickiTarr I wouldn't even want to go back to 1950, never mind to prehistory.

@RickiTarr We have found remains of only 400 individual Neanderthals including only 33 'relatively' complete skeletons; furthermore many of those remains have not been extensively studied.

There is absolutely no way we can make population level estimates of their average age at death; it's highly unlikely that the remains we have studied are representative. There is not enough data.

@RickiTarr
Did somebody close drop into the Goop?

@RickiTarr The latest episode of the Srsly Wrong podcast, called "Ecological Luxury" is about this very topic! Def worth a listen

@RickiTarr Totally.

Fuck anprim bullshit.