Guys do u know that one meme where there’s a girl and like a bodyguard (???) ordering drinks and the waiter give them the wrong drinks so they switch them on the last panel,???????? BECAUSE I C1NT FING IT^
To invading germs, you are a jungle full of hungry tigers. To your gut bacteria, you are a warm orchard of perpetual bounty. To your eyelash mites, you are a walking fortress and a mountaintop pasture. How many generations have you hosted? What do they name the wilderness of you?
— “Host” by @cryptonature, in his book Field Guide to the Haunted Forest
Parasites and other symbiotes (*symbiosis is actually an umbrella term that includes parasites, before anyone asks) outnumber free living organisms in both species and individual numbers, meaning that the *norm* for life on earth is to live your whole life in or on another creature. Us larger independent beasts are technically special in having adapted to survive the harsh non-living world; to gut bacteria and mites and parasitic worms we’re like planets keeping them safe from an immense deadly void.
an issue people like to point to in a lot of public discourse is that many people have never been given the tools to evaluate the reliability of information—this goes for scientific studies, news reports, information disseminated by doctors or think tanks, &c.
liberal efforts to combat this problem tend to start and end at advice to “find and listen to a trusted authority”—by which they mean, someone with a professional and/or academic credential. the obvious problem with this strategy is that many credentialed people are also full of shit, and credential-granting institutions themselves have ideological purposes and ends. that is, an md or a phd or any other expert certification is not value-neutral or apolitical. teaching people to defer to authorities and experts is not the solution here.
the secondary liberal response, if you can walk them up to this point, tends to start and end with “teach people how to evaluate which experts are trustworthy”—but of course, in the liberal imagination this education must always and only take place under the aegis of a suitably credentialed and officially approved institution. it’s like an endless redux: “ok, this particular authority might be bad and propagandistic actually—let’s find the correct authority to fix that!”
as long as you’re not giving people the tools to evaluate, engage with, and challenge expertise themselves, all you’re doing is continuing to replicate the same power structures but with different faces swapped in as the source from which the ultimate epistemological authority emanates.
And then the naive anti-authority response is to, “do your own research” but then this runs into the original problem of people not knowing how to critically evaluate original research material so they end up falling for quacks and grifters who reenforce their preexisting biases.
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