For those of you who listen to our fortnightly NZ Skeptics podcast, Yeah… Nah! (which is based on this newsletter), you'll be aware that I tested positive for COVID recently. It's been a week now since my first day of symptoms, and I'm feeling a lot better than I did a week ago. Craig was kind enough to cover for me on the radio talking with Graeme Hill last week, but thankfully I was feeling good enough to get back in the saddle yesterday afternoon. For those of you who listen to the radio, I highly recommend listening to Graeme's “Hill's Weekend” show on Sunday afternoons - Graeme always manages to line up a set of fascinating people to talk to, and I'm always grateful to be able to talk with him about skepticism and some of the nonsense we find out there in the world.
On Wednesday I received an interesting email trying to sell me on the idea of remote healing using Rife Therapy - maybe I should have given it a go, to see if they could treat my COVID. I've dissected the email's claims below.
I also noticed a link in our Facebook group to a new post from Ken Ring, which turned out to be seven shades of weird. As well as having been sucked in by a host of daft conspiracy theories, Ring is also promoting some racist nonsense about Egyptians being in New Zealand before Māori were.
Finally Bronwyn jumps into Amway, which she describes as an O.G. M.L.M. (for those of you who don't keep up with slang terms, O.G. stands for Original Gangster, meaning it's old and well-established). I really enjoyed reading this, given Amway's long history.
I wonder if we can convince Bronwyn to reach out to one of these MLM's one day, and pretend like she's an interested potential member. I've done this before, and found the entire thing to be fascinating. A lot of the unfounded claims that are made by members of these MLMs are only ever passed on verbally, and never written down (for obvious reasons) - so actually sitting down and chatting with someone who wants to recruit you into their “downline” can be an eye opening experience. I've not only been told about medical nonsense by MLM recruiters, but also a whole lot of conspiracy theories as well.
