| Fuck You, Oprah |
[Jul. 14th, 2010|07:45 pm] |
Jenny McCarthy is getting a talk-show.
You may remember Jenny McCarthy as the face floating above a pair of (frankly overrated) breasts in an issue of Playboy back in 1993, or as the annoying cohost of MTV's trainwreck dating show "Singled Out". More recently, Jenny has gained fame for being repeatedly, publicly wrong about an imaginary link between vaccines and autism, pretending that she's cured her son's autism with "mommy instincts", and perhaps most laughably, that her son has fucking superpowers.
But you know what? Fine. Attractive women are always on the lookout for ways to make the world care about them that aren't breast-related, so if Jenny wants to live in an imaginary world where she's defeated the medical establishment with her rogue brand of healthcare, let her. She's not hurting anyone (except, perhaps, her son... oh, and all the parents who listen to her lies and fearmongering... oh, and plus she's pretty much chewed up everything good about Jim Carey... but, you know, other than that...), so let her have her day in the sun.
But you, Oprah...
I've never met her, but in general I believe that Oprah is a pretty smart lady. Maybe not book-smart (though she sure as fuck reads a lot, since she has approximately 36 billion Official Book Club Selections each year), but she's certainly business-savvy. And from a purely moneymaking standpoint, a Jenny McCarthy talk show will put some asses in the seats; Jenny's reimagined herself as a brave crusader, and a lot of desperate parents of autistic children are turning to her (patently ridiculous and demonstrably false) philosophy as kind of a last-ditch source of hope for their own children. You take a bunch of desperate people and one boisterous nut-job, and you've got the makings of a religion, and even the most devout amongst us have to concede that few things have as much raw moneymaking power as religion.
So Oprah's probably looking at all that and fucking salivating.
And shame on you for that, Oprah.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Oprah just hasn't had the time to actually investigate anything that Jenny McCarthy claims. Maybe she hasn't been made aware that the entire case for vaccines causing autism has been totally neutered after the retraction of Andrew Wakefield's initial MMR study (and, later, the loss of Wakefield's medical license for ethical violations and pretty much being an all-around shitty scientist). She sure as fuck seems to read a lot... maybe she just hasn't worked a goddamn newspaper into the rotation for the last year or so.
But even if she doesn't know, even if Oprah is totally oblivious, it doesn't change the fact that she's taken someone who is spreading a very bad, very dangerous philosophy, and blinged-out their soapbox. Jenny McCarthy was already a household name, but at least most of them time you'd hear that name right before some says, "...is a fucking idiot".
But now she'll have her own show, where she can invite her own "experts" and spend an hour filling viewers' heads with bogus science while completely ignoring the mountains upon mountains of research devoted to debunking her completely bullshit claim. And desperate parents too close to the situation to know better will eat it up.
Kids won't get vaccinated.
Diseases that have been all but wiped out will gradually return. (It's already happening.)
So, yeah; thanks for the measles, Jenny.
And fuck you to hell, Oprah. |
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| Comments: |
Great post. I stumbled upon it in Reddit and have added you to my FL. | |
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