I’ve been sent this story a few times by friends who know my thoughts on gluten intolerance.  I never thought it was real. Food allergies are real, but rare. When all of sudden half the population becomes allergic to bread, you should know it is hysterical bullshit. I know exactly one person with celiac disease. I know dozens of people claiming to be gluten intolerant. The fact that all of these people were eating bread with no problem until this fad came along is what the empirically minded call a clue.

That’s according to an academic study that effectively overturned the results of a previous one in 2011, which had served as evidence that non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS) is a real condition, Real Clear Science reports.

Peter Gibson, a gastroenterology professor at Monash University in Australia, conducted the original study, but was not satisfied with its results.

So he and a group of researchers carried out a new one, giving 37 people with a declared gluten sensitivity and irritable bowel syndrome four separate diets. Participants were first fed a baseline diet that was low in FODMAPs (fermentable, poorly absorbed short-chain carbohydrates) for two weeks.

The subjects then were blindly assigned one of three diets for a week: a high-gluten diet, which had 16 grams per day of added gluten; a low-gluten diet, which had two grams of gluten and 14 grams of whey protein per day; and a control diet, which had 16 grams of whey protein isolate per day, according to the study.

Subjects reported worsening gastrointestinal symptoms no matter which diet they consumed. Data from the study suggested a “nocebo” effect, similar to when people feel symptoms from Wi-Fi and wind turbines, Real Clear Science reported.

It should also be noted subjects reported feeling fewer gastrointestinal symptoms after eating the baseline diet, low-FODMAP diet, which includes many foods from which people abstain when taking on a gluten-free diet, such as breads, beer and pasta.

This reminds me of the peanut allergy hoax popular last decade. All of a sudden, 20% of the nation’s youth was allergic to nuts. Basic science said this could not be true, but parents convinced themselves their little snowflake was allergic. Then the kids got to the age where they could pick their own food and magically they were no longer allergic. I knew a woman who swore her kid was allergic until one day he came home munching a peanut candy of some sort.

Of course, all of this is an off-shoot of the victim culture. Everyone is looking for a clever way to prove they are up against it. The greatest displays of public piety are those that involve the suffering of the pious. Instead of nailing themselves to the cross, bourgeois bohemian mothers pretend their otherwise mediocre offspring have an exotic disorder.  That’s run its course, so now, in middle age, those same moms claim cupcakes give them the runs.

Conservative Inc. and the Republican Party are struggling to come to terms with what the neocons did to the movement and the party, particularly the Bush years. The “new” conservatism was supposed to do all the things Reagan failed to do by appealing to a broad audience on liberal terms. Instead, it turned the GOP into the Democratic Party circa 1975, with endless wars of choice in the Middle East. The latter is a debacle from which the country may never emerge.

Anyway, The American Conservative is featuring a long essay from somepne named Brain Patrick Mitchell. He is some sort of political thinker slash theologian, pushing a new political theory. His “new” contribution to the hyphen party is ethical-conservatism,. which is different from other conservatism because it is ethical. That sounds a lot like the Bush compassionate-conservatism of a decade ago. It actually starts out on an interesting footing

The modern age is an age of anarchy, an era of habitual rebellion against old ways and existing order in the name of liberty, equality, enlightenment, and progress. It began as a rebellion against religious hierarchy, burgeoned into a rebellion against political monarchy, and finally boiled over in a rebellion against social patriarchy, leaving in its wake a new civilization endlessly at war with civilization itself.

Raised to rebel, the modern, anarchistic, progressive personality is always impatient with the world as it is and ever insistent that it change to suit him. Believing himself innocent, he blames others for the suffering he sees, indicting Society, Civilization, the Church, the State, the Establishment, the System, the Corporations, or the Man for crimes against the People and the Planet. Consistent with the age’s Luciferian culture of grievance justifying rebellion, the progressive lives passionately and impulsively as the hero of his own personal revolution, in which anything that stands in his way—that limits his autonomy, inhibits his self-expression, frustrates his ambitions, convicts his conscience, offends his sensibilities, or denies him satisfaction—can be condemned as unfair, unjust, intolerant, and therefore intolerable.

That’s some fine writing and a rare attempt to take an honest look at the people cult running America since the end of World War II. I don’t agree with his analysis, but I don’t think he is too far from the truth. It is rare to see an attempt to understand the Left on its own terms so that’s encouraging, even if it misses the mark.

This is the spirit riling the two competing passions of our age, libertine individualism and envious egalitarianism. Both deny the moral relevance of the objective other to the subjective self. Both insist on the self as the point of origin and reference for all definitions of goodness, truth, and justice, in effect replacing the First Person of the Holy Trinity with the selfish first person—the singular “I” in the case of individualism, the plural “we” in the case of egalitarianism.

This is where this type of analysis falls down the stairs. The writer sets up a false dichotomy and then uses it as a launching pad for his own opinions that he thinks are unique and different from whatever else is kicking around today. It has always struck me as a get out of jail free card. If you can dismiss current reality, you’re free to indulge in whatever you like. Libertarians tend to do this by pretending Left and Right are two sides of the same coin, when they are right there with them.

That said, I’m all in favor of rejecting the left-right model of describing political thought in the modern age. That is nothing more than a tarted up version of the Left’s us-versus-them world view. It is how you end up with Hitler on the Right, alongside Burke and Reagan. Somehow we are to believe that the polar opposites are Hitler on one end and Marx on the other. The truth is that all of these sects are the sons and daughters of the marriage of Rousseau and Hobbes.

The one thing I think he needs to explore more deeply is the Left’s impulse to destroy for the sake of destruction. He gets into it a little, but can’t seem to bring himself to accept that it is destruction for its own sake. The old 1960’s rallying cry of “burn, baby burn!” is instructive. There are no rallying cries from the Left that bring images of anything other than destruction. Whatever Utopian fantasies are at the start of the movement, the end is always about pulling the roof down.

It’s what makes all of these attempt to slap a new coat of paint on the Baby Boomer Conservatism pointless. White Americans are throwing in the towel on their race and culture. People who stop having children are saying it is better to have never been born than to carry on the traditions of their age. You’re not turning the tide with ten point plans and clever tax reform proposals. At least this brand of hyphen philosophy gets a little closer to the truth.

Way back in the olden thymes I lived near a Hari Kirsihna center. Despite their reputation for extreme weirdness, they were excellent neighbors. You only saw members when they were headed out to annoy people in a public place. That is one of their primary methods of spreading their faith. They make a big fuss in a public area, hoping someone will find it interesting. They really do seek out people who have run out of options, as far as participating in a social group.

Otherwise, they kept to themselves and avoided all contact with neighbors. A key characteristic of cults is the adherent’s “us” versus “them” view of the world. Everyone and everything is either inside or outside the group. In the case of groups like the Krishnas, that results in complete isolation from outsiders. As far as they were concerned, the neighbors did not exist and that was the way they wanted it.

We tend to think of cults as having a charismatic. That leader has some grand vision of the future. Maybe it involves space aliens or God. Maybe he thinks he is God. Of course, the cult of popular imagination always follows the same arc. The leader acquires some followers and it all seems innocent and wonderful. The thing grows as the leader becomes increasingly deranged. At some point he either leads them into mass suicide or into some crazy act that brings the whole thing down.

As we see with the Krishnas and Scientology, obliteration is not the outcome in all cases or even most cases. The guy who started the Hari Krishnas has been dead for years and his movement keeps going. Scientology thrived after the death of L. Ron Hubbard. As far as I know, neither is plotting mass suicide or trying to launch a revolution.

The famous UFO cult, The Seekers, fell apart, reformed a few times until Dorothy Martin died. The point being that cults and religious movements don’t always end in obliteration. In fact, most either stabilize into a viable ongoing concern or they fall apart and the followers find a new movement. Those that survive their founders tend to get good at drawing bright lines between themselves and everyone else.

I was reminded of all that when I saw this posted on MR the other day. On a regular basis, a gaggle of social scientists release a study telling us why liberals are good and conservatives are bad. Sometimes it is just a focus on why conservatives are bad and other times it is a study on some essential goodness of liberals. The point is always the same, as the people doing it are always the same.

The gold standard for this, oddly enough, led to the Goldwater Rule. In 1964 a bunch of liberal psychiatrists, during the 1964 presidential campaign, declared that Barry Goldwater was clinically insane. After all, only a crazy person would deny the essential goodness of the Progressive movement. Some version of this pops up every few years, masked as social science.

An obsession with the moral differences between “us” and “them” is a hallmark of mass movements. It is fair to say they are fanatical about it. Oddly and maybe even counter intuitively, members of mass movements are not very good at understanding the differences between the array of groups not in their group. The others are just an undifferentiated mass of people not inside the cult.

A good example is the Amish. As far as they’re concerned, everyone else is English, by which they mean outsiders. They could no more tell a Catholic from a Jew and they don’t care. Muslims see nothing but infidels outside the world of Islam. Scientology, from what I understand, has similar labels for people outside their faith. Jews call non-Jews gentiles and, oddly, Mormons call non-Mormons gentiles too.

Progressives are by any reasonable definition, a political cult. Like Islam, it is aggressive and intolerant, particularly of Christianity. Not unreasonably, it sees Christianity as its chief threat. Not that Christians are automatically a bunch of freedom loving Burkeans. The Pope, after all, is a Marxist. That does not matter to the Left. They have a long hatred for Christians and Christianity.

The mandates in ObamaCare were not put in for health or cost reasons. Their intent was to make life miserable for Christians because they oppose contraception and abortion. That’s why Progressives have gone berserk over the Hobby Lobby case. If you imagine yourself in a life and death struggle with your chief rival, even tiny set backs seem like the end of the world.

I’ll wrap this rambling post up with a short story about an Iranian I once knew. This was back in the Iran – Iraq War days. He had been drafted into the Ayatollah’s army and sent to fight the Iraqis. A commander called for volunteers to clear a minefield. Immediately a bunch of young fanatics volunteered. They were sent out into the minefield, finding the mines the old fashioned way. Behind them the infantry, followed the now clear path through the field.

Shortly thereafter my Iranian friend went AWOL, got a fake student Visa and found his way to Belgium. He hooked up with other Iranian ex-pats, mostly Christians and Jews. They helped him get his paperwork in order. Because of the chaos in Iran at the time, his parents were able to claim he was missing in action so they could avoid trouble from the fanatics.

That’s life in a land where a cult takes over.