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Re:Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon? by pmoriarty on Friday February 01, 2019 @02:17PM (#19057460)
The rabbit hole goes deeper than that.

You should research Wilhelm Reich[1], a student of Freud's who came up with the term "orgone", who fled to the US to escape the Nazis only to have his writings confiscated and burnt by the US government, which imprisoned him until he died.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich

Re:Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon? by dTal on Friday February 01, 2019 @04:22PM (#19058767)
"Until he died" being a year, days before his parole, lest anyone think the US government sentences people to life in prison for quackery.

I think this is underappreciated ethical dilemma, rather like Typhoid Mary. I don't think that Wilhelm Reich thought of himself as a quack, or a fraud - he was more of a kind of technological mystic. While he himself was doubtless earnest, this kind of thing really is memetically dangerous - Scientology, for example, is a deliberate and successful attempt to weaponize it. Even now, people do crazy things like "seed" areas with "orgonite" to dispel "negative energy" - that is, they litter the ground with bits of metal encased with resin. A whole religion of woo, just from a few years of exposure to Reich's ideas.

So what is one to do with someone who is earnestly good-intentioned, highly charismatic, and completely stark-raving mad?

Re:Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon? by krapp on Friday February 01, 2019 @04:31PM (#19058850)
>So what is one to do with someone who is earnestly good-intentioned, highly charismatic, and completely stark-raving mad?

Ignore them as you should any other crackpot, charlatan or fraud. Don't waste your energy, time or money on them except to be entertained.

Re:Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon? by njarboe on Friday February 01, 2019 @04:17PM (#19058729)
"imprisoned him until he died"

True? He died a year in to a two year sentence for violating an injunction against him from committing fraud by selling his orgone accumulators.

Re:Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon? by pvaldes on Friday February 01, 2019 @09:05PM (#19060541)
But every time it rains You're here in my head Like the sun coming out Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen...