Angel Dusting is defined as a misleading marketing practice where a minuscule amount of an active ingredient is included in a product, an amount insufficient to give an measurable benefit.
Not to be confused with the drug Angel Dust, which has a long history of making people forget themselves in a compliant, controllable reverie… But hang on, isn’t that what Angel Dusting is all about as well?
One main purpose of Angel Dusting is to avoid falling foul of pharmaceutical patents, by only adding a trace amount of a patented chemical in a product. But that’s a practise becoming continually more pertinent to many other products and claims, especially in the days of fake-news. We seem to live in a world where almost any facet of public life can be subject to Angel Dusting, politics, justice, even education, whether to avoid patent, or discovery and prosecution.
Avoiding Patents or prosecution through Angel Dusting.
Angel Dusting in almost any area can easily fool people. Because you advertise justice, skepticism, humanism, or any supposedly desirable quality, merely using the words alone convinces that there is some in there. You can hope people will not realise that the actual amount of justice, skepticism or humanism contained in the product or claim, is not enough to have any measurable benefit. If you are powerful enough you can just not care whether they realise it or not.
It may be a novel and unfamiliar concept but I promise you, once you start thinking about this you will see Angel Dusting everywhere.
Angel Dusting – Good Thinking Range
So this Christmas we’d like to introduce you to a new Skepticeutical range of products under the Good Thinking label. Each product in the range does contain actual skepticism, we promise.
We chose this label because, along with Steiner critics, skeptics and humanists, and bio-psycho-social fan boys, the Good Thinking Society is a classic Angel Duster. The charity project seeks to be seen as containing so much of the ingredient of ‘Good Thinking’ that it can often dispense with the word “Society” and just present itself as being synonymous with actual thinking that is ‘good’. This year’s legal threat to the Charity Commission for not deregistering “alternative medicine” charities, disguises that fact that actual skepticism is only present in the Good Thinking Society in trace amounts.
Skeptics and Humanists Angel Dust ‘anti-cult’; they pretend to criticise authoritarian and controlling groups like Steiner Education. When push comes to shove they will happily drop that facade and defend cults, and even use cult techniques they claim to deplore when the need arises. It’s so easy for them to do so as they were only Angel Dusting anyway – a fake facade is super easy to drop.
Angel Dusting Quackery Itself
UK skeptics have gone overboard, Angel Dusting British society as much as possible, using the Science Media Centre, their links with the BBC, the Guardian etc., They seek to create a wonderful impression of skeptic and humanist engagement with the public. In reality they mostly cry ‘harassment’ when people they don’t like have reasoned opinions that differ from theirs. That’s if they can’t be covertly harassed out of public debate so dissent never comes up at all.
2017 has happily been a fairly productive year de-masking these practises with regard to the PACE trial. This popular, and even medical opinion is finally starting to blow back against bio-psycho-social flannel that is currently Angel Dusting the concept of bona fide healthcare.
A Government that leaves citizens to die on the streets instead of protecting them is literally Angel Dusting the whole concept of governance anyway.
But hey, we’re Angel Dusting Brexit, the CSA, and even democracy itself, blowing a fine powder into your face to make you do exactly what we want. Not so far from Angel Dust after all.
The very merriest of Christmases to you.
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What other examples of Angel Dusting are forming a big part of our everyday lives?
Amazon News Media, Angel Dust, Angel Dusting, ANM, brexit, Charity Commission, CSA, CSA Enquiry, featured, Good Thinking, Good Thinking Society, humanism, PACE Trial, Quackery, Science Media Centre, skepticism, Steiner Education
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