Gillian McQuack in Twitter-based stupidity competition
Oh, what fun it has been: Gillian McKeith has been a gift that keeps on giving.
Let me recap this without the social media case study whitewash that various douchenozzles will undoubtedly apply.
Gillian McKeith is a quack nutritionist. She has a phony Ph.D from an unaccredited American correspondence college. She is also a published author and used to have a bloody awful television program called “You Are What You Eat”, where she combined sensible dietary advice with being a horrible nagging bitch queen and a lot of complete and total fruit loop pseudo-medicine. Basically, the show consisted of being such a whiny and horrible nagger to the overweight people she encountered that they gave in and crash dieted just to get the horrible witch out of their house.
During which she put forward some totally crazy ideas like the idea that green vegetables are good for you not because they are vegetables but because they contain chlorophyll which oxygenates your blood. Just in case your blood wasn’t being oxygenated enough by breathing, your stomach and intestines are busy at work oxygenating your blood through photo-fucking-synthesis. Yeah. I failed my biology AS-level. Completely fucking ‘U’ - unclassifiable, ungradable - failed. But I stayed awake long enough in the class to understand that photosynthesis doesn’t work in your gut. Now, if I can grok this simple fact with little more than a GCSE in science, surely someone who has a Ph.D in nutrition ought to be able to figure it out. Right?
Except she doesn’t have a Ph.D. Not a real one. She has a phony Ph.D - it is as real as Kent Hovind’s (you know, the creationist idiot who has got his idiotic self put in idiot prison for not paying his taxes after Jesus rode up next to him on a T-Rex and told him that he’d go to heaven if he valiantly refused to pay the U.S. income tax). If you get yourself a phony degree from a university that isn’t actually accredited by anyone other than the Associated Federation of Quacky Quacksters of Quackland, you can’t go around calling yourself a doctor. And, really, even if you have got a Ph.D, calling yourself a doctor is bloody stupid. I’m planning to get a Ph.D, and while it is nice to be a Doctor of Philosophy (the ‘Ph’ and the ‘D’ from ‘Ph.D’), when someone has a heart attack at 30,000 feet, the ability to pontificate on Leibniz is not quite as helpful as the medical doctor’s specialist abilities. To reduce confusion, then, calling yourself a doctor even if you have a legitimate Ph.D isn’t a wise move. On the front of a book or in the promotion for a television programme about healthy eating - the sort of things a Real Doctor rather than a Ph.D is an expert on - is a definite no-no. And if your degree is not from a prestigious real university that has gone through all the bother of getting approved to give degrees by the government of the country one is residing in (which, these days, isn’t that big of a deal since universities in Britain are now giving out Bachelor of Science degrees in magical water mixing - or Homeopathy to give it its proper title), that’s a bit of a fuck up.
So, Mrs. McKeith has not got a real Ph.D. In the USA, anyone can say they have a Ph.D. The important thing is that the institution which granted it to her isn’t accredited by an accreditation body that is recognized by the US Department of Education.
And the other day, a Twitterer called Rachel Moody was reading a book by the science writer Ben Goldacre which recounts the above facts: namely that McKeith is (a) a loon, and (b) a charlatan. She tweeted about this. To which Gillian McKeith responded with the following barrage of tweets:
Is it that you don’t like my Doctorate (PhD) because it’s from America and you’re discriminatory? USA knows how to educate too
Sad thing Rachel that your excitement comes from negativity. Think about it. U can shift yourself when you decide
Miss Anti-American: How sad a life to enjoy reading lies about another by an ass who makes money from pharmaceutical giants
So you believe if you tell a lie enough times it becomes fact. It doesn’t honey! Your anti-American bigotry is too glaring. gx
First of all. No one was doubting that the USA knows how to educate. But we aren’t talking Harvard v. Oxford here. We’re talking about the Clayton College of Natural Health. Is it anti-American bigotry to point out that the Ph.D McKeith has is not from a United States Department of Education approved institution? No, I’d say it is saying that the US needs to maybe clean up the regulations around who can claim what awards. It is actually showing the value of the US government’s approval of accreditation bodies.
If denying that the Clayton College of Natural Health is a legit institution means one is anti-American, then I guess all the Americans I know who think McKeith is a charlatan with a phony diploma are anti-American. And maybe the US Department of Education is also.
When people started then laughing about how McKeith was a charlatan, a loon and willing to exhibit both of these wonderful traits for all to see on Twitter, she decided to delete these tweets. Which was pretty funny.
Thankfully, people noticed them before she pulled the plug. You can’t rewrite history too much on Twitter.
Following this, a massive campaign of hilarious “negativity” ensued. We - and by ‘we’, I mean mostly the skeptical community who hang out on Twitter - had a jolly good laugh at her expense. She then decided to call all the people saying nasty stuff about her “chav-like bullies”. Which was pretty amusing. I haven’t heard of many chavs who spend their time mocking other people for claiming to have a Ph.D from a non-accredited American correspondence college and using it as a way to pretend to be a doctor. Perhaps I’m just a privileged Home Counties toff. It may be a topic of hot discussion in the council estates of Essex. I’m no sociologist. What do I know?
So we’ve all been having a good laugh at Gillian McKeith. My own contributions:
Oh, and @gillianmckeith is a doctor in the same way Dr. Nick from The Simpsons is.
I got it: @gillianmckeith found out her degree certificate has chlorophyll in it and so inserted it up her… ventilation pipe.
I am having horrible thoughts about the Human Centipede and fake-doctor @gillianmckeith. There is an analogy in there…
(The Human Centipede being a goofy horror movie I watched last night and am now obsessively name-checking because the image of three people surgically joined anus-to-mouth is a very useful image for illustrating plenty of important facts about contemporary society: the world economy, UK politics, US politics, the entertainment industry, the cosy relationship between public relations agents and journalism - you name it. Gillian McKeith? I’m not sure how the image fits, but any explanation of her obviously involves a large quantity of shit being forcibly pushed down someone’s throat.)
Now, Gillian McKeith is claiming that the Twitter account isn’t hers. On her Twitter account. It’s like a weird self-referential paradox or something. This is the tweet:
Do you actually believe this is real twitter site for the GM?
Well, let me see, her Twitter account is linked to from her YouTube account, which in turn is linked to from her website. Her Twitter profile links to her website, her website links to her Facebook, which links to her YouTube and back to her website. Thanks to the magic of the Interweb, you can see this kind of thing on Google’s Social Graph API. As a point of comparsion, here’s mine.
And people say that microformats, the Semantic Web et al. are useless geek toys. Seems pretty useful here!
Take a look, by the way, at her impressive number of Twitter list memberships. She’s on my “bullshit” list along with a parade of other idiots. “ppl-without-doctorates” is a nice one, “phd-in-social-media-fail” is another. “deluded-fucktards” may be going a bit too far - she’s needn’t be deluded - she simply needs to delude others. Lots of “quacks”. “totally-pointless-people” is a nice one.
McKeith seems to want to conclude the war of words with the following:
The moral of the story: Love your neighbour and your enemies too.
Which is funny, because I draw quite different moral from this little story. Thanks to the Internet and the dedicated gang of anti-quackery activists who hang out there, if you try and pretend that you are a credentialed expert when you aren’t, we may potentially come and deliver a firm groin kick on behalf of reality. If you want us to stop “e-bullying” you - which we aren’t - stop claiming to have a Ph.D. Stop claiming to be a “nutritionist”. Put out a statement that explains that you are very sorry for lying to the people of Britain and giving them phony medical advice. Shut the fuck up and stop being a charlatan. Then we’ll stop being all nasty and insisting on real credentials. Channel 4 may not check your CV, but we do. And we don’t like what we see.
If I had a message for Gillian McKeith, it would be this: your very existence devalues the qualifications given by real universities and the hard work that goes into achieving them. Fuck you. Your moronic advice confuses those who are seeking real help with living a better lifestyle and diet - which basically boils down to ‘eat less, eat better, exercise more’. Fuck you. All this shit about superfoods and chlorophyll and so on dilutes the very simple healthy living message, and turns the easily-understood (but not necessarily easy to live by, as everyone on the planet - myself definitely included - can attest) principles of healthy living and eating into a bizarre ritual of food fetishism that only middle class yummy-mummies and their moronic metrosexual husbands (basically, the modern reincarnation of Hooray Henries) can go along with. Fuck you. You and your ilk have turned wellness into an expensive fetish for idiots rather than a birthright of all. Fuck you. If I had to nominate who ought to have their mouth sewn onto the anus of another, you would be up there with Prince Charles, Hitler and the decomposing carcass of Jerry Falwell. Fuck you. Fuck you again. Now, go away.
If you want the same thing with more pictures and less swearing, go read this instead.
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