Salty Current

The Lavender Scare and American Science in an Age of Anxiety

2012-01-26T16:23:00.004-05:00

It was largely a coincidence that I read Jessica Wang’s 1999 American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War

and David K. Johnson’s 2004 The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government

at about the same time recently. As it turned out, they complemented each other quite well. Both deal with Cold War witch hunts (metaphorical - not literal), their effects on the people targeted, and individual and organized opposition to persecution.

What makes the two books work so well together – and makes them so useful for the student of activism – is that, because of differences emerging in their methods of resistance in these years, the two targeted groups described in the books had very different trajectories. The scientific community left behind outspoken and organized public struggles in favor of working to advocate for individuals through private or official channels and forming alliances within the government, and as a result lost its effectiveness both in terms of individual advocacy and in terms of fighting for a different public role for science. As Wang describes:

The political culture of Cold War liberalism celebrated the potential of the bureaucratic state, privileging procedural reform over principle, and process over fundamental questions of value. In the late 1940s, many scientists began to confine their actions within the rhetorical and political boundaries of Cold War liberalism. Increasingly, scientists turned away from a progressive left rhetorical style that emphasized fundamental civil libertarian principles. Instead, they relied on more limited procedural reforms, most notably the protection of due process rights, to counter the threat to political freedom posed by the loyalty-security system (p. 8).

Scientists' public resistance to anticommunism was tempered by both fear of increased repression and the politically safer route of quietly building alliances within the Atomic Energy Commission and other receptive government agencies in order to mitigate the adverse effects of the loyalty-security system. Scientists achieved some short-term successes in limiting the impact of security investigations on scientists, but ultimately the safer strategy was self-defeating. By earning concessions through unobtrusive, backroom negotiations with government officials and deliberately avoiding public scrutiny, scientists failed to develop public political means of countering the growing ideological demands of the Cold War era. Their alliance with federal agencies bought time, but eventually time ran out. In 1949, scientists and the AEC lost a key political battle with Congress over the AEC fellowship program. Thereafter, the scope of anticommunist attacks on scientists expanded steadily for the next several years (pp. 7-8).

In contrast, gay activists increasingly left behind quieter individual support in favor of open challenges, developing organized direct-action strategies which brought great successes and formed the basis for the later mass movement:

Though [the Stonewall riots are] commonly seen as the beginning of the gay rights movement, by the time those gay, lesbian, and transsexual bar patrons fought a routine police raid, the movement had already won its first major legal victory and had established much of the rhetoric and tactics it would deploy over the next thirty years (Johnson, p. 211).

They’re only two cases, and of course they’re not perfectly comparable,* but the contrasting histories add two data points to our knowledge about social movement methods and their results.

Both books provided historical information that was new to me. I had little knowledge, for example, of the history of immediate-postwar scientific movements or the variety of visions of democratic science originating in the political ferment of the 1930s:

Following a path with few antecedents for American science, ordinary scientists turned to the political realm, where they explored a new synthesis of science, mass-based politics, and the legislative process in order to shape the contours of postwar nuclear policy and the institutional structure of science. As they did so, scientists began to recast their own political identity, pursue fundamental changes in the science-government partnership, and rethink the basic nature of the relationship between science and society (pp. 1-2).**

Similarly, I knew little of the lively wartime gay culture in Washington, DC, which forms a stark contrast to the climate of fear in the persecutory postwar era. And I hadn’t previously recognized the importance of this early activism to later gay rights struggles. I was pleased to learn recently that the book is the basis for a new film

although I haven’t been able to find information about its release.

Johnson in the book on the Lavender Scare does refer to the intersecting persecution of scientists (it’s noteworthy that Frank Kameny was a scientist), but Wang in her history of scientists and anticommunism doesn’t talk about the Lavender Scare (even at some moments expressing confusion as to why certain scientists were singled out, when Johnson shows that it was because of their sexuality). I don’t think this was intentional on her part, but it’s unfortunate that this aspect is neglected in her work as in others on the era. In any case, as I said, the two books pair up nicely, and I’d recommend both.

*An argument that open, organized public protest in this era was more accessible to or likely to succeed for gay people than scientists (many of whom had already engaged in it) would be an interesting one, but I think difficult to sustain.

**Both the pre- and postwar histories shed critical light on silly nostalgic portrayals of the 1950s as a high point for American science and its public role.

More emerges about Islamophobic propaganda film shown by NYPD

2012-01-25T13:14:00.004-05:00

I missed this story when it broke a year ago. The rightwing scaremongering propaganda film The Third Jihad was shown over a period of several months in 2010 to NYPD officers as part of their training. When the reports first came out, those in charge refused to tell the full story. Now they’ve had to reveal more.

The Third Jihad

was produced by Raphael Shore and bankrolled by the Clarion Fund, which appears to be closely connected to if not simply an offshoot of Aish HaTorah, an Israeli Orthodox organization, and heavily funded by the Donors Capital Fund. The Donors Capital Fund is directed by the AEI/Cato/Heritage crowd (I’ll also note the involvement of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, which is part of the Atlas network and thus linked toTempleton,* and which I’ve mentioned before).

As Steve Rendell and Isabel MacDonald describe,

The term “Islamophobia” refers to hostility toward Islam and Muslims that tends to dehumanize an entire faith, portraying it as fundamentally alien and attributing to its followers an inherent, essential set of negative traits, such as irrationality, intolerance and violence. And not unlike the charges made in the classic document of anti-Semitism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, some of Islamophobia’s more virulent expressions…include evocations of Islamic plots to dominate the West.

These campaigns are not about criticism of Islamic religious beliefs or religiously-inspired crimes (note the lack of interest in, and even support for, similar crimes by non-Muslim movements and governments). They feed exaggerated fear and the marginalization of Muslims in countries where they’re a minority, imperialist foreign policy, and violence toward Muslims (or those perceived as Muslims) at home and abroad. It’s especially dangerous when those targeted for propaganda are police or military. It’s part of a clear rightwing political, economic, and often religious agenda. It shouldn’t remotely need pointing out that these individuals and organizations are no friends to social justice, human rights, equality, or secularism. They exist, they have a real effect, and they shouldn’t be ignored.

*And, as probably shouldn’t even need mentioning at this point, winner of at least three Templeton Freedom Awards.

NPR: the serotonin "hypothesis" takes another hit

2012-01-23T20:47:00.004-05:00

Howard Brody at Hooked links to a report on NPR about the chemical-imbalance explanation for depression and how it lacks empirical support. They’re very late in coming, but I’m glad more of these stories are appearing, since it annoys me to no end that people who should know better continue to peddle this story in the media (all while their counterparts deny that anyone really believes it).

Brody is disappointed that they didn’t talk to Lacasse and Leo (they could have talked to Irving Kirsch as well), but the people they did interview were reasonably clear about the fact that that the monoamine story is a myth. I’m not thrilled about the impression the report gives to some extent (especially in the misleading title, “When It Comes to Depression, Serotonin Isn’t the Whole Story”) – that this explanation is merely reductionistic or incomplete rather than flat wrong. But the basic message is there.

I also agree with Brody that it’s odd, and to me comes across as seriously naïve, that the report doesn’t talk about the role of the pharmaceutical companies (with the complicity of the FDA) in promoting this myth. It hasn’t been so successful and enduring simply because people like the certainty of simplistic explanations that promise a cure. It’s been so successful and enduring because there are billions of dollars in profits at stake for the makers of psychotropic drugs, and they have no interest in the public becoming aware that the conception of disease and mechanism of action their product is based on is a myth.

I’m slightly disturbed by the focus on the alleged positive and negative consequences of the neurotransmitter story. Alan Frazer, interviewed for the report, claims that the story is positive in that it allegedly “enables many people to come out of the closet about being depressed,” although he offers no evidence in support of this position (the evidence suggests that rather than having a destigmatizing effect, biological explanations are themselves stigmatizing). Pedro Delgado

points out that years of research have demonstrated that uncertainty itself can be harmful to people — which is why, he says, clear, simple explanations are so very important.

"When you feel that you understand it, a lot of the stress levels dramatically are reduced," he says. "So stress, hormones and a lot of biological factors change."

No evidence of this is provided, either, but the paternalism is shocking. It is completely unethical for doctors to knowingly lie to patients about the nature of their condition, or for scientists to lie to the public.*

The report does mention some drawbacks: that people are led to take medications rather than using talk therapy, and that it distracts researchers from studying “other” causes of depression. Both of these are understated, but the point isn’t that they overstate possible benefits of perpetuating this myth and minimize the harms, even though they do. The problem is that they’re focusing on the supposed effects of telling a false tale rather than the fact that it is false. Even in the hypothetical case that lying to depressed people making decisions about treatment and to the public about a major health issue had nothing but benefits, it would still be wrong to do. And this hypothetical situation not only doesn’t apply, but it couldn’t possibly. Creating a culture in which scientists, physicians, and counselors accept and perpetuate falsehoods will always cause harm in the long term.

*And this emphasis on simplicity evades the central issue. As Lacasse and Leo argue:

Since 2002, the first author (JRL) has repeatedly contacted the FDA regarding [the use of the serotonin myth in drug advertising]. The only substantive response was an E-mail received from a regulatory reviewer at the FDA: “Your concern regarding direct-to-consumer advertising raises an interesting issue regarding the validity of reductionistic statements. These statements are used in an attempt to describe the putative mechanisms of neurotransmitter action(s) to the fraction of the public that functions at no higher than a 6th grade reading level” (personal communication, 2002 April 11).

It is curious that these advertisements are rationalized as being appropriate for those with poor reading skills. If the issues surrounding antidepressants are too complex to explain accurately to the general public, one wonders why it is imperative that DTCA of antidepressants be permitted at all. However, contrary to what the FDA seems to be implying, truth and simplicity are not mutually exclusive. Consider the medical textbook, Essential Psychopharmacology, which states, “So far, there is no clear and convincing evidence that monoamine deficiency accounts for depression; that is, there is no ‘real’ monoamine deficit” [44]. Like the pharmaceutical company advertisements, this explanation is very easy to understand, yet it paints a very different picture about the serotonin hypothesis.

Interlude - Anti-Lullaby

2012-01-22T22:22:00.002-05:00

Interlude - The Preacher and the Slave

2012-01-22T22:19:00.001-05:00

The Science of Schlock

2012-01-22T18:47:00.004-05:00

I wrote in a recent post about the Templeton Foundation’s funding of initiatives called “The Science of Gratitude” and the “Science of Intellectual Humility.” Recalling other questionable “sciences” of Templetonian provenance, I decided to do a quick search. Here are a few more initiatives:

The Science of Generosity

The Science of Free Will

The Science of Love

The Science of Godly Love

The Science of Forgiveness

The Science of Optimism and Hope

The Science of Wisdom

The Science of Virtue

Now, new concepts can arise based upon our developing understanding of the world or changes in it: addiction or sexual harassment, say. And some phenomena – ecology, for example - warrant the creation of a new field of science. We can also use approaches from existing sciences to illuminate areas of interest (and, in turn, use this application to educate about science).

But here “the science of” doesn’t seem to have any real meaning. These are not concepts defining previously unrecognized or new phenomena. There can be and have long been, of course, scientific (anthropological, sociological, psychological, evolutionary) analyses of altruism, aggression, and so on. But this doesn’t appear to be what’s going on here for the most part. Even if funded initiatives in “the science of forgiveness” could or do to some extent include worthwhile research, “Godly love” doesn’t seem to lend itself to similar scientific investigation.

What appears to be going on at root is that concepts connoting or reminiscent of religion (and specifically Christianity)* have been strategically chosen as themes,** and to these the gloss of “science” has been applied to lend the initiatives, and by extension religion/Christianity, credibility. This rhetoric and the fact that so much of this scholarship is explicitly religious subtly reinforce the connection in people's minds between, say, love and wisdom on the one hand and religion/Christianity on the other. It’s at heart religious propaganda and distorts the meaning of science. That’s nothing new for Templeton, of course, but I wanted to draw attention to it because it’s such a transparently manipulative and schlocky strategy.

*The idea being reinforced, needless to say, is that goods such as generosity and intellectual humility are inherently the province of religion.

**The more suited to rightwing political-economic efforts, the better.

What is this, International Intimidation Month? The Case of Will Potter

2012-01-20T20:54:00.005-05:00

I’m putting together a post about my favorite books, movies, and television of 2011. At or near the top will be Green Is the New Red by Will Potter. The writing is feisty, and I learned much about terrible developments in the US government’s approach to some of the most important social movements of our time. But maybe the best aspect is how the stories of animal rights and environmental activists, including Potter himself, are told in a way that conveys how the efforts to redefine their activism as terrorism and to intimidate them have affected them and their relationships.

Recently, in the sentencing of animal rights activist Jordan Halliday, prosecutors have claimed that Halliday is linked to the “extremist” Potter because Potter credited Halliday in a photo caption in a story about a house raid (resulting in no arrests). I’m not sure what the most troubling aspect of this is, but it may be, as Potter writes, that according to the government

Anyone who writes about what the government is doing to animal rights activists is an “animal rights extremist” by extension....My writing and commentary on civil liberties issues has been featured by NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, and many other of the top media outlets in the country. I have lectured at nearly 100 universities and associations, including Georgetown Law School, Yale Law School, and the House of Democracy and Human Rights in Berlin. My book was awarded a Kirkus Star for “remarkable merit,” and has been praised by Publishers Weekly, Utne, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and many others. I say all this hoping to make clear that if my journalism is being labeled “extremist,” if my entire body of professional work can be reduced to extremism because I ask questions about what the government and corporations are doing, then everyone is at risk.

Or it could be the inherent sliminess of this particular tactic. They are using a writer’s admirable sympathy and relationships of trust to silence him. Just as it’s easier to put yourself than your children at risk by protesting, the decision to document the truth about government abuses is far simpler when they’re threatening you and not your sources. As Potter describes, this creates a moral and emotional dilemma for journalists exercising their basic rights:

[I]t makes me feel that using my First Amendment rights puts my sources at risk. When I saw that my work was being used by the FBI and prosecutors against Halliday, it made me sick to my stomach. It’s one thing to see my name in terrorism files, it’s another to see my work being used by prosecutors to punish people I have written about. An old muckraking motto is “comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.” To have my work afflict people who already have the full weight of the U.S. government pressing down upon them goes against everything I believe about this craft.

…And so, as I edit this, about to hit “publish,” I keep hesitating. Will writing about this amplify that message of fear? Everything I do depends on the trust I have built with countless activists and their friends and families. What if this makes people afraid to be mentioned on this website?

The mere fact that I have to ask myself those questions is a testament to how much we have lost in the name of fighting “terrorism.”

This pattern of conduct by the FBI and federal prosecutors is nothing less than an attack on the First Amendment, and an attack on journalism. It is an attempt to foster distrust between author and source, and it is an attempt to shake the confidence that one can report freely and without retribution, both of which are essential to any meaningful expression of journalism in a democracy.

It’s not a new tactic, but it is a disgusting one, and it has no place in any system that calls itself democratic.

Allen Frances on the DSM-5 Field Trials

2012-01-20T18:54:00.005-05:00

Two approaches are possible when the DSM 5 field trials reveal low reliability for a given suggestion: 1) admit that the suggestion was a bad idea or that it is written so ambiguously as to be unusable in clinical practice, research, and forensics; Or, 2) declare by arbitrary fiat that the low reliability is indeed now to be relabeled ‘acceptable’.

So Allen Frances has a couple of new pieces about fatal problems with the DSM-5 Field Trials. First, they certainly appear to be retroactively and illegitimately lowering their reliability standards based on disappointing field-trial results:

The commentary states: “A realistic goal is a kappa between 0.4 and 0.6, while a kappa between 0.2 and 0.4 would be acceptable.” This is simply incorrect and flies in the face of all traditional standards of what is considered ‘acceptable’ diagnostic agreement among clinicians. Clearly, the commentary is attempting to greatly lower our expectations about the levels of reliability that were achieved in the field trials – to soften us up to the likely bad news that the DSM-5 proposals are unreliable. Unable to clear the historic bar of reasonable reliability, it appears that DSM-5 is choosing to drastically lower that bar – what was previously seen as clearly unacceptable is now being accepted.

It’s rather strange that they didn’t have to establish and publicly defend acceptable reliability levels beforehand. This is especially problematic given that, Frances reports, the Oversight Committee was insisting in 2010 that they would not move forward if the field trials returned “crappy results.” But the second phase that was to test revised criteria based on their performance in the first phase was dropped. It appears they are moving forward by redefining “crappy.”

As he points out, reliability is only one criterion, but it’s an essential one: “Why does this matter? Good reliability does not guarantee validity or utility – human beings often agree very well on things that are dead wrong. But poor reliability is a certain sign of very deep trouble. If mental health clinicians cannot agree on a diagnosis, it is essentially worthless.”

Furthermore, they did not set up the field trials to assess how the new diagnostic criteria would affect prevalences. As the post hoc rationalization goes:

[O]ne contentious issue is whether it is important that the prevalence for diagnoses based on proposed criteria for DSM-5 match the prevalence for the corresponding DSM-IV diagnoses” …. “to require that the prevalence remain unchanged is to require that any existing difference between true and DSM-IV prevalence be reproduced in DSM-5. Any effort to improve the sensitivity of DSM-IV criteria will result in higher prevalence rates, and any effort to improve the specificity of DSM-IV criteria will result in lower prevalence rates. Thus, there are no specific expectations about the prevalence of disorders in DSM-5.”

But, as Frances makes clear,

This is irresponsible for two reasons. First off, we are already suffering from serious diagnostic inflation. Rates of psychiatric disorder are already sky high (25% in the general population in any year; 50% lifetime) and we recently have experienced three runaway false epidemics of childhood disorders in the past 15 years. Second, drug company marketing has been so abusive as to warrant enormous fines and so successful as to result in widespread misuse of medication for very questionable indications….

The DSM-5 proposals will uniformly increase rates, sometimes dramatically. Not to have measured by how much is unfathomable and irresponsible. The new diagnoses suggested for DSM-5 will (mis)label people at the very populous boundary with normality…The field trial developers seem either unaware or insensitive to the unacceptable risks involved in creating large numbers of false positive, pseudo-patients.

Indeed, quite contrary to the blithe assertions put forward in the commentary, we should have rigorous expectations about prevalence changes triggered by any DSM revision. Rates should not be wildly different for the same disorder UNLESS there is clear evidence of a serious false negative problem and firm protections against creating a massive false positive problem. And new disorders with high prevalences should not be included without substantial scientific evidence and convincing proof of accuracy, reliability, and safety. We have known since they were first posted that none of the DSM-5 proposals comes remotely close to meeting a minimal standard for accuracy and safety. And now, the AJP commentary seems to be softening us up for the bad news that their reliability is also lousy.

These field trials sound like a mess. They would be insufficient even if they were well designed and executed and met acceptable standards of reliability, which does not appear to be the case.

Imagine a medical licensing program for which performance standards are not specified in advance and students who receive Ds - frequently misdiagnosing healthy people with serious illnesses and prescribing expensive and dangerous courses of treatment - are granted licenses. Scary.

In the future, please attack atheists in this manner.

2012-01-19T13:39:00.007-05:00

Ophelia's just posted a bit more about the UCL Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society flap. She quotes from a BBC article (which presents the position, such as it is, of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association but not that of the atheist group) quoting Adam Walker, the national spokesperson for the Association:

The principle is more important than who is being attacked – this time it is Muslims and Christians but in the future it could be atheists themselves.

Attacked?! ATTACKED?! A religious organization is calling this comic an ATTACK?!

This is madness. The atheist group should not be giving into it in the slightest.

I love my Presto PopLite popper

2012-01-18T19:46:00.004-05:00

A few months ago, I saw an advertisement for a hot-air popcorn popper. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they were still being made, and mentioned it to several people, one of whom was thoughful enough to get me one for Christmas. When I investigated, I was happy to see that this inexpensive model had won Slate's Pop Off.

It's hilariously retro, and pops almost every kernel to puffy perfection.

Did you know that Janssen was using you?

2012-01-18T19:17:00.005-05:00

The fraud investigator had traced as much detail of Shon’s activities as would make an innocent man blush. The prosecution also exhibited internal Janssen emails referring to Shon’s value to the marketing efforts of the firm. The prosecution asked Shon a question that is coming to be the leitmotif of the trial: Did you know that Janssen was using you? - Kalman Applbaum

While the APA works to intimidate critical bloggers, the Risperdal trial begins in Texas:

Risperdal earned J&J $34 billion during its 17-year patent period. The size and complexity of the machinery necessary to generate revenues on that scale cannot be easily summarized. Those who don’t have firsthand knowledge of how mega corporations work cannot easily comprehend what’s involved.

Explaining this is the very challenge facing the Texas Attorney General’s office in the coming weeks. They have gathered millions of bits of data but have only a handful of hours to make their case to a jury as to how they think J&J could have defrauded the state of $579 million. It is of course too early to tell how they will build their case, but in the plaintiff’s opening statement, attorney Tom Melsheimer accused J&J/Janssen of implementing a “systematic scheme…not a one-time event, not an accident” to turn a drug designated for narrow use in the treatment of schizophrenia into a $34 billion pill, with a 97% profit rate, he said, and to defraud the Texan taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars along the way.

Melsheimer asked the court how the company could have accomplished this feat of unnatural expansion. He alleged four ways: They (1) influenced usage guidelines by bribing Texas officials; (2) illegally promoted the drug for use in children—he added that half the patient population for the drug is under the age of thirteen; (3) made false claims that Risperdal is safer than other antipsychotic drugs; and (4) made claims that, despite costing 45 times as much as generic competitors against which Risperdal could show no superiority, it was cost effective to the tax payer.

Somatosphere is reporting on the trial.

Stupidity

2012-01-18T18:50:00.003-05:00

First,

In reality, science is locked into a series of dogmas that are largely untested and to some extent untestable, which for science ought to be the great no-no. Yet they must be adhered to, or risk the charge of flakiness and loss of grant. In The Science Delusion, Rupert Sheldrake drags ten of the most powerful dogmas out of the basement and into the light of day; and does science, humanity and the world a large, a considerable favour.

The most obvious and all-prevailing of the great dogmas is that the universe as a whole – including life -- is mechanical. Bits of stuff interact – and that's it. The smaller the bits, the more fundamental the explanation is deemed to be. According to Richard Dawkins, human beings are "lumbering robots", driven by their "selfish" DNA (where "selfish" is a shameless and seriously misleading piece of anthropomorphism). Consciousness, says Boston philosopher Dan Dennett, is an illusion – just the noise that neurons make, although it is hard to see how something that is not itself conscious could suffer from illusions. On the back of this mechanical dogma all metaphysics, which in effect means all religion, is kicked into touch.

Is comment even necessary?

Second,

But what if there were other concepts of God? It seems possible that Dr. Stenger and Dr. Pinker have only shown that, for some people, science seems to make belief in certain concepts of God obsolete. Instead of negative definitions of God that fill the void, if we had positive concepts of God that do not lean on the need for comfort, or fill voids like unexplained phenomena, could science make those concepts of God obsolete? What would those concepts look like? Instead of a faith that only has something to offer to those who don't understand a phenomenon, those who are fearful, the comfortless, those near death, or the depressed, what if we had a concept of God independent of gaps and voids? What if we there were concepts of God that had something to offer or add to the fulfilled? What if we had concepts of God based on creativity? On a positive definition of incomprehensible peace? On imaginative joy? On creative, problem-solving love?

What if, what if, what if. What if you weren't just flinging words about? Do you have such a concept or definition? No, you don't. You have blather. Do you realize how transparently desperate this straining about "incomprehensible peace" and "imaginative joy" is? You should do very well with Templeton, Udoewa.

So much commentary on science and religion has devolved into utter stupidity.

APA bullies blogger

2012-01-18T15:53:00.004-05:00

There’s a surge of late in efforts to silence atheists and secularists, which is being well covered by the blogs. People in the skeptical community, though, might not be aware of another recent instance of the use of threats to silence a critic.

The APA, some might know, is completing the DSM-5. It’s been extremely controversial, and many scientists and others have been highly critical of the process. (Here, for example, is an open letter and petition with more than 10,000 signatures, stating in part:

Though we admire various efforts of the DSM-5 Task Force, especially efforts to update the manual according to new empirical research, we have substantial reservations about a number of the proposed changes that are presented on www.dsm5.org. As we will detail below, we are concerned about the lowering of diagnostic thresholds for multiple disorder categories, about the introduction of disorders that may lead to inappropriate medical treatment of vulnerable populations, and about specific proposals that appear to lack empirical grounding. In addition, we question proposed changes to the definition(s) of mental disorder that deemphasize sociocultural variation while placing more emphasis on biological theory. In light of the growing empirical evidence that neurobiology does not fully account for the emergence of mental distress, as well as new longitudinal studies revealing long-term hazards of standard neurobiological (psychotropic) treatment, we believe that these changes pose substantial risks to patients/clients, practitioners, and the mental health professions in general.

and calling for an independent scientific review of controversial portions:

As you know, it is common practice for scientists and scholars to submit their work to others for independent review. We believe it is time for an independent group of scientists and scholars, who have no vested interest in the outcome, to do an external, independent review of the controversial portions of the DSM-5. We consider this especially important in light of the unprecedented criticism of the proposed DSM-5 by thousands of mental health professionals, as well as mental health organizations, in the United States and Europe.

Will you submit the controversial proposals in DSM-5 to an independent group of scientists and scholars with no ties to the DSM-5 Task Force or the American Psychiatric Association for an independent, external review?)

One site providing information and critical analysis of DSM-5 development has been Suzy Chapman’s. In December, Chapman received two cease-and-desist letters from the American Psychiatric Association demanding that she remove “DSM 5” from her domain name or face legal action for trademark infringement:

Name: Redacted
Email: Redacted
Message:

December 22, 2011
Suzy Chapman
http://dsm5watch.wordpress.com/

RE: DSM 5 Trademark Violation

Dear Ms. Chapman:

It has come to our attention that the website http://dsm5watch.wordpress.com/ is infringing upon the American Psychiatric Association’s trademark DSM 5 (serial number 85161695) and is in violation of federal law by using it as a domain name.

According to our records, the American Psychiatric Association has not authorized this use of the DSM 5 trademark. Consequently, this use of the DSM 5 mark is improper and is in violation of United States Trademark Law. Your unauthorized actions may subject you to contributory infringement liability including increased damages for willful infringement. We request that you immediately cease and desist any and all use of the DSM 5 mark. Furthermore, we request that the DSM 5 mark is removed from the domain name http://dsm5watch.wordpress.com/ .

The American Psychiatric Association has a good-faith belief that the above-identified website’s use of the DSM 5 name and marks is not authorized by the American Psychiatric Association, its agents, or the law. I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct and that I am authorized to act on behalf of the American Psychiatric Association.

Please confirm, within the next ten (10) days of the date of this letter, that you will stop using our trademark in http://dsm5watch.wordpress.com/ , and provide documentation confirming that you have. Any further use will be considered an infringement.

Thank you for your prompt cooperation in resolving this issue.

Very truly yours,

[Redacted]
Licensing and Permissions Manager
American Psychiatric Publishing, A Division of American Psychiatric Association
1000 Wilson Boulevard Suite 1825
Arlington, VA 22209
E-mail: Redacted

This is simple intimidation. Everyone is familiar with “____ Watch” groups and sites, and this is widely viewed as fair use. As Chapman argues:

This experience has taught me that the APA trademark claims were not only misguided, but probably legally indefensible. ‘Nominative fair use’ is permitted those who are publishing criticism within texts if use of the trademark is relevant to the subject of discussion or necessary to identify the product, service, or company. Courts have found that non-misleading use of trademarks in the domain names of critical websites (like walmartsucks.com) is to be considered ‘fair use’ by non-commercial users – so long as there is no intent to misrepresent or confuse visitors to the site and when it is clear that the site owner is not claiming endorsement by, or affiliation to, the holder of the mark.

Everything I have read suggests that my clearly non-commercial use of my previous subdomain name (dsm5watch.wordpress.com) – with its prominent disclaimer and no intent to mislead – falls well within the concept of ‘fair use’. This then raises the obvious question – what grounds did APA have for serving me with demands and threats of possible legal action? Several people have independently sent me materials on ‘SLAPP’ lawsuits (strategic lawsuit against public participation). These are threats of legal action intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense – so that they will abandon their criticism or opposition.

Changing the name of her blog naturally led to a substantial reduction in traffic. Fortunately, the professional and internet community came swiftly to her defense, and this episode has likely garnered her site much more attention than if the APA had left her alone. But this should never have happened.

I think what we may be witnessing with the broad challenges to the DSM-5 is the beginning of the end for this psychiatric model. Its flaws, failures, and cooptation by corporate interests are becoming more widely known, and it’s unraveling. Efforts at evasion and intimidation like these merely dramatize the process.

Stay away from medicine, Templeton Foundation!

2012-01-12T15:17:00.006-05:00

So what’s Templeton been up to? (In the realm mainly of religion, that is; AGW denialism and the like treated separately.)

Well, they and Pew funded “Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population.” They found that the percentage of Christians in the world has declined slightly (from 35% to 32%) in the past century, and that the centers of Christian population have shifted from Europe to the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa. This should be useful to atheists.

They’re sponsoring a lecture series on science and religion at Gordon College in Massachusetts this fall:

The lectures, which will be open to the public and are meant to encourage both dialogue and further scholarship, will appropriately be held in the school's state-of-the-art Ken Olsen Science Center.

Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Corp. and a longtime Gordon board member, once wrote: "Science is more than a study of molecules and calculations; it is the love of knowledge and the continued search for the truth. The study of the sciences promotes humility, leaving us with a clear sense that we will never understand all there is to know. At the same time, science provides a defense for truth, authenticates Christianity and stems from the nature of God."

Bet you didn’t know that!

They’ve awarded $5.3 million to something called the Thrive Center at Fuller Seminary in Florida to examine…wait for it…”The Science of Intellectual Humility.” That humility doesn’t have to come into play with regard to Christianity, apparently. Oh, I forgot - science authenticates humble Christianity and stems from the humble Christian God.

They’re also, in this time of economic crisis, perversely but predictably funding “research” on gratitude. An alleged “gratitude trend,” according to an article at CNN, is driven in part by “economic hard times, which appear to have provoked a greater appreciation for the basic things in life, like family and food.” The alleged trend is also driven by “what some experts call 'an explosion' in academic research on the practical benefits of gratitude.” The article doesn’t actually talk about these practical benefits, but it does refer to the economic hard times:

The 2010 Baylor survey showed no significant change in the number of people who pray or believe in God, although it did not directly address gratitude.

Forty eight percent of the 1,100 Americans with fulltime jobs surveyed by Wayne Hochwarter, a professor at Florida State University College of Business, have a greater appreciation of family because of the economic malaise.

Hochwarter's 2010 survey found that 49% feel the economic situation helped them appreciate people more than things.

So this is a survey of people with full-time jobs (and presumably homes and health insurance), and fewer than half reported this greater appreciation, which the writer is interpreting as (religious) gratitude. Nothing, of course, about the people without jobs, homes for their families, food, or health care. It would be kind of unseemly to be asking them about their appreciation of the simpler things.

The writer claims that “A wave of academic research has offered evidence of the important role gratitude plays in well-being and relationships,” but, again, does not share this research, preferring to focus on weak anecdotes (“While it won't make serious problems go away, Dr. Nerurkar said, it can help change your attitude. 'On a bad day', she said, 'sometimes I’m just grateful for a soothing cup of tea'”). The supposed academic wave seems primarily to consist of: “This year, the John Templeton Foundation awarded a $5.9 million grant to the University of California, Davis for a research project entitled 'Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude'.”

A foundation started and run by right-wing billionaires, amidst enormous and growing inequality, rampant greed by the rich, the plundering of the planet’s resources, and widespread want and suffering, encouraging people to focus on gratitude rather than social justice and change? Color me surprised.

Worst of all, they’ve got their grubby paws in medicine. This article describes the increasing role of chaplains in medical facilities, the worrisome encroachment of “spirituality” into medical practice, and a Templeton-funded mega-study of hospital chaplains. All of this is completely unacceptable.

The piece repeats claims like “Studies indicate as many as 40% of patients with serious illnesses like cancer struggle with spiritual concerns, which can harm emotional and physical well-being” and “Patients who have negative thoughts—say, questioning God's care for them—are more likely to develop worse health outcomes than patients who show positive spiritual coping, such as turning to religion for solace.” Of course, they don’t provide evidence of this relationship between “spiritual struggles” and health outcomes for any specific condition, and certainly not for the cancers discussed in the piece. (Barbara Ehrenreich, drawing on the scientific literature, would have something to say about this broad claim.)

This insidious notion that turning to religion in the face of illness is “positive coping” while questioning religious beliefs is “negative spiritual coping” pervades the article. Below, the latter is explicitly referred to as “negative religious coping”: “‘Negative religious coping’—feeling angry, unloved or abandoned by God, or doubting one's beliefs—has been associated with anxiety, depression and poorer social and emotional well-being.” In other words, doubt itself is negative and detrimental to well-being. Doubt and the examination of belief are not a natural and fruitful human response to existential crisis, but simply conducive to unhappiness and pathology and in need of fixing by professional illusionists.

But here’s the most disturbing aspect:

With a $3 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation—whose late founder was an investor interested in the intersection of scientific research and spirituality—the Health Care Chaplaincy will oversee six national research projects on professional chaplains' role in health and palliative care, Dr. Smith says.

Should we expect this research to adhere to the highest standards of consent? Here’s the paragraph that follows:

A study published online in July in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that among 3,000 patients hospitalized over a three-year period at the University of Chicago Medical Center, 41% wanted a discussion of religious and spiritual concerns, yet only half of that group reported having one.

Patients who had a spiritual discussion reported being more satisfied with their overall care, whether or not they said they had desired it.

Whether or not they said they desired it. (And let me express my doubt that all of those who had not said they desired it had a positive response to such a discussion. I know I wouldn’t.)

It’s one thing to ask patients if they would like to have such a discussion and if so with whom. It is quite another to inflict such an intervention on a person who hasn’t expressed interest in it. It becomes even more suspicious when the article goes on to say: “Patients may hesitate to ask for a chaplain's services out of concern that chaplains will proselytize—even though in many cases they don't use explicit theological language and 'are there to be companionable and offer support', says Wendy Cadge, associate professor at Brandeis University.” It’s dangerous for people favoring this research to be suggesting that people who don’t request these meetings just don’t know what’s good for them. It’s also disingenuous to argue that this does not involve proselytizing in those “many cases” [!] in which no “explicit” theological language is used, especially given the fact that there are professionals who provide support services with no religious spin or motive.

Sick, hospitalized people are a vulnerable population and should be fully protected from those with ulterior motives and agendas based on false beliefs. Given their history of shaping academic research, Templeton’s involvement with studies on this population, particularly those overseen by an organization with a self-serving agenda, should give anyone pause.

I love cats

2012-01-10T11:45:00.003-05:00

I want them in a basket...and I want them to be on a rainbow...

An open letter to Ascena Retail Group, Inc./Dress Barn/Tween Brands/Justice clothing stores

2011-12-04T22:02:00.006-05:00

Dear Justice Stores and corporate owners:

I was in one of your stores today shopping with a friend for her daughter, and noticed a disturbing display. As we approached the counter, I found that what I had thought a brightly colored accessory rack was in fact CANDY. CANDY. In a CLOTHING store. FOR CHILDREN. Let's leave aside for the moment the question of whether candy belongs at the registers in any store aside from...a candy store. I cannot entertain the notion that anyone would think this a good idea in any sense other than the cynical quest for profits. Nor can I entertain the notion that any adult, let alone any adult with children, would need the problems with CANDY AT THE REGISTERS IN A CHILDREN'S CLOTHING STORE explained to them, so I won't. This is appalling, and the candy should be removed from your stores immediately.

SC

Irving Kirsch to debate Ian Anderson on antidepressants

2011-11-23T09:42:00.004-05:00

And in other events-related-to-topics-I've-covered news, there will apparently be a debate this week at the 4th International Congress on Psychopharmacology of the Turkish Association for Psychopharmacology between Irving Kirsch and Ian Anderson on the proposition "Antidepressants are useful in the treatment of depression."

I agree with PZ about the usefulness of debates in deciding empirical matters, but I would love to see the video of this one!

(Duncan Double at Critical Psychiatry, where I first read about the debate, takes issue with a statement from Daniel Carlat, and I have a problem with it as well. Carlat says: "Unfortunately we know a good bit less about what we are doing than you might think...When I find myself using phrases like 'chemical imbalance' and 'serotonin deficiency', it is usually because I'm trying to convince a reluctant patient to take a medication. Using these words makes their illness seem more biological, taking some of the stigma away." Setting aside momentarily the ethics of claiming knowledge you don't possess and even suspect to be false in order to convince someone to take a drug, the question of removing an alleged stigma is an empirical one. Carlat is making an assumption here about medicalization and biologization that I don't believe holds up. I coincidentally came across a link recently to this 2009 article by Ben Goldacre - "A genetic cause for ADHD won't necessarily reduce the stigma attached." "[M]ore compelling than any individual study," Goldacre offers,

a review of the literature to date in 2006 found that overall, biogenetic causal theories, and labelling something as an "illness", are both positively related to perceptions of dangerousness and unpredictability, and to fear and desire for social distance. They identified 19 studies addressing the question. Eighteen found that belief in a genetic or biological cause was associated with more negative attitudes to people with mental health problems. Just one found the opposite, that belief in a genetic or biological cause was associated with more positive attitudes.

As a side note, excessive biologization and medicalization are problems in multiple regards, but a significant and insufficiently appreciated one is political. I have some significant criticisms of Bruce Levine's Surviving America's Depression Epidemic, but a compelling argument Levine (amongst many others over time) makes concerns the effects of treating psychological responses to a capitalist, consumerist, unequal society and its destructive hypercompetitive, alienating, standardizing culture as individual problems or medical pathologies rather than political issues. As Levine argues, this general tendency has been around from the beginning, when "Father of American Psychiatry" Benjamin Rush diagnosed an excessive desire for liberty as a "form of insanity": anarchia.)

Tunisian secularism film to be featured at US festival

2011-11-23T09:04:00.006-05:00

In other film-I've-previously-mentioned news, Icarus Films reports that Neither Allah Nor Master, the film by Nadia al-Fani I mentioned in a recent post (but haven't yet had the opportunity to see), will be featured at the MESA (Middle East Studies Association) Film Festival in Washington, DC, which will run from December 1-4.

Reminder: It's Hard Being Loved by Jerks

2011-11-23T08:28:00.004-05:00

Also during my unwilling hiatus, people were talking about the firebombing and response of French periodical Charlie Hebdo. I wasn't able to participate in the conversation at the time, but want to somewhat belatedly call attention once again to the documentary about Charlie Hebdo I recommended back in June - It's Hard Being Loved by Jerks. It's a great film and provides useful background for understanding current events.

Imogen Evans et al., Testing Treatments

2011-11-22T18:11:00.004-05:00

Here’s another post I’d started prior to my externally imposed hiatus:

Ben Goldacre posted last week about the new edition of Testing Treatments by Evans et al. for which he’s written the preface. He links in his post to a site where you can download the entire PDF of the book for free (!!!), and it’s pretty good. It has much to offer, and I’ll discuss its strongest aspects first. Then I’ll make my criticisms.

The authors openly confront medical uncertainties, calling on medical professionals to acknowledge and address them rather than trying to project a false image of confident authority when that is unwarranted. They point out that much medical practice is based on limited knowledge concerning prescribed treatments, illustrating the point with the stories of several treatments used for years and even decades without being properly evaluated, and argue for a transformation of practice that integrates research with treatment in cases of uncertainty.

One of the more insightful aspects of the book is its elucidation of the ethical and regulatory “double standard” with regard to treatment and research:

In practice, what this means is that clinicians can give unproven treatments to patients, as long as patients consent, if therapies are given within the context of ‘routine’ clinical practice. By contrast, conducting any study of the same treatments to evaluate them properly would involve going through the protracted regulatory process. So clinicians are discouraged from assessing treatments fairly, and instead can continue to prescribe treatments without committing to addressing any uncertainty about them… (pp. 108-9).

Essentially, physicians are rather perversely prevented by this double standard from advancing knowledge in the course of their practice. Moreover, the authors argue, the current system of research is unfair to research subjects. The tests of treatments are often unnecessary - they discuss at length the problem that ethical reviews do not focus on the need for or contribution of the research in light of existing knowledge or the concrete usefulness of the information potentially obtained. They are also poorly designed and conducted, often twisted by those with an agenda, and the authors discuss (including linking to the eye-opening article discussed and available here) the numerous techniques used by drug and device makers to manipulate the research process to their ends.

They point to the fact that patients themselves rarely participate in the process of deciding research priorities. This quotation sums up the challenge:

‘Who has the power to see that research questions actually address the greatest needs of patients in all their misery and diversity? Why aren’t the most relevant questions being asked? Who is currently setting the questions? Who should be? Who shall direct this prioritisation? Patients are best able to identify the health topics most relevant to them and to inform their comfort, care, and quality of life, as well as its quantity. The patients are the David, who must load their slings against the Goliaths of the pharmaceutical companies who need evidence to market goods and make profits, and trialists who are driven by curiosity, the need to secure research money, professional acclaim, and career development. Profit, scientific inquiry, grant money, and research papers are acceptable only if the central motivation is the good of patients. Independent patients and organisations that advocate good quality research should ready their sling, carefully choose their stone, take aim, and conquer.’ - Refractor. Patients’ choice: David and Goliath. Lancet 2001; 358:768 (131)

Evans et al. make the case for eliminating the double standard and integrating research with practice so that information gained in the care of patients contributes to the growth of medical knowledge. Of course, in order for this to be productive, research needs to be designed and performed competently and fairly. The authors call for fair tests of treatments, and define well and in detail what they mean by this term. Their vision for fair tests encompasses the entirety of the research process - from the questions asked through the research design to the dissemination of results and systematic reviews and meta-analyses. They propose a system of research designed to be fair to and benefit the important participants, particularly patients. (I’m pleased that they appreciate and discuss the role for social scientists in advancing this program.)

So the book makes a solid case about what’s wrong with the current research system and some original and sound suggestions for changing it. Of course, I appreciate their objection to paternalism and emphasis on participation, openness, and the basic value that science should serve human needs and be consistent with democracy. I also like that they substantially recognize the negative and counterproductive influence of corporations in this context, although others have perhaps explained it better and more comprehensively. An aspect of the book I enjoyed particularly was the short discussions of the history of movements within science (e.g., of doctors and patients in relation to breast cancer and HIV/AIDS), and the authors’ acknowledgement of the complexities of these movements and the hidden role of corporations in some. And it shouldn’t need mentioning that I appreciate that they’ve made it available for free download.

However, I do have a few criticisms (which does seem ungrateful given the free download and all). The first deals with form rather than content. It takes great finesse to make text boxes blend seamlessly with the body text. Even when what they present is relevant and interesting, those bordered boxes tend to interfere with reading, especially when they carry over from one page to the next or appear mid-sentence. In most cases, including this one, the information they contain would be better integrated into the regular text. (The graphics are nothing spectacular, either.) Also, the lists of suggestions and proposals at the end are a bit excessive and become confusing.

The second set of criticisms relates to the authors’ proposals for overhauling the research system. While I agree that the current double standard should go and that research should be integrated with care, I can’t accept the basis for their call to weaken ethics regulations. The authors argue that

[t]he regulatory system for research, in its preoccupation with risk and protecting potential research participants, has become over-protective and overlooks the fact that patients and the public are increasingly involved as partners in the research process... (p. 109).

I certainly think that’s the ideal, and it may be more the case in the UK, but I’m not convinced at all that patients and the public are sufficiently involved as research partners in the US or many other countries that ethical standards could be relaxed while they remain protected. This is an odd claim given that, while they don’t go into the work of people like Harriet Washington and Sonia Shah, the authors clearly recognize the power that pharmaceutical companies hold over research. This isn't going to wither away if regulations are relaxed. They continue:

Requirements relating to provision of information and consent for studies are one of the ways in which the regulatory system acts to discourage rather than encourage research to address uncertainties about treatments. It is important – and ethical – to consider the interests of everyone currently receiving treatment, not just the few who participate in controlled trials. The standard for informed consent to treatment should therefore be the same whether people are being offered treatment within or outside the context of formal treatment assessments. To come to a decision that accords with their values and preferences, patients should have as much information as they want, and at a time that they want it (p. 110).

I agree with the general sentiment here, which goes to their point about double standards. Essentially, patients in care settings receiving treatments about which there’s uncertainty are not being provided with enough information or a say. They’re not even unwitting research subjects, since their use of “experimental” treatments isn’t contributing to scientific knowledge. I know the authors are arguing for a change in ethical standards and regulations that informs and empowers patients, which I support; but calling for the weakening of any ethical standards is dangerous in the existing context.

Furthermore, the book doesn’t really address a major problem: that many doctors simply lack the knowledge of science and research methods necessary to integrate research and care properly. I think it’s important to get doctors engaged with this as part of an effort to increase their scientific understanding and competence, but it’s going to require a good deal of education and practice.

Finally, although Evans et al. discuss the what they consider an overemphasis on lab and animal research – suggesting that this is ethically problematic in that such research is far less likely to respond to the immediate needs of sick people – they don’t have anything to say about the ethical issues this research raises in terms of our moral relationship to nonhuman animals. The same criticisms the authors make about the ethical problems with bad research involving human subjects apply to animal research as well, perhaps more so because they can’t consent.

Overall, a good book that I’d recommend, maybe together with Goldacre’s Bad Science and a few others.

Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany - on laughter and oppression

2011-11-21T15:49:00.004-05:00

I started writing this shortly after I read Rudolph Herzog's Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany

several weeks ago and was prevented by circumstances beyond my control from finishing or posting it at the time. Some recent events and claims about humor and its harmlessness and subversiveness have led me to return to it:

There was long a popular belief in the social sciences, if humor and other forms of “micro-resistance” were considered at all, that these worked to soften passions or divert energy and passion from serious, organized, effective rebellion against repressive conditions. People like James Scott

and Robin Kelley

took on this belief, using examples to make a convincing case that everyday forms of resistance, including jokes and pranks, can be both meaningful forms of resistance in themselves and form the foundation for wider rebellion.

Unfortunately, this latter insight has now itself become something of a default assumption, including in cases in which it hasn’t empirically been shown to apply. That is, humor, and especially political humor, is often assumed to be inherently subversive and daring. This is the view underlying the presentation of humor in Nazi Germany, both by those trying to minimize German enthusiasm for the regime in the postwar years and, oddly enough, amongst several of those responding to Rudolph Herzog’s recent book on the subject, Dead Funny. Herzog doesn’t attempt to make a general theoretical argument in engagement with academic literatures about the uses and political effects of humor, but instead addresses this particular era in response to concrete historical arguments that have been made about it.

He counters interpretations of the collections of “whispered jokes” published just after Germany’s defeat in the war:

People who laughed at Hitler within their own four walls, the authors of such compilations tried to suggest, disapproved of the Nazis and were perhaps even part of a tacit resistance. Recent research, however, has revealed that this notion, though a comforting idea, is little more than wishful thinking and historical legend–making (KL 52-55).

He states very clearly his thesis that in this context “Political jokes were not a form of resistance” (KL 55-58). They served as a release valve in a way that generally worked in the interests of the Nazis. “‘Whispered jokes’,” he argues, were “a surrogate for, and not a manifestation of, social conscience and personal courage” (KL 63-64) under the regime. But what amused people does provide us with evidence of how people thought (and didn’t think); they’re valuable, as he suggests, for “the insight they give into what preoccupied and moved Hitler’s ‘racial community’” (KL 41-42). “What makes them important today,” he argues, “is the way they reflect, as all old jokes do, what truly occupied, amused, and annoyed the people of their time. They open a window on the Third Reich, giving us an inside view more authentic in its way than can be found in official historical documents" (KL 111-113).

Herzog argues that political humor under the Nazi regime was not hard-hitting or resistant. In many cases it was the contemptuous humor of people who felt themselves victors. As the regime initially consolidated its power, “[w]hat moved people in Germany, what made them split their sides laughing, was the musty old Weimar Republic and its democracy” (KL 431-432). They laughed at the dismantling of the constitution, and they laughed at the League of Nations.

People mocked the personal foibles of Nazi leaders, often recycling old jokes about previous politicians in Germany and elsewhere, and with “no detectable hatred for party bigwigs” (KL 274-275):

They belong to that genre of political humor in which the shell of an ancient jest is simply refilled with content appropriate to its time. Some patterns of human behavior are so obvious, they can survive any change of system or regime. At heart, such jokes are apolitical, even when they are aimed at a well-known political figure (KL 277-279).

...In general, jokes from the early years of the Third Reich amounted to little more than harmless teasing of the regime and could be told in public without fear of reprisals (KL 491-492).

Ordinary Germans joked about Party social climbers and the boorish behavior of some officials. Such jokes were “largely harmless and silly” (KL 130-134). But popular humor also had a very dark, ugly side. Not only were popular jokes not subversive dark humor that thinly concealed a distaste for brutal Nazi methods, some reveled in violence. The popular responses in humor to the Night of the Long Knives are nauseatingly revealing. The public followed the Nazis’ lead and “came up with a number of extremely macabre jokes about Röhm’s bitter end” (KL 1086-1087). Röhm himself “quickly became the butt of a number of jokes. Significantly, most of the witticisms revolved around Röhm’s relatively open homosexuality rather than the violent excesses of his brownshirts” (KL 1056-1057); and “a number of stock ‘gay jokes’ were adapted to feature Röhm personally” (KL 1062).

There were jokes about pointless Nazi rituals, the growing web of Nazi organizations, and how participation in Nazi activities affected the daily life of families. These day-to-day inconveniences, Herzog notes, “stirred Germans far more than any concern for their Jewish fellow citizens or for members of the political opposition, even though the Nazis left no doubt that the future would be most unpleasant for both groups” (KL 448-450). And jokes about concentration camps (consolidated as jokes about Dachau) “seem to have been aimed more at accustoming Germans to this new phenomenon than articulating any real criticism of it” (KL 885-888). Furthermore, as Herzog suggests, as with other jokes about Nazi crimes, the many jokes about Dachau clearly suggest that the populace was well aware of what was happening there.

As they had mocked the League of Nations earlier, with military successes came jokes about the countries they’d defeated and even their southern European allies. More generally,

[t]he humor of the Third Reich was that of the victor and reflected the arrogance that comes from the belief that one has been proven right. The feelings of inferiority that had accrued during the Weimar period disappeared in the intoxication of Nazi military triumph. Humility was off the agenda, as more and more Germans began putting on superhuman airs and looking down with contempt at their supposed inferiors. Popular jokes celebrated the leaders of an empire that was supposed to last a thousand years and heaped scorn upon the vanquished (KL 1453-1457).

And of course throughout there were jokes about Jews. These revolved around crude stereotypes - Jewish greed, lasciviousness, and Communism were standard tropes.* “There were even,” he attests,

jokes that laughed at anti-Jewish violence, and these were told not just by hardcore Nazi party supporters, but also by hordes of willing opportunists and March violets (KL 1420-1421).

…The violent fantasies of most Nazis were shared by many ‘nonpolitical’ Germans. The constant stream of anti-Semitic propaganda likely contributed to this, but ordinary Germans seemed to have come up with the majority of anti-Jewish jokes on their own—a troubling indication of a fundamental animosity toward Jews and Jewishness (KL 1423-1426).

Existing anti-Semitism was consciously prodded by the regime, especially in comedic films. Herzog reports that “Ninety percent of all films made during the Third Reich were insignificant, superficial comedies intended to distract Germans from state terrorism and, later, the hardships of war” (KL 1513-1514). These popular films were calculated to subtly convey their political, racist messages:

The distorted image of Jewishness at the center of Robert and Bertram’s comic plot was not just a reflection of crude beer-tent anti-Semitism. It was part of a coolly planned, larger strategy. A seemingly harmless comedy was a far more effective means of infusing poisonous propaganda than the weekly newsreels. Audiences laughed and did not expect any political message. But the humor in question made them receptive to the campaigns that led to the persecution, ostracism, and extermination of Jews (KL 1584-1588; my italics).

One of the most important points Herzog makes is about the importance of context:

Jokes of this sort were in constant circulation and reinforced and confirmed popular anti-Jewish stereotypes. And though the readership of the Stürmer may have collected and passed them on, anti-Jewish jokes were also told by apolitical Germans. They were a symptom of the latent anti-Semitism that had survived beneath the surface of German society and long before the Nazis took power had laid the groundwork for the persecution of Jews in the Third Reich. The line between harmless kidding and defamatory jokes full of resentment was blurry, and not every joke-teller may have been aware of when he crossed the border from mere bad taste to injuriousness. Nonetheless, even naively repeated clichés helped ostracize the once completely integrated Jewish minority. Once Jews were seen by the public as outsiders or intruders, the authorities could do with them what they wanted. In this sense, no anti-Jewish joke, however mild, was harmless. Moreover, making light of Jews against the backdrop of their persecution, disappropriation, and forced exile was heartless and cyclical, and it gave a gloss of legitimacy to those acts of injustice. The difference between Nazi-era jokes about money-mad Jews and the jokes about tightwad Scotsmen that were popular after the war (many of the latter were adaptations of the former), was that the Scots were not a persecuted minority in Germany, nor was there widespread resentment against them (KL 1400-1410; my italics).

It’s easy today to read about this toothless and even fawning and celebratory humor in the Nazi era and attribute at least some significant portion of it to overwhelming repression and fear. But Herzog counters this notion with a discussion of the actual consequences for critical humor, drawing on his own interviews and a quantitative study by Meike Wöhlert. Again, the idea pushed by postwar apologists and believed by many to this day is that even mildly critical humor in the Nazi regime was subversive and perilous. As Herzog says, “The compilations of jokes that circulated in Germany after the war bore titles like Deadly Laughter and When Laughter Was Dangerous, but there is not much evidence that the jokes they contained were inevitably risky for the teller” (KL 969-972). Insults to the government and leadership increased as the war turned, and laws tightened. But as Herzog points out, especially in the early years but really throughout the Nazi era,

the system never functioned as comprehensively as the Nazis would have liked. It wasn’t possible to keep all German citizens under surveillance or to watch over what happened in every house and on every street corner. And Germans going about their daily lives no doubt knew that the state was not omnipotent (KL 949-953).

The majority of Herzog’s interviewees “said that they were indeed able to tell political jokes freely, openly, and without fear of punishment” (KL 960-961). Quantitative research Herzog refers to (but doesn’t discuss in as much detail as I’d wish) finds that the majority of critical joke-tellers, when they were arrested at all, were released with a warning or relatively light punishment:

The historian Meike Wöhlert has analyzed and compared the judgments rendered by courts responsible for malicious acts of treason in five cities. Although her research only deals with registered cases and not unofficial ones, the results suggest that the telling of political jokes was a mass phenomenon beyond state control. In 61 percent of official cases, joke-tellers were let off with a warning, alcohol consumption often being cited as an extenuating circumstance. (People who had had one too many in bars were considered only partially responsible for their actions, and because most of the popular jokes that made it to court had been told in bars, the verdicts were accordingly lenient.) Fines were rarely handed down, and in only 22 percent of cases were those found guilty sentenced to any time in jail. Strangely, the harshest sentences for “maliciousness” were rendered in prewar Nazi Germany, but even then the term of incarceration seldom exceeded five months (KL 962-968).

In the last years of the war, there were some death sentences for joke-tellers (some of them turned in by one of “a small army of eager informers who delivered hundreds of fellow citizens critical of the regime to the gallows,” KL 2123-2125), but Herzog suggests that these were “extreme exceptions to the rule” (KL 969-972) and calls attention to the double standards by which people were judged and sentenced. Telling critical or even defeatist jokes on its own was, even in these later years, not likely to get people in real trouble; the harsh sentences were imposed upon those whom the government had deemed enemies of the regime, and jokes were rather a pretext or further evidence of the person’s hostility:

The draconian punishments handed down by the People’s Court were aimed at making examples of certain individuals and could hardly have failed to have at least part of their desired effect. As the number of death sentences increased, so did people’s feeling of being under threat when they told jokes critical of the regime. Yet this does not mean, as has been so often suggested, that laughter in the Third Reich was deadly. Merely telling a political joke did not put the joke teller’s life at risk. The real risk arose when the Nazis were looking for an excuse to remove an unwanted member of the community. What mattered was not the “misdemeanor” itself, but the overall picture the authorities made of a defendant’s attitude toward National Socialism (KL 2240-2246).

Jewish comedians and cabaret performers of course had a high priority as targets of repression. Herzog discusses the vibrant cabaret worlds of Berlin and Austria in the Weimar era, calling these cities the “capitals of Jewish humor” in the “golden age of Jewish comedy” that would be destroyed by the Nazis. He tells the terrible stories of a few Jewish and non-Jewish performers, including some in exile and further exile (how difficult it must have been for people to translate comedy into foreign cultures and languages is hard to imagine), and briefly – too briefly! – mentions the public trial of the comedian Werner Finck and colleagues, which itself would make for great theater. He also describes the gallows humor to which people resorted in the face of marginalization, persecution, and even mass killings and death camps. The author argues that

the fundamental difference between German and German-Jewish jokes was less a matter of tone or edge than of function. Whereas “whispered jokes” among Germans served primarily as a release valve for pent-up popular frustration, jokes told by their Jewish countrymen can be interpreted as an attempt to muster courage—or, as the great compiler of Jewish-German jokes Salcia Landmann put it, as an expression of Jews’ will to survive against all odds. These jokes make fun of the terrors Jews experienced every day. As such, the blackest Jewish humor expresses defiance: I laugh, therefore I am. My back is to the wall, and I’m still laughing (KL 95-100).

So there were people for whom telling political jokes made life more dangerous, and for whom humor could be a daring act of defiance or basic sanity and survival. But, as Herzog shows, this was not the case for the majority of the German population. Indeed, he notes that Hitler himself enjoyed humor that reflected Nazi ideology:

Hitler and his cohorts liked the idea of using cabaret routines to threaten dissidents. The pompous dictator who loved to pose publicly as an emperor also had his lighter side: he enjoyed popular entertainment and crude jokes…. The Nazi leadership who ruthlessly turned their goons on Jewish comedians and opposition cabaret performers were not at all immune to humor, as long as it toed the party line (KL 1469-1473).

Some humor, as the book shows, was quite compatible with and even functional for violent oppression.

Herzog’s study is historically illuminating and also contributes to a body of work from which we can draw several broader insights. The most general is that humor – even bad or "innocent" humor - should be taken, well, seriously in understanding relations of inequality, oppression, and resistance. It's wrong to dismiss the potential social and political effects of jokes or stories told for a laugh. But at the same time we should be wary of generalizing unduly from some examples to the claim that all humor, or all humor that offends or pushes a line, is necessarily brave, subversive, or challenging. The people telling and targeted by the jokes or stories, their content, and the sociopolitical context – particularly the relations of power and privilege – in which humor exists are all crucial to understanding its (potential) social meaning.

*In one case, Herzog discusses a specific popular joke which conveyed the greedy stereotype:

Pinkus and a Gentile are attacked in the forest, and as the highwaymen are about to frisk them, Pinkus takes out his wallet and says to his fellow victim: “Ah, I just remembered. I owe you 500 schillings” (KL 1397-1399).

Coincidentally, I’d just read the same joke in David Graeber’s Debt (p. 7). He calls it “an old vaudeville gag” and offers a telling by Steven Wright:

I was walking down the street with a friend the other day and a guy with a gun jumps out of an alley and says “stick ’em up.”

As I pull out my wallet, I figure, “shouldn’t be a total loss.” So I pull out some money, turn to my friend and say, “Hey, Fred, here’s that fifty bucks I owe you.” The robber was so offended he took out a thousand dollars of his own money, forced Fred to lend it to me at gunpoint, and then took it back again.

I don’t know where the joke got its start, and it’s probably very old, but the characters featured and of course circumstances in which it’s told clearly shift its meanings.

expletive

2011-11-21T10:02:00.003-05:00

Loro Parque. I'd like to read English translations of these decisions providing the full justifications.

This all makes a mockery of the idea of rescue and rehabilitation of wild animals. It makes these efforts look like thinly veiled and cynical means of obtaining captive performers and breeders for corporations, or at the least too easily coopted for this purpose. People and governments who support rescue efforts should be assured that their work and money will not support captures, and the public should be made aware of this situation.

Anxiously awaiting Morgan decision

2011-11-21T07:54:00.003-05:00

The judge's decision should be announced within hours.

Corporate ethics: the Xigris example

2011-10-27T18:44:00.007-04:00

Howard Brody has a post up about Eli Lilly's pulling the sepsis drug Xigris from the market and, of particular interest, the story (if the reports are accurate) of how the corporation had maneuvered to get it used:

The part of the Xigris story that especially caught my attention was how some of my colleagues in bioethics were caught up in the company's PR campaign without apparently realizing it--or else taking the money and not caring. As one prong of the marketing strategy, Lilly decided that since Xigris cost so much, and since so few ICUs were purchasing it (since the studies had been so equivocal), then there must be rationing of life-saving treatment going on. Of course one solution would have been to lower the price, but perish the thought. So Lilly instead forked over $1.8M to fund an "ethical" study of rationing in the ICU, with the intent of bringing pressure to bear on recalcitrant units with the dreaded "R word."

The part of the story that I did not cover in HOOKED, as Williams reminds us, was actually addressed in a 2006 commentary in the New England Journal (subscription required) by Eichacker and colleagues. Having managed to get the FDA to approve Xigris despite iffy data of efficacy and safety, Lilly bankrolled a big PR firm to do three things--set up the rationing "ethics" inquiry, and get major medical societies to write guidelines for sepsis care that included the use of Xigris (by funding the guideline panels and making sure that numerous docs with Lilly money in their pockets served on the panels). The third thing however was what made Eichacker and company worried. It was Lilly's subsequent effort to lobby the organizations that create quality indicators for hospitals and insurers to include those guidelines in their quality measurements. That is, if an ICU did not use Xigris, because they deemed it insufficiently useful and overly dangerous (a reasonable evidence-based position at the time), the hospital might get a lower score for quality of care and then have problems with insurance reimbursement as well as the bad publicity. Eichacker et al. very reasonably said this was a blatant hijacking of these quality indicators for commercial purposes.

...Why bother sending drug reps into thousands of doctors' offices if you can buy off the people who write the guidelines and the people who ding the hospitals for bad quality of care?

To reiterate: They hired a PR firm to portray the non-use of their drug as rationing, lure ethicists - ! - and guidelines developers into going along with this framing, and work to get the quality-rating organizations to favor the use of their drug and penalize those hospitals that weren't using it. For a drug with little evidence of efficacy and which in the end was withdrawn for a lack of it.

Brody quotes David E. Williams' advice to the drug companies:

--Industry: Feel free to market your products and services aggressively, but don’t take things too far. If you do you’ll end up killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. No one will trust doctors, guidelines or journals anymore

First, the idea that it's morally acceptable for corporations making medications to put the interests of their shareholders above those of the people taking the medications is a huge problem. Of course, that's to be expected in a corporate-capitalist system. They've been getting away with it, and indeed escalating, for decades, and moreover have other means of attaining their goals. They're not going to worry about this alleged long-term risk to reputations. Nor are doctors and medical organizations - in a situation in which these corporations are free to pursue their interests aggressively - going to counter them. Regulations, if they were passed and enforced, would make some difference,* but the real meaningful solution is to separate corporations from medicine entirely. Or, at the very least, to take out the worst offenders by revoking their corporate charters or holding their executives personally criminally responsible.

* In this specific case, a report on the drug's withdrawal notes that the study showing a lack of effectiveness was "ordered by European regulators in 2008 as a condition of the product's continued approval there."

The orca slavery lawsuit: a plea to avoid reflex ridicule

2011-10-27T09:35:00.006-04:00

Strangely enough, none of my usual sites (including the Orca Coalition) mentioned the orca slavery lawsuit before I learned of it on the Colbert Report last night:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

PETA has a link to the suit, "asking a federal court to declare that five wild-caught orcas forced to perform at SeaWorld are being held as slaves in violation of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution," on its site. It involves some of the orcas that have been discussed here, and appears to have received its impetus from the Morgan case (Ingrid Visser is one of the Friends).

I can already imagine the hostility and mockery that will greet it: it's just another kooky stunt from PETA, rights isn't the appropriate framework in which to discuss the ethical status of animals, it's an offense to humans who've been enslaved to suggest that nonhuman animals are, everyone knows the Constitutional basis doesn't exist, and so on. I fervently hope, though, that people will take some time to read the suit and consider the case within a longer historical framework, and will not dismiss or reject the struggle of and for these orcas because of a dislike of PETA or animal rights arguments. (You can read some of the background by clicking on the "whales" tag below.)

I also hope people will consider the point made by Colbert - that we live in a country in which the argument that nonhuman animals can be "people" who can be enslaved is ridiculed but corporations are granted the legal rights of people:

Brave women: Tunisia and Uganda

2011-10-26T19:55:00.004-04:00

Tunisia is at a crossroads. Fresh off of elections and embarking on writing a constitution, the country still has an opportunity for a (relatively) democratic secularism. Reading a call from HRW for the dropping of criminal charges against a TV station for airing a film claimed to "defame" religion, I learned that more than one determined filmmaker is critically commenting on religion there:

Laws that criminalize the “defamation” of religion or religious groups are not compatible with norms of freedom of expression, Human Rights Watch said. The United Nations Human Rights Committee, in its general comment on article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Tunisia has ratified, stated that it is not permissible for “prohibitions of displays of lack of respect for a religion or other belief system, including blasphemy laws … to be used to prevent or punish criticism of religious leaders or commentary on religious doctrine and tenets of faith.”

Since the ouster of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali on January 14, there have been other attacks on artistic expression by groups claiming to act under the banner of protecting Islam. On September 26, protesters forced their way into the Afrikart Cinema in downtown Tunis to protest its screening of Secularism, If God Wills, a film about atheism shown as part of a cultural evening.

Intrigued by this description, I checked the link and discovered the following:

Online commentators, including on Facebook, have vilified the documentary under its former title, Neither Allah Nor Master (Ni Allah ni Maître) and its director, Nadia al-Fani, a Franco-Tunisian, largely because al-Fani has openly declared her atheism in interviews on Tunisian television and made it the subject of her film. Al-Fani has received numerous online death threats.

I found this interview with al-Fani, in which she argues: "I think in order to live together there must be this concept of secularism. I already had this position before the fall of Ben Ali, that to ask for democracy, is to ask for secularism."

In Uganda, Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera, who recently won the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, is leading a different but related struggle - for LGBT rights. Here's a short video about her:

Martin Ennals Award Laureate 2011 Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera from True Heroes Films on Vimeo.

Interlude - Ella

2011-10-22T21:28:00.001-04:00

Interlude - yay cats

2011-10-22T20:12:00.005-04:00

That is all.

Because after the tear gas, there's nothing you need like acupuncture

2011-10-22T13:24:00.008-04:00

This is really a celebratory post about professionals involving themselves in social-justice movements. Social Medicine has run a few posts the past two weeks about medical workers at the Occupy protests, both as activists and as volunteer medics:

"Doctors for the 99%: Physicians Participate At the Wall Street Occupation"

"Doctors for the 99% out in force on October 15th"

"How to be a Street Medic (updated)"

The first two highlight the organized activism of professional medical groups fighting for just health care systems. The last is an updated version of a 2004 article describing the activities of street medics - professionals who attend to the medical needs of protestors. Overall, it's fine and informative. However, it includes this bit:

Who are street medics?

Street medics come from a variety of health care backgrounds including herbalists, nurses, EMTs, NPs, health educators, physicians, medical students, and acupuncturists. In fact, a medical background is not actually necessary to be a street medic as most receive additional training in first aid, the management of activist-specific injuries and such topics as scene control and pre-hospital assessment. A large amount of formal medical training is not applicable to street medic work [?], so additional training is always necessary.

Being a street medic requires more than just medical knowledge. The ability to work in non-hierarchical affinity groups, value non-western medical knowledge and work in stressful, and at times dangerous, situations are all equally important to street medic work. For many physicians and nurses, developing these skills will be the focus of their street medic experience. [my bold]

There is no such thing as "non-western medical knowledge." There is no such thing as Western medical knowledge. There is only medical knowledge. Acupuncture is placebo. This is an insult to the medical professionals participating in the protests, who are working to make the fruits of medical science accessible to everyone.

Developing a just system of health care means abolishing the corporate model of health care. That is entirely in keeping with, and in fact truly captures, the spirit of this movement. It is to create a system in which the powerful tool of medical science is participatory and serves human needs instead of corporate profits. Developing a just system of health care does not mean opposing science-based medicine in favor of woo. To throw the scientific baby out with the corporate bathwater is to unintentionally hand more power to corporations and their efforts at obfuscation in every sphere.

As I said, this one point irked me but this post is really a cheery one about how professionals can lend and are lending not just their voices but their skills and talents to movements for social justice. And it's not just medical professionals. I posted a little while ago about the National Lawyers Guild's web site for cyber-activists. They've now initiated a large-scale Occupy legal support program:

“We know from decades of experience in defending free speech rights that law enforcement agencies, absent competent and aggressive legal pressure, tend to run roughshod over the rights of those engaged in dissent,” [Carol Sobel, co-chair of the Mass Defense Committee] said. “We are taking a proactive approach to the defense of demonstrators.” “We don’t want to just defend protesters who have been falsely arrested—we want to head off the false arrests at the outset and send a message to local police agencies that suppression of free speech will not be tolerated,” Sobel said.

The page at my link provides contact information and a listing of the cities in which they're already operating.

This is all very exciting. So many people, it seems, think of activism as marches and protests only, and don't realize how their skills and talents - as artists, nurses, graphic designers, legal professionals, social workers, IT experts, scientists,... - can contribute to social movements, and in turn how their participation can expand their own consciousness and lead them to push for change within their profession.

Make Mine a Double

2011-10-20T17:58:00.004-04:00

"I found my first real home during my second year in New York, at a bar in the East Village. Maybe it was the kind of bar you've loved, if you've loved a bar." - Kristen Dombek

Gina Barreca once happened into the book store where I worked. She was truly pleasant and gracious enough to sign all of our copies of her books, which left me with good feelings towards her. So when I read about a new collection of pieces about women and drinking - Make Mine a Double: Why Women Like Us Like to Drink (Or Not) - I was happy to discover that she was the force behind it.

I immediately added it to the large mix of books I'm reading at the moment. It's a delight. I'm only about a third of the way through, and already the essays have hit on drinking and feminism, religion, gender, race, class, and families. I laughed aloud several times reading Sarah Deming's "Against Mixology." Perhaps I'll post about it again when I finish them all, but I'd recommend it on the strength of the first several alone.

Interlude - Vineyard, fall

2011-10-20T15:20:00.005-04:00

Radioactive Wolves!

2011-10-20T08:56:00.005-04:00

This was fascinating.

I want to take pictures there.

Orca Coalition set to appeal Morgan decision

2011-10-20T08:31:00.004-04:00

I reported last week that the decision had been made to send Morgan to Loro Parque in the Canary Islands. Encouragingly, the Orca Coalition quickly raised funds to initiate an appeal. There's hope yet!

“International regulations for the care of a protected animal have still not been followed. Only if rehabilitation is deemed impossible, other options are allowed to be considered. But the Dolfinarium has so far not been able to mention one action that shows that they are trying to prepare Morgan for a life in the wild”, according to Marq Wijngaarden, lawyer of the Orca Coalition. Because of the court ruling in August the Dolfinarium has to wait at least five more weeks before they are allowed to export Morgan. The Dolfinarium appears to have no intention to uphold this term, and again wants to violate the rules.

The Orca Coalition is still open for a meeting with the Dolfinarium. “We are supported by a group of international orca scientists who have experience with rehabilitating these protected animals in the wild. Their knowledge and experience is available for Morgan, and also for future stranded orcas. For a year now a detailed plan to return Morgan to her family has been available”, says Barbara van Genne, marine biologist and spokesperson for the Orca Coalition. The Orca Coalition continues to take efforts to implement this step by step release plan in order to return Morgan back to her family under expert guidance, according to international regulations.

Rorschach's post about the ERV comments

2011-10-17T12:47:00.004-04:00

It's great that so many people have donned their hazmat suits and waded into the ERV pit to protest the threatening, misogynistic language by saying "No." Rorschach has posted about the matter, including email addresses for ScienceBlogs and National Geographic. He notes:

[T]his and other comments in that and the previous threads on elevatorgate hosted by Abbie Smith on her blog in the last 3 months seem to be in breach of Scienceblogs’ Code of Conduct :...

An understatement. They appear to have reversed the Code and used it as an instruction manual.

If any of the other remaining ScienceBloggers are still unaware that this is happening on the site they share, they should probably be informed as well.

The skeptical-atheist community needs to say: NO THREATS

2011-10-15T19:14:00.005-04:00

This has gone on more than long enough. We don't have immediate influence on those outside our community, but we need to stand together against veiled threats of the sort directed at Ophelia Benson.

Let's give them the Geraldo treatment.

Two sex queries

2011-10-15T11:18:00.003-04:00

So...I have two questions related to my post yesterday:

First, just after I saw Orgasm, Inc., I heard on the car radio an ad for some sort of herbal supplement for men (I wish I'd written down the name). The product was alleged to mimic or promote testosterone or something. The commercial acknowledged that the "condition" it supposedly treated was merely normal changes associated with aging, but focused - in addition to boosting vigor generally - on maintaining or increasing sexual desire.

I recalled at least one Roman writer* reflecting upon declining sexual desire with age and calling it a positive and enjoyable experience: men (I think they were writing specifically about men) are less likely to behave stupidly, and the weakening of those overwhelming physical drives frees them to focus on other aspects of their lives, especially their work. Now, I can see a specific situation in which a man's partner has a problem with his lack of interest in sex (not that this silly supplement would do anything for that beyond, potentially, the placebo effect). But I see the Roman writers' point, and don't really understand why people would want to artificially create desires in themselves, even if these can be satisfied. Why are some men interested in doing this?

Second, both PZ and Dan Savage have written recently about the mystery of the female orgasm, both leaning toward the "by-product theory" which sees the female orgasm as an evolutionary by-product of the male orgasm. This makes sense, but I've been confused about why the female orgasm is seemingly assumed to have no adaptive function because it's not needed for ejaculation. I could well be missing something important here, but I would think that the pleasure of orgasm, like other sexual pleasure, would incline women to have more sex. Is the assumption that female sexual interest/desire has played no evolutionary role whatsoever? If so, that assumption doesn't seem defensible in light of primate and human anthropological research.

With regard to the specific case Savage is commenting on, I think his advice to relax about it is good. We know that this can be strongly affected by psychological states, and being wound up about it can't be helping, even if it's not hurting. At the same time, cultural beliefs (and the feelings of shame that stem from them) and ignorance about sex (on both partners' parts) shouldn't be dismissed as possible factors because of an evolutionary hypothesis.

*(if anyone can remind me which specifically, please do)

CFI to take legal action against Wyndgate; O'Reilly to respond to Dawkins cancellation

2011-10-15T10:55:00.005-04:00

The Center for Inquiry reports that they plan to take legal action against the Wyndgate Country Club for cancelling Richard Dawkins' talk after the club's owner saw Dawkins interviewed on The O'Reilly Factor and learned of his atheism.

O'Reilly is expected to comment on the matter on his show on Monday night (8 PM EST).

Media on media: a contrast

2011-10-14T21:20:00.006-04:00

Today, I learned of three new books about media history. The first works featured in the New York Times' upcoming book reviews, under the title "Dynasts of the Daily Press," are about the Medill family, media tycoons: The Magnificent Medills: America’s Royal Family of Journalism During a Century of Turbulent Splendor by Megan McKinney and Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Life and Monumental Times of Cissy Patterson by Amanda Smith. Also, yesterday's Democracy Now! offered an interview with Juan Gonzalez (Democracy Now! co-host) and Joseph Torres, authors of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, which looks at how the media has historically shaped views about race in the US and the role of technological changes and government policy, bringing to light the work of minority journalists and media activists in fighting for a more democratic media.

This is from the Times review:

Megan McKinney’s “Magnificent Medills” and Amanda Smith’s “Newspaper Titan” between them expend more than 1,000 pages chronicling the escapades of Joseph Medill and his family. McKinney’s book includes accounts of Joseph Medill and his offspring, on to the great-grandchild Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, who came to own and run Newsday. Smith (the editor of Joseph P. Kennedy’s letters), at much greater length than McKinney, concentrates on Cissy Patterson, who was Joseph Medill’s favorite grandchild and led the gaudiest life of the Medill grandchildren.

...Contra McKinney, the Medills were not magnificent but neurotic, alcoholic, megalomaniac and inordinately unpleasant generally. Far from being a titan, of newspapers or anything else, Cissy Patterson was, in Smith’s own showing, capricious, spoiled, headstrong, snobbish, litigious, anti-Semitic, a mean drunk and vindictive. Not, as we should say today, a fun family, Joseph Medill’s offspring.

They did spend grandly, though chiefly on themselves, living more like Medicis than Medills. They called on Stanford White to build them mansions on Astor Street in Chicago, on Dupont Circle in Washington, and had other architects build them mansions elsewhere. Vast sums went on clothes, jewels, luxurious travel, liveried servants, private railroad cars, horses, fox hunting and buying off ex-husbands and -wives....

...The Medill grandchildren viewed journalism as purveying entertainment while enhancing their social positions and spreading their political views. “Never overestimate the intelligence of the American people” might have been their motto, and in their newspapers they rarely did. They gave their readers what they thought they wanted. This included large photo spreads, stories of sex and violence, advice columns, lots of gossip, strong opinions, contests and comic strips. (Joe Patterson was especially adroit at developing new comic strips for The Daily News.) The formula worked. At one point the family owned and controlled the three largest-circulation dailies in the three most important cities in the United States.

From Gonzalez' description of News for All the People:

So we’ve tried to outline how that developed, from the early Post Office for newspapers; the rise of the telegraph, that gave rise—that really made possible the wire services that dominated news throughout the late 19th century; the rise of radio, then of cable television, because television was really just an extension of radio, the rise of cable television; and finally the rise of the internet. Each of these new technologies has created a huge debate over what is the role of the media in a democracy and what is the role of the government in establishing the rules of operation by which all the different groups in society will be able to have access or be heard or produce news.

They talk about the work of several minority journalists, and then media reform movements:

JUAN GONZALEZ: ...We point out in the book that between 1970 and 1973 there were more than 340 license challenges to the licenses of television and radio stations across the country. As thousands of African-American and Latino community leaders—forgotten—people like William Wright in Washington, D.C., Emma Bowen in New York, Lonnie King in Atlanta—all marched into the television stations and the radio stations and said, "We are fed up with your failure to cover our communities. We want you to hire more African Americans and Latinos. We want you to have shows that speak to our communities." And they launched a massive movement all across the country challenging licenses. And as a result of that movement is when you had the newsrooms opened up to people like Ben Bradley—I’m sorry, to Ed Bradley—

AMY GOODMAN: 60 Minutes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —and to Geraldo Rivera*—

AMY GOODMAN: Fox.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —and to all of these first generations—Gil Noble, Gloria Rojas. The first generation of African-American and Latino journalists came into the newsrooms as a result of this massive community movement of media reform in the 1970s....

The contrast between the Times' and Democracy Now!'s assessments of the interests of their respective audiences is pretty stark: for the former, the fox hunting, backstabbing, and marital problems of narcissistic media magnates; for the latter, an analysis of the history of media democracy, racism, and reform movements, taking us through the net neutrality struggles of today.

*I admit I have another motive for quoting this particular portion of the interview, and that is to show this video (the segment leading up to this, also at the link, has Cornel West referring to "our atheist and agnostic brothers and sisters"...on Fox):

Cuttlefish should like it. :)

Diagnostic expansion and Orgasm, Inc.

2011-10-14T13:31:00.003-04:00

Duncan Double last month made a call (or, I should say, joined the call) for "No more psychiatric labels." I was struck by the extremity of the demand, but its reasoning and subtleties become more clear if you read his longer piece about it and this piece by Allen Frances about the DSM-V. A recent article in Society and Mental Health, "Creating an Age of Depression: The Social Construction and Consequences of the Major Depression Diagnosis," also gives a sense of the validity problems faced by these diagnoses as well as their consequences.

I happened to read Double's post just after I saw the film Orgasm, Inc.

As a documentary, it's not spectacular, often seeming unfocused and employing some unnecessary gimicks and misplaced humor. (It would have been a better film, I think, had it centered around Leonore Tiefer and the Berman sisters.) But the story and the issues the movie addresses carry it along.

One aspect that caught my attention was the film's engagement with diagnosis, stigma, and shame. A claim I frequently hear in discussions of mental problems is that their medicalization has removed - or, more typically, is in the course of removing - some alleged stigma. I've never been much convinced of this, particularly at a time when the number of psychiatric diagnoses continues to rise, enveloping more and more areas of life and ordinary difficulties that had not previously been stigmatized. In the particular case of "female sexual dysfunction" it would be a hard sell: the label plainly redefines (at least some) regular life experiences as problems in need of treatment. The larger story concerns the frightening power of corporations and other groups to transform,* in their own interests, the way people think and feel about their most intimate experiences and problems and their causes.

Success at SourceWatch!...and a request

2011-10-13T11:51:00.005-04:00

I posted just yesterday afternoon about the terrible condition of the Alternative Medicine page at SourceWatch, which had, undetected, come to be a site of woo-promotion and, worst of all, HIV-AIDS denialism. I checked the page this morning and found this:

Alternative medicine refers to alternative approaches to healing and wellness which do not decisively fall within the professional realm of conventional and orthodox (predominately drug and surgery based) medicine. Complementary and Alternative medicine (CAM) is an umbrella term for alternative, complementary and integrative medicine.

Note: This article has been placed under review. Its contents will be preserved on the talk page until that review is completed. ~~

Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy/SourceWatch, left the following message in my comments:

Dear Sir or Madam:

I received this alert about the SourceWatch article discussed above.

Based on your note, I have placed the article under review. Its contents have been re-located to the talk page of the article, pending that review. If you have edits to that page that you would like to make or suggest, while this review is pending, you can make them there.

Without the Google alert, I might not have discovered your criticism of one of the tens of thousands of articles on the site. If you have future suggestions for correction or improvement, please help us in updating the article at issue or alert us to the issue. We are a small ngo with a small staff of editors along with some who volunteer on SourceWatch.

Lisa Graves, the new Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy/SourceWatch

I'm extremely impressed and pleased by the rapid response, which just strengthens my trust in SourceWatch, and regret not having contacted them directly as well.

So I ask for the help of the science-based community in making a better page. I'll be coming up with some ideas for topics that should be covered and references, but I would appreciate any suggestions, or better yet people can make them there directly. Please keep in mind that the audience of SourceWatch tends to be critical of corporate distortions of medicine and medical research, and that a factual presentation of CAM merely requires good science and accurate history, not corporate cheerleading. (In this vein, discussions of CAM as an industry and its political influence are completely appropriate and important information for SourceWatch readers.)

sCAM invades SourceWatch!

2011-10-12T10:41:00.005-04:00

I've often used SourceWatch in investigating people and organizations. The information can be dated and incomplete, and you have to follow up on the references, but overall it's an extremely useful resource. So, after reading posts about the ACS' rejection of atheists, I was following a link trail there originating at the American Cancer Society page (there are, of course, several legitimate criticisms that can be leveled at the ACS) and becoming increasingly disturbed. I reached the Alternative Medicine page and couldn't choke back the outrage.

Most of it is taken up with attacks on "mainstream" medicine. Now, I've never been shy about my opinions of health care in the contemporary US and elsewhere. I believe a comprehensive and fully functioning clinical trials database is important, but only one of the radical changes that need to happen for medicine to serve people rather than profits. But even if every claim about mainstream medicine made on the page were accurate, which is not the case, this would in no way validate CAM. The article suggests, for example, that randomized clinical trials can be twisted and suppressed, which is true.* However, in arguing this, the article's editor(s) are saying nothing to challenge RCTs scientifically, and in fact implicitly accepting the RCT rationale. The discussion of rigged, cherry-picked, and dubious trials is followed immediately by:

Orthodox practitioners and various related and profitable industries, may also spin facts to make the strong and solid features of a minority practice appear strange and eccentric. For example, the very small doses used in homeopathy must be ineffective. Also, the fact that they have employed medicines for over 200 years as evidence that the field has not "progressed". However, another interpretation might be that these 200 year old remedies (along with other non pharmaceutical, toxic and surgical remedies) still work and have not led to serious injuries and deaths. Incredibly, the fact that homeopaths conduct detailed, personal patient interviews has been portrayed as "quirky" because it revels in "inane facts" about a patient.

This is ridiculous enough, but it's the section on HIV-AIDS that had me fuming. A few excerpts:

Since the first hypothesis by Robert Gallo of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at an April 23, 1984 press conference, there has never been any proof that HIV caused AIDS. In fact, Gallo only announced that he had discovered the virus which probably caused AIDS. Others claimed that he had discovered the “AIDS virus” and he never corrected them.

...[T]here has been no well-funded, empirical research regarding the true cause of AIDS. In spite of this, evidence exists to conclude that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, according to critics of the orthodox HIV/AIDS paradigm. Furthermore, the HIV test is so inaccurate and misleading, it has never made a real connection between HIV and AIDS.

...After his challenge to the the AIDS orthodoxy in 1997, Dr. Duesberg was ridiculed, marginalized and denounced. Years later, other medical practitioners and scientists are realizing the inherent fallacies in the HIV/AIDS paradigm. The most obvious is the lack of scientific documentation.

And most eye-spittingly infuriating:

In November of 1999, President Thabo Mbeki publicly questioned the HIV/AIDS paradigm, causing intense domestic debate in South Africa. It was the first challenge to the paradigm that the HIV virus caused Aids. Most people in U.S. and global "markets", were healthy and alive prior to their HIV positive death certificates and died within a year of taking prescribed medications. Like most contrary “AIDS” debates, it was largely ignored or censored by U.S. media.**

Needless to say, the citations are utterly ridiculous. This CAM SourceWatch invasion might be the work of just a few individual cranks, but it can't be allowed to stand. People visiting the site for information about the doings of ALEC or the Koch brothers should not also find these lies.

*The various techniques for doing so are described in detail by Ben Goldacre in Bad Science and Irving Kirsch in The Emperor's New Drugs.

**Goldacre's Bad Science is also the best source on this.

Sad news about Morgan

2011-10-12T10:31:00.003-04:00

She's going to Loro Parque. This is so depressing. How anyone could think it's in any orca's interests to be sent to this place is beyond me. And how can this process be legal?

Don't buy a ticket

2011-10-11T14:03:00.002-04:00

Famine and epidemics

2011-10-11T12:27:00.003-04:00

This is an interesting post from Contagions, the first in a series about the link between malnutrition and epidemics and the vicious cycle that can be created.* Ziegler writes, "Today this cycle can be mitigated and eventually broken by international food relief and even limited modern medical treatment." This is an overly optimistic expectation. Patchy mitigation can be achieved, but what is needed is a revolution in food production and distribution.

*The 2007 article on which it's based is open access.

Great reporting on Honduras

2011-10-11T12:03:00.003-04:00

This 25-minute video provides a solid overview of Honduras from the coup to the present, focusing on violence against resistance journalists and activists. It ends on a hopeful note. There are some brave people in Honduras.

(via Quotha)

Lobo in Washington: the political jenny spins on

2011-10-10T17:18:00.007-04:00

Pepe Lobo, Honduras' coup president, visited Washington last week in the latest chapter in the Obama administration's bloody betrayal of the Honduran people and Honduran democracy. (And no, foolish people, this utter moral failure has had nothing to do with Obama's parental responsibilities or alleged sleep habits, and nor, it shouldn't have to be pointed out, has it occurred despite some imaginary objections from Hillary Clinton.) The visit was of course accompanied by the endless parade of lies and spin, as Adrienne Pine and Free Speech Radio report.

Ag gag laws and other environmental, animal rights, and food news...

2011-10-10T15:58:00.006-04:00

First (via Climate Change), as this article in, of all places, Forbes, reports, environmentalists joined the Occupy Wall Street protests last week.

Wednesday’s march was also buoyed by another group of rabble-rousing upstarts: environmentalists. Fresh off their own nonviolent stand outside the White House — where they spent two weeks protesting the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline — the re-energized U.S. environmental movement has now found an even bigger, broader stage. And like most factions of Occupy Wall Street, it seems perfectly happy to share that stage with other interests.

...McKibben and 350.org now hope to conjure some of that mojo in Washington (which also held its own “Occupy D.C.” march Thursday) for “ Occupy State Department,” a protest to stop lobbyists from dominating Friday’s final public hearing on Keystone XL. The State Department will rule on the proposed pipeline by year’s end, and critics have accused it of “bias and complicity” in favor of the project. On top of that, Haigh says, many hearings so far have suspiciously become pro-pipeline pep rallies.

The inclusion of organized environmentalists, as the story points out, should come as no surprise:

Occupy Wall Street’s first “official” statement lists an array of grievances with corporate America, many of which are at least indirectly related to environmental and public health. Referring to corporations in the third person, some of its most clearly environmental grouses include:

“They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.”

“They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.”

“They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.”

“They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.”

“They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.”

Second, on the other side, corporate interests and their political lapdogs continue their offensive against animal rights and environmental organizations that interfere with their profiting through destruction.* As Food & Water Watch reports:

Today, the vast majority of animals raised for meat, milk and eggs live in extreme conditions where they are unable to express their most basic instinctual behaviors. Many of these animals never once feel grass under their feet or the sun on their back.

Numerous organizations are committed to exposing the reality of what factory farming means for animals welfare. This has always been a challenging task, but it may soon become even more difficult. With the help of several state legislators, the meat industry is working harder than ever to ensure they maintain exclusive control over their public image by banning unauthorized images from their facilities.

Over the past year, representatives in four states (Florida, Iowa, Minnesota & New York) have introduced legislation that would make it illegal to record any image or sound inside a farm without the owner’s permission. The Iowa and Minnesota bills would also criminalize the re-broadcasting of these images by the media.

Proponents say the legislation is necessary to protect private property from theft and vandalism and to ensure bio-security. But all of these concerns are already well covered under current laws. The real motivation behind this legislation is unmistakably clear—the videos recorded on these farms confirm the worst fears of conscientious consumers and severely damage the industry’s carefully crafted public image.

I suspect ALEC ghostwriting...

Finally, The Nation last month ran a set of pieces about social justice and the food movement, kicked off by Frances Moore Lappé's essay.

Frances Moore Lappé, "The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities"

Raj Patel, "Why Hunger Is Still With Us"

Vandana Shiva, "Resisting the Corporate Theft of Seeds"

Eric Schlosser, "It's Not Just about Food"

Michael Pollan, "How Change Is Going to Come in the Food System"

They're quick reads; the quality varies. My favorite line is from Vandana Shiva: "That is why we have to make food democracy the core of the defense of our freedom and survival. We will either have food dictatorship for a while and then a collapse of our food systems and our societies, or we will succeed in building robust food democracies, resting on resilient ecosystems and resilient communities. There is still a chance for the second alternative."

*I've finished Green is the New Red,

and highly recommend it. It moves, in two important senses - touches the reader (through substantive reporting and without heroizing activists) and zips along. The best aspect is the way Potter situates the environmental and animal rights movements and the onslaught against them within a historical context, particularly with reference to the McCarthy era. Also important is the discussion of the special "terrorist" prisons that have emerged in the US in recent years.

More percentages - this time, orca sounds and certainty

2011-10-08T08:31:00.008-04:00

I'll be posting more in the next few days about the reported percentages of HPV-positive oropharyngeal cancers, but there was another percentage reported that caught my eye recently and made me wonder. While I made an argument about the use of percentage in the previous articles, in this case I simply have a question.

The news last week from the Orca Coalition contained a happy announcement that Morgan's family had likely been located. If so, this is significant, since her prospects for returning to the ocean are much improved if she can rejoin them. The announcement read "Family of Morgan found with 77% certainty." The text reads:

Independent scientists have now found that there is a match of at least 77% between the sounds that orca Morgan makes and specific orca families residing in the North Atlantic Ocean including around Norway.

So my percentage-related question is: Does finding a minimum 77% sound match translate into 77% certainty of having found her family? (I'm not necessarily saying there's less certainty - in fact, there could be more - but this direct translation of percentages sounds odd to me. Could be correct, though...) Also, how is the sound match determined? It's all very interesting, and brings into even greater relief the rich social life these whales are deprived of in captivity. Listen!:

Strangely beautiful. (Unfortunately, I can find little to no information about the people listed as having taken the pictures or recorded the sounds, which is odd.)

Fun with Wiley and Wikipedia

2011-10-08T00:51:00.005-04:00

Speaking of Wikipedia, in reading Dan Vergano's article before my quick post about the latest in the Wegman scandal on Wednesday, I neglected to click on the link to Andrew Gelman's "Wiley Wegman chutzpah update," with its guide to choosing between WP and WIREs Computational Statistics. It's good.

It's not louche! It's literate!

2011-10-08T00:32:00.005-04:00

I mentioned the other day that the ABC series Revenge has become a guilty pleasure. After posting about it, I became curious enough to look into its critical reception. One of the reviews mentioned that it's based on The Count of Monte Cristo (it's even listed in the novel's Wikipedia entry under adaptations), which I didn't know because _{I hadn't read it}. That error is now being rectified. I'm enjoying the original in precisely the same way, which is making me feel much less guilty.

Peter Singer, making me angry

2011-10-06T19:58:00.003-04:00

Pretty much every time the subject of differences in the abilities and interests of “races” or sexes comes up online, there are a few people (not always the same people) ostensibly on “my side” who chime in to repeat the same basic line. It goes something like, “Anyway, group differences are merely statistical averages, so we can’t make assumptions about any individuals; moreover, people should have equal opportunities or treatment regardless of such differences.” These comments have always annoyed me, as the argument always seems to rest on the assumption that these differences do in fact exist. They’ve also bothered me because this line of thinking is so formulaic that I was sure it must trace to a common source, but didn’t know what it was.

It’s evidently Peter Singer. Chapter 2 of the latest edition of Singer’s Practical Ethics

is, quite simply, a scholarly nightmare. It’s also…(ironically) kind of unethical. I was a bit worried going in, since his discussion of Marxism in the previous chapter was simplistic and that chapter had hinted at some problems. The basic contention of the chapter at issue, one with which I generally agree, is that while people are not really all “equal” on every criterion, our treatment of each other has no business being based on people's capacities or characteristics other than the fact that they have interests. We all have the same fundamental interests, and any true ethics is democratic in the sense that everyone is considered a moral equal; everyone’s interests are given equal weight under the principle of equal consideration of interests.

Singer concludes the chapter with a discussion of disabled people, of whom he says

When we ask how such people ought to be treated, there is no argument about whether their abilities are the same as those of people without disabilities. By definition, they are lacking at least some ability that normal people have. Their disabilities will sometimes mean that they should be treated differently from others… The fact that a specific disability may rule a person out of consideration for a particular position does not, however, mean that that person's interests should be given less consideration than those of anyone else. Nor does it justify discrimination against disabled people in any situation in which the particular disability a person has is irrelevant to the employment or service offered (pp. 44-45).

Of course, as he notes, “people with intellectual or physical disabilities,” like the “gifted” or “geniuses” of whatever stripe at the other extreme, is a huge umbrella category, and anyone disabled in one way can be perfectly average or even immensely gifted in others. In fact, Singer could simply have written entirely about individuals. He could have spoken of people who are not bright, or talented, or who lack abilities considered important in a particular culture or area, or their opposite – people with extraordinary abilities on any particular scale. His fundamental argument is that none of this has anything to do with the moral consideration we grant any of these beings.

Singer doesn’t focus on individuals, though. Instead, the chapter is taken up with a discussion of alleged race and sex differences, and this analysis is, frankly, dreadful. Again, there’s really no reason for this discussion. His point could be made easily with reference to individuals. Singer repeatedly notes that it doesn’t really matter whether racial or sex differences in intelligence or other capacities or propensities exist. He’s only, he says, discussing them hypothetically because he wants to show that even if they do exist they should have no ethical ramifications. His arguments, he argues, “give no comfort to racists.”

Throughout the chapter, though, he shows his hand: it’s clear that he does believe these differences exist. It’s all there - The Bell Curve, the unspecified black US Olympic team, mental object-rotation, Greater Male Mathematical Variation, female verbal ability and recognition of emotional states, aggression, live faces vs. mechanical mobiles, evo psych just-so stories… And it’s all presented as if the scientific evidence is overwhelming, and social inequalities a result of differences in ability. For example,

[T]he fact that there are more males at both extremes of ability in mathematics, whereas females tend to cluster more around the average level, does support Lawrence Summers’ ill-fated remark about the relative scarcity of suitable female candidates for Harvard positions in those areas of science and engineering in which mathematical ability plays a key role. Only those with exceptional ability become professors, and even within that select group, only those among the very best have any prospect of becoming a professor at an elite institution like Harvard. It isn't difficult to see that males are likely to be overrepresented among those at the extreme upper end of the scale of mathematical giftedness.(p. 32).

Ay. Where to start? This is remarkably ignorant, on so many levels. I’m reading, and I’m fearing, but I’m thinking, “No, he wouldn’t possibly go there…”

And then…

In addition, the preferences young females show for playing with dolls, and young males for playing with toy trucks, have even been shown to hold for vervet monkeys! No wonder that parents continue to give their children the toys that they most desire and with which they are most likely to play (p. 30).

Veeeeeeeeeeeerveeeeeeeeeeeets! In the annals of racist and sexist “research” it has a lot of competition, but this may in fact be the stupidest article ever. (And so much for mere alleged statistical averages – now it’s “the toys that they most desire.”) Someone so deeply concerned with animal rights should stand with vervets against their use in research so profoundly dumb and pointless.

But this is just the most egregious element in a chapter that, without honestly acknowledging it, takes on board much of the range of racist and sexist contentions that have characterized the past several years. It’s almost as though Singer read one or two of the popular “difference” books and just swallowed it all whole. Throughout the discussion, he makes no effort to take seriously or engage with the extensive criticisms of the research he cites or the equally extensive counterevidence. He writes:

It would be inappropriate for me to attempt to assess the scientific merits of biological explanations of human behaviour in general, or of racial or sexual differences in particular. My concern is rather with the implications of these theories for the ideal of equality. For this purpose, it is not necessary for us to establish whether the theories are right (p. 25).

But then follows a lengthy discussion, after which:

...These are the major psychological differences that have repeatedly been observed in many studies of females and males (p. 29).

Followed by:

Adopting the strategy we used before in discussing race and IQ, I shall not go further into the evidence for and against these biological explanations of differences between males and females (p. 31).

Oh, of course not. This, again, given what he actually does write, is completely disingenuous. He presents the alleged scientific foundation for these differences (he never does even define “race” or point to any scientific basis for this concept) as though it were scientific fact. But of course these “theories” have no implications as such if they’re incorrect (as I discuss below, their existence as “theories” taken seriously has very real implications, but that’s something very different).

Indeed, as Singer sees it, antiracists and feminists – those dumb feminists never seem to understand! – are at fault for making a big deal of these beliefs, which we should all just admit to because they’re really not a problem at all. The (so ‘70s) opposition of these groups to the plain findings of science can only reflect ill-founded political sensitivities, fears, and feelings. “The opposition to genetic explanations of alleged racial differences in intelligence is only one manifestation of a more general opposition to genetic explanations in other socially sensitive areas,” he writes.

It closely parallels, for instance, the hostility of 1970s feminists [I love that it’s about the “1970s feminists”] to the idea that there are biological factors behind male dominance in politics and business. (Today's feminists are more willing to entertain the idea that biological differences between the sexes are influential in, for example, greater male aggression and stronger female caring behaviour. [???]) The opposition to genetic explanations also has obvious links with the intensity of feelings aroused by evolutionary explanations of human behaviour. The worry here is that if human social behaviour is seen as having evolved over millions of years and having links with the behaviour of other social mammals, we shall come to think of hierarchy, male dominance and inequality as part of our evolved nature, and thus unchangeable. Nevertheless, evolutionary explanations of human behaviour are now much more widely accepted than they were in the 1970s [?] (p. 25).

One of my biggest pet peeves is the formulation of explanations for allegations. Hypothetical explanations should be for actual, defensible findings. How do you have an explanation for something that’s simply alleged? Related to this is the charge that feminists – well, those clunky, outdated ‘70s feminists – have no arguments or empirical challenges to these contentions, only fear and irrational hostility. Regardless, the claim of blanket opposition to any "evolutionary explanations of human behavior" is a straw man.

And of course those 1970s feminists were so ignorant to think that biological essentialist arguments were a problem:

Although this question of origin is important in some special contexts, it was given too much weight by the 1970s feminists who assumed that the case for women's liberation rested on acceptance of the environmentalist view. What is true of racial discrimination holds here too: discrimination can be shown to be wrong whatever the origin of the known psychological differences (p. 29).

Singer’s views are amazingly clear in the following:

Some years ago an American sociologist, Steven Goldberg, built a provocatively entitled book, The Inevitability of Patriarchy, around the thesis that the biological basis of greater male aggression will always make it impossible to bring about a society in which women have as much political power as men. From this claim, it is easy to move to the view that women should accept their inferior position in society and not strive to compete with males or to bring up their daughters to compete with males in these respects. Instead, women should return to their traditional sphere of looking after the home and children. This is just the kind of argument that has aroused the hostility of some feminists towards biological explanations of male dominance. As in the case of race and IQ, the moral conclusions alleged to follow from the biological theories do not really follow from them at all. Similar arguments apply (p. 32).

Great! The actual consequences that those dumb feminists think might follow from the acceptance of arguments in books like The Inevitability of Patriarchy really don’t! Peter Singer said so, or at least that they shouldn't, and the conclusions of philosophy books are binding. (Don’t even get me started on his ignorant claims about capitalism.)

This all rests on so many nonsense assumptions. Here’s my view:

1) The vast majority if not all of these shifting but resilient essentialist claims about race (not to mention the idea of biological race) and sex are wrong. They need to demonstrate their scientific worth in the face of challenges, and they haven’t.

2) The fact that so many, including so many in the media, are so willing to readily accept notions of difference that are based on garbage research and/or actively contradicted by the evidence makes me angry. It also makes me angry that distinguished scholars not only buy into this nonsense but go out of their way to include it in their otherwise intelligent books.

3) The idea that we – women and minorities - shouldn’t be concerned about these “scientific” racist or sexist claims is shockingly wrong. It’s a naïve notion that could only be held by the powerful. The effects of these claims aren’t determined or ameliorated by an ethics book. Their consequences are well established. (The same is true of nonhuman animals: The facts about orcas and people’s knowledge of them, for example, make a difference to how orcas are treated. If people believe that they’re generally unintelligent and asocial, they’re going to be treated as such.) This is reality, and it’s irresponsible - and therefore immoral - to ignore it. This doesn’t mean social realities are unchangeable, but that it’s unethical to write as though they don’t exist and one’s claims don’t fall on a fertile ground of racism and sexism.

I think the ethical course of action, given modern history and demonstrated social effects, for anyone writing or talking about racial or sexual differences in abilities/capacities/interests would be to

A) Not assume the biological reality of race, and in fact regard the notion critically.

B) Not make or repeat claims about these differences unless these claims are supported by solid and extensive scientific evidence.

C) Consider alleged evidence critically. This means not just critically evaluating this evidence but seeking out and taking seriously critical perspectives and opposing evidence.

D) Consider alleged evidence historically. This means learning the history of racist and sexist “science” – and this goes well beyond eugenics - and viewing contemporary “findings” in this line. We need to appreciate both contemporary and historical variation, and go out of our way to learn of examples that contradict our notions of what’s natural, aware that our ideas of human nature are bound to reflect the prejudices of our own times. This epistemic ethics is part of the practical ethics Singer talks about.

Singer says:

It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers [ahem], from which our fathers [ahem] freed themselves. It is more difficult to search for prejudices among the beliefs and values we hold (p. 49).

Yes. Let’s all do this.

UPDATE: I wrote this post a few days ago, and at the time I assumed that I’d have few problems with the later chapters. I was wrong. This surprised me given that, as with the chapter I talk about here, I agree with him on the most central points. I’ll probably post about his childbearing and abortion sections soon.

Now the History of Vaccines Blog, too

2011-10-06T13:50:00.004-04:00

I can't believe they did it, too:

A study published in the October 3, 2011, issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology reveals a startling rise in the rate of throat cancers related to human papillomavirus (HPV). The study looked at specimens from 271 throat cancers (specifically oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinomas, or OPSCC) collected over 20 years. The researchers found that HPV prevalence in the cancers increased from 16.3% during 1984 to 1989 to 71.7% during 2000 to 2004. They note that "The overall rise in OPSCC incidence during 1984 to 2004 is largely explained by the increasing incidence of HPV-positive cancers, whereas incidence of HPV-negative cancers declined.”

As I pointed out yesterday, these percentages are absolutely meaningless in detecting an increase in HPV-associated OP cancers or OP cancers in general. The only figures of significance in this determination are incidence rates. From the article's abstract:

Population-level incidence of HPV-positive oropharyngeal cancers increased by 225% (95% CI, 208% to 242%) from 1988 to 2004 (from 0.8 per 100,000 to 2.6 per 100,000), and incidence for HPV-negative cancers declined by 50% (95% CI, 47% to 53%; from 2.0 per 100,000 to 1.0 per 100,000). If recent incidence trends continue, the annual number of HPV-positive oropharyngeal cancers is expected to surpass the annual number of cervical cancers by the year 2020.

Ignore the percentages here, too, as they're useless and misleading. In terms of the actual (estimated) incidence, we're talking about an increased incidence of HPV-positive OP cancers from 0.8 to 2.6 per 100,000 and a decreased incidence of HPV-negative OP cancers from 2.0 to 1.0 per 100,000 in the US over the period 1988-2004. This resulted in an overall increase of 0.8 per 100,000 - from 2.8 per 100,000 to 3.6 per 100,000. This results from a +1.8 change in HPV-positive OP cases and a -1.0 change in HPV-negative OP cases. I questioned in my previous post about this whether an increase of 1.8 cases per 100,000 of a disease over a 16-year period constitutes a "dramatic" rise in HPV-associated OP cancer, and I would ask the same about the overall increase. I find it difficult to imagine that an increase of less than one case per 100,000 over 16 years, even for a rare disease, is a "startling" increase.

The changing HPV-positive and -negative proportions of OP cases (from 16% to 72% HPV-positive) can in some sense be seen as 'good' news. First, the fact that it partially results from a decline in smoking-associated cases reflects a decline in smoking, and smoking causes a gamut of other health problems. Second, as the abstract notes,

Median survival was significantly longer for HPV-positive than for HPV-negative patients (131 v 20 months; log-rank P < .001; adjusted hazard ratio, 0.31; 95% CI, 0.21 to 0.46). Survival significantly increased across calendar periods for HPV-positive (P = .003) but not for HPV-negative patients (P = .18).

So HPV-positive OP cancers are much more survivable than HPV-negative OP cancers, and treatments for the former have improved while those for the latter have continued to be less successful. The bad news is that the number of cases of HPV-positive OP is expected to grow as the virus (especially HPV 16) spreads further through the population.

And of course there are HPV vaccines that could help to prevent against infection with the strain (HPV 16) responsible for almost all HPV-positive OP cancers. The HoV Blog reports:

We spoke with Paul A. Offit, MD, chief of Infectious Diseases at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, about the new study and its implications for HPV vaccination for boys. When asked whether we have evidence that HPV vaccination prevents throat cancers in males, Offit said, “What we do have is evidence that HPV vaccination can prevent infection. And since we know that a cell cannot become cancerous [with HPV-related cancer] unless it was infected with HPV, then the vaccine will protect against oropharyngeal cancers in men.”

Moreoever, Offit noted that we do not have direct evidence that HPV vaccination prevents cervical cancer in girls; what we have is compelling evidence that the vaccine prevents the cervical intraepithelial neoplasias that are requisites for cervical cancers. “So, for boys, we have the same thing: a cell can’t be transformed unless it is infected with HPV. And we have data that the vaccine prevents infections.”

I have a couple of questions about this: Can "infections" be talked about in this general way? Can we assume that the vaccine would prevent oral HPV infection exactly the same as genital HPV infection? Are these entirely the same? I read one report that suggested that Maura Gillison (one of this study's authors, incidentally) successfully pilot-tested an indicator for HPV throat infection, so it seems like this could be used in determining efficacy in preventing infection... In any case, as I've said, it's a highly plausible assumption. The post continues:

Offit thinks that the recommendation HPV vaccination for boys will come soon, possibly at the end of this month when the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices meets. The topic is on the committee’s agenda for Tuesday, October 25.

If the most optimistic hopes for the long-term efficacy and safety of the vaccine are realized, and if combined with other preventive measures, it will be a valuable addition (given to girls and boys pre-exposure) to the preventive arsenal against a number of diseases, including OP cancer. I trust the CDC will make its decisions based upon all of the existing knowledge (including knowledge of the uncertainties involved) and not meaningless percentages or media hype.

My guilty pleasure

2011-10-05T23:16:00.003-04:00

...of the moment (and that of several people I know) is Revenge:

Suspend disbelief,* forget all notions of social and political justice for an hour, and revel in the telenovelal silliness of it all.

*Really. I hear you saying, "But why would he...? There's no way she wouldn't..." Shut up and look at the beach.

A good movie that isn't a documentary

2011-10-05T21:53:00.003-04:00

It's "foreign,"* unless you're in Argentina, so I suppose I should call it a "film." Haunting.

But why the hell do so few films pass the Bechtel test?

*Won the 2010 Best Foreign Language Academy Award.

That's just dumb.

2011-10-05T17:43:00.003-04:00

Via Rorschach's blog I learned of a new study about HPV-associated oropharyngeal cancers. Apparently, the story's all over the place. Some of the stories are decent, if insufficiently critical. But several present the study in ways that are just...dumb.

In a typical example, the headline from Medical News Today reads "HPV Linked Oropharyngeal Cancer Rates Rise Dramatically." The first paragraph:

In the 1980s just over 16% of patients with oropharyngeal cancers tested positive to HPV, compared to over 70% during the last decade, researchers reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The authors add that if the rise in incidence continues at its present pace, the incidence of oropharyngeal cancers will overtake that of cervical cancer.

Oh, good grief. Regarding the latter claim, whether it will overtake cervical cancer is irrelevant. They're both rare in the US, and cervical cancer is rare and its rates have declined dramatically due to screening which is extremely effective in prevention. That trend will continue as long as women can get and follow up on Pap tests, are educated about the need for regular screening, and are not led to a false sense of protection by the hype about the vaccine.

The only information relevant to the rise in HPV-associated oropharyngeal cancers - aside from where and over what time period you're talking about, which I'd think would be obvious but seems to be lacking in several articles - is the actual incidence of HPV-associated oropharyngeal cancers. The MNT and other articles imply that if the percentage of HPV-associated OP cancers has increased dramatically, this reflects a dramatic increase in the incidence of HPV-associated OP cancers. But that's just dumb. OP cancers are also caused by smoking and alcohol use, so changes in smoking or drinking rates leading to a lower incidence of OP cancers caused by them will change the percentage of OP cases caused by HPV regardless of changes in their actual incidence. (Indeed, the incidence of HPV-associated cancers could decline and its percentage still increase: Say there were 100 cases of OP cancer one year, and 50 each are caused by smoking and HPV. The next year the number of cases caused by smoking drops to 10, while the number of cases caused by HPV drops to 40, for a total of 50 overall. The percentage of HPV-associated cases will have risen from 50% to 80%.)

We know that these changing percentages reflect to some extent declining smoking rates in the US and the resultant decline in smoking-related OP cancers. But the authors of the study (I don't unfortunately have access, though the accompanying editorial is available, as is the supplementary data) did find an increase in the incidence of HPV-associated OP cancers over the period studied. The presentation of this increase in the media reports has also been fairly misleading, though. The "225% increase" is repeatedly reported, but it's harder to see the "dramatic" rise when you consider that the increase is from .8 cases per 100,000 to 2.6 cases per 100,000 over a 16-year period. I don't have the knowledge to fully put this in perspective, but the actual numbers are significantly less dramatic than the trumpeted percentage increase, and it's still rare.

But of course even if there are "just" several thousand cases of HPV-associated OP cancer per year in the US, and even if it's more treatable than the other kind (the most interesting aspect of the article, from what I was able to gather from the editorial), that's several thousand too many, especially if the increase continues. I can understand people suggesting a broad HPV vaccination of men as well as women.

The HPV vaccines are approved in the US for boys 9-26 for the prevention of genital warts and some cancers, though they aren't currently recommended for boys by the CDC. Some have said that this study should push the CDC in the direction of recommending the vaccines for boys as well, or even mandating them. The problem with this is that there is no evidence that the vaccine is effective against OP cancer. There's no evidence against it, as far as I know - there's no evidence at all. Merck and GSK haven't done the research, and they're apparently not going to. I was suspicious about Merck's dropping it, but the argument made in this article is plausible: there's no equivalent to Pap smears for OP precancers, so any clinical tests of vaccine effectiveness would be expensive and take a good deal of time, and tests that screened only for oral HPV infection wouldn't necessarily convince the FDA of effectiveness against precancerous lesions.

But the fact remains that the evidence doesn't exist, even if a plausible rationale does. So "I can't see the harm of [mandatory] vaccination of boys for OP cancers" remains problematic. For families making the decision, the financial costs are known, the long-term risks aren't, and the effectiveness (in this case, either short- or long-term) isn't. As a public health measure, the same considerations apply, and additionally there are concerns about the best use of resources in terms of this disease and other related diseases. If I were being cynical, I would say that Merck is in a great position here. They're not going to spend the money to find out if the vaccine is effective in preventing OP cancers, but people will push for public funds to be used for the purpose. Meanwhile, plenty of people are urging, on the basis of this research, that the vaccine be given to or mandated for as many boys as possible, and it's already approved for boys, so sales will increase.

Even if I'm not being cynical, I would simply argue that the decisions need to be made on the basis of the available evidence and on a cost and risk vs. benefit ratio.

The same disclaimer I attached to my earlier post about this applies to this one: I'm not trained in medicine, and some of my facts or analysis could well be wrong. If they are, I would appreciate corrections. A note that shouldn't be necessary: I'm not anti-vaccine, as anyone familiar with my writing should well know, and anyone who does a search for "health" on this blog can easily discover. I'm anti-thinking-every-disease-and-vaccine-profile-is-the-same, because that's just dumb.

Victory settlement for Amy Goodman and others for 2008 convention arrests

2011-10-05T16:43:00.005-04:00

A final settlement has been reached in a federal lawsuit challenging the police crackdown on journalists reporting on the 2008 Republican National Convention and protests in St. Paul, Minnesota. Democracy Now! host and executive producer Amy Goodman, along with former producers Nicole Salazar and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, filed the lawsuit last year against the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments, the Ramsey County Sheriff and United States Secret Service personnel. The lawsuit challenged the policies and conduct of law enforcement during the 2008 RNC that resulted in their arrests. They were among dozens of journalists arrested that week in St. Paul. The settlement includes $100,000 in compensation paid by the St. Paul and Minneapolis police departments and the Secret Service. The settlement also includes an agreement by the St. Paul police department to implement a training program aimed at educating officers regarding the First Amendment rights of the press and public with respect to police operations, including proper procedures for dealing with the press covering demonstrations.

Here's their press conference, appropriately enough from near the Occupy Wall Street encampment in lower Manhattan:

Papist gangs of Nebraska

2011-10-05T16:01:00.006-04:00

The story:

Students at a public school in Fremont, Nebraska, have been told they can't wear a rosary to school because it's also considered a gang symbol.

Elizabeth Carey, 12, told Omaha television station KETV her elementary school adopted the policy last year.

"The principal said I couldn't wear my necklace at all because gangsters were wearing it," she said.

Superintendent Steve Sexton told the television station the policy is for student safety.

"We had information from law enforcement that there were documented instances of gang activity in the area and we had information that states that the rosary was being used as a symbol of gang affiliation," Sexton said.

But the move has raised the ire of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska....

Here's the ACLU-Nebraska press release, "That gang of nuns looks pretty dangerous":

...Amy Miller, ACLU Nebraska Legal Director, said "Students have the right to express their faith in public schools. Whether a student wants to wear a crucifix, a rosary, or another symbol, it is wrong for school officials to interfere. We understand the serious concerns about gangs in schools, but Fremont Public School should demonstrate there is a concrete gang connection before shutting down a student’s free speech and religious rights. ACLU Nebraska has and will continue to support the constitutional rights of religious people”...*

I agree that this is a real issue and fully support the kid's right to wear a crucifix to school, but I can't help but find this funny. A girl is prohibited from wearing a crucifix to school because of its alleged association with gang activity. In an elementary school. In Fremont, Nebraska. It's funny.

...Hmm... Perhaps I'm primed by the segment about Al Smith's presidential campaign in Prohibition last night, but could it actually be anti-Catholic bigotry? I'm not finding anything about the town's religious make-up, but Wikipedia did offer "Fremont gained national attention in 2010 when residents approved a referendum that would ban illegal immigrants from renting and working in the town." (Here's the article at the WP link.) So there appears to be strong anti-Hispanic sentiment which could be behind this, and a recent history with the ACLU... Hmm...

*They should of course support the constitutional rights of nonreligious people as well.

Wegman: Another installment in the 'dismal chronology'

2011-10-05T15:36:00.002-04:00

Dan Vergano reports on Deep Climate's newest analysis.

Copying from Wikipedia. For shame.

So...how's that investigation going, George Mason?

An open letter to ERV

2011-09-30T17:21:00.006-04:00

Dear Abbie,

From a thread at ERV:

2921

Finally it's loaded for me!
Abbie, have you seen Salty [Current - ed.]'s accusation that you've been lying to us, "*I feel it necessary to mention one more time that her recent claims that the HPV vaccine is 100% effective against cervical cancer are FALSE"

The 'her' here is you.

Posted by: Justicar [link removed] September 30, 2011 1:48 PM

2922

The main efficacy studies of the quadrivalent vaccine were conducted in young women and men (16 through 26 years of age). Among persons not previously exposed to a targeted HPV type, the trials demonstrated nearly 100% vaccine efficacy in preventing cervical precancers, vulvar and vaginal precancers, and genital warts in women caused by the four vaccine types, as well as 90% vaccine efficacy in preventing genital warts and 75% vaccine efficacy in preventing anal precancers in men.

You would think with their PhDs from Google U this crew could figure out how to find this information on their own.

Posted by: ERV September 30, 2011 1:52 PM

Please stop irresponsibly spreading dangerous falsehoods about the HPV vaccine. You and your commenters continue to misunderstand basic facts, and you are misleading people. My sources include the same as yours. Read the CDC information you quoted. Notice the phrase “caused by the four vaccine types.” The two covered strains of HPV that can lead to cervical cancer cause about 70% of cervical cancers.* So even if the vaccine is taken by people prior to any exposure (efficacy declines with age due to greater probability of having been exposed, such that the FDA recently declined ~~GSK~~ Merck’s request to extend approval to women 27-45) and provides lifetime protection (which has not yet been established, of course), it is still not 100% effective against cervical cancer. Under the best conditions and assumptions, it will still only protect against 70% of cervical cancers.

The CDC makes this clear:

The vaccines do not protect against all HPV types— so they will not prevent all cases of cervical cancer. About 30% of cervical cancers will not be prevented by the vaccines, so it will be important for women to continue getting screened for cervical cancer (regular Pap tests).

This information is also readily available on the Gardasil home page:

GARDASIL is the only human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine that helps protect against 4 types of HPV. In girls and young women ages 9 to 26, GARDASIL helps protect against 2 types of HPV that cause about 75% of cervical cancer cases [other sources say about 70%],…

…GARDASIL may not fully protect everyone, nor will it protect against diseases caused by other HPV types or against diseases not caused by HPV. GARDASIL does not prevent all types of cervical cancer, so it’s important for women to continue routine cervical cancer screenings.

When you tell people the vaccine is 100% effective against cervical cancer, you give people a false sense of safety that might lead some later to forego regular Pap tests, which are demonstrably effective in preventing all cervical cancers in all women. Please correct this error.

My doctorate is from a highly respected university. I assume you’ll get your own real PhD in the future, but you fail the entrance exams for Google U.

SC

*Note that this does not mean that all infections with these four strains will lead to cervical cancer.

Free Morgan video

2011-09-30T14:39:00.005-04:00

The Orca Coalition has produced a new informational video about Morgan and the campaign to free her. That's one small tank.

Tim Zimmermann also wrote recently about the violent life of Tekoa, another orca captive at Loro Parque, and Wired Science last week posted a good interview with former SeaWorld trainer Jeff Ventre about the effects of captivity on orcas.

Abuses of biology, indeed.

2011-09-29T14:37:00.006-04:00

So I recently learned of a grant competition for projects on "The Uses and Abuses of Biology":

The aim of the interdisciplinary Programme is to investigate contemporary non-scientific uses and abuses of biological thought (beneficial, benign or negative) in the domains of philosophy, the social sciences, the media, religion and politics. Collaborative projects between those engaged in the biological sciences and investigators from other disciplines are particularly welcomed.

Sounds good, I thought. So I went to the web site...

The Uses and Abuses of Biology Grants Programme, organised by The Faraday Institute [...for Science and Religion, founded in 2006 with a $2 million grant from the Templeton Foundation], St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, and funded by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation,...

The Grants Committee, in classic Templeton style, is comprised entirely (or almost) of members of the Templeton "family" who work on the the so-called intersection of science and religion (John Hedley Clarke, Nidhal Guessoum, Elaine Ecklund, David Livingstone, Ard Louis, Alister McGrath,...). I could have guessed the nature of the suggestions for sample projects without even looking, but it was fun to look. Here's a selection*:

•Does the teaching of biology convey implicit philosophies?

•Have the publications of the ‘new atheists’ in biology stimulated a rise in creationism and Intelligent Design?

•What is the sociological impact of notions of biological altruism on the interpretation of altruism within human societies?

•How does the field of biological complexity impact on ideas of human value and purpose?

•Are the biological sciences communicated in ways that are implicitly materialistic or teleological?

•Biology and the Imago Dei – an investigation into the ways in which the biological sciences have influenced interpretation of this theological concept.

•The impact of biology on the interpretation of Jewish food regulations.
•Biology and natural theology - contemporary attempts to utilise biology in the justification of theological ideas.

•How does contemporary eugenics impact on notions of human freedom and spirituality?

*What's excluded is also interesting:

Topics excluded from the Programme include: bioethics, history (unless with strong contemporary relevance and application), ethical issues in the application of science, questions of sexual identity and policy, and race.

This last is especially strange as some of the reading suggestions are about race.

Musicians shilling for tobacco

2011-09-29T13:31:00.006-04:00

One of the more shocking aspects of the report I talked about in my previous post were the cigarette-sponsored concerts in Indonesia headlined by artists from North America, the UK, and Australia. (Well, not all that shocking, unfortunately.) I was disappointed to see that a public campaign and petition to get artists to pull out of the tobacco-sponsored Java Rockin' Land festival appear to have failed, and the concerts went off this summer as planned. (Other artists, like Alicia Keys and Kelly Clarkson, had previously heeded the message and changed course.)

Seriously, bands? You want to advertise for tobacco companies? You want to be part of getting kids hooked on smoking? You're OK with that suffering on your conscience? A while back I posted about the Sun City campaign by Artists United Against Apartheid,* in which musicians joined together to refuse to play a resort area in apartheid South Africa and produced an album sold to raise funds for the anti-apartheid cause. If the Cranberries and others are so shameless as to participate in this exercise in irresponsibility, other artists should come together to criticize these concerts and state publicly that they themselves would and will not participate.

*It appears the video has since been removed.

"Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes" on Current TV

2011-09-29T12:35:00.007-04:00

I've been recommending Allan Brandt's The Cigarette Century since it came out. It's a superb history of science on a hugely important topic. Although the bulk concerns the history of science - and industry interference with it - in the US, the later segments dealing with the successful push to market cigarettes in other countries are some of the most disturbing. While smoking rates fortunately continue to plummet in the US, the number of smokers, especially children, is exploding in poor countries. Many of these people don't know the risks, and hundreds of millions of them will die terrible, preventable deaths. The costs to health care systems are staggering.

I was happy to see that Current TV's Vanguard has done an episode, "Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes," on the marketing of cigarettes in Indonesia and the work of anti-tobacco activists to educate and protect children there.

For those who get Current TV, they seem to be showing the episode fairly regularly. It and the other Vanguard reports are very good.

Interlude: rope swing

2011-09-28T00:48:00.009-04:00

So I have a new camera [!!!] and have spent the past several days tormenting cats and kittens (for, generally, a good cause), amongst other activities. And they're unspeakably cute.

But I also went down by the river yesterday and found many an odd thing. I've done nothing to it and this is one of the best pictures I've ever taken. I love it, in every way. Don't? I don't care.

Would be funny if it were fiction

2011-09-26T09:38:00.006-04:00

Tenney Naumer was kind enough to leave a comment on last night's post about Dr. Charles Monnett linking to her extensive coverage.

For a taste of the quality of the investigation, Brad Johnson at Think Progress reports on a February interview of Monnett by IG Special Investigators Eric May and Lynn Gibson:

As Monnett attempted to explain in the interview, his influential paper included observations made flying over transects of a region of the polar ocean, as such:
Before a storm, 4 swimming polar bears observed / 11 percent of total region surveyed = about 36 expected swimming polar bears over entire region

After the storm, 3 dead floating polar bears observed / 11 percent of total region surveyed = about 27 expected dead floating polar bears over entire region

Thus, over the entire region, the rough estimate for the survival rate of swimming polar bears assuming they were caught in the storm is 9/36 = 25 percent.
The interview descends into farce as May reveals that he was incapable of understanding the very basic math behind the study:
ERIC MAY: Did they comment at all about any of the stats?

CHARLES MONNETT: Uh, there’s no stats in there.

ERIC MAY: Well, calculations, for, for example, the 25 percent survival rate.

CHARLES MONNETT: Oh, well, that’s just a mindless thing. That’s in the discussion. Um, that is not a statistic. Um, that’s a ratio estimator. It’s a, it’s a fifth grade procedure. Do you have kids?

ERIC MAY: No.

CHARLES MONNETT: Okay, well, if you had kids, you would know that in about fifth grade, they start doing a thing called cross multiplication. “X” is to “Y” as, you know, “N” is to “M.” And you can – there’s, there’s a little procedure you use to compare the proportions. And so that’s a, um, simply a calculation. It’s not a statistic.
May then tried to argue that there were actually 63 polar bears, because 4 live polar bears + 3 dead polar bears / 11% = 63. Dr. Monnett quickly grew frustrated at the innumeracy and illogic of this calculation:
CHARLES MONNETT: And so I, I don’t even still follow what they did to get the 60 percent. That, that’s –

ERIC MAY: The 63 percent.

CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah, that’s just goofy. [...]

ERIC MAY: Okay, and we’ll – let me, let – “of bears before the storm, then the total number of bears after the storm is 63,” and that’s where I came up with the sixty –

CHARLES MONNETT: That’s just stupid. I – did you do that?

ERIC MAY: No.

CHARLES MONNETT: That is stupid. …

CHARLES MONNETT: Somebody is deficient in fifth grade math.

ERIC MAY: (Laughing)

CHARLES MONNETT: Seriously. I mean, give me a break.

Debt cancellation for the poor. Yeah, I like that.

2011-09-25T21:56:00.003-04:00

I'm still working through David Graeber's fascinating book. He's been involved in the Wall Street protests this month, and was interviewed on Democracy Now! recently about debt and debt forgiveness:

My favorite quote: "Well, generally speaking, when you hear a Republican talk about class warfare, you know they’re waging it."

French pharmaceutical CEO faces criminal charges

2011-09-25T21:26:00.004-04:00

Reuters reports:

The head and founder of France's Servier laboratories was placed under investigation on Wednesday in a probe of the drug Mediator, which officials say has caused at least 500 deaths in France, and has sparked a public furore over drug regulation.

Jacques Servier, the company's president, is being investigated in Paris on suspicion of dishonest practices, deception over the drug's quality, and of falsely obtaining authorisation to sell it, said his lawyer, Herve Temime.

Bloomberg reports:

Jacques Servier, chairman of France’s second-largest drugmaker, must post bail of 4 million euros ($5.51 million) and his freedom may be restricted as he faces charges that he helped hide the risks of a drug suspected of causing the deaths of as many as 2,000 people.

Servier, 89, was charged with involuntary manslaughter, aggravated deception and fraud, the newspaper Le Monde reported, citing his lawyer.

If he has actually been charged with involuntary manslaughter, it seems a strange detail for Reuters to leave out.

The dubious investigation of Dr. Charles Monnett

2011-09-25T20:47:00.004-04:00

While there's been some attention to the ongoing trial of Italian scientists, developments in the case of Charles Monnett - author of a 2006 paper about drowned polar bear sightings - are receiving little. I haven't followed the case and wouldn't make any strong assertions about this being politically motivated (though Inhofe's involvement sets off alarm bells), but some of the recent developments - including that the IG's investigation is itself now being investigated, as well as revelations in PEER's rebuttal - leave me deeply suspicious.

In a letter recently sent to U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) on the case, Acting IG Mary Kendall claimed her agency would not “opine on the substance of the underlying science.” Yet during an August 9th interview, IG agents continued to press Dr. Monnett on details of the 2006 peer-reviewed article in the journal Polar Biology, including how the paper’s abstract was edited, how comments made by anonymous peer reviewers were resolved and whether a conservative estimate was within the bounds of good science.

"Killer Controversy: Why orcas should no longer be kept in captivity"

2011-09-22T20:40:00.005-04:00

Naomi Rose of the Humane Society International has prepared a report about the deleterious effects of captivity on orcas. The Orca Coalition reports that it's been submitted to the judge in Morgan's case. It's not a peer-reviewed article, but it does review the scientific literature. I haven't checked all of the references, but I don't know how many are needed to convince. This has been a disastrous experiment, and needs to be put in the past.

We maintain that the only logical conclusion, after considering the preceding evidence, is that orcas do not belong in captivity. They do not thrive: they are physically harmed, living shorter lives, and they are psychologically harmed, injuring each other and humans in a way rarely or never observed in the wild.

...It is not justified to continue their display for entertainment or even for education, especially when that education is biased toward information that supports a corporate narrative rather than good science.

As long as the public buys tickets to see orcas perform, oceanaria are unlikely to voluntarily close orca exhibits. Therefore it is up to the public, as well as the media, the regulatory agencies, and the scientific community, to consider and weigh the evidence and make the only logical deduction. Orcas are too large, too intelligent, and too behaviorally and socially complex to adequately provide for in concrete enclosures. No more orcas should have to die prematurely; no more trainers should be put at risk. It is time to accept that we have been wrong in our assumptions. The orcas deserve no less (pp. 8-11).

Children's rights wiki created amidst horrors

2011-09-22T20:20:00.006-04:00

CRIN has announced the debut of a children's rights wiki, providing information on laws and conditions around the world (including in the US). From the Q&A:

Organisations and individuals working to advance children's rights can contribute to the Wiki. This includes international and national NGOs, Children's Ombudspersons, legal organisations, governmental organisations and academics, among others.

Much needed.

Yesterday, the same day Troy Davis was executed, the government of Iran hanged a 17 year old.

Charles Darwin, godfather of terrorism

2011-09-20T14:50:00.005-04:00

I had to stop in the middle of Green Is the New Red when I read about a certain report. ALEC has been in the news over the past several months, and its corporate agenda is of course well known. But I was still taken aback to read of their 2003 report about animal rights and environmental activism:

In 2003, ALEC issued a report titled “Animal & Ecological Terrorism in America.” The Private Enterprise Board Chairman at the time was Kurt L. Malmgren, a senior vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. The editor of the report, Sandy Liddy Bourne, would later become vice president for policy and strategy at the Heartland Institute, which calls climate change “scare-mongering.” In a section titled “From Books to Bombs,” the report outlines the history of animal rights and environmental extremism, beginning with Darwin’s publication of The Descent of Man. According to ALEC, the voyage of the Beagle charted a course that led to the Animal Welfare Act and then to the ALF. The next step, the report warns, is physical violence. The authors make this warning repeatedly and dishonestly… (p. 127).

Potter has a link to the report on his site, and it does in fact suggest this:

They are hell-bent on revolutionizing a system of perceived abuse into one that abides by deeply rooted philosophies of fundamental animal equity and environmental preservation. Change has been slow to take root, both politically and within the psyche of the American public. Yet the movement has brought the nation from an understanding of the ethics of animal/ecological welfare to a presumption of fundamentally protected rights. Outlined below is a timeline of this historic and sustained struggle for animal rights organizations:

1859 – Philosophical roots bud as a result of Darwin’s publication of The Descent of Man where he claims, “There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.”
...

From Darwin’s initial theories on the nature of animals and other scholarly works concerning environmental sustainability, these groups have progressed to the modern day firebombing of those institutions that have caused a breach in their vision of good society.

So the philosophical ancestor of today’s “radical” animal rights movement is Charles Darwin? On the surface, Darwin’s an odd choice. If his scientific ideas were so conducive to today’s radicalism, we’d expect him to have been a radical in his own time. But in fact the ideas quoted in the report were shared by many people over the centuries. His observations are accurate but not really original. The Animal Rights Library includes this selection from Darwin (and, incidentally, one from Richard Dawkins), but it also includes works from Tolstoy, Gandhi, Paley, and Schweitzer. Religious and secular arguments (and believers and atheists) have long been and still are found on both sides of animal rights questions around the world.* Anti-vivisectionist movements existed in Darwin’s time, but he was no anti-vivisectionist radical: see this excellent piece by Eric Michael Johnson.

But I think the theory of evolution, what it suggests about the inseparability of humans from other animals, and its rejection by the Religious Right are at the heart of why Darwin’s writing was selected in the report as the intellectual ancestor of the animal rights movement. It’s an interesting question to what extent evolutionary knowledge affects people’s thinking about our ethical-political relationships with other species. As I’ve said before, I think scientific knowledge can play a role in developing our ethical sensibilities concerning other animals. No ethical position, much less any set of tactics, automatically or inevitably follows from this knowledge, though. People with a deep appreciation of evolution can still be unmoved ethically to protect nonhuman animals.

The link made in the ALEC report, though, isn’t an intellectual or empirical one. It’s politically motivated – an attempt on behalf of corporations to appeal to the Religious Right, whose ideology we saw in action in the hilarious “Religiosity and Global Warming Advocacy” panel at the Big Footprint conference. By insinuating a nebulous link between the ToE and (a caricature of) the animal rights and environmental movement, they can smear both. By opposing to them a vision of religion that doesn’t recognize the mass exploitation and destruction of nonhuman animals by humans as a fundamental moral issue – or even celebrates it - and a minimalist animal “welfare” program in the interest of corporations, they can promote both.

*This is discussed in Paul Waldau’s Animal Rights:

You're killin' me, Today

2011-09-19T13:18:00.003-04:00

So this morning's Today Show featured Dr. Roshini Raj talking about “Four Vaccinations That Every Woman Should Get.” These turn out to be the flu shot, DTAP, HPV, and Hepatitis B.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

From the transcript:

Guthrie: The next one is the vaccine for Human Papillomavirus, better known as HPV. Now, I was under the impression that you, a woman only needs to get this when, you either get it when you’re young or it’s not worth getting at all.

Raj: Well, right now it’s FDA approved for age, for women aged 12 [sic] until 26. And we think that after the age of 26 that most sexually active women have probably been exposed to most strains of HPV, so it won’t be as effective. However, it still could probably protect some women over the age of 26. But certainly if you’re under 26, sexually active, you should be getting this vaccine. This is a truly remarkable vaccine that could help prevent most cases of cervical cancer, so it’s really important. And by the way, men under the age of 26 should also think about getting it. It protects against genital warts, and would protect against passing this virus to other women.

Doesn’t the Today show have fact checkers to verify these claims before they’re aired? Raj’s remarks give the impression that FDA approval for older women is likely, so they should seriously consider it. In fact, in April the FDA denied Merck’s request to extend approval for the vaccine to women 27-45. It is not approved for women over 26. Why on earth is a health expert presenting it as a vaccine “all women” should get?

Michele Bachmann’s comments have stirred up discussion of the vaccine again, but it’s almost as though few are bothering to learn about the most basic issues related to the vaccine or cervical cancer in the US. I’ve posted with some links on this thread at Pharyngula, but I recommend this New York Times article from 2008 and this other 2008 piece from Common Dreams. From the latter:

Merck would like to expand vaccination with Gardasil to much older women, but even if the FDA approved it, there are serious cost-benefit questions. Merck has suffered a regulatory setback of its owh this year, when the FDA rejected its application to legally extend the ages for which Gardasil can be marketed. Currently, it is approved for girls and women between the ages of 9 to 26. Merck wanted to extend that to age 45, and initial reports said Merck had data to support the extension that they would submit to the FDA by the end of this summer.

August, however, saw a flurry of news stories and medical journal articles that cast serious doubt on the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of vaccinating women later in life. The August 21, 2008 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) carried both an editorial and a lengthy study on HPV vaccines. The editorial was written by Dr. Charlotte J. Haug, editor of The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association. She directly challenged the claim that HPV vaccination is effective at preventing cervical cancer. "Despite great expectations and promising results of clinical trials, we still lack sufficient evidence of an effective vaccine against cervical cancer," she wrote. "With so many essential questions still unanswered, there is good reason to be cautious."

The accompanying NEJM study, "Health and Economic Implications of HPV Vaccination in the United States," looks specifically at the cost-effectiveness of the HPV vaccine. Anytime someone raises the question of cost-effectiveness, of course, someone is bound to object that we can't put a price tag on human life. In reality, however, cost-benefit considerations always play a role in health decisions. With respect to cervical cancer in particular, the high cost of Gardasil compares poorly against simple Pap smears, which provide a time-tested, reliable and inexpensive diagnostic tool that can detect premalignant processes early and thereby prevent cervical cancer. It seems, therefore, that financial and public health sense should favor programs to ensure that all women, but especially those most at risk from cervical cancer, receive consistent and appropriate screening.

As for Gardasil, the NEJM study concluded that while the cost benefit of vaccinating twelve-year old girls falls within accepted guidelines for wealthy countries, the cost benefit declines rapidly as age increases. This finding is a major blow to Merck's efforts to promote intensive "catch up" vaccinations of girls and women who are over the age targeted by schools and proposed mandates. The benefit drops dramatically by the time women reach the maximum approved vaccination age of 26. In the even higher age range of 27 to 45 for which Merck is seeking additional approval, the calculated cost benefit is far outside the accepted range.

This information might seem to suggest that it is all the more important to vaccinate girls at the youngest age possible. Merck's Dr. Richard Haupt told the New York Times that the NEJM study "underscores the value of vaccinating pre-adolescent girls." But there is a big hitch. The NEJM study states clearly that its cost-benefit ratios are based on an assumption that the vaccine provides lifetime immunity to HPV. There is no evidence that this is actually the case. In fact, a number of indicators suggest one or more boosters will be needed during the recipients' lifetimes.

Even in the best-case scenario, HPV vaccines would only prevent 70% of cervical cancer cases, which means that regular and consistent screening, such as tried and true Pap smears, will remain critical for women's protection against cervical cancer. This means that the significant costs of the three shot initial Gardasil vaccination series (with a price tag of $450-$1,000, not including a possible booster) will be in addition to the existing costs of screening.

The NEJM article spelled out the bottom line: "If vaccine-induced immunity lasted only ten years, the vaccination of preadolescent girls provide only 2% marginal improvement in the reduction of the risk of cervical cancer as compared with screening alone."

It is irresponsible for those who are supposed to be educating the public about vaccines to make scientifically unsupported claims about them. It is also irresponsible to present HPV vaccines as a means of cancer prevention without noting declining effectiveness with age, the unknown duration of protection, the unknown long-term risks, and especially the fact that even the people who’ve received the vaccine prior to any exposure to HPV (and even if it turned out that the vaccine provided lifetime protection) still need to have regular Pap smears, as the vaccine only prevents the strains that cause 70% and not 100% of cervical cancers. There is a very real risk that people who’ve received the vaccine will believe themselves fully protected and forego regular cancer screenings. There’s also a risk that attention and resources will be diverted from screening, which is an extremely effective method of prevention (for all women and for all cervical cancers), educating about and reducing disparities in which could prevent the relatively few cases of cervical cancer that still occur in the US.

I have no medical expertise, so if anyone who does notices any errors in what I've prevented here I would appreciate the corrections.]

Psychiatrists and NIMH: Set the record straight

2011-09-18T17:08:00.006-04:00

The other day, the Today show featured a health segment with Dr. Nancy Snyderman talking to Natalie Morales about the importance of early detection of various conditions, including depression.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

From the transcript:

Snyderman: But the hallmark for depression versus just having a lousy day is hopelessness. People say it's like being in a steel can where you just can't claw yourself up the sides. If you're irritable, you no longer like to do the things you like to do, and I mean reduced sex drive, like nothing brings you satisfaction anymore, sometimes fatigue, you'll hear women say I just don't want to get out of bed in the morning. Or difficulty concentrating. Any of those alone may not be enough, but put them together and it's important. And for you and I who have children, you have to really look at transitional times in a child's life. Pre-adolescents can really become depressed and when you see it as a parent you may not notice it. But changing grades, friends at school.

Morales: Hormones.

Snyderman: All of that stuff. We even know that in utero we can start to pick up on depressed babies based on how they respond to music and what their overall environment is like. This is not something to be worried about; it's not something to be chastised. It is really something to understand, because there are phenomenal treatments, including therapy.

Morales: And it's usually lower levels of serotonin that triggers depression?

Snyderman: The whole neurotransmitters. And a lot of times it's medicine. Increasingly we believe it's medicine and some kind of therapy.

Now, there’s so much wrong here I wouldn’t know where to begin (how exciting for pharmaceutical companies to have that vast in-utero market still to exploit!), but this last response struck me. In the past couple of months, I’ve noted Abraham Nussbaum asserting that he “know[s] of no serious psychiatrist who believes that psychotropic drugs ‘fix chemical imbalances in the brains’ of their patients” and NIMH head Thomas Insel conceding that notions of neurotransmitter imbalances as the cause of depression are “beginning to look antiquated.” The subject also arose in the recent exchange about Marcia Angell’s article, in which her interlocutors Friedman and Nierenberg refer to serotonin deficiency as “an outdated and disproven chemical imbalance theory of depression.”*

I just read Bruce Levine’s Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy,** which is a few years old, and was surprised [?] to discover that Insel’s been saying this since at least 2007 (making his recent “beginning to believe” sound rather odd). Despite the fact that the monoamine hypothesis has long been discredited,

…the general public continues to hear (through antidepressant commercials and from many mental health authorities) about the neurotransmitter deficiency theory of depression, and so it was news to many Americans when Newsweek, in a February 26, 2007, cover story about depression, reported: "For decades, scientists believed the main cause of depression was low levels of the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine.... [However, a] depressed brain is not necessarily underproducing something, says Dr. Thomas Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health - it's doing too much.... Instead of focusing on boosting neurotransmitters (the function of the antidepressants in the popular SSRI category such as Prozac and Zoloft), scientists are developing medications that block the production of excess stress chemicals."

Pharmaceutical companies, however, have been so effective at marketing the neurotransmitter deficiency theory of depression that even though the NIMH has now retreated from this view, the general public and many doctors continue to believe it. The mental health establishment has not yet zealously publicized its newer depression theory - that excess stress chemicals (such as cortisol) can cause nerve cell damage - perhaps because it would confuse millions of patients who continue taking neurotransmitter-enhancing drugs (it would certainly upset the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture them) (p. 23).

Amusingly (OK, darkly amusingly), the newest depression “theory” from Insel is completely different from the 2007 “theory,” but that this absurd situation continues year after year – the repeated acknowledgements that the alleged mechanism for the alleged efficacy of antidepressants is wrong with at the same time no real effort made to correct widespread public misperceptions stemming from doctors and from advertising - is amazing and unacceptable. The public has a right to know what the science has shown about this important question, and it’s well past time for people who obviously know the facts to set them out plainly and honestly.

* As Nussbaum does with Whitaker, Friedman and Nierenberg suggest that Angell is ignorantly or disingenuously setting up a straw man by pointing out the scientific discrediting of the chemical imbalance idea: “Angell uses an outdated and disproven chemical imbalance theory of depression (i.e., serotonin deficiency) as a straw man to deny that depression has any biological basis at all.”

Angell replies: “Contrary to Friedman and Nierenberg, I do not 'deny that depression has any biological basis at all'. I know very well that all thoughts, emotions, and behaviors have their origin in the brain. But it is a great leap from recognizing the obvious fact that mental states arise in the brain to knowing why and how they arise. …As for the chemical imbalance theory of depression being a straw man, I still hear it invoked frequently. Even Oldham seems to entertain it in his letter, saying ‘…there is no consensus on whether these imbalances are causes of mental disorders or symptoms of them’.”

** A mixed bag, ranging from the science-based and truly insightful to the borderline wooish and irritating. I recommend…the good parts. I can’t be too harsh as it was through him that I read about Ignacio Martín-Baró.

Morgan case update from the Orca Coalition

2011-09-18T14:45:00.002-04:00

The coalition's Twitter feed (@orkacoalitie) linked to this update earlier today:

First of all we would like to thank you for the wonderful support we have received from the moment Morgan was taken from the sea. This has meant a lot to us but also to Morgan. This support is what keeps us going and gives us the extra energy to keep up the fight day after day.

We would also like to give you an update on the current situation. Unfortunately we cannot go into the details on some parts, but hopefully this gives more clarity.

This last week the Orca Coalition has been writing and collecting additional documents that we could submit to the Ministry following the hearing on 9 September. These documents serve to support our arguments for Morgan's release.

In the near future it should become clear what the Ministry will decide. Will it be Loro Parque in Tenerife, or will they finally decide that Morgan can return to her family in the wild? Because we certainly take into account a negative decision, we are preparing ourselves for a possible subsequent lawsuit. Also raising funds to cover the legal expenses is badly needed.

Of course we hope that the Ministry will make the right decision, allowing Morgan to finally begin her rehabilitation and a life of freedom in the prospect, from which much can be learned. If the Ministry decides to release Morgan we will continue to work on her rehabilitation and we will give support where needed.

We hope to be able to give you more information soon.

The Orca Coalition

Interlude - Shelf Life

2011-09-17T09:51:00.001-04:00

Deep Water (that's right - another excellent documentary)

2011-09-15T14:09:00.004-04:00

The story is unbelievable, but it would be worth it for the sailing footage alone. I wish there had been a bit more information about the subsequent fates of the other sailors and their family members.

POV: "If a Tree Falls"

2011-09-14T10:56:00.004-04:00

Saw it last night on PBS. You can watch it on their site for a few weeks (unfortunately, I don't know if that holds outside the US). I thought it was pretty well done, though it didn't devote sufficient attention to the radical and irreversible destruction carried out by corporations. It happens that I had just started Will Potter's Green Is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement Under Siege

last week, and it appears more comprehensive. But I recommend the film as well.

Human Rights Watch demands investigation of killings of peasants in Honduras

2011-09-13T10:37:00.002-04:00

While a US human rights delegation is in Honduras in response to urgent pleas, Human Rights Watch has issued a public call for action:

...Honduras is party to several international treaties, including the American Convention on Human Rights. These treaties obligate countries to deter and prevent rights violations, investigate and prosecute offenders, and provide remedies to victims.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has held that “the State has the obligation to use all the legal means at its disposal to combat [impunity], since impunity fosters chronic recidivism of human rights violations and total defenselessness of victims and their relatives.”

Susan G. Davis, Spectacular Nature

2011-09-12T22:46:00.005-04:00

I read Susan Davis’ Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience

a couple of months ago, and it seems useful to write a bit about it now in light of the Morgan case. The book is from 1997 – I may have attended one of the Shamu shows she writes about in the early ‘90s – though it doesn’t feel dated. It covers a range of aspects of SeaWorld, from working conditions and marketing research to the context of urbanizing San Diego, but one of the most important themes is the corporate vision of nature and conservation promoted by the parks, “one of the most popular and available versions of the wild that contemporary American and international tourists can encounter” (p. 9).

As Davis notes,

Sea World's versions of nature - carefully produced, manufactured, and coordinated from a mega-corporate point of view - are, of course, not the only ones available. But never before have images of nature had such a direct and powerful link to corporate capitalism or such wide dissemination through the mass media. The same forces involved in the biosphere's exploitation have an important stake in nature's definition and representation (p. 18).

So SeaWorld and its displays are key sites of corporate political management. In a model founded on individual consumption, nature is represented to SeaWorld’s largely white, wealthier audience as “a commodity for sale in its own right, in order to sell other things and to help people feel good about larger social projects and arrangements, including the high-consumption economy typified by the theme park itself” (p. 30). Indeed, “in the late twentieth century, American business has worked hard to define consumption as a form of concern, political action, and participation,” leading many people to regard the act of visiting the park itself as an “act of caring” (p. 39).

The orcas, referred to by management as the parks’ “core product” (p. 28), are the main attraction. The animal shows grow out of a “genteel history of nature appreciation,” imperial conquest and its representation, and the tawdry world of circuses and side shows. While other marine mammals have a longer history of performance, killer whales have only been performing since Shamu*’s arrival in 1965. There has long been protest of SeaWorld’s capture and display of animals. The passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972 – “[t]he park bitterly resisted the National Marine Fisheries Service's interpretation of the Act and other animal protection legislation as "anti-zoo," "irrational," and "needless over-regulation" (p. 68) - made matters more difficult for SeaWorld, particularly after they lost important legal battles in 1985. “The whaling issue,” Davis argues, “forced Sea World to undertake a public relations offensive to convince their regional and national audience that they had the orcas' best interests at heart” (p. 69).

Their response to public protest and legislation was to put a scientific veneer on their activities: “The managers hoped that a more rational image of study and science would help counter the activists' assertions that keeping whales in captivity was simply commercialism pushed to its cruelest limit” (p. 69). Sea World beefed up the research institute, spinning its purpose as scientific and educational. Davis calls it largely “a new kind of theme park performance. Frequent mention of the institute in theme park exhibits constructs Sea World as a place of responsible scientific investigation and unfolding knowledge, and emphatically not a site of animal exploitation” (p. 70). As she notes, research is conducted there – often funded by corporations and government – but much is applied research seeking to serve both clients’ needs and SeaWorld’s own (e.g., research on captive animals).

SeaWorld also became very active in education and “outreach,” both in the media and through programs for students in public education. These programs have been closely tied (in fact subservient) to company PR, are generally unrelated to any research conducted, and present – as the parks do in general – a corporate-endorsed vision of science and conservation. SeaWorld’s materials

show or tell very little about the complex patterns of animal life and society in the wild. To do so might emphasize how far from the wild the animals are at Sea World. To see some version of real "wildness," the audience would have to see something potentially complex and confusing, something perhaps not transparently visible or harmonious or colorful at all (p. 116).

The view is far from comprehensive or ecological:

The audience's good feelings about animals, then, support judicious stewardship and ratify the dominant managerial role of humanity. But Sea World's explicit educational philosophy doesn't extend much beyond fact delivery and cultivation of feeling, since very little time or energy are spent actually explaining complex ecosystemic relations (or even what an ecosystem is), or exploring relations between humans and the nonhuman living world outside the theme park (p. 146).

Disturbingly, at the time of Davis’ writing, virtually no mention was made of evolution, and these references had actually declined over time. As she writes of the Shamu shows:

Some slight mentions of evolutionary history could be found in past scripts. For instance, one show mentioned the fact that whales developed from an archaic land mammal and so retain the nub of a digit in the pectoral fin. By the time of "Shamu New Visions," these vestigial mentions had been selected out, since Sea World now scrupulously avoids any mention of evolutionary theory in its education or entertainment programs (p. 221).

Davis quotes from a 1991 training manual obtained by the Orlando Sentinel and quoted in Harper’s magazine in 1992**, which advised: "Evolve: because evolution is a controversial theory, use the word `adapt."' As Davis argues, “This is one measure of how serious Sea World's science education is, so exquisitely sensitive is it to market pressures. Sea World may be sensitive not only to antievolutionists among its commercial audience, but to the growing number of private Christian schools in its education market” (pp. 298-299). As she makes clear, this is but an illustration of the broader problems with corporate influenced science education: they seek, of course, not primarily to convey scientific knowledge but to market the company to a target population.

In general, through these efforts the corporation seeks to present itself as a responsible environmental steward: “Research puts a gentle face on the human penetration and control of nature, and conversely, human penetration of the natural world and environment can be seen only as rational investigation” (p. 230). As with scientific research, so with conservation. SeaWorld presents itself through all of these activities as a force for meaningful conservation. In keeping with the corporate message, environmental destruction is shown divorced from corporate action (at the time Davis wrote and until 2009, SeaWorld was owned by Anheuser-Busch) or government policy and presented as simply a matter of individual habits. SeaWorld, itself a generator of massive amounts of waste, “educates”*** children and adults that their primary means of marine environmental action is better personal habits. “Of course,” Davis notes,

a careful outlining of the issues involved with marine pollution would mean discussing agricultural and industrial runoff, toxic waste dumping, the trash explosion, oil spills, and undersea nuclear testing, to name a few controversial issues. As the entertainment arm of a huge corporation with extensive agribusiness operations, Sea World can appear environmental but it can't point fingers or even name issues. It can, however, suggest to its audience that corporate America has the best interests of animals and the environment at heart (p. 150).

And we can see even more clearly now that marine pollution of this sort is only one factor, added to ocean acidification, corporate industrial fishing, and numerous forms of habitat destruction. Davis concludes:

Not least among the things missing is a broad understanding that environmental problems are problems of whole economies and ways of life, and that solutions must go far beyond "don't litter" lectures and beach cleanups (p. 243).

In sum, then, SeaWorld shares the problems associated with theme parks in general, and adds to them both the capture and exploitation of marine animals and the propagation of a vision of nature and the human and corporate role within it that obscures the real problems and leads people to accept corporate claims to environmental stewardship and to misunderstand what needs to done.

*There have been and continue to be several whales, male and female, playing the “Shamu” role.

**The article’s title, appropriately, was “Chickens of the Sea.”

***I use the past tense aware that the book was published several years ago. Although the rhetoric of “corporate social responsibility” has become more sophisticated over the past decade, including giving lip service to some of the issues raised by Davis and others, there have been no significant changes in basic corporate practices or their preferred model of environmental (in)action.

Kenya bans FGM

2011-09-12T20:04:00.004-04:00

From the Guardian:

Kenya follows a number of African governments in outlawing the practice. According to the Pan African news agency, at the time of the African Union summit in June, which proposed prohibition of FGM, Benin, Ivory Coast, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Niger, Nigeria, Kenya, Central African Republic, Senegal, Chad, Tanzania, Togo and Uganda already had legislation against it.

But in nine countries (including some of those where it is illegal) it is still widely practised. In Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Mali, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan, 85% of women undergo mutilation.

(No citations given, it should be noted.) Can't say I'm thrilled that "the law even prohibits derogatory remarks about women who have not undergone FGM," though I suspect that's more symbolic than meant to be meaningfully enforced.

Morgan PSA

2011-09-12T19:37:00.004-04:00

No updates about Morgan the Orca, but I give you this video (Tim Zimmermann called it "a bit overcooked," and I have to agree, but it makes its point):

Gay rights in Poland and the RCC

2011-09-12T18:37:00.005-04:00

I talked in a recent post about the efforts of the Catholic Church to deny reproductive rights in Poland. I've learned of another WikiLeaks US cable from 2009, this one concluding that "Polish society and the Polish Government have a long way to go toward ending discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation" and citing the RCC as a major "source of anti-gay views":

Gays and lesbians face discrimination in the educational system, in the workplace, when renting or buying property, and in access to health services. Some have been subject to or threatened with physical violence on the basis of their sexual orientation....

---

The Catholic Church plays a significant role in the formation and propagation of anti-gay attitudes in Polish society, especially in rural areas. In a society that is 94 percent Catholic, the Church is widely recognized as a political and moral force. While the Polish Episcopate has condemned violence and discrimination against gays and lesbians, this message is often ignored - and sometimes contradicted - by parish priests in small towns and villages, some of whom present homosexuality as a deviant condition. Moreover, the Church continues to label homosexual acts as sins and calls on homosexuals to practice abstinence. Most Polish opponents of gay rights cite "Catholic values" and "natural law" to support their views. In November 2008, for example, users of the internet forum "Fronda" launched a boycott campaign against IKEA in response to its gay-friendly advertising. The campaign was named "I'm a Catholic and I don't shop in IKEA."

I'm troubled that the story of these cables and the dismal situation of sexual and reproductive rights in Poland (this article places it within a broader context of pro-natalist policies in the region that have disproportionately harmed women) has appeared of late almost exclusively on rightwing Catholic blogs and sites - I found the most recent cable through a link to something called LifeSiteNews, which I won't link to. It does seem to be under discussion to some extent elsewhere. A conference earlier this week was apparently organized to foster acceptance of the role of the Church in Polish politics: "'The goal of this conference is a mutual discussion about what is missing in our current political system and what values politics should serve,' conference organizer Wladyslaw Zuziak was quoted as saying by the Catholic News Agency." At the event, though, German president Christian Wulff warned against people with "convictions that divide people into 'us' and 'them' based on culture, religion or nationality" coming to power and that "fanatical Christianity can bring suffering."

"What makes us human"

2011-09-12T18:27:00.003-04:00

I'm probably not the first to say this, but... I hear almost constant references to "what makes us human," "what separates us from the animals," and the like, including in contexts that have nothing to do with other animals or living things. I've even done it myself fairly recently, I believe. There's enormous variety in the specific characteristic mentioned, and they're all debatable. They also have a dark history of excluding certain humans from full moral consideration. Which leads me to wonder, what's the purpose of these alleged distinctions? Why is it so important to try to draw this specific line? What do they say about our attitudes towards the non-human?

Morgan update and more about Loro Parque

2011-09-10T10:37:00.003-04:00

My previous post discussed the battle being waged for the freedom of Morgan, the young rescued orca. You can follow events on Twitter - @orkacoalitie - or on FB. What the court in the Netherlands decided yesterday is still unclear to me, but from the most recent tweet appears generally positive for Morgan.

Tim Zimmermann has posted "A Close-Up Look At Loro Parque," following up on his earlier work. This first part of his exposé includes the full text of the report he received from a former AV supervisor in the park's killer whale section. Loro Parque is the Canary Islands facility where SeaWorld transferred four of "their" orcas several years ago and where they are now pushing to have Morgan sent to breed and perform.

SeaWorld in the news; Morgan the orca

2011-09-09T15:33:00.005-04:00

Dawn Brancheau's family is suing in federal court asking that OSHA, which investigated her 2010 killing by Tilikum (they recently fined the theme park for violations, which SeaWorld is contesting), not release images of the event.

In related news, SeaWorld is involved in opposing the freeing of another orca, Morgan, from the Dolfinarium Harderwijk in the Netherlands and pushing for her to be sent to Loro Parque in the Canary Islands. An international campaign has been mounted to get Morgan released back into the wild, including scientists like New Zealand orca expert Ingrid Visser, who has argued that captivity is already taking a serious toll on Morgan's health. According to the article linked to above, a judge in the Netherlands is deciding on Morgan's fate today.

Visser's organization the Orca Research Trust reports that a program about Morgan co-produced by the BBC and the Discovery Channel was to begin airing last week in the UK, but I can't find any information about it on the Discovery Channel's site. Is it a simple delay, or is someone blocking its airing in the US? Any information would be much appreciated.

***CORRECTION***: Ah. The documentary isn't about Morgan but more generally about their work and a NZ orca they rescued.

David Graeber interviewed about Debt: The First 5,000 Years

2011-09-09T15:06:00.005-04:00

I wasn't planning to post about the book

until I'd finished it (it's quite long), but I noticed The Big Picture's interview with Graeber was just put up a few days ago. I've read enough of the book to be able to recommend it highly and without reservations.

Pharma payments and CoI disclosure news

2011-09-07T21:55:00.007-04:00

Retraction Watch reports that Anil Potti (who's had five papers retracted to date) didn't disclose his corporate relationships at the time he published papers in JAMA which haven't been retracted.

It happens that this was reported on the same day as this announcement from ProPublica (I love the PR response from PhRMA):

Tonight, ProPublica will be posting a significant update to its Dollars for Docs database [1], adding new payment reports from 12 drug companies that comprise more than 40 percent of U.S. drug sales. Hundreds of thousands of doctors will be added to the database.

JAMA and other journals rely on self reports. Is someone going to go through the database and verify that all of these payments/relationships were disclosed in any publications by these individuals?

Mammal camera traps and conservation refugees

2011-09-07T13:28:00.006-04:00

Conservation International has a project to place cameras in tropical forests to photograph mammals:

Although conservationists are concerned about tropical forest mammals, there is very little information on what is actually happening to most of these mammal communities as the threats of climate change and deforestation loom over them. But now we have system to gather it: the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network.

TEAM has the largest monitoring system for terrestrial vertebrates on the planet. Instead of having people walking around the forest looking for mammals — which is very inefficient, as these animals are usually rare and hard to spot — TEAM deploys camera traps over large areas of forest all over the tropics (eight monitoring sites in Latin America, five in Africa and Madagascar and four in Southeast Asia).

They have 52,000 photos, and the ones they've made publicly available are cool:

The part that worries me is what follows:

At each monitoring site, these camera traps work 24/7 for one month, taking pictures of everything that crosses their path — including hunters. These hunter images could potentially be used by park authorities to help control poaching in these areas.

This picture is labelled "Poacher caught on camera in Uganda":

First, I don't know about the legality of photographing people in this way or using the photos for this purpose. More generally, though, I'm concerned about the identification of these people as criminal "poachers." I worry that some may be (not that these are necessarily mutually exclusive categories) local people, including members of indigenous groups who've been forced off their lands, trying to survive. I have a problem with wealthy BINGOs like CI, who themselves partner with the very corporations responsible for massive environmental destruction in these areas, portraying poor local people as villains for local governments and their international audience. I recommend Mark Dowie's Conservation Refugees. From an article by Dowie about the book:

“We are arrogant,” was the confession of a CI executive working in South America, who asked me not to identify her. I was heartened by her admission until she went on to suggest that this was merely a minor character flaw. In fact, arrogance was cited by almost all of the nearly one hundred indigenous leaders I met with as a major impediment to constructive communication with big conservation.

If field observations and field workers’ sentiments trickle up to the headquarters of CI and the other BINGOs, there could be a happy ending to this story. There are already positive working models of socially sensitive conservation on every continent, particularly in Australia, Bolivia, Nepal, and Canada, where national laws that protect native land rights leave foreign conservationists no choice but to join hands with indigenous communities and work out creative ways to protect wildlife habitat and sustain biodiversity while allowing indigenous citizens to thrive in their traditional settlements.

Go, Electronic Frontier Foundation!

2011-09-07T13:15:00.006-04:00

A few days ago, they posted the audio of their arguments in two warrantless wiretapping cases (that post also contains useful background and links). Then they put up links to the videos themselves:

(I've watched the Jewel arguments, but not yet the Hepting. Good stuff.)

A plausible explanation for the strange support for neoliberal policies in the US

2011-09-07T13:02:00.006-04:00

From Randy Hohle:

Neoliberalism is the political and economic framework based on privatizing public works, removing rules and regulations over businesses that protect citizens, and tax cuts for the wealthy. You might wonder why anyone outside of the wealthiest 1% would support such policies. Here’s my theory: neoliberalism was made possible by a racialized language of privatization that defined all things private as “white” and all things public as “black.”

...The reality is that white resentment towards blacks has made neoliberalism possible despite 30 years of failed policy and to the detriment of whites and blacks.

One more reason to like the Red Sox

2011-09-07T12:49:00.003-04:00

Their support of LGBT anti-bullying campaigns:

Of course, the bigoted clowns don't like it:

The site itself and its companion site lead kids to homosexual pornography and homosexual groups with a history of targeting kids with graphic homosexual material. Far from "helping" troubled kids, these sites would add considerably to their psychological and medical trauma.

…

But worse, the Boston Red Sox are helping the radical homosexual movement push their depraved agenda on troubled kids, many of whom probably need real help. They seem fine with that. By any rational measure, this is simply evil.

Evil?! No, that's the Yankees.

Another step forward in repression tourism

2011-09-07T12:34:00.005-04:00

The other day I posted about the IISG's public collection of graphic materials related to contested tourist destinations. It turns out, if this report is to be believed, that the Romanian Ministry of Tourism hopes to encourage nostalgic police-state tourism:

More than 20 years after the fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu, the country’s ministry of tourism has announced the creation of a "propaganda itinerary," which will take in specific places that figured large in the life of the "Conducător." According to the minister concerned, the initiative is justified, among other reasons, by the fact that "50 per cent of Romanians, who believe that life was better under his rule, regret the passing of the dictator," while "40 per cent believe that Communism was a good thing."

An exchange about Marcia Angell's "The Illusions of Psychiatry"

2011-09-05T19:21:00.005-04:00

I was focused on other things last month and missed "‘The Illusions of Psychiatry’: An Exchange," featuring responses to Marcia Angell's two-part article/book review on psychiatric drugs from June. Be sure to read all the way down to her reply. I don't have much to add to it at the moment, except to reiterate her argument that these (weak) responses mischaracterize her, Kirsch, and Whitaker on several key points.

Repression, tourism, and social struggles

2011-09-05T19:12:00.004-04:00

The International Institute of Social History has a collection of materials on a dozen contested tourist destinations from the past several decades.

The tourist paradise and the police state may very well go hand and hand. A flourishing tourist sector adds to the economy and the international prestige of a country, political prisoners, concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, murder, and disappearances, notwithstanding. The tourist usually remains unaware of the signs of violence and repression. In many cases this ignorance is a matter of choice. The adversaries of the police state are well aware of the impact of tourism and try to mobilize public opinion on this very point. They advocate international sanctions and boycotts, morally appeal to the individual traveler or organize bomb attacks to frighten tourists.

I’ve selected the sticker calling for a tourism boycott in Guatemala in 1980 since, as they note, this was a transnational union-organized campaign.

This brings to mind current touristic and retirement development in Honduras, as repression continues and disappearances begin. Life Visions, whose CEO was treated with a special award by Honduran “president” Porfirio Lobo shortly after the Honduras is Open for Business event, was featured in June in Canadian Business magazine:

As retirees colonize the shorelines of Central American and Caribbean countries at breakneck speed, the best deals are reserved for those who buy in early. Which helps explain why poverty-plagued Honduras, still recovering from the 2009 coup that deposed its former president, is at the cutting edge. Taking its cue from development on the nearby island of Roatan, Mississauga, Ont. Based Life Vision Properties is luring retirees to the mainland city of Trujillo with bargain prices and picturesque vistas. The firm has already sold some 500 properties.

(By the way, the IISG now has a Latin America desk, and will step up its efforts to gather materials from truth commissions and leftwing movements in the region.)

More on Barrio Adentro

2011-09-04T22:01:00.005-04:00

...And sometimes delayed feed-reading is a problem. I didn't catch this coincidental announcement for a talk by Steve Brouwer in New York until today. Unfortunately, the event was the other day. Happily, though, for anyone interested, the post links to a couple of articles from Social Medicine about Barrio Adentro.

Abortion in Poland, the US, Venezuela

2011-09-04T21:37:00.004-04:00

Sometimes it’s good that I don’t read all of my feeds in real time, only getting to some posts after the urgency of the situation they describe has passed. That was the case with a post by HRW a few days ago – “Poland: Reject Blanket Ban on Abortion.” I was relieved to find that the law had failed. On the other hand, the state of reproductive rights in Poland is dismal. Abortions are only legal under three circumstances: the pregnancy poses a threat to the health or life of the woman or results from rape, or the fetus is severely deformed or sick. And even under these circumstances, it seems they’re nearly impossible to obtain. Legal abortions numbered a mere 583 (in a population of 11 million women of childbearing age) in 2010. It’s estimated that well more than 100,000 abortions actually occurred, not counting those obtained in foreign countries; these were illegal and expensive (a veritable racket), beyond the reach of many poor women.

It’s difficult to estimate the suffering and death this has caused, and it’s especially perverse given that abortion was legal under Communism. The denial of human rights to women in Poland does not simply reflect cultural attitudes. It results from the long-term targeted interference of the Catholic Church in the country’s politics. As Wikileaks documents have revealed, the Vatican has looked upon Poland as a place to realize their authoritarian, misogynistic fantasies in the 21st century and a fortress against secular Europe. I hope this law’s failure signals that the Vatican is losing its grip on Poland and that the country will make progress on reproductive rights.

Unfortunately, many US states are determined to outdo them. The Guttmacher Institute reports that

In the first six months of 2011, states enacted 162 new provisions related to reproductive health and rights. Fully 49% of these new laws seek to restrict access to abortion services, a sharp increase from 2010, when 26% of new laws restricted abortion. The 80 abortion restrictions enacted this year are more than double the previous record of 34 abortion restrictions enacted in 2005—and more than triple the 23 enacted in 2010. All of these new provisions were enacted in just 19 states.

Venezuela provides an example of how revolutionary social change, even that which challenges the Church and leads to important gains for women in some respects, can leave behind women’s most basic human rights. I was unpleasantly surprised to read in Revolutionary Doctors Brouwer’s description of a local health committee meeting:

…There was a short discussion about birth control, with everyone lauding the free contraception available in various forms at each walk-in clinic and asking for even more information to be provided by both doctors and health committee volunteers. No one, however, brought up the subject of abortion, which generally is not accepted by most lower-class Venezuelan women. For this reason, I was told, the Cuban doctors, who are used to providing abortion on demand in their own country, do not proselytize about the subject to their Venezuelan patients. (KL 1489-1493).

It should be noted that this was several years ago, but it’s probable that Brouwer is underestimating the strength of desire for reproductive rights in the country even then. Women continue to be sacrificed by politicians and governments who claim to be fighting for justice. It should be discussed in this context, as the criminalization of abortion is not just a denial of human rights but a serious public health concern. Estrella Gutiérrez reports that unsafe abortions are the second leading cause of maternal mortality in the region. The Catholic hierarchy hates Chávez anyway and would like nothing better than to get rid of him (as they helped do with Aristide). I don’t care if many politicians, including Chávez, see themselves and their movements as in part inspired by Christianity. No church should have any role in government policy.

The Day for the Decriminalization of Abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean is the 28th of this month, and I plan to post more at that time. There is movement, and I’m optimistic for the expansion of reproductive rights globally, including in the three countries just discussed. But a major element in effecting that expansion has to be getting religious, and especially Vatican, influence out of policy.

To what end? Because...?

2011-09-04T00:46:00.004-04:00

"I want people to leave religion..."

"I want people to embrace science..."

In the answers to these questions lies the direction of "our"* movement.

*Whether or not it's mine depends on the answers, I suppose.

Nice!

2011-09-03T18:12:00.004-04:00

[Sou

Oops, I mean [Source]

NLG offers Nerd Scare resources

2011-09-03T13:32:00.003-04:00

(I had to use "Nerd Scare" - yesterday was the first time I heard it and it made me laugh.)

The National Lawyers Guild last month put up a page, AnoNLG, for cyberactivists* with "Know Your Rights" resources and contact information for those targeted by the government. It's a strange looking site - so much so that I had to confirm that it is indeed a product of the NLG - and I hope it'll be improved over time, but the links to pamphlets and other information on the right look useful and their twitter feed on the left from what I've seen has some interesting notices.

*(of which, needless to say, I am not one :))

The Global Social Justice Journal

2011-09-03T13:09:00.004-04:00

The exciting new journal is calling for papers.