Denialism Blog

Month: July 2007

  • Saletan on the Ethics of Stem Cells

    William Saletan takes the position that progressives have no real bioethical position on stem cells in his most recent column in Slate. I’m a bit disappointed with Saletan over this one, because in his never ending quest to be thoughtful about everything, he’s usually much more fair to people – even those he disagrees with. But listen to his characterization of “progressive bioethics”.

    I have problems with liberals. A lot of them talk about religion as though it’s a communicable disease. Some are amazingly obtuse to other people’s qualms. They show no more interest in an embryo than in a skin cell. It’s like I’m picking up a radio signal and they’re not. I’d think I was crazy, except that a few billion other people seem to be picking up the same signal. At most liberal bioethics conferences, the main question in dispute, in one form or another, is whether to be more afraid of capitalism or religion.

    …

    Lately, “progressives” have taken to issuing talking points. Every time a peer-reviewed science journal reports some new way of deriving embryonic stem cells without having to kill embryos, I can count on receiving a “progressive bioethics” e-mail that warns me not to be distracted by such fantasies. Bioethics has become politics by another name.

    …

    To fend off the bullies, the nerds have seized on stem cells. Some of them think embryonic stem-cell cures are just around the corner. Others know better but believe in the research anyway. What unites them is awareness that stem cells score very well in polls, much better than anything else on their agenda. Of 32 commentaries posted on the Web page of the “Progressive Bioethics Initiative,” 26 focus on stem cells. Some don’t even address ethics; they just lay out the polls. Stem cells are a chance for liberal bioethicists to beat the living daylights out of their opponents.

    …

    So I went to talk to them last night. I bitched about the atheism, the talking points, and the word progressive. I made a pitch for my version of liberalism. The freedom to strip-mine embryos, have a baby at 60, or kill yourself can’t be the end of the story. Not everything that’s legal is moral. The most interesting moral questions aren’t the ones you can settle with simple rules. They’re the subtle ones you find in literature and real life.

    Conservative bioethicists think that when we recoil at something in this gray area, our repugnance signals a moral problem. Liberal bioethicists dismiss this argument as “fuzzy intuitionism” based on an illogical “yuck factor.” The liberals are making a big mistake. Fuzz and yuck are very real. They’re a lot more real to most people than bioethics is. You can’t just ignore them or wish them away. You have to help people sort them out and honor their concerns in a way that doesn’t require prohibition. An embryo may be less than a person, but it’s more than a tissue source. The government can’t stop you from having a baby at 60, but don’t be so reckless.

    Is this a fair characterization of the ethics of using stem cells for research and maybe one day, tissue-engineering and cures? It may be what he took from the meeting, but I hope that isn’t the extent of progressive or liberal bioethics on stem cells, a desire to use a hot-button issue to beat conservatives at the polls. As someone who thinks this research important, I’ll try and do Saletan a favor and create a positive argument for embryonic stem cell research.
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  • What's the matter with this curve?

    MarkCC takes down this idiotic analysis from AEI that appeared in the WSJ Friday.

    I saw this curve yesterday

    on their editorial page and thought, what kind of idiot would fit a curve to an obvious linear regression? Not really having math expertise I dismissed it as probable crap, and moved on.

    Thankfully, MarkCC whips out the math and shows exactly how stupid this stupid analysis is. I’m glad for this, because I knew it was stupid to fit a curve to it, but not how exceedingly stupid it was.

    One should also note their recent editorials which include, “The Surge is Working” and “Sick Propaganda“.

    Does anyone need any additional explanation for why I consider the WSJ editorial page to be a denialist organization? It’s a virtual clearinghouse of denialism on par with Uncommon Descent. Their denialist garbage ranges from bad economic arguments using laughable math, to global warming denialism, to typical libertarian crankery (FDA kills people, the EPA = fascism), to what might soon qualify as a new branch of denialism – the “everything is fine/we’re winning the war denialism”.

    ** PZ mocks it too.

    ***An update *** It is not my intent that everyone I link as spreading BS to be deserving of the denialist title. It takes a lot more effort to get that designation, namely the use of a significant number of the tactics in an attempt to attack legitimate science or fact. I don’t agree with the Offit editorial and believe that it’s based on a straw man attack on Moore’s movie. By linking it without context Orac and others clearly have felt that I was labeling Offit or Omar Fadhil denialists by default. I do think it’s an example of the WSJ editorial page acting as an aggregator of BS. I’ll spend some more time in the future talking about the WSJ and examples of how they do this and construct a more thorough takedown of their use of the tactics.

  • Wow Orac, you found a real winner

    Does Tim Slagle strike anyone else as being a crank?

    I feel like we should lend Orac a hand. He’s had to deal with the anti-global warming denialism from this guy all on his own. Let’s do a take down of this wise man’s approach to global warming science.
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  • Genomicron wants to help ID out

    We’ve discussed the incompetence of cranks in their critical reasoning skills, and their inability to think about science in a lucid or productive fashion. But have we tried to help them? Have we moved beyond caddy criticisms and actually bothered to extend a hand to our fellow man? Clearly not. Rather than continuing to mock ID for being the intellectually-dishonest, crank-laden nonsense that it is, why don’t we help them become a real science?

    Genomicron has some suggested experiments to help ID get on the right track. Maybe, if they are legitimately interested in science, we’ll be able to direct them towards some productive research, since they can’t seem to figure out how to get beyond their current promiscuous teleology and crank arguments without help.

    Here are some of the suggested experiments:
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  • Now this is the genetic fallacy

    Hey Luskin. This is what a genetic fallacy actually looks like.

    The Darwinists devoutly desire to avoid the true history of their creed, and usually the media assist in the cover up–unknowingly, I would like to think. The “Inherit the Wind” trope that is monotonously employed by journalists–not to mention Judge Jones of Dover, PA fame–derives from the play and movie of that name. But this cliché, which is the source of what many journalists think about the subject, was fiction and not even aimed at the evolution issue so much as the danger of McCarthyism in the 1950s. The real Scopes trial in 1925 was rather different. And so was the biology textbook that was at the heart of the Scopes trial.

    Hunter’s A Civic Biology was racist. It advocated therapeutic eugenics–and it was widely used in schools around America, not just in Tennessee. John West’s forthcoming book, Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science, includes an extensive examination of the subject as it relates to the popularity of eugenics in general.

    …

    Congratulations therefore go to Garin Hovanissian, who brings up the topic of the Hunter biology textbook in The Weekly Standard. We are coming up on the 100th anniversary of Darwin’s birth in 2009, so you can be sure that Inherit the Wind will be shown in thousands of high school and college classrooms, where it will be lovingly presented as an approximation of the truth. It might be useful before then to dig up all the speeches of William Hunter, the racist and eugenicist, and of his champion, the great H. L. Mencken. The fullness of the truth will be found there. How hard will the Darwinists fight to keep the students from learning about that?

    Just thought he might like to know what one looked like. “Darwinism was once used in a racist textbook and racist people liked it – therefore there is something wrong with the science and you should believe ID”. He’s got some poisoning the well there too, going after H. L. Mencken and Hunter for being bigots. It has nothing to do with the validity of the science of course. And Mencken wasn’t just a racist and eugenicist, he was also sexist, anti-semitic, anti-woman, anti-child, anti-foreigner etc. Mencken pretty much hated on everybody. It’s not exactly a secret you know. It’s also totally irrelevant to the validity of the science.

  • Alternative medicine quacks deny efficacy of conventional medicine

    Make no mistake about it, the promoters of alternative medicine are denialists. One of the more stunning examples of their denial of the efficacy of evidence-based medicine appeared in Newstarget with the headline The false gods of scientific medicine revealed: It’s a cult, not a science by Mike Adams.

    Promoters of conventional medicine claim that all the drug marketing, FDA approvals, surgical procedures, chemotherapy and all other treatments are based on “hard science.” The term “science” is invoked with hilarious frequency: Science journals, science-based medicine, proven medical science and so on. As you might have guessed, however, there’s surprisingly little genuine science to be found in the common practice of conventional medicine. Rather, what passes for “science” today is a collection of health myths, half-truths, intellectual dishonesty, self delusion, fraudulent reporting and wishful thinking.
    …
    This is how doctors have come to believe the incredible: That food has nothing to do with health, that antioxidants will kill you, that herbs interfere with drugs, and that only drugs can treat or cure disease. It’s a cult-like belief system handed down by the high priests of conventional medicine, and if this intricate web of false beliefs was actually subjected to genuine scientific scrutiny, it would crumble into a thousand pieces of junk science and marketing propaganda.

    It’s the usual denialist garbage. Conspiracy theories about drug companies, doctors, scientific conspiracies and the FDA. The straw man that doctors think that food has nothing to do with health is an egregious denial of all research done into nutrition. And his statement that herbs can’t interfere with drugs? Well, try taking St. John’s Wort and birth control sometime and see what happens. But my jaw dropped with this claim:

    Chemotherapy has been scientifically proven to be worthless at curing cancer, enhancing quality of life or protecting the health of the patient. In fact, chemotherapy kills patients, and even the ones who survive it are left with permanent damage to their brain (“chemo brain”), kidneys, liver and other organs. Chemotherapy is a medical hoax with absolutely no scientific validity. The size of a tumor is not a measure of the degree of cancer that exists on a patient’s body, and shrinking a tumor is not a meaningful measure of a cancer treatment’s success.

    Oh really? I wonder if I can find an example of chemotherapy extending life. Let’s see…

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  • FRC wants gays out of baseball, mom's apple pie

    Sounds dirty doesn’t it? But the homobigot fake family values group, the Family Research Council, is dead serious about keeping teh gays out of baseball games.

    This past Sunday, at the San Diego Padres baseball game, what was advertised as a “Free Floppy Hat Night” for kids under 14 turned out to be a double play. While the Padres management was enticing families with the giveaway for kids, it was also promoting the evening as a Gay Pride night at the ballpark. Children who received free hats were treated to the Gay Man’s Chorus of San Diego singing the national anthem prior to what one homosexual group billed as “Out at the Park with the San Diego Padres.”

    The San Diego Padres organization should be ashamed that they would promote such an event on a night they specifically designed for the family. On this curveball of an evening, the Padres struck out.

    Click the link below to contact the San Diego Padres and tell them that baseball is a family game that shouldn’t be used as an exhibition of homosexual lifestyles. The national pastime is just that: an opportunity for fans of the sport to enjoy a game and take respite from the daily grind. It’s not place for politics – or political correctness.

    We’ve provided a short sample text you can sign or modify as you like to the Padres. Let’s tell major league baseball to leave politics aside at the turnstile.

    That’s right, please, tell the Padres what you think.

    After all, if children see gay people or hear them sing, it’s like a siren-song of gayosity that will convert them to the homosexual lifestyle, or something. That’s my current hypothesis. My other one is that the FRC is such a shameless coven of bigots that they feel they can intimidate business owners out of allowing gays to show their faces (and sing) at public events. They believe it is socially acceptable in this century to force gays back in the closet out of some ridiculous appeal to protecting kids. Oh won’t somebody please think of the Children!

    i-144c24146c7fb7dde1e86d344a3cd67a-Thinkofthechildren.gif

    Via Box Turtle Bulletin

  • Behavioral Econ: Less Dismal, Less Denialist

    Patricia Cohen reports in today’s New York Times on a development in economics that will have a huge effect on denialism: the increased willingness to question the orthodoxy of neoclassical economics. Consumer rights, environmental protection, and any number of other issues has suffered for decades under the neoclassists, who hold their beliefs in markets so strongly that it’s just like a religion. A bad religion. Anyway:

    “There is much too much ideology,” said Alan S. Blinder, a professor at Princeton and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Economics, he added, is “often a triumph of theory over fact.” Mr. Blinder helped kindle the discussion by publicly warning in speeches and articles this year that as many as 30 million to 40 million Americans could lose their jobs to lower-paid workers abroad. Just by raising doubts about the unmitigated benefits of free trade, he made headlines and had colleagues rubbing their eyes in astonishment.

    “What I’ve learned is anyone who says anything even obliquely that sounds hostile to free trade is treated as an apostate,” Mr. Blinder said.

    And free trade is not the only sacred subject, Mr. Blinder and other like-minded economists say. Most efforts to intervene in the markets — like setting a minimum wage, instituting industrial policy or regulating prices — are viewed askance by mainstream economists, as are analyses that do not rely on mathematical modeling.

    That attitude, the critics argue, has seriously harmed the discipline, suppressing original, creative thinking and distorting policy debates…

  • Crankery is caused by a fundamental defect in reasoning

    Casey Luskin doesn’t like that evilutionists equate Intelligent Design Creationism with, well, creationism. I’m sobbing.

    But in a perfect example of how cranks like using the tools of logic to make their point, and then fail, he suggests that the assertion that ID = creationism is an example of the genetic fallacy. Well, that’s interesting. What’s his reasoning?

    Darwinian logic often contends that because a given proportion of ID proponents are creationists, ID must therefore be creationism. It’s a twist on the genetic fallacy, one I like to call the Darwinist “Genesis Genetic Argument.” As noted, it implies that each and every argument made by a creationist must be equivalent to arguing for full-blooded creationism. This fallacious argument is easy to defeat on logical grounds by pointing out that some ID proponents are not creationists, and in fact have been persuaded to support ID in the absence of religion. Thus something other than creationism or religion must be fundamental to the set of views underlying ID (big hint: it’s the scientific data indicating real design in nature)!

    First of all a big belly laugh from the “scientific data” point. But anyway, is this actually a case of the genetic fallacy? And even if it were fallacious, is it really an example of an argument of irrelevance?

    Luskin links the wiki as well in his post, but it’s clear he didn’t read it (correctly).

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  • White House Muzzled Surgeon General; Three References to Bush Per Page

    Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona alleged yesterday in testimony before the House Government Reform Committee that the White House censored his speeches and activities. Laura Mackler of the Wall Street Journal reports:

    The most recent U.S. surgeon general told Congress the Bush administration routinely blocked him from speaking out on controversial issues, including stem-cell research, emergency contraception and sexual abstinence, and pressured him to support an “ideological, theological” agenda.

    Dr. Richard Carmona, surgeon general from 2002 until 2006, said that his speeches were edited to remove material about controversial issues and that he was encouraged to attend internal “political pep rallies.” He said he was prevented from releasing a report on global health because he wouldn’t make it a “political document” touting actions by the U.S. The report has yet to be released.

    […]

    Dr. Carmona told the committee that, as surgeon general, he hadn’t been permitted to talk about the importance of comprehensive sex education or emergency contraception. He said he wasn’t permitted to discuss the science of embryonic-stem-cell research. Under the Bush administration, there are strict limits on federal funding for such research. “I was blocked at every turn,” he said. “I was told the decision had already been made — stand down, don’t talk about it,” he said.

    He also said he was prevented from attending a Special Olympics event to talk about health and disabilities. “I was told I would be helping a politically prominent family, [and] why would I want to help those people?” Dr. Carmona said. The Special Olympics were founded by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of Sen. Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.).

    He said his speeches were regularly vetted to ensure they weren’t controversial. Speeches were edited to add references to Mr. Bush — he was told there should be at least three per page. “The vetting was done by political appointees who were specifically there to spin my words to ideologically preconceived notions,” he said.