Take a look around key committees of the House and you’ll find a governing body stocked with crackpots whose views on major issues are as removed from reality as Missouri’s Representative Todd Akin’s take on the sperm-killing powers of a woman who’s been raped.
On matters of basic science and peer-reviewed knowledge, from evolution to climate change to elementary fiscal math, many Republicans in power cling to a level of ignorance that would get their ears boxed even in a medieval classroom. Congress incubates and insulates these knuckle-draggers.
He then goes on to cite multiple examples of what should be career-fatal stupidity that has been routinely ignored and inadequately mocked in the media. My favorite?
Barton cited the Almighty in questioning energy from wind turbines. Careful, he warned, “wind is God’s way of balancing heat.” Clean energy, he said, “would slow the winds down” and thus could make it hotter. You never know.
“You can’t regulate God!” Barton barked at the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, in the midst of discussion on measures to curb global warming.
I think we need to thank Akin again. He managed to say something so grotesquely stupid, so insanely backwards in terms of its scientific validity and misogyny that we’re actually seeing dialogue about scientific illiteracy in congress again. Perhaps his comments were the straw that broke the camel’s back?
I’m not saying that his medieval medical hypothesis has any scientific validity, he is after all just parroting pro-life misinformation spread to attack scientific data about the frequency of pregnancy after rape. The Kinsley gaffe in this case is that he revealed the truth about what he, and other pro-life politicians who support no-exception abortion bans, believe.
Why should we punish this truth-telling with removal of Akin from the race? All that will happen is that the GOP will replace Akin with another pro-life fanatic who is simply better at hiding what he actually believes about women, reproduction, sexual assault, and their autonomy over their own bodies.
I’m thankful for Akin’s honesty, because he has dropped the facade that the radical right cares about women, respects their autonomy, understands sexual assault or has any place in this century. He has pulled back the curtain and shown what they really believe. Other examples of this attitude abound, from the abusive ultrasound bills, to this comment from Idaho Republican Chuck Winder in March wondering if women even know what rape is, to American Vision’s comparison of the blowback against Akin as “like gang-rape”. He has only further exposed the misogyny of the pro-life movement and brought some of their more despicable lies front and center for all to see. We should be thanking him for his honesty.
Atul Gawande, thoughtful as always, writes about the “wicked problem” of healthcare reform and the historical similarity between this battle and previous battles to expand fairness to all of our citizens. Opening with the kind of experiences all physicians have had with tragically-uninsured patients, he emphasizes why this was a needed change:
A few days ago, while awaiting the Supreme Court ruling on the Obama health-care law, I called a few doctor friends around the country. I asked them if they could tell me about current patients whose health had been affected by a lack of insurance.
“This falls under the ‘too numerous to count’ section,” a New Jersey internist said. A vascular surgeon in Indianapolis told me about a man in his fifties who’d had a large abdominal aortic aneurysm. Doctors knew for months that it was in danger of rupturing, but, since he wasn’t insured, his local private hospital wouldn’t fix it. Finally, it indeed began to rupture. Rupture is an often fatal development, but the man—in pain, with the blood flow to his legs gone— made it to an emergency room. Then the hospital put him in an ambulance to Indiana University, arguing the patient’s condition was “too complex.” My friend got him through, but he’s very lucky to be alive.
Another friend, an oncologist in Marietta, Ohio, told me about three women in their forties and fifties he was treating for advanced cervical cancer. A pap smear would have caught their cancers far sooner. But since they didn’t have insurance, their cancers were only recognized when they caused profuse bleeding. Now they required radiation and chemotherapy if they were to have a chance of surviving.
Even inexperienced physicians like me, still in my residency, have these kinds of stories to tell. They’re tragic. But worse, they’re just so stupid. Notice how, in each instance, the problem still ends up being taken care of, only now it’s emergent, farther along, more risky, and of course, more expensive to treat. This is part of the ludicrous nature of the opposition to health care reform. There is no way to get out of paying for these things. All we do by denying people coverage for necessary medical treatment is guarantee that in a few days, months, or years, they’ll be in the emergency room, only now it will cost ten times as much to fix, at greater risk to the patient. This is also backed up by the international experience of health care. Every other industrialized country has universal coverage, many have far superior care, not to mention superior service (France anyone?) to the United States. Yet every one of the countries pays far less per capita (most less than half) than we do on health care. Data from studies within our own country show it’s cheaper for the state to cover the uninsured than to let them stay uninsured. Because of EMTALA, passed by that notorious socialist Ronald Reagan, everybody gets emergency care whether they are insured or not, and fully 50% of emergency care is uncompensated, costs which get transferred to the insured and the tax payers.
For most of us in the healthcare system we see that universal coverage is necessary (unless you reverse EMTALA which will never happen), although we may disagree on how to accomplish it. If anything, the ACA/Obamacare is more of a free-market reform than many physicians would like. Many in my generation (though certainly not in the older generation) would have preferred single-payer, but for reasons I discussed yesterday this is actually not as important as merely guaranteeing universality. Mixed private/public and government payer/private insurance schemes are, if anything, the norm around the world and they work well while still costing less than 50% of what we pay per capita.
So why so much resistance to what should be obvious? There is no way to avoid paying for this stuff, so why don’t we do it more sensibly? Why don’t we move primary care out of the ER? Why not pay for problems when they’re cheap and not emergent?
Gawande suggests the problem is that healthcare is a “wicked problem” and such problems that don’t have simple, crisp answers generate more controversy and resistance to change.
In 1973, two social scientists, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, defined a class of problems they called “wicked problems.” Wicked problems are messy, ill-defined, more complex than we fully grasp, and open to multiple interpretations based on one’s point of view. They are problems such as poverty, obesity, where to put a new highway—or how to make sure that people have adequate health care.
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Solutions to wicked problems, by contrast, are only better or worse. Trade-offs are unavoidable. Unanticipated complications and benefits are both common. And opportunities to learn by trial and error are limited. You can’t try a new highway over here and over there; you put it where you put it. But new issues will arise. Adjustments will be required. No solution to a wicked problem is ever permanent or wholly satisfying, which leaves every solution open to easy polemical attack.
This sounds awfully familiar, and I think it’s a good explanation for much of the controversy. I’ve been emphasizing from the beginning, there is more than one answer to the problem of the uninsured. The only really wrong answer is, “doing nothing”. We’ve been doing that for long enough and it actually costs us more to do nothing than to expand coverage! Gawande then discusses Albert O. Hirschman’s studies of the polemical forms of resistance to solving these wicked problems, and how they rely on arguments of perversity, jeopardy and futility. However, I find that a critique of these debates isn’t particularly satisfying. Just because one argues that a reform is perverse, or risky, or futile, doesn’t necessarily make one wrong, even if it is a frequent pattern of obstinance. Gawande also leaves out the 4th tactic of the current opponents of reform. That is, of course, mendacity.
In order to oppose a reform so obviously needed, so completely supported by the data from international experience and studies from within our own country, and in the face of the obvious gob-smacking experience of every physician in the country, one ultimately must rely on just lying. Politifact, both before and after the Supreme Court decision, has demonstrated this phenomenon. Many of the claims against the ACA have been so rabidly false as to deserve their “pants-on-fire” designation, including the fully debunked death panels nonsense (2009 lie of the year!), that it’s the largest tax increase ever, it’s rationing, or that it is some kind of Obama socialist plot. See the top five lies here. Immediately after the ruling Romney was apparently tripping over his own feet in order to be the first to lie about his own reform package saying it would increase the deficit by trillions, another lie, and Limbaugh reiterated the lie that it was the largest tax increase ever.
I think that’s what’s most disappointing to me about this current debate, but these days it is no surprise. The outrageous mendacity of the opponents of reform, and the unwillingness of the right to engage in honest debate on this topic, are beyond anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. But a few facts are undeniable. We spend more on health care than any other country. For that cost we can’t even cover all of our citizens. Universal healthcare systems are also universally less expensive than ours. When we refuse to cover people, and allow them to be uninsured, they still receive care, it just costs us more to deliver. Why do people oppose universality when these are the facts?
It’s good news that the Supreme Court split 5-4 with Roberts (and not Kennedy?!?) as the deciding vote, to uphold the affordable care act. It’s interesting that this was controversial, and certainly Roberts led the court to a very safe middle ground making the issue about taxation and saying the commerce clause could not apply. If anything, I wonder if this weakens the previous commerce powers of Congress as defined by Wickard v. Filburn, I’d love to hear what a lawyer thinks.
What does this mean?
Well in the short term not a whole lot, this healthcare bill requires a very slow roll-out of provisions. This was never a revolutionary law, which is why it was so surprising that people treated what was essentially a free-market giveaway as if it were some act of revolutionary socialism. But it will mean that states will have to go ahead and start implementing exchanges, it means that lots of other cost-control provisions are going ahead, coverage for pre-existing conditions will remain (victory!), and most importantly, we can start a great cultural shift from using emergency rooms or just plain avoidance to deal with necessary health maintenance and primary care needs.
Now, I know many that think single payer is the only way that healthcare can be provided might have been hoping this hodgepodge mix of free-market and social reforms would fail in favor of a truly government-administered system. I would say to them, don’t worry! It’s possible to have highly efficacious universal healthcare based on insurance for all and subsidization for those who can not afford it. Most systems not inherited from the Soviets came to universal healthcare from different angles, and only really the UK, Canada, and New Zealand represent totally government-administered healthcare systems in such countries. In between would be Sweden, Japan, France, or Australia with government-administered payment or mixtures of public and private hospitals with government sponsored insurance options. Even Russia now has a mixture of public and private healthcare spending. Then there are the systems which look a bit more like what the ACA will be. For instance Germany, which has had universal health care since Otto von Bismarck, has health coverage through employer-subsidized sickness funds, a mixture of public and private hospitals and clinics. Finally, the Netherlands system probably is most like the system proposed by the ACA. They describe it as “private insurance with social conscience”, and the Netherlands enjoys metrics of patient satisfaction, short wait times, and access to procedures far superior to that of other systems including ours (which performs quite poorly on almost all metrics including access). On the extreme free-market side of universal health care is Singapore, which relies on universal governmental catastrophic insurance coverage, but an individual mandate on citizens to contribute to personal health savings funds which cover primary care and most expenditures until you go over a yearly limit. The only thing all of these systems have in common is that they spend half of what we spend yearly per capita on healthcare.
So, to those who oppose it because you either don’t want healthcare or because you don’t think it was enough, don’t despair! For those who think it’s the worst thing ever to pay for other’s health insurance, don’t worry! You already are! You have been since Reagan passed EMTALA. That won’t change, the cost might actually get cheaper (or at least stop increasing at such a violent pace). For those who think that anything but single-payer is awful, don’t complain! What’s most important is that we have universal coverage that encourages primary care usage, getting patients out of the ER and subsidization for the poorest among us. The international experience shows that truly single-payer systems are the minority, and most systems are a mixture of public and private hospitals, insurance and personal expenditure. Further, one of the best systems in the world, the Netherlands system closely resembles what the ACA will accomplish and has resulted in excellent outcomes and patient satisfaction in that country. In fact, most single-payer systems perform worse in terms of access, wait times, and satisfaction than the mixed systems, with the possible exception of Sweden (probably because they put so much money into it).
This is a victory for healthcare and the country. Even if it’s not “perfect”, or even if you think people being treated for their medical problems is some kind of sin against capitalism, too bad. It will accomplish a great deal, there is international precedent that such systems work (and may work better than single-payer), and there is no escape from the fact that we have to pay for people’s healthcare. We can do it expensively, wastefully, and emergently in the ER, or we can do it like thoughtful, decent citizens who care about each other’s welfare and provide a baseline of access for all.
Chris and I have met with our new National Geographic overlords here in DC, and we had a productive and interesting meeting. It was a great chance to put names to some faces and hear about where Nat Geo wants to take Scienceblogs. If any of the other sciblings can wrangle it I can highly recommend it. Also, to those who have commented on the migration to wordpress, the new look etc., they clearly are monitoring your opinions about the change and working to first make the system fully functional, then hopefully we can improve some stylistic elements of the site. In particular I think people miss the links to comments from the sidebars, number of comments visible from the main post, and the size of the lead-in. I also have to figure out why WP doesn’t want to upload my custom banners. Oh well. It’s a process.
Today I read about two individuals who decided on political defections over perceived anti-science amongst their former political allies- one due to climate change, the other for anti-GMO. From the right, we have Michael Fumento, who in Salon describes his break with the right, spurred by Heartland’s campaign comparing those who believe in climate change with the Unabomber, as well as a general atmosphere of conspiratorial crankery and incivility. And from the left, we have Stephen Sumpter of Latent Existence leaving the Greens over their support for the misguided anti-scientific campaign of “Take the Flour Back” to destroy a crop of GMO wheat at Rothamsted Research which carries a gene from another plant to make it aphid-resistant. Starting with the anti-GMO extremists (since I’ve been picking on right-wing denialism a lot lately), their movement is pretty classic anti-science and extreme. The Rothamsted Research program has been very forthright and clearly is trying to engage and communicate with the protestors, has released this video trying to engage them in a fruitful debate over their research:
We have learned that you are planning to attack our research test site on 27th May. Please read the
following in the spirit of openness and dialogue – we know we cannot stop you from taking the action you plan, nor would we wish to see force used against you. Therefore we can only appeal to your consciences, and ask you to reconsider before it is too late, and before years of work to which we have devoted our lives are destroyed forever.
We appeal to you as environmentalists. We agree that agriculture should seek to work “with nature rather than against it” (to quote from our website), and that motivation underlies our work. We have developed a variety of wheat which does not need to be sprayed with insecticides. Instead, we have identified a way of getting the plant to repel aphids, using a natural process that has evolved in mint and many other plants – and simply adding this into the wheat genome to enable it to do the samething.
So our GM wheat could, for future generations, substantially reduce the use of agricultural chemicals. Are you really against this? Or are you simply against it because it is “GMO” and you therefore think it is unnatural in some way? Remember – all plants in all types of agriculture are genetically modified to serve humanity’s needs, and the (E)-β-farnesene compound our wheat produces is already found in over 400 species of plant, many of which are consumed as food and drink on a daily basis (including the hops used in beer, to give just one example). To suggest that we have used a ‘cow gene’ and that our wheat is somehow part-cow betrays a misunderstanding which may serve to confuse people or scare them but has no basis in scientific reality.
You seem to think, even before we have had a chance to test it, that our new wheat variety is bad. How do you know this? Clearly it is not through scientific enquiry, as the tests have not yet been performed. You state on your website: “There is serious doubt that the aphid alarm pheromone as found in this GM crop would even work.” You could be right – but if you destroy our test, you and we will never know. Is that what you want? Our research is trying to shed light on questions about the safety and the usefulness of new varieties of the staple food crops on which all of us depend. As activists you might prefer never to know whether our new wheat variety would work, but we believe
you are in a minority – in a democratic society most people do value factual knowledge and understand that it is necessary for sensible decision making.
You have described genetically modified crops as “not properly tested”. Yet when tests are carried out you are planning to destroy them before any useful information can be obtained. We do not see how preventing the acquisition of knowledge is a defensible position in an age of reason – what you are planning to do is reminiscent of clearing books from a library because you wish to stop other people finding out what they contain. We remind you that such actions do not have a proud tradition.
… Our work is publically funded, we have pledged that our results will not be patented and will not be owned by any private company – if our wheat proves to be beneficial we want it to be available to farmers around the world at minimum cost. If you destroy publicly funded research, you leave us in a situation where only the big corporations can afford the drastic security precautions needed to continue biotechnology research – and you therefore further promote a situation you say you are trying to avoid.
We end with a further concern. You may not know much about Rothamsted. You may not know that our institute is the site of perhaps the longest-running environmental experiment in the world, with plots testing different agricultural methods and their ecological consequences dating all the way back to 1843. Some of these plots are very close to the GM wheat test site, and we are extremely worried that anyone walking onto them would endanger a research programme that has been in operation for almost two centuries.
But we also see our newest tests as part of this unbroken line – research never ends, and technology never can nor should be frozen in time (as implied by the term ‘GM freeze’). Society didn’t stop with the horse-drawn plough because of fears that the tractor was ‘unnatural’. We didn’t refuse to develop better wheat varieties in the past – which keep us well-fed today – simply because they were different from what went before and therefore scary. The wheat that we consume today has had many genetic changes made to it – to make plants produce more grain, resist disease, avoid growing too tall and blow over in the wind, be suitable for different uses like pasta and bread, provide more nutrition and grow at the right time for farming seasons. These agricultural developments make it possible for the
same amount of food to be produced from a smaller area of land, meaning less necessity for farmers to convert wildlands to agriculture, surely we should work together in this?
When you visit us on 27 May we will be available to meet and talk to you. We would welcome the chance to show you our work and explain why we think it could benefit the environment in the future. But we must ask you to respect the need to gather knowledge unimpeded. Please do not come to damage and destroy.
As scientists we know only too well that we do not have all the answers. That is why we need to conduct experiments. And that is why you in turn must not destroy them.
Yours sincerely
J. A. PICKETT DSc, CBE, FRS (Professor)
Michael Elliott Distinguished Research Fellow and
Scientific Leader of Chemical Ecology
Toby Bruce (Scientist specialising in plant-insect interactions, Team Leader)
Gia Aradottir (Insect Biology, Postdoc )
Huw Jones (Wheat Transformation, Coinvestigator)
Lesley Smart (Field Entomology)
Janet Martin (Field Entomology)
Johnathan Napier (Plant Science, Coinvestigator)
John Pickett (Chemical Ecology, Principal Investigator)
The protestors, thinking they’re attacking some Monsanto-like evil corporation, are so consumed with their hatred of GMO that they are spreading misinformation, refusing to allow scientists to even engage in the research into GMO, and rather than engaging the scientists in dialogue are threatening to just destroy their experiment. This is the worst kind of bullying, extremist, anti-science garbage out there. At least the creationists don’t show up in our labs and start spitting in our test tubes. The climate denialists might make a lot of noise but they aren’t threatening to blow up James Hansen’s computer. Finally the “take the flour back” justifications are terrible:
Rothamsted have planted a new GM wheat trial designed to repel aphids. It contains genes for antibiotic-resistance and an artificial gene ‘most similar to a cow’.
This sentence is so stupid I have trouble understanding how they wrote it for public consumption. A gene can not be “similar to a cow”. This makes no biological sense. We could have a gene that has similar sequence to that of a gene in a cow, but even that shouldn’t necessarily be threatening. After all, if you look at our genes you’d find most of them (80 percent) have significant homology to bos taurus. This claim despite being biologically silly, is refuted by the researchers who insist the gene being studied is (E)-β-farnesene, a protein that is in many plants we already consume, that transfers natural resistance to aphids.
Wheat is wind-pollinated. In Canada similar experiments have leaked into the food-chain costing farmers millions in lost exports. There is no market for GM wheat anywhere in the world.
This is patently absurd, the absence of a market for a product that has not yet been brought to market is not an argument. Further, the evidence is that GM crops are readily adopted in the United States, and increasingly in China. The loss of millions has more to do with the unjustified panic over GM that has been created by Luddites in Europe, and finally, how is it possible to study the efficacy and safety of this technology if they’re just going to show up and destroy it? It would be better studied and the results will be more openly reported by the publicly funded Rothamsted researchers than if these experiments were done behind some fence in China by Monsanto.
This experiment is tax-payer funded, but Rothamsted hope to sell any patent it generates to an agro-chemical company.
The researchers deny this and have pledged not to patent the product. However, this might ultimately be an error that is ultimately harmful to the researchers’ attempts to distribute the technology. By patenting the product and licensing it, you will have a greater ability to convince an agricultural supplier to invest in, market and distribute the product. If you don’t patent it, and it becomes immediately public, the inability of a corporation to have exclusive use of the patent may discourage them generally from adopting the product. They’re out to make money, it’s true, and the sad thing is, even if you have the best product in the world, if they can just be copied by any competitor the appeal of investing in your product will be zero. It’s sad but true. I think they should patent it, and simply promise that licensing would require ethical provisions for its distribution to impoverished countries.
La Via Campesina, the world’s largest organisation of peasant farmers, believe GM is increasing world hunger. They have called for support resisting GM crops, and the control over agriculture that biotech gives to corporations.
The marketing practices of agri-business like Monsanto are extremely problematic, and it isn’t just peasant farmers in other countries but farmers here in the US that object to being strong-armed by big businesses, and seemingly extorted into using Monsanto seeds over reseeding their own fields. However, this is separate from the argument that GM crops are unsafe or increase world hunger. If anything, the experience of those such as Norman Borlaug and the creation of dwarf wheat varieties should demonstrate that modification of wheat can have a tremendous impact on world hunger. I have no doubt that GM technology might in the future generate similar advances in productivity as traditional methods. It’s also not the point of the research at Rothamsted which is to decrease the need for pesticide use. Yes, Monsanto sucks, what does that have to do with Rothamset? What does world hunger have to do with decreasing pesticide use? These are illogical arguments, that are a combination of appeals to consequence and straw men. Rothamsted is not Monsanto.
‘Take the Flour Back’ will be a nice day out in the country, with picnics, music from Seize the Day and a decontamination. It’s for anyone who feels able to publically [sic] help remove this threat and those who want to show their support for them.
Decontamination, what an excellent euphemism for vandalism, destruction of property, and violence. They are going to destroy the research project of publicly-funded plant researchers who are trying to answer questions about safety and efficacy of a product that could decrease pesticide use. They have justified this based on false information, biological ignorance, and a Luddite attitude towards biological technology that if anything will improve the safety of our food supply.
People have bizarre ideas about genetic modification, that somehow, transferring a gene from one species will then confer the properties of that entire species to the plant (hence the senseless cow comparison above). This is absurd. The arguments against resistant organisms don’t make a lot of sense to me either, because the alternative – pesticides – share the same flaw – at the same time represent a health threat to humans as well. The idea of transferring a gene that makes a protein that we already eat in other plants hardly seems like it should even raise an eyebrow to me. I don’t get the paranoia from the environmentalists on this issue. The need to feed ourselves and wrest resources from the pests and bacteria that we compete with on this planet is not static. It is constantly changing and our strength is our ability to use technology and science to our benefit. We don’t refuse to research antibiotics because one day bacteria might become resistant. We develop new antibiotics.
This demonstrates though that any ideology is susceptible to anti-science when it becomes extreme and that includes environmentalism. Based on shoddy understanding of biology, paranoia about Monsanto, and misinformation about publicly-funded researchers, these morons are about to go out and destroy a scientific project. If there were a better description of a modern Luddite I haven’t heard one.
Anyway. Onto Michael Fumento’s article in Salon. Fumento is irritated with the right because he sees them as exhibiting the one characteristic that he has never been able to stand in anyone – hysteria.
Gosh! When did I end up in bed with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber? Could it be because I did specialize in blowing things up while serving my country for four years as an airborne combat engineer? I also watched human beings blown up. I had friends and Navy SEALs I was in battle with blown up. My own intestines exploded on the first of my four combat embeds, three in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Took seven operations to fix the plumbing. I later suffered other permanent injuries.
Yet now I find myself linked not only with the Unabomber, but also Charles Manson and Fidel Castro. Or so says the Chicago-based think tank the Heartland Institute, for which I’ve done work. Heartland erected billboards depicting the above three declaring: “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” Climate scientists now, evidently, share something in common with dictators and mass murderers. Reportedly bin Laden was scheduled to make such an appearance, too.
The HI and and Morano have been shrieking about how environmentalists are worse and that this was unfair targeting of what the enviros do all the time, but no, not really. Usually when they find some example of an environmentalist calling for consequences for global warming denialism it’s quoted out of context, and even if it does happen, despite being a tu quoque this was a pretty extreme campaign. Extreme enough to even turn Fumento against them. No small feat.
Now a brief interlude for Fumento to stroke his vast ego (just read his blog tagline):
This is nuts! Literally. As in “mass hysteria.” That’s a phenomenon I wrote about for a quarter-century, from the heterosexual AIDS “epidemic” to the swine flu “pandemic” that killed vastly fewer people than seasonal flu, to “runaway Toyotas.” Mass hysteria is when a large segment of society loses touch with reality, or goes bonkers, if you will, on a given issue – like believing that an incredibly mild strain of flu could kill eight times as many Americans as normal seasonal flu. (It killed about a third as many.)
I was always way ahead of the curve. And my exposés primarily appeared in right-wing publications. Back when they were interested in serious research. I also founded a conservative college newspaper, held positions in the Reagan administration and at several conservative think tanks, and published five books that conservatives applauded. I’ve written for umpteen major conservative publications – National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, among them.
Fumento is a weird guy. He really doesn’t like it when people tell him he should be worried about something. To the point that he’ll deny things like that heterosexuals are at risk of spreading HIV, or at least diminish the heterosexual spread of the disease. This is despite the fact HIV is predominantly a heterosexual disease outside of the US. Similarly with other epidemic concerns, scientists make a big deal out of them, he usually says, “it’s no big deal”, and then by virtue of prevention programs, luck, or maybe even overestimation of the pathogenicity of the bug in question, he seems to come out on top. I don’t think it’s a good way to view the world, because when he’s wrong, he’s going to be really wrong. I tend towards to more cautious side of the spectrum based on historical events like the flu pandemic of 1918. We know it can happen, we should treat emerging diseases and severe flu strains seriously.
So now that he perceives the right is the hysterical bunch, screaming conspiracies about Obama ruining the entire capitalist western world, true to form he rejects the hysteria:
Nothing the new right does is evidently outrageous enough to receive more than a peep of indignation from the new right. Heartland pulled its billboards because of funder withdrawals, not because any conservatives spoke up and said it had crossed a line.
Last month U.S. Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican recently considered by some as vice-president material, insisted that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party, again with little condemnation from the new right.
Mitt Romney took a question at a town hall meeting this month from a woman who insisted President Obama be “tried for treason,” without challenging, demurring from or even commenting on her assertion.
And then there’s the late Andrew Breitbart (assassinated on the orders of Obama, natch). A video from February shows him shrieking at peaceful protesters: “You’re freaks and animals! Stop raping people! Stop raping people! You freaks! You filthy freaks! You filthy, filthy, filthy raping, murdering freaks!” He went on for a minute-and-a-half like that. Speak not ill of the dead? Sen. Ted Kennedy’s body was barely cold when Breitbart labeled him “a big ass motherf@#$er,” a “duplicitous bastard” a “prick” and “a special pile of human excrement.”
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Civility and respect for order – nay, demand for order – have always been tenets of conservatism. The most prominent work of history’s most prominent conservative, Edmund Burke, was a reaction to the anger and hatred that swept France during the revolution. It would eventually rip the country apart and plunge all of Europe into decades of war. Such is the rotted fruit of mass-produced hate and rage. Burke, not incidentally, was a true Tea Party supporter, risking everything as a member of Parliament to support the rebellion in the United States.
All of today’s right-wing darlings got there by mastering what Burke feared most: screaming “J’accuse! J’accuse!” Turning people against each other. Taking seeds of fear, anger and hatred and planting them to grow a new crop.
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President Obama is regularly referred to as a Marxist/Socialist, Nazi, tyrant, Muslim terrorist supporter and – let me look this up, but I’ll bet probably the antichrist, too. Yup, there it is! Over 5 million Google references. There should be a contest to see if there’s anything for which Obama hasn’t been accused. Athlete’s foot? The “killer bees”? Maybe. In any case, the very people who coined and promoted such terms as “Bush Derangement Syndrome, Cheney Derangement Syndrome and Palin Derangement Syndrome” have been promoting hysterical attitudes toward Obama since before he was even sworn in.
Well at least he’s consistent. Although he once did send me an email comparing me to Hitler. I wish I’d kept it, it was pretty funny. I tend to agree with the characterization of this as hysteria, although to be fair I think Obama is getting it worse than Bush did. After all, the accusations against Bush were often true, including the worst one. His administration did deceive us into a war in Iraq. The weapons were not there, the intelligence was inflated, and either through incompetence or irrationality we ended up in a Middle-Eastern hellhole for 10 years. The evidence against Obama, who in reality is a rather milquetoast pragmatist, being Stalin/Hitler/Marx/The Antichrist is a bit weaker.
His call is for civility, which for some reason that eludes me, is often anathema to bloggers. Civility in some sense of the word is patriarchal oppression, or censorship, or something. I don’t know about that, but my general rule is I write like my mother is reading this (and she might be), so it’s best not to be an outrageous turd to other people.
No, I’m not cherry-picking. When I say “regularly referred to,” interpret literally. Polls show that about half of voting Republican buy into the birther nonsense (one of the more prominent hysterias within the hysteria). Only about a fourth seem truly sure that Obama was actually born here. In her nationally syndicated column Michelle Malkin wrote regarding Limbaugh’s slut remarks, that “I’m sorry the civility police now have an opening to demonize the entire right based on one radio comment.” In a stroke she’s expressed her disdain for civility and declared the new right’s sins can be dispatched as an itsy-bitsy little single faux pas, “one radio comment.”
No, Michelle, incivility – nay, outright meanness and puerility – rears its ugly head daily on your blog, which as I write this on May 23 has one item referring in the headline to “Pig Maher’s boy [Bill Maher]” and another to “Jaczko the Jerk,” [former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko]. She calls Limbaugh target Sandra Fluke a “femme-agogue” and her supporters “[George] Soros monkeys.” Pigs? Monkeys? Moonbats? It’s literal dehumanization.
And now I’m in the bizarre position of actually agreeing with Fumento. Never thought I’d say that. Somehow his protective “never panic” mantra has been protective against the panicky insanity over the Obama presidency coming from the left, and allowed him to hold onto some core of humanity. Maybe it’s an adaptive feature after all?
The new right cannot advance a conservative agenda precisely because, other than a few small holdouts like the American Conservative magazine or that battleship that refuses to become a museum, George Will, it is not itself conservative. Pod people are running the show. It has no such capability; no such desire. I find that disturbing for obvious reasons. But, based on my own conversations with liberals, I think – nay, I know – that if more of these allegedly godless, treasonous people understood real conservatism a lot would embrace many conservative positions.
And this is true. I have voted for Republicans in the past (Connie Morella was the first congresswoman I ever voted for when I was 18), and would like to be able to in the future. But I agree with Fumento (my fingers just went numb again), until they accept empiricism again, and stop pitting their ideology against science there is no way I would ever vote for one. It’s unfortunate, because in the old school/Rockefeller Republican/revenue generation isn’t anathema days they occasionally had good ideas to contribute, and a ideological view that was balanced by a tradition of civility and responsibility towards the country.
Right Wing Watch is a great site to follow to track the latest conspiratorial craziness coming from the right. It seems every single day there is some new bizarre claim about homosexuals trying to enslave America and institute sharia law (that makes sense right?), or how Obama is a muslim, yada yada. But today I they’ve got a real zinger and I can’t pass it by. Apparently at age 11 Obama decided to become president of the US to destroy the Shiites, Israel, and America itself. Here come the insanity, from Avi Lipkin:
Lipkin: Obama was made a Muslim man in Indonesia by age 11. He said, ‘I’ve got health care problems, I got economic problems in America, Muslims in Egypt and Muslims in the Muslim world, be patient, I will show you when the time comes what I am going to do to Israel.’ My wife picked up other broadcasts, for example the Saudis were saying, ‘we will have a Muslim in the White House in 2008.’ The Saudis also said, ‘Obama has three tasks: task number 1 is to destroy the Shiite threat in Iran, task number 2 is to destroy the Jewish threat Israel, task number 3 is to destroy the great Christian Satan America and turn America into a Muslim country.’
If there ever was a more perfect example of how ideology is the source of conspiratorial, irrational insanity, it’s the Obama presidency. It’s not just hte continual absurd birther conspiracies, which have escalated to the point that Arizona’s secretary of state was threatening to leave Obama off the ballot (but relented when Hawaii sent them proof of his citizenship). There is apparently nothing that can’t be pinned on this man by his ideological opponents. It’s also reflective of the total failure of our society to educate people that when someone starts talking about some insane conspiracy theory, the appropriate response isn’t to perk up and listen but rather to point and laugh. The next reaction should be to wonder what kind of warped personality defect would lead to this type of reasoning. The more you see him accused of worse and worse crimes, the only explanation can be it’s not just right wing ideology, but rather the ugliest kind of racism.
Time to break out the tinfoil hats people.
Thanks to rightwingwatch, for doing the dirty work of sorting through this vile nonsense.
I can’t take any credit for it. Nat Geo has transitioned us to wordpress. Please let me know in the comments if there are any problems with the new format or with commenting and I’ll see what I can do to get things up to snuff.
Many of the climate change denialist sites have been up in arms by comparisons of climate change denial to holocaust denial. In particular Marc Morano at climate depot has hadmultiplearticlesattacking and expressing hysterical outrage at these comparisons.
We know they don’t like the comparison, but the question is, is it apt? (more…)
The New York Times has the results from when they posed the question, “is it ethical to eat meat?” The finalists, with one or two exceptions, are quite interesting. Certainly, when it comes to opinions about food, everyone has one, and the judges emphasized the variety of the opinions, and interestingly, the near unanimous belief that CAFOs are unethical (I’m with Pollan on that one). The only other topic at the NYT which seems to generate as much diversity of opinion, and frankly insane commentary, is child-rearing. But what I liked most about these finalists were the three writers who actually participate in making food Stacey Roussel, Justin Green, and the winner Jay Bost. Ethical discussions about food production and the ethics of eating meat never seem to involve enough of the people actually producing food. Here’s some snippets about how these farmers who actually grow food think about the role of animals in farming.
From Roussel:
Production of vegetables without the use of animals requires much larger amounts of energy. In small-scale farming, we use animals to clear fields of vegetation instead of relying only on industrial systems like tractors and herbicides. On our farm, we grow rows of vegetables while green cover crops and weeds fill the spaces in between those rows. After the harvest, dairy goats are grazed to get the land back under control, followed by the chickens that eat most of the remaining vegetation, and then finally with one pass of my tractor, I incorporate what is left back into the soil and plant the next crop. The animals clear vegetation and leave free fertilizer. They build biology in the soil rather than destroy it. Working in the natural order reduces our dependence on outside sources of energy, allowing us to harness the energy that is on-farm. The method leads to a better product, one that is more balanced for my customer, my community, my land, and me.
…
A farm animal is not a pet or a wild animal fending for itself. The farm animal and the small farmer must cooperate to build a stronger herd or flock; we literally cannot survive without each other. The eating of animals is paramount to the production of food in a system that embraces the whole of reality. This is why eating meat is ethical. To not consume meat means to turn off a whole part of the natural world and to force production of food to move away from regenerative systems and to turn toward a system that creates larger problems for our world.
This brings up a good point. The ethics of farming moves beyond just whether or not killing animals is wrong. After all, you kill tons of animals farming plants. You raze habitat, displace whatever wildlife was living there, you spray pesticides (yes even organic farmers use pesticides), you dump freeze-dried ladybugs all over the place (how organic farmers attack aphids), and when you harvest, clean and transport the food animals, especially insects and small mammals, are going to be killed as a result.
Instead what Roussel is emphasizing is that the costs of not having farm animals participating in the process creates other harms, largely in the form of increased fossil fuel use from farm equipment or fertilizer generated by the Haber process. This is reminiscent of one of Pollan’s strongest arguments against CAFOs, that instead of using animals as a component in the cycle of harvesting energy from the sun, CAFOs have broken the cycle. Instead of cows and chickens and pigs serving roles as producers of fertilizer and eaters of waste, they’ve turned them into producers of waste and eaters of oil. They are fed grain, fertilized by synthetic fertilizer, and their manure, once a beneficial source of nitrogen on the farm, is now an methane-producing environmental catastrophe waiting to happen in some CAFO associated manure lagoon. While economically this appears efficient, this is only if you fail to factor in these other costs, including environmental and work-safety costs of these feeding operations.
These costs I think get factored into many arguments and may be the cause of the rise in vegetarianism. Justin Green’s article, about his transformation from a meat eater, to a vegetarian, then back to a meat-eater after he started farming, emphasizes this point:
Merely understanding these relationships does not provide a sound ethical defense of meat-eating, however. Animals play an essential role in our food system, yet it is undeniable that much of our production has fallen out of balance. It’s not enough to simply ensure the safety and survival of my animals. As fellow sentient creatures with whom I am engaged in a partnership, I have a responsibility to show both respect and benevolence, in life and in death. I can’t think of a moral justification for the industrial-scaled confinement operations that fail to uphold our side of the bargain.
Almost 25 years after deciding it was wrong to eat animals, I now realize that it’s not that simple. There is an ethical option — a responsibility, even — for eating animals that are raised within a sustainable farm system and slaughtered with the compassion necessitated by our relationship. That, in essence, is the deal.
The winner, Jay Bost, also emphasizes the proper role animals have as potential harvesters as solar energy and contributors to the farm ecosystem:
I was convinced that if what you are trying to achieve with an “ethical” diet is least destructive impact on life as a whole on this planet, then in some circumstances, like living among dry, scrubby grasslands in Arizona, eating meat, is, in fact, the most ethical thing you can do other than subsist on wild game, tepary beans and pinyon nuts. A well-managed, free-ranged cow is able to turn the sunlight captured by plants into condensed calories and protein with the aid of the microorganisms in its gut. Sun > diverse plants > cow > human. This in a larger ethical view looks much cleaner than the fossil-fuel-soaked scheme of tractor tilled field > irrigated soy monoculture > tractor harvest > processing > tofu > shipping > human.
Every argument I’ve been in about meat-eating inevitably seems to devolve into attacks on CAFOs, and I agree, they’re ethically indefensible. Not for their scale, but for the way they’ve disrupted the cycle, and in doing so create environmental problems and waste energy. The animals’ existence is not only unpleasant, but actively harmful to the ecosystem and to us. Bost emphasizes the ethics of growing plants can be equally problematic as long as it is based on converting fossil fuels into food rather than solar energy into food.
This will be the major obstacle our agricultural system will face in the next century. In the last century, the boom of industrialized farming allowed us to generate more food than has ever been seen in human history. It is economically efficient, and allowed us to feed not only ourselves but to export food all around the world. In the next century we need to address the fact that this boom occurred largely due to cheap fossil-fuel, not improved agriculture. This is ultimately not sustainable or good for the ecosystem. Industrial agriculture separated out the constituent elements of a farm and amplified them on a massive scale. But without co-ordination between the parts of a farm you lose energy efficiency for the sake of economic efficiency. Instead of having animals provide nitrogen, we use fossil fuels. Their waste then, instead of being reintegrated into the farm, is now a problem, for both the ecosystem and for the humans working and living there. The need to separate out the component parts of agriculture for industrial scaling has generated new problems we have to address if we’re going to continue to feed ourselves.
Ethical farming and ethical eating therefore shouldn’t be an argument about meat, or worse accepting Newkirk’s profoundly ignorant article suggesting energy-inefficient in vitro meat as a replacement (how will it harvest energy from the sun?) but rather a return to some of the lessons that humans learned through thousands of years of trial and error in agriculture. That of a cycle, with the sun as the predominant source of energy, and animals reintegrated into our production system as a beneficial source of nitrogen and a source of farming efficiency. We will not be able to return to a pre-industrial state of agriculture, but instead we will innovate some hybrid of the two. Agriculture on a scale to feed the world, but with a design that recognizes the ideally cyclical nature of carbon and nitrogen fixation that we need to harvest energy efficiently from the sun, and not from oil.
