Denialism Blog

Category: Cranks

  • More madness from PETA

    My earlier post on People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was perhaps not clear enough.

    PETA is not for “the ethical treatment of animals”. They are for treating animals as if they were furry humans. In fact, they are for treating animals better than we treat humans. This is a dangerous philosophy.

    To equate human rights with animal rights is to diminish the value of human beings. First, which animals do we apply these rights to? The cute ones? Bunnies? Drosophilia?

    And in their battle for equal rights for all animals, humans included, do they work for the rights of people?

    One sick post on their website (to which I will not link) has a “Final Four” of scientists who work with animals. This page posts the locations and photos of the researchers, with inflammatory language, such as “remov[es] cats’ eyes while they’re still alive”, but of course doesn’t mention the goals or accomplishments of the research.

    Do you think their propaganda is harmless? Here’s some comments from the site:

    they should have to suffer just like those animals had to do for their unright (sic) and cruel experiments.

    Someone should put steel rods in their heads

    I say they experiment on them, how about that:)

    So, I guess we need to be nice to non-human animals, but it’s open season on humans.

    I’d venture a guess that most people feel we should be nice to animals. There are exceptions of course, but in general, people are against undue cruelty to animals. PETA argues than any harm to animals is “undue”.

    The problem with this stance is that it devalues human lives. For example, a recent news item from Europe previews an ad campaign by PETA. They will run ads during the war crimes trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor.

    I’m really not sure how to state this any more clearly—the slaughtering of human beings is not morally the same as the slaughtering of animals.

    Those who believe that it is create a dangerous devaluation of human life.

  • Bill Maher is a crank

    I must admit I have a love-hate relationship with Bill Maher. He is a funny guy, he is good at mocking some of the more ludicrous aspects of politics, and he has been an effective critic of this administration and some of its more egregious policies.

    However, I’ve also long held the position that both liberals and conservatives alike must own up to their own extremists. Liberals must own up to the fact that they don’t have a universally-solid grasp on scientific truth, and just like the right wingers, we have people and movements within the left wing that are cranky and denialist. I would say left wing crankery includes animal rights extremism, altie/new age woo, and anti-technology Luddites.

    Bill Maher is one of these cranks (he scores 3/3), and if the liberals want to represent themselves as truly pro-science we must make a concerted effort to reject the unscientific beliefs of these crackpots. We must call out Bill Maher on his BS (we have before as has Orac), and call him a crank for his unscientific, and frankly insane beliefs about medicine, disease, “toxins” and health.

    As PAL has already pointed out and I wholeheartedly agree, Bill Maher made an outrageous statement Friday night on his show Real Time. In an interview with Arlen Specter, who’s life was saved by medical science, he said:

    Because President Bush actually brings up a good point, because you can’t catch cancer, but people in this country treat it like you can. What you do is you hatch cancer by human behavior. Most cancer, there is of course some genetic cancer, but most of it is by behavior…

    But doesn’t that tell you something about our system, why do you have so much faith in Western medicine when they get it so wrong, when the third-leading cause of death in this country the health care system itself. Isn’t the paradigm wrong?

    Where to begin with such a pair of despicable statements? For one, this is a classic crank attack on medicine, using the IOM report, as PAL mentioned, to attack medicine ironically in the midst of one of its attempts to be self-correcting. The misunderstanding that anti-medicine cranks are exploiting in this report are that the overwhelming majority of “mistakes” in that report were things like failure to rescue (failing to recognize when a patient starts circling the drain) and hospital acquired problems like decubitus ulcers and nosocomial infection. What does that mean? That means the failure of medicine that the IOM is being critical of reflect failures to save the lives of people that are critically, critically ill. These are failures in saving people from death. These are mistakes in a population that are actively dying (failure to rescue), or so sick that they are unable to even move under their own power (decubitus ulcer), or immune compromised enough that they can’t defend against infections (nosocomial infections). These mistakes are a problem, and I don’t seek to diminish the importance of finding ways to avoid them. The IOM report represents the efforts of medicine to correct preventable failures in medical care that are very serious, and we’ve spent the last decade trying to resolve (we will likely spend many more). For example the recent War Games video I posted was an example of attempts to train medstudents and interns how to recognize and deal with rescue situations more quickly and effectively.

    But Bill Maher makes it sound like doctors are stalking healthy people in the streets and beating them to death with ball-peen hammers. You don’t go into your doctor’s office for a routine visit and acquire a c. difficile infection or MRSA or decubitus ulcers or a “failure to rescue” mistake. We’re talking about very sick people who often wouldn’t be alive in the first place without medical intervention, who doctors, albeit for some preventable reason, are failing to keep alive or inadvertently make worse. That doesn’t stop Maher from making it sound like we’re running people down in the parking lot, and I don’t appreciate the implication that doctors who sacrifice so much time and effort saving lives are heedlessly killing people.

    Further it is exceptionally ignorant for ignoring the incredible net contribution of medicine to extending and improving life. Why do we live longer on average than any generation in human history? Childbirth no longer represents a major threat to a woman’s life. Children don’t die from ordinary illnesses and infections. Major traumas like gunshots, fractures and massive blood loss no longer are an instant death sentence – we often can put people right back together after amazing injuries. How have we managed to cure diseases like polio, or cure Senator Specter’s Hodgkin’s lymphoma? Evidence-based medicine and the applied science of modern medical care is the answer to all those questions. No magic crystal, acupuncturists needle, or diluted tincture has accomplished these feats.

    Bill Maher is a Luddite, who has tried to blame the death of bees on cell phones has engaged in anti-vaccine wingnuttery, routinely complains of mysterious “toxins”, supports animal rights extremists, and generally has a disgusting “blame-the-victim” mentality towards health. Lung cancer may be a largely self-inflicted illness, but the other big cancer killers? Breast cancer? Prostate cancer? Pancreatic and colorectal cancers? Each may have a small environmental component, but most cancers aside from those caused by cigarettes have much more minor contributions from lifestyle and environment. That is not to say these contributions do not exist, but compared to cigarettes the relative risks of misbehavior are astronomically smaller. Most of these cancers have overwhelmingly genetic risk factors and the number one risk factor is almost always family history. Maher’s statement that cancers are “hatched” or that there is only “some” genetic component is typical of his ignorance of medicine, his blame-the-victim mentality towards disease, and is just as despicable as his depiction of medicine as a killer.

    Liberals have to own up to the fact that they have cranks in their midst as well. Bill Maher is the left-wing version of Dinesh D’Souza or Jerry Falwell. His views on science are no more elevated, and when in conflict with his ideology, no less hateful towards science, or the people he disagrees with.

  • More JPANDS lies—Godwin, here we come


    BPSDB    Once again, JPANDS, the mouthpiece of the AAPS, has it all wrong. The contradictory missions of the AAPS often lead to humorous juxtapositions of policy. For example, the AAPS wants the physician-patient relationship unsullied by any outside forces—unless that relationship pisses them off. They intervened in the Terry Schiavo case, they wish to make abortion illegal—in other words, they’re libertarians, unless AAPS disapproves of your decisions.

    Their big beef in the current article is that there has been a conspiracy to hide the dangers of oral contraceptives and abortion. You see, apparently these cause breast cancer and the NIH doesn’t want you to know. Straight to Godwin:

    The NCI Workshop on Early Reproductive Events is reminiscent of an event that occurred in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Hitler was displeased because “Jewish” science was coming to prominence. The government assembled 10 physicists, including two Nobel laureates, to each write an essay against Einstein’s theory of relativity. The book was published as 100 Essays Against
    Einstein    . Einstein remarked to an inquiring reporter that were they correct, “it would have only taken one.” In a similar way, our government has interfered with the scientific process of conducting studies and relaying the relevant information to the general public.

    Wow. Let me clarify a few things here. First, the relationship between oral contraceptives (OCPs), and breast cancer is muddy to nonexistent. Huge studies have been conducted to try to clarify the issue of exogenous estrogen use and the jury is still out. There are a number of reasons to use both OCPs and HRT, and sometimes reason to avoid them. Most of these reasons have to do with blood clotting disorders rather than cancer.

    Anyway, the one issue that is not unclear is the abortion-breast cancer question. Here is a short list of citations for articles that have shown no link between abortion and breast cancer:

    1. NEJM 1997, 336, 81-5
    2. British Medical Journal 1989, 299, 1430-2
    3. Cancer Causes & Control 1997, 8, 93-108
    4. Lancet 2004, 363, 1007-16
    5. American Journal of Epidemiology 1988, 127, 981-9
    6. British Journal of Cancer 1982, 45, 327-31
    7. American Journal of Epidemiology 1987, 126, 831-41
    8. International Journal of Cancer 1991, 48, 816-20
    9. European Journal of Cancer 1999, 35, 1361-7
    10. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health 2005, 59, 283-7
    11. Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention 2003, 12, 209-14
    12. American Journal of Epidemiology 1983, 117, 35-45
    13. Epidemiology 2000, 11, 76-80
    14. International Journal of Cancer 2001, 92, 899-905
    15. Cancer Causes & Control 1997, 8, 841-9
    16. International Journal of Cancer 1996, 65, 401-5
    17. British Journal of Cancer 1990, 62, 122-6
    18. International Journal of Cancer 1993, 215-9
    19. Cancer Causes & Control 1995, 6, 75-82
    20. American Journal of Public Health 1999, 89, 1244-7
    21. British Journal of Cancer 1999, 79, 1923-8
    22. Epidemiology 2000, 11, 177-80
    23. Cancer Causes & Control 2000, 11, 777-81
    24. International Journal of Cancer 1998, 76, 182-8

    And here is a list of all the well-done studies showing a clear link:

    (crickets)

    So, why abortion and OCPs? Why not hormone replacement therapy? Why not smoking? Because the radical Cult Christians and quacks that run AAPS hate women. Period. They want to put control of women and their bodies back where it belongs—in the hands of Cult Christian manly men.

    Thankfully, the AAPS is a fringe cult group. But people do listen, and they hear what they want to hear. Shameful, really.

  • Autism cranks going after bloggers

    It’s time to open up a can of Streisand. The author of the autism blog Neurodiversity, along with many other blogs and other online entities, has been subpoenaed to produce what amounts to her entire life to aid in some frivolous autism suit. The only thing they didn’t ask her to do was submit to a speculum exam (don’t get any ideas, bastards!).

    This is truly outrageous. It is a clear attempt by a group of (forgive me, please PP) demented fucking wackaloons to intimidate a humble New Englander who enjoys writing.

    Time to get the word out!

    (Hat tip LizDitz)

    Addendum:

    Orac and others have pointed out that the lawyer involved is the real bad guy here. It’s hard to blame devastated parents, but this Clifford Shoemaker guy should be ashamed of himself.

  • Is that really a disease? Epistemology and crank-ism

    And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto the man to see what he would call them; and whatsoever the man would call every living creature, that was to be the name thereof. (Genesis 2:19)

    Human beings are great organizers. As far back as written history goes, people have named and classified what they observe. In fact, it forms the basis for modern science. Linnaean classification, based on observation of traits, predates modern cladistic and genomic classification of organisms, based on arguably more fundamental characteristics.

    The same is true of human disease. Hippocrates was a great observer of human disease and correctly described many conditions in ways easily recognizable to modern doctors. Today, where we know causes of disease, classification has become more precise. For example, we may divide diseases into those caused by bacteria, viruses, genetic defects, etc. When we don’t know the cause of a disease, we still rely on observation. We have various syndromes such as lupus where we do not know the cause, and must fall back on description. This is especially true of psychiatric diseases, where causes are largely unknown, but identifiable patterns of thought and behavior exist.

    It is of course most desirable to be able to describe a disease and know its cause, but being able to name less “concrete” disorders is also helpful. It allows researchers to identify cases and test interventions. Even though lupus does not have one easily identifiable cause, we can describe it well enough to study treatments, thereby helping design treatments.

    This all leads up to a larger epistemologic question: what is a disease?
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  • Wifi Woo Strikes in Sebastopol

    By way of AP and BoingBoing, one can find this post by Dale Daugherty on O’Reilly Radar about the newest attack of the tinfoil-hat-wifi-radiation brigade:

    Our town, Sebastopol, had passed a resolution in November to permit a local Internet provider to provide public wireless access. This week, fourteen people showed up at a City Council meeting to make the claim that wireless caused health problems in general and to them specifically. These emotional pleas made the Council rescind its previous resolution.

    Ah, California! There’s good stuff out there explaining this breed of woo, but these activists still have traction because they’re very good at spreading fear and uncertainty. For instance, what do you do as a county supervisor (perhaps with no education in science since college) and a mob shows up at the meeting with signs that say “Just Say No to Radiation”?

    Or “Money Talks, We Get CANCER.”

    Strongly motivated, vocal, organized minority groups can have a powerful effect on politics. And this is irresponsible for several reasons–this anti-antenna movement has grabbed on to health and safety issues to mask their underlying goal: to make the neighborhoods more beautiful by removing antennae!

    As such, it is great example of how health and safety concerns and the precautionary principle can be used to simply push other political motivations. Cato and AEI could use this post as footnote 1 in any argument against health and safety legislation.

  • Chris Mooney on ignoring the cranks

    Now that PZ, Brian, and ERV have all weighed in on whether Chris Mooney’s piece on crank enablers is right or not, let me lay out my operational strategy as an anti-denialist writer.

    It is true that repetition of denialist arguments is a strategic error, and that the repeition itself can reinforce their arguments. One has to consider this when dealing with nonsense and debunking it not to fall in the trap of just fisking it, which can defeat the purpose of your writing – to decrease the amount of BS in the world.

    However, a knowledge of the history of denialism is of utility in this discussion. Let us take, for example, the tobacco companies. The publication of internal memos from the tobacco companies has proven definitively that the companies were engaged in a strategy of willful deceit. Documents from as early as 1963 (PDF) demonstrate conclusively that the companies were aware that tobacco is addictive, that tobacco causes disease including emphysema and cancer, and that they were in the business of selling a unhealthy drug-delivery device.

    Despite these facts that were well known to them, they engaged in a campaign of disinformation to fight labelling information, smoking restrictions and regulatory control of cigarettes for over 30 years. Now that these documents have come to light their tactics have been studied in detail by various researchers and you see how effective denialism can be when unrecognized. Careful studies have definitively proven denialist tactics were being used to thwart public health for instance:

    ICOSI began as a conspiracy among seven tobacco company chief executives to promote internationally the fiction of a “controversy” regarding smoking and disease [15]. It quickly developed into a multi-million dollar global organization with a new name, expanding membership, and a broader mandate. Relying on a network of centralized staff, member company senior personnel, consultants, lawyers, and NMAs, ICOSI’s successor, INFOTAB, operated as an anti-WHO. Its mission was to systematically thwart public health by globalizing “doubt” not only about smoking and disease, but also about the economic costs of tobacco, the social costs of smoking, the motivations of tobacco control advocates, the relationship between smoking and advertising, and the need for smoking restrictions. Where it succeeded, INFOTAB unquestionably facilitated the spread of the global tobacco disease epidemic.

    In addition the documents have shown how tobacco companies carefully cherry-picked their research, bought “journalists” to promote their agenda (including Fumento and Milloy), created fake research organizations and used libertarian denialist think tanks such as Cato, the Heritage Foundation, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute to further disseminate lies about the healthiness of smoking and the risks of environmental tobacco smoke (see here). All the while the tobacco companies hid their agenda, and their financial ties to these journals, organizations, and journalists.

    More below the fold…

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  • Values Voters and Neo Nazis

    I see that I’m in good company in my curiosity about why Ron Paul enjoys so much crank magnetism. And his crank magnetism and appeal to racist groups can’t be denied. Here for instance, is Ron Paul posing with Don Black, culled from the neo-nazi Stormfront website:

    i-7cd49f3c65eacc9dfe3357dfd02dbfe9-20071220RonPaulDonBlack.jpg

    Now, I think its unlikely Ron Paul knew who this was when he posed for this shot, but between this and their endorsement of Paul on Stormfront radio, I think it’s pretty well confirmed who their candidate is. Also note, this picture was taken at the “Values Voters Presidential Debate” just as a reminder of who “Values Voters” debates appeal to.

    One of my commenters, quoting Digby, made the point that Ron Paul support isn’t so much a political position as a sign of disaffection. Based on the wide political spectrum of cranks that seem to think this anti-government radical is their guy (including the poorly-named Reason magazine as PZ points out) I think Digby’s assessment is the correct one. Cranks recognize one of their own.

    I’m not actually concerned about Ron Paul’s candidacy, I believe his appeal is overblown as any real exposure to his beliefs will turn off the 95% who realize such a fervently anti-government radical libertarian would be the worst candidate one could conceivably elect. He scores easy points at these debates mocking the rather pathetic Republican presidential field and appealing to the people’s populist sentiments, but underneath this facade is a crank, and crank candidates rarely poll higher than about 5-10% (and I include Nader in this category – deal with it). So while it’s been fun mocking this also-ran all week, I don’t think we’ll be seeing much more of this guy after Iowa and New Hampshire.

  • Obesity Crankery Part II

    Orac alerted me, based on my recent obesity writings, of a new crank obesity attack on science.

    This latest is in the form of a rebuttal to Morgan Spurlock’s excellent film Supersize me. Comedian Tom Naughton, who has all the charisma of a wet sponge, is making his own documentary Fathead: You’ve been fed a load of bologna. Here’s the trailer:

    Aside from the shoddy production, noncharismatic host, and general crankery, I guess it’s not so bad. But I am growing concerned about the continual assault on what little good nutritional data is out there, and the misleading tactics of those defending food that is responsible for obesity and poor cardiovascular health.
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  • Obesity Crankery – A growing problem

    Recently, it seems there has been a backlash against medicine and the current knowledge of the relationship between diet, weight and overall health. I don’t actually believe this is directly the fault of scientists or doctors, who react to the trashy mainstream reporting of science with little more than the occasional raised eyebrow. However, many people in response to all these silly health pronouncements, which seemingly come from on high but really are from press coverage of often minor reports in the medical literature, have lost their trust in what science has to offer as a solution to what Michael Pollan refers to as “the Omnivore’s Dilemma”. That is, what should we be eating?

    The result of this confusion is a mixture of distrust, cynicism, and receptivity to crankery and lies about diet. After all, if science ostensibly can’t keep their message straight, who knows what to believe?

    The fact is, science knows many things about the relationship between diet, obesity, and health with great confidence and it hasn’t changed nearly so much as the popular press would have you believe. The failure to state clear messages about nutrition is a reflection on the haphazard way in which nutritional health is reported, the often confusing nature of epidemiologic science, and the various parties that are interested in cashing in the confusion by promoting their own nonsensical ideas about diet.

    Take, for example, Sandy Szwarc. Sandy doesn’t believe obesity or any food choices are actually bad for you. To help spread this nonsense she dismisses valid sources of information like WebMD (which has quite good information) based on the rather silly conspiracy that they have designed their entire website and health enterprise around misleading people into using their products – especially weight-loss products. Because, you know, it’s impossible for a corporation to offer free health advice as a public service without conspiring to grab you buy the ankles and shake the money from your pockets. But it doesn’t end there. We see rest of the standard denialist tactics of course!

    Case in point, in a recent article she makes the astonishing assertion that her mortal enemy – bariatric or gastric-bypass surgeons – have admitted that obesity makes you healthier!

    Today brought another unbelievable example of ad-hoc reasoning, as well as a remarkable admission that the war on obesity is without scientific merit. It appeared in a paper published in the journal for the American Society for Bariatric Surgery (now calling itself the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery), which is edited by the Society’s president, Dr. Harvey Sugerman, M.D. FACS.

    The article, “Do current body mass index criteria for obesity surgery reflect cardiovascular risk?” was “work presented at the 2005 American Society for Bariatric Surgery Meeting in poster form.” The authors, led by Edward H. Livingston M.D. at the University of Texas Southwestern School of Medicine, reported that the conventional risk factors for cardiovascular disease “decreased with increasing degrees of obesity.”

    Yes, you read that correctly, decreased.

    “Therefore,” the authors argued …

    “the criteria for obesity surgery should be changed to lower BMIs than are currently used.”

    Now, boys and girls, what is the very first thing you do when a suspected denialist feeds you some nonsense in quotes? Check the source! Always, always, always, check the source. Let’s expand those six words that Sandy lifted out of the abstract and see what else the authors had to say:

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