This week’s PalCast is still in production, so your patience is appreciated.
Previous episodes are here.
Denialism Blog
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Look, Ma, I'm on TV!
Ok, really, it’s bloggingheads.tv. Dr. Free Ride from Adventures in Ethics and Science invited me for a chat about ethics, which you can view, well, right now. Next time, I’ll remember to keep the camera a bit further away.
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Swayze on woo
Mrs. Pal just called me upstairs where she was watching Barbara Walters. She (Walters, not Mrs Pal) was interviewing actor Patrick Swayze who is battling metastatic pancreatic cancer, a disease which will certainly kill him. Walters asked him quite a bit about the disease and treatment, and Swayze, whose answers were earthy, but pretty accurate, gave a compelling interview. He is no graduate of Google U.; he spoke frankly about his suffering, his hopes, his fears, but didn’t claim to be any sort of expert outside of his own experience.
Walters asked him if he was using any alternative medicine. He unenthusiastically noted that he was taking a few Chinese herbs, but roundly dismissed alternative medicine as a hope for him:
If anybody had that cure out there like so many people swear to me they do, you’d be two things: you’d be very rich and you’d be very famous— otherwise shut up .
Patrick, thank you. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
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The Ayn Rand Deprogrammer: Submissions Solicited
Sciblings, I request your assistance in an important venture.
I recently learned that Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead was a top read among UC Berkeley undergrads in 1987 and 1997. This dismaying fact drove me to start assembling a reader, The Ayn Rand Deprogrammer. I’ve spent the last several weeks reviewing possible texts for this important new work. Here is the first candidate for inclusion, and going forward, I would appreciate any suggestions that you have for the Deprogrammer.
Mary Gaitskill: Two Girls, Fat and Thin
I spent much of my vacation reading Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin, where Ayn Rand is presented as Anna Granite, an amphetamine-popping, average looking, salon-holding kook who writes The Bulwark. Gaitskill depicts the salons held in Rand’s apartment in the development of her second book, Atlas Shrugged (which apparently included Alan Greenspan!).
Gaitskill does a bizarro sex scene even better than Rand (from Two Girls):
She crouched in the darkened room, her face almost contorted with fear. He stood still in the doorway, arms loose at his sides, an amused sneer on his mouth. She felt her lip curl. She darted forward and then she felt her body, helpless and frail, crushed against chest. She felt her fists and elbows beating against his form. She thought she felt a deep, silent laugh well up in his chest. Effortlessly, he lifted her body and carried her to the stone sculpture. It was not an act of love, or an act of hate. It was an act of contempt, an act of detachment and brutality. Asia knew that she was being utterly debased by him. Yet the debasement was bound to an exaltation that made her moan. Their mouths locked; there was pain that tore her body and ecstasy that wrenched her soul. He crucified her on his stone.
Gaitskill attacks Rand in many ways, most directly through an article written by one of the two protagonists:
This cultural utopia of greed, expressed in gentrification and the slashing of social programs, has had its spokesperson and prophet for the last fifty years, a novelist whose books are American fantasies that mirror, in all its neurotic excess, the frantic twist to the right we are not experiencing. Anna Granite, who coined the term “the Truth of Selfishness,” has been advocating the yuppie raison d’etre since the early forties; it is only now that her ideas are being lived out, in mass culture and in government.
This book requires a lot of investment for the Ayn Rand critiques, but it is probably worth it. I love the depiction of Ayn Rand’s public lecture; it reminded me of visits to the Cato Institute.
Call for Submissions
If you think this is an important venture, please suggest texts in the comments for inclusion.
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It's Just Crazytalk in the Journal
If you want to get an idea of how crazy the Wall Street Journal editorial board is, read Friday’s oped by their senior economist, Stephen Moore. The title itself says a lot: ‘Atlas Shrugged’: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years.”
Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read “Atlas Shrugged” a “virgin.” Being conversant in Ayn Rand’s classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok was practically a job requirement. If only “Atlas” were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.
[…]
In one chapter of the book, an entrepreneur invents a new miracle metal — stronger but lighter than steel. The government immediately appropriates the invention in “the public good.” The politicians demand that the metal inventor come to Washington and sign over ownership of his invention or lose everything.
The scene is eerily similar to an event late last year when six bank presidents were summoned by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to Washington, and then shuttled into a conference room and told, in effect, that they could not leave until they collectively signed a document handing over percentages of their future profits to the government. The Treasury folks insisted that this shakedown, too, was all in “the public interest.”
Eerily similar? This flawed, unnuanced comparison illustrates the pathology of both the Cato Institute and the Journal!
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Rejecting Homosexual Children Results in Disastrous Health Outcomes – An Appeal to Parents
Not infrequently, science butts heads with culture as the data scientists collect about issues of the day may conflict with cultural perceptions and deeply-held beliefs. Attitudes and perceptions about homosexuality are, not surprisingly, a source of denialism as certain overvalued ideas about sexuality are being challenged with our deeper understanding of human sexual desire. For one, homosexuality is not a choice, despite all attempts to reprogram or suppress homosexual desires, the desires do not go away. One might even hypothesize the attempts to repress or disparage such a fundamental aspect of someone’s identity might cause harm long term and result in negative health outcomes. Sure enough, this article published in the journal Pediatrics last week suggests this is in fact the case, and I believe we must begin to view the rejection of homosexuality by parents as not just as small-minded, but actively harmful, constituting child abuse that has long term implications on their childrens’ health.
The authors identified 224 gay and lesbian youths between 21 and 25 years of age and using surveys to evaluate for high risk behaviors, mental health and levels of rejection by family, they found some startling patterns…
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Chris Mooney on the deniers
Welcome to the new year, and now that I’m back from a little family vacation I’d like to applaud PAL for the excellent job he did summarizing our thesis, and the job he’s done in general in the last year. I’m busy doing my last 3rd year clerkship in neurology (even though I’m graduating in 2009 – it’s complicated) and it’s wonderful to have him at our side fighting the good fight.
Objects of interest in the last couple of weeks include (former?) framing ally Chris Mooney breaking with Matt Nisbett on the necessary language for addressing denialism. In his article defending the Obama administration’s appointment of real scientists like John Holdren or Jane Lubchenco, Mooney writes:
Use of the Term “Denier. Holdren’s aforementioned op-ed, published in the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune, is strongly worded about the problem of global warming “skepticism” or “denial”–and rightly so. It prompted a large volume of response, and Holdren has, in turn, answered his critics. It’s important to note that the op-ed wasn’t written when he was a representative of the president, and I would imagine that his language might not be as strong in the future. But in any event, I want to defend his, and anyone’s, right to use the term “denier” in a global warming context, something The Rocky Mountain News (among others) objects to. I am continually baffled by attempts to rule a perfectly good word out of bounds under the strange pretense that any use of it implies some type of connection with the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, which is the central complaint that global warming “skeptics” tend to make.
“Denier” is defined in the dictionary as meaning “one who denies.” You will note that there are no Holocaust references. The verb “deny” means (among other things) “to refuse to recognize or acknowledge; disown; disavow; repudiate.” It does not specifically refer to the Holocaust either. Perhaps that’s because the word is massively older: As Dictionary.com notes of the etymology (relying on the online etymology dictionary):
c.1300, from O.Fr. denier, from L. denegare, from de- “away” + negare “refuse, say ‘no,’ ” from Old L. nec “not,” from Italic base *nek-“not,” from PIE base *ne- “no, not” (see un-).
Why should we not properly use this time honored word? In particular, the idea that calling someone a “global warming denier” is an implicit comparison with Holocaust denial is absurd. When one uses words like “denier,” “denial,” and “deny,” there is no necessary reference to one particular species of the broader phenomenon, and thus no more invocation of Holocaust denial than of those who denied Christ or those who are in denial about their crumbling marriages. Global warming deniers do not have the power to redefine words that long preceded them, and that will long outlive them.
I tend to agree, although I of course have a bias towards referring to their tactics in general as denialism – or the systematic use of distracting tactics to prolong debate over settled science and historical facts.
I’d also like to point out some fun items from my denialist RSS feeds over the last couple of weeks. For one HuffPo deserves credit for debunking some odious historical revisionism by Fox News on the Great Depression and this nonsense that FDR prolonged it. We should give credit where credit is due.
And I couldn’t resist noting some hysterical nonsense from crazy Joe Mercola. At the same time he decries a war on the public by modern medicine he in the next breath suggests that you forgo food and obtain all your sustenance by staring at the sun. I can’t make this stuff up.
HIV/AIDS denialist Christine Maggiore has died from AIDS and I won’t hedge and say it was merely likely it was from AIDS. A 52 year old HIV positive individual with bilateral pneumonia treated multiple times in 6 months has AIDS until proven otherwise. This woman and her daughter were killed by her foolish ideology and I have no sympathy for her similarly deluded husband. I dislike discussing the medical diagnoses of individuals (even public ones) on a blog, but in the case of HIV/AIDS denialism this is an important public health issue, and it’s important the denialists don’t get away with further revising history and science by suggesting this was anything other than what it obviously is – another death from HIV/AIDS denialism. As Ben Goldacre mentions in his coverage, HIV/AIDS denialism may be responsible for as many as 340,000 deaths so far. This is denialism that kills.
Finally for Michael Egnor (who no doubt would find our attacks on HIV/AIDS denialism to be “arrogant”) I’d suggest reading this Lancet article on adaptive evolution and antibiotic resistance. The real arrogant ones aren’t the ones fighting for legitimate scientific discourse but those that reject the most established fields in science simply because they “see design.” The issue includes several articles on the impact of evolution on medicine and is a wonderful read.
With school, travel and interviews things will be slow at first this year, but hopefully they’ll ramp up before long.