denialism | January 6, 2012When Duesberg was recently given space in Scientific American I think the blogosphere was rightly chagrinned that they would give space to a crank whose crackpot ideas are thought to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. But it seemed at the time he had been keeping his denialism on the down low, maybe appearing to have given up on his crank view that HIV does not cause AIDS. Not so anymore. He's back, and has secured publication of a paper denying HIV/AIDS in an Italian Journal.
The title, AIDS since 1984: No evidence for a new, viral epidemic - not even in Africa, seems…
denialism | January 5, 2012This week's think like a doctor column in the NYT is great. It asks the question, if a woman goes to a chiropractor, gets her neck manipulated, and within hours and for the succeeding four years she's had symptoms of severe headaches and a pulsatile sound in her ears, what is the diagnosis?
You can guess what mine is...
Quackery!
It's a great case because it comes with an excellent set of images and reports on this woman's case. But what I can't get over is that the most obvious problem here is that the woman was seeing a chiropractor. The most obvious conclusion of the piece is that this…
denialism | January 5, 2012Seth Mnookin has reasons to hope. It has been clear though for years that Huffpo was a clearinghouse for what I would describe as liberal crankery, which includes things like Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccine crankery, or Bill Maher's anti-pharma paranoia.
But now they have a new site, Huffpo Science, and after my head stopped ringing from that particular oxymoron I went and checked it out.
A lead article on going to Mars by Buzz Aldrin was interesting. An article on Frankenmeat came out relatively clean without getting all paranoid about GMO foods or lab-grown nutrients being less pure…
denialism | January 5, 2012As you can see, mine included blogging again. Fortunately, I'm in a brief research hiatus from surgical residency, so for the next year or so, I actually have some free time. Today I was inspired to start by the Huffington Post of all things, and with good news!
I realized that one of the biggest obstacles to blogging while being a resident was how difficult it is to read outside of work when you're being overworked. After a 14 or 16 hour day, or 30 hour call, the last thing I wanted to do was do more analysis of information, make more decisions, or think at all. I read a lot of Terry…
choofnagle | May 24, 2010Those of you who read Mark Zuckerberg's oped in today's Washington Post might appreciate my take on how Facebook talks about privacy in tomorrow's San Francisco Chronicle: The Privacy Machiavellis.
denialism | May 24, 2010Luckily they don't make the mistake of actually debating denialists. The feature of last weeks issue, "Age of Denial" is a series of articles by skeptics and one laughable rebuttal, discussing the nature of denialism and tactics to use against it. They do quite a good job covering the basics, starting with Deborah MacKenzie and her article "Why Sensible People Reject the Truth":
Whatever they are denying, denial movements have much in common with one another, not least the use of similar tactics (see "How to be a denialist"). All set themselves up as courageous underdogs fighting a corrupt…
choofnagle | April 16, 2010Media reports teem with stories of young people posting salacious photos online, writing about alcohol-fueled misdeeds on social networking sites, and publicizing other ill-considered escapades that may haunt them in the future. These anecdotes are interpreted as representing a generation-wide shift in attitude toward information privacy. Many commentators therefore claim that young people "are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are." This report is among the first quantitative studies evaluating young adults' attitudes. It demonstrates that the picture is more nuanced…
choofnagle | April 15, 2010Naftali Bendavid reports today in the Journal on a problem facing conservatives: how should they assure their supporters, many of whom are suspicious of government activity, to participate in the US Census? After all, the Census sounds suspiciously like something Tiberius would like. But Moses was a fan too. And now Karl Rove is pitching the Census.
Ron Paul argues:
"The census should be nothing more than a headcount," Mr. Paul wrote this month in his weekly column. "It was never intended to serve as a vehicle for gathering personal information on citizens."
It should be noted that Paul…
choofnagle | April 12, 2010What is this business about the Broadway opening of Green Day's American Idiot? Both the Journal and the Times have reported on it, and in the process, defamed an entire genre by describing Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong as a "punk" rocker.
This musical, which opened at the Berkeley Rep a few months ago (to an audience that will ovate any performance), was pretty disappointing. The musical is essentially a "buddy movie," but typically in buddy movies, some great thing is accomplished. It might be some caper or venal activity, but at least one can care about its execution. Not so with…
choofnagle | March 31, 2010Shamelessly stolen from Gawker: Brick Fatwa Libertarian Also Gets Fat Government Checks. For what? A preventable disease! Oh, what ever happened to personal responsibility?
Illustration: A typical American male libertarian in its natural habitat
denialism | March 30, 2010I have now completed almost a year of surgical internship, and as I'm sure you've noticed from my sparse blogging, I've had little free time for writing. It's a shame too because surgery is just so cool.
Intern year is mostly about learning to manage surgical patients, basically people in varying degrees of health who have the added stress of having surgery recently performed on them. Although the 80-hour workweek and case requirements have pushed more exposure to the operating room into the process than previously existed, it's still mostly medical management of patients at this stage. We…
denialism | March 29, 2010With the recent victory of this administration in passing health care reform I felt it was time to talk again about the importance of this issue and some of my own experiences in the last year of my surgical training.
I was, and still am of the belief that reform, whatever form it might take, will be successful as long as we manage to make health care universal. Partly because our system already is universal but defective. No matter if you have insurance or not, if you show up in a hospital with a problem that needs to be addressed, we'll treat it. We ethically can not turn people away…
choofnagle | February 24, 2010Dear Readers, we've been completely derelict in maintaining Denialism Blog. Please accept our apologies. Mark is training to be a surgeon, and Chris recently had an enormous baby! We hope to get back blogging soon. Please excuse our absence until life is back in order.
choofnagle | January 7, 2010Check out this week's New Yorker for a well-put insight into the Rand-infected mind. Nick Paumgarten writes about John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods and his attitudes towards unions:
...His [Mackey's] disdain for contemporary unionism is ideological, as well as self-serving. Like many who have come before, he says that it was only when he started a business--when he had to meet payroll and deal with government red tape--that his political and economic views, fed on readings of Friedman, Rand, and the Austrians, veered to the right. But there is also a psychological dimension. It derives in…
choofnagle | November 28, 2009Chris Anderson's provocative new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, argues that in the digital world, "free" pricing is a realistic and normatively good approach to pricing information products. Unlike the physical world of "free" products, which is plagued with fraud and tricks, the properties of the digital world make free actually possible when bits are sold. The physical world is limited, but the digital world is abundant. Businesses can leverage this abundance, and give it away while making money by charging for whatever is still scarce. For instance, software can be given…
choofnagle | November 22, 2009
Take Pristiq. Warning: side effects include becoming a fat wind up doll.
denialism | November 16, 2009So who here has actually read the health care bill?. I've been devoting a bit of time each week to peruse more and more of it, and while there are endless obstacles to a complete understanding of it (including legalese and the annoying tendency of legislation to contain edits to other bills without including the text of the other bills being edited) it is telling that opponents of the bill are having some difficulty coming up with real criticisms of it. For example, the now infamous death panel fiasco was a willful misunderstanding of a completely wholesome concept, the idea that physicians…
choofnagle | November 14, 2009The Viking and I ventured out early this morning to get the H1N1 vaccine and found long lines in the tony neighborhoods. SF Gate reports that the Marin public vaccination clinic was swamped. (The irony!--Marin is a hotbed of the anti-vaccination movement.) So where can you get the vaccine quickly? Downtown! We were in and out in less than an hour! There's almost no one there.
choofnagle | November 13, 2009
Exhibit 1001, on our great college and university campuses, this wretch can complain of coyote ugly. The nerve. Nice hat, BTW. Do you have a matching jersey? Ladies, imagine waking up with this puffy misogynist! Via Gawker.
Exhibit 1002, Southern Football's Dating Game in Today's WSJ.