General Discussion

Take Denialism 101

denialism — Sun, 03 May 2015 08:19:25 +0000

Take Denialism 101

John Cook, of Skeptical Science fame, has created an online course through the University of Queensland and edX, on denialism and climate change. Easy to access and free to take, I found it simple to join from their facebook page, and if you don't want to join you can still see the lectures from their Youtube channel.

Having gone through the materials so far I have to say Cook nails it. His graphic depicting the 5 tactics is very clear and easy to understand.

Also I think he has done a great job of making clear that the problem isn't one of education, facts or knowledge. The problem is the way we think, and how our ideology skews what we are willing to believe, setting us up to fall for denialist arguments. That combined with the series of high-quality experts from Oreskes to Mann makes for a really excellent introduction to the problem from real experts in the field.

denialism Sun, 05/03/2015 - 04:19

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Denialism Defined

General Discussion

global warming denialism

I'm glad to see this conclusion. Knowledge and ability do not mean infalible judgement. Intelligence does not gaurantee fairness or justice.
That is why the best run and freest nations are those with group leadership -- western democracies.

very cool info

When are you going to allow commenting on:

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2014/12/03/nyt-helps-in-typical-rape-…

Again?

I mean, now that it's been demonstrated to be a hoax, and the slanderer hasn't faced any consequences?

NYT Helps in Typical Rape-victim Smearing

denialism — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 14:12:40 +0000

NYT Helps in Typical Rape-victim Smearing

We should have predicted this when we discussed the UVa Rape story in Rolling Stone last week, it was just a matter of time before people would start suggesting the central figure in the story, Jackie, might be fabricating. I would be surprised if this response did not occur, because sadly it is so typical. What I'm surprised by is that the New York Times, is credulously repeating this smear led by Richard Bradley, and Jonah Goldberg of all people.

Still, some journalists have raised questions about the story. Richard Bradley, who as an editor at George magazine was duped by the former New Republic writer and fabulist Stephen Glass, said in an essay that he had since learned to be skeptical of articles that confirm existing public narratives. “This story contains a lot of apocryphal tropes,” he wrote. Others, including Jonah Goldberg, a Los Angeles Times columnist, compared the case to rape accusations in 2006 against three lacrosse players at Duke University who were subsequently cleared and speculated that the Virginia story might be a hoax.

First, I'll give you Richard Bradley might be legitimate, but his argument is completely speculative. He says it merely sounds odd to him. Hardly newsworthy. But then Jonah Goldberg? Author of "Liberal Fascism"? Who gives a damn what he thinks about anything? On the basis of basically one credible reporter's feeling, they feel this deserves an article suggesting Jackie was not a credible source. Not on any independent investigation, sourcing or facts, they're smearing this victim. And their argument about Rolling Stone's reporting being adequate is highly debatable.

The subject of the article, who was identified by only her first name, had requested that her assailants not be contacted, and Rolling Stone decided that her situation was too delicate to risk going against her wishes, according to people familiar with the reporting process who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

News media critics questioned the article’s reliance on a single source. “For the sake of Rolling Stone’s reputation,” said Erik Wemple, The Washington Post’s media critic, “Sabrina Rubin Erdely had better be the country’s greatest judge of character.”

So, the story should be rejected because they didn't contact the rapist for his take on the story? Let's predict how that would go. The guy would either say, "no comment", "it never happened", "I don't know what you're talking about", or "talk to my lawyer." If he was stupid he would admit some culpability or suggest it was consensual, thereby giving a future prosecutor an edge in establishing the fact of the crime. There, I filled in the blanks. Do they really think that would add anything to this story, or result in it not being reported? This is total nonsense.

Worse, it ignores the focus of the story, which isn't about the facts of the victims allegations but in how my Alma Mater handles such allegations which is clearly sourced from discussions with several school administrators including the president Teresa Sullivan.

Can we call this anything but typical victim smearing? How dare the New York Times thoughtlessly promote this unethical critique of Rolling Stones reporting and this rape victim. This isn't based on independent investigation, sourcing or facts, but on the feeling of one reporter, the reliable victim-bashing of a right-wing ideologue, and a misplaced argument about the value of obtaining "balance" by talking to an alleged rapist who (if he was smart) would undoubtedly be completely unhelpful or silent.

The point of Rolling Stone's article was not to investigate a gang rape, but to expose how this University (and other universities as we discussed) similarly use internal rape boards to sweep crimes like these under the rug and avoid Clery Act reporting. NYT does a disservice to this victim, and other victims, by smearing Rolling Stone and Jackie in this fashion, without any real independent investigation or reporting. Maybe it's time we write a letter to their ombudsman. I suggest you join me. Write to their public editor Margaret Sullivan at public@nytimes.com.

Also in today's New York Times, another Cosby victim has come forward alleging sexual molestation when she was a minor. It strikes me as ironic, that this type of casual smearing of victims is the exact problem that allows serial rapists to thrive. Until we support victims, and stop reflexively accusing them of making rape allegations up, men who rape will have no problem moving from victim to victim without fear of justice.

denialism Wed, 12/03/2014 - 09:12

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education

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sexism

Rape is real. Fantastic claims about premeditated, organized, ritual rape and cruelty are usually false, and folks are right to be skeptical.

Maybe you are too young to remember Santanic Panic in the 1980s, but I would encourage you to educate yourself on the topic and give the Rolling Stone article another read.

Satanic Cults, urban gangs that require rape and murder for initiation, fraternities that require pledges to rape innocent victims, these are all ghost stories. Don't flash your lights at the car with its headlights off, because they will kill you!

If you actually care about rape (and almost everyone does) the Rolling Stone piece should anger you. When high profile rape allegations are proven to be false, does that make actual rape victims more or less likely to believed?

The point of Rolling Stone’s article was not to investigate a gang rape, but to expose how this University (and other universities as we discussed) similarly use internal rape boards to sweep crimes like these under the rug and avoid Clery Act reporting.

Try reading the entire blog entry, won't you?

You may satisfy your sense of... whatever it is you think you're proving by dismissing this as a fable of an organized gang rape (such things do actually happen, btw) all you like, but the real problem here is that fraternities, in particular, DO create environments that encourage this behavior, and universities DO routinely sweep these crimes under the rug. "If the ref didn't see it, it didn't happen."

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Because the "point" is not to create a false hysteria, the fact that I published (what appears to be) a work of fiction as a real event doesn't even matter.

But it does matter. Because when this account is proven to be false, it is going to make life that much worse for actually rape victims.

False hysteria is never a good thing, even if it is motivated by a higher purpose.

This is Satanic Panic 2.0.

Maybe you are too young to remember Santanic Panic in the 1980s, but I would encourage you to educate yourself on the topic and give the Rolling Stone article another read.

I would disagree. A central feature of satanic panic was the use of bogus psychological techniques such as recovered memory and abuse of children, not adults, who are even more easily suggestible. None of this sounds like this event was cultivated in the individual, further the event can be corroborated by her friends who encountered her after the incident, shoeless and beaten. If her friends came forward and said the facts don't fit, that would justify evidence of a hoax (per the reporter in this podcast while not identified they know they are part of the story). So, is it possible this is a fabrication? Always. Should it be our first reaction? No. Does it resemble satanic panic? Not really.

More importantly that when the university heard the allegations of this violent crime, they didn't encourage criminal investigation. That's the real story. Even if fabricated such an allegation should be pursued, and it wasn't.

Does it really matter whether it was an implanted memory or run-of-the-mill mental illness? Is that really the take home lesson about Santanic Panic? Not for me. The lesson for me is: be very skeptical when you hear fantastic tales about organized groups of sociopaths inflicting unimaginable cruelty on others. Doesn't mean they don't exist, but be very, very skeptical.

We have seen moral panics pretty damn similar to this one time and time again. Satanic Cults. The Christian Right believed it because it confirmed their biases evil and nonbelievers. African American street gang initiations. Suburbanites believed it because it confirms their fears.

You have to admit it maybe possible that the UVA rape story confirms your biases. Maybe if we sub out "fraternity kids" for "social workers" you would view the exact same story with a more critical eye. Maybe not. Maybe you would hear a story about 7 social workers getting together planning and executing a brutal beating and rape and think "sounds plausible." No need to even question the story.

Where are those awful sociopathic "friends" that didn't want their friend who was bleeding after being brutally raped for 3 hours to go to the hospital (not even the police) because it might hurt their social life? Have they corroborated this story?

I don't know what to say if that part of the story doesn't set your BS detector blaring. This is not the way real people behave. When my BS detector is blaring, my first instinct is to require more evidence before I decide to believe a hard-to-believe story. If I tell you that alien's probed my butt (sexual assault) are you morally bound to believe me lest you are a "rape denier." I don't think so. My story is just too far-fetched.

As to what you see as the broader point (i.e., UVA's response), according to the story, Jackie was presented with the option of going to the police and decided not to do it. I guess the question is whether the Dean should have gone to the police against Jackie's wishes. I think there are good arguments both ways.

"Let’s predict how that would go. The guy would either say, “no comment”, “it never happened”, “I don’t know what you’re talking about”, or “talk to my lawyer.” If he was stupid he would admit some culpability or suggest it was consensual, thereby giving a future prosecutor an edge in establishing the fact of the crime. There, I filled in the blanks."

First of all, if he WAS stupid and did say "it was consensual," that would be worthwhile to find out. And some rapists ARE stupid.

Second of all, it's *possible* that he would have answered "I was in France attending such-and-such an event that week, and I can document that," and that Rolling Stone, given that information, would have been able to confirm that story. It's not likely, but it's possible. If that had been what had happened, then that would have been worth finding out for the reporter.

Admittedly, neither of these things are likely. But a really thorough reporter would at least try, unless there's a strong reason not to (as maybe there was in this case). Or so it seems to me - is there something I'm missing?

Other than that, I basically agree with your post.

Slate, the New Republic, the Washington Post, and the Daily Beast are also credulously repeating the smears against Rolling Stone. It's a credulity pandemic.

I seem to remember the same asinine "victim smearing" nonsense being thrown around during the Duke rape case. Remind me again, how did that turn out?

Some of the details in the Rolling Story are ridiculous on their face.

As for the "friends" who supposedly "encountered" the victim "shoeless and beaten", the "reporter" in the article makes clear the only corroboration for that detail comes from, you guessed it, "Jackie". Anyone who honestly believes that "friends" would find advise someone who had just been gang-raped, who they found "shoeless and beaten" not to go to the police or the administration because it would hurt their chances of pledging a frat(as is stated quite clearly in the RS article) is simply too gullible to put into words.

"You were just raped by seven people, but hey, we really want to rush Psi Kappa, so please, don't tell anyone about it."

Give me a break.

This story is so much like the bogus Duke Lacrosse case that it is scary.

"But then Jonah Goldberg? Author of “Liberal Fascism”? Who gives a damn what he thinks about anything?"

Wow, that is one hell of a brilliant rebuttal, genius.

Unfortunately for you and your pathetic narrative, the RS article and the shoddy reporting that produced it is being questioned by more than just Richard Bradley and Jonah Goldberg. You can add the Washington Post, The New Republic, Slate, and the Daily Beast to the growing list. But that doesn't fit your "victim smearing" narrative, so it goes unmentioned.

This article nicely rebuts your foaming-at-the-mouth, ad hominem style of "argument":

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/04/we-must-scrutinize-the…

"Worse, it ignores the focus of the story, which isn’t about the facts of the victims allegations..."

Yeah, those claims that someone was gang-raped by seven people? That's just secondary.

I'm curious, were you one of the people who demanded the Duke Lacrosse "rapists" be castrated, or were you just writing silly blog posts presuming their guilt?

According to Rolling Stone, Jackie's "friends" supposedly uttered, according to Jackie (and Jackie only, contrary to what you claim)the following statements to Jackie, after being told she had been gang-raped by seven people, for three hours:

"have fun with it…[with a] bunch of hot Phi Psi guys”"

“we’ll never be allowed into any frat party again”

If that sounds even remotely plausible to you, I have a unicorn farm, tended by leprechauns, I would like to sell you. It can be reached via the Brooklyn Bridge, which I also have for sale, along with some choice real estate in the Florida Everglades.

The following quote appears in an article at Slate (I guess they are another credulous outlet specializing in the smearing of rape victims):

"In her story, Erdely does describe a scene in which Jackie’s 'three best friends on campus' encounter her immediately after the alleged incident. The way Erdely writes that scene, it’s impossible to know if she’s getting the quotes directly from the friends (whose names have been changed in the story) or from Jackie’s recollection of what they said. Mostly, it seems to be the latter."

Yeah, so much for your claim that the encounter on the stairs was independently corroborated.

Congratulations to the left-leaning media outlets who coughed up a shred of journalistic integrity (after several days). Congratulations also to those who would falsify rape claims; you have set back the cause about 30 years. The general public is not as stupid as you might think and they have every reason to question rape claims like this that trivialize the real sexual assaults that do occur.

The only thing missing from this case is a corrupt DA cynically pressing charges and slandering a group of men in order to win the black vote in his campaign to be reelected.

The following quote comes from a Washington Post story published today:

"Several of the woman’s close friends and campus sex assault awareness advocates expressed doubt about the published account, and the magazine’s editors also apologized to readers for discrepancies in the story."

http://tinyurl.com/oy23n6b

This story is collapsing faster than The New Republic.

However, this statement, from the same article, is even more damning:

“In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced".

So, for the clowns who smeared those who questioned this obviously bogus story, are you going to eat that crow with the egg you scraped off your face, or are you going to save room for the humble pie?

Hahahahahahahahaha, if you don't look like a total jackass right now, I don't know who does.

What have we learned from this fiasco?

1. If anyone says a category of persons should always be believed about certain allegations that sometimes get made, that person is spinning you for political purposes. Discount it.

2. If a given story violates your personal sense of logic, common sense and probability, your instincts are probably not wrong.

3. We don't want to live in a world where normal human skepticism about a given story, allegation or theory is shouted down by internet jackals like the author of this piece. No matter who you are or what group you identify with, do not let anyone silence you by questioning your motives or character.

I guess I just need to republish the relevant piece from my post:

The point of Rolling Stone’s article was not to investigate a gang rape, but to expose how this University (and other universities as we discussed) similarly use internal rape boards to sweep crimes like these under the rug and avoid Clery Act reporting.

Or as I said in #3:

More importantly that when the university heard the allegations of this violent crime, they didn’t encourage criminal investigation. That’s the real story. Even if fabricated such an allegation should be pursued, and it wasn’t.

Even if this did not occur as Jackie has said, if she came to the university with this allegation, and they did nothing, that's the problem. That is the issue Rolling Stone is trying to expose. That's the problem we discussed when the article first came out. The point of the Rolling Stone article, and what will get lost when the focus becomes on slamming the victim of the crime, is that the culture of the institution is fundamentally defective, that internal rape boards exist to protect institutions and not sexual assault victims.

After all, what was this story about? A girl described a violent assault taking place against her, and the university diverting the victim of the alleged violent crime into an internal disciplinary process that suppresses reporting, hides these crimes, and prevents criminal investigation that will allow the truth of allegations to be determined and criminals to be punished. We don't know if this is a fabrication, or an exaggeration, in the meantime, when victims come forward alleging violent assault it's wrong to just say, "that's impossible" just because it sounds extreme, or unlikely to you. The proper thing to do is to believe victims, investigate the allegations, and find out the truth. And I stand by that Jonah Goldberg is a hack.

If this turns out to be a fabrication that will be sad, because it will distract from the real facts of how colleges and universities suppress rape statistics, and funnel these victims into internal disciplinary systems which let rapists off the hook, and prevent legitimate data from being collected. This is what we explored last week, and that is still a valid problem.

Finally Rudyard, don't hammer-post, it's annoying. And I won't ever feel bad for sticking up for women who come forward with sexual abuse allegations. The Rolling Stone may have erred with this source, but that doesn't mean the problem with rape on campus doesn't exist. Your schadenfreude is really rather pathetic. This isn't a victory for anybody.

Virtually every single professional journalist who reported on this story noted that not getting a statement from the accused is a serious lapse of journalistic ethics. But why should you listen to them when you can just read the pathetic musings of Mark Hoofnagle? Because when you automatically assume the guilt of the accused, of course it is silly to get their side of the story. After all, when you are writing a piece that can destroy their lives, who cares what they have to say? This pointless victim-bashing must end.

Fake but accurate. Understood. Thanks, Mr. Hoofnagle.

Whose life is destroyed by this article? Other than maybe Jackie now that it appears she's exaggerated or fabricated? Someone named "Drew" at UVa?

This isn't about assuming the guilt of the accused but a need to stop immediately disbelieving rape victims, which sadly is the status quo. When you look at the data if 20-25% of women are being raped while at college, and only about 10% report, what's the cause of that discrepancy? Could it be because we so readily disbelieve victims of rape?

The RS article, if anyone has read it which I'm beginning to doubt, is not just about Jackie, or a crime piece on her rape, and doesn't just use her allegations to substantiate their case. How about Liz Securro? No one can challenge her story, her rapist admitted to the allegations. How about the data from Lizak showing that the typical rapist on campus will have 6 victims. The article is about how college campuses divert victims from reporting violent crimes. It's about how rape on campus is not taken seriously, and as a result, serial rapists can basically function without fear of reprisal.

I suspect we'll find out that Jackie has been a victim, but her claims are exaggerated. But so what? What does that change about the facts of the article? Does it alter the facts of how UVa handles rape allegations (even if they turn out false)? How they haven't expelled a student, even those found guilty of raping students, in years?

It will be sad indeed if we use this girl as an excuse to further ignore, disbelieve and further abuse victims of rape.

My schadenfreude is pathetic? No, what's pathetic is that you can casually accuse multiple people of committing violent felonies, without a shred of evidence, then smear as denialists or rape apologists those who are skeptical of a story that is so obviously bogus, anyone with an IQ over 12 can see it. Worse is the fact that you mock the attempts that should have been made to obtain any sort of evidence or corroboration. But even more ludicrous, yet totally indicative of the rest of your asinine bullsh*t, is how you think labelling someone a "right wing ideologue" is some sort of argument-winning trump card. Why prove your point with actual evidence when you can simply note that someone is, horror-of-horrors, on the right of the political spectrum? You're not interested in the truth. All you care about is pushing a political narrative. You're pathetic.

Your style of "ignore the facts if they don't fit the narrative" bullsh*t is precisely why cases of rape should not be adjudicated on college campuses and why everyone in the United States should be thankful the accused are afforded a presumption of innocence in non-kangaroo courts.

"The proper thing to do is believe victims, investigate the allegations, and find out the truth".

How completely revealing that you list "believe victims"(notice the word alleged is never used, as you are evidently intent on not learning any lessons, ever) first. It is perfectly indicative of the "well-publicized accusations first, evidence later" modus operandi of the rape culture warriors. And you write this bullsh*t on a blog devoted to science and critical thinking?

Schadenfreude? You fuc*ing deserve every last bit of the derision directed at you. That you try to pretend you don't is laughable.

Good lord, not only do you cite a study that has been derided by just about everyone, you can't even do it right. The much talked about 20% concerns so-called "sexual assault". The study, an online survey of two whole schools, used a ridiculously broad definition of sexual assault that includes things such as unwanted kisses on the cheek. Nowhere, NOWHERE, does the asinine study to which you refer indicate that 20% of women on campus are "raped" in the way rape is understood by the general public. It simply amazes me that anyone with half a brain thinks college campuses in the United States are as violent as a Johannesburg ghetto, which is what you have to believe in order to claim, with a straight face, that 1 in 5 college women are "raped". If that were the case, we would be calling out the national guard, not debating policy in the pages of a magazine better known for publishing stories about shallow musicians.

The following boils down your above comment: "We need to do something about 'rape culture', so who cares if innocent lives are destroyed in the process." That summarizes pretty much everything you have written on this subject.

Those who are making it easy to discount the stories of real rape victims are people, like you, who push the bogus ones without a single fuc*ing thought as to how many innocent lives they are destroying with their crusade.

What have we learned from this fiasco?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. We are incapable of learning lessons. We are stupid, hairless apes possessing the ability of logic and reason, but who refuse to use those abilities if they interfere with our biases and superstitions.

Don't think for a second anyone has learned any lessons. The next time a moral panic inevitably arises, nobody except a small percentage will ever even remember this episode. And when reminded of this episode, the others will insist that the next moral panic is "totally different." The next moral panic will be real. They will be certain of it.

Without a hint of irony we denounce skepticism on something called the scienceblog. Because skepticism is tantamount to denialism. And denialism is anti-science. Therefore, skepticism is anti-science. Believe. Just believe. Believe unless you have concrete proof to disbelieve.

We live at the bottom of the rabbit hole, not at the top.

Who cares if this farce has real victims in the form of rape victims that will have a harder time being taken seriously in the future?

Who cares that a group of young men have had to wear a scarlet "R" around campus? Who cares that they have been harassed and shamed? Who cares that they have seen bricks thrown through their windows and their house vandalized? Burn the witch!

No one cares because they are privileged little shits. Sure they have been harassed. Sure they are the victims of crimes. But so what? They are probably just rapists that haven't been caught yet. They had it comin', right?

In the words of Clint Eastwood, "we all have it comin', kid."

I stopped reading the comments, probably because they were all entirely rude and disrespectful. But, I am writing as a student at a University who was raped almost 2 years ago by a division one athlete, while his roommates stood outside the door making noises and remarks that I will never be able to forget. These men likely did not realize what was going on behind the door, but nonetheless they have changed my life forever. They encouraged this man to continue what he was doing, and when I was able to finally leave that night, I hid in shame and guilt for many months. I immediately contacted therapists to deal with the issue, but it was not until I failed a mandatory physical that I ended up revealing what had happened to me. People like you are the ones who force people like me into hiding. I was so afraid of what people would say or think about me, that I did not want to say anything.

Two years later, I am still on anti-depressants, and the person I have accused of rape has never seen serious consequences because of the way our country and universities deal with these situations.

Sexual assault is REAL. It is a huge problem, and I can relate to the RS story. It takes a true, very disgusting story to get peoples' attention, and unfortunately it grabbed the wrong kind of attention from you all who have terrible things to say. RS is apologizing, because it is impossible for every detail in their story to be correct (no story is ever told the way that things happened....ever. Try it at home by making dinner with your wife and see what she says happened and what you say happened), and they want people to stop flaunting this story around like Holocaust denialist.

This young ladies life has been forever changed, and I have met victims who have later gone on to commit suicide because of people like you. Rape is just about the most heinous crime I believe that a person can commit. The person survives the attack, and has to forever live with it. Victims of sexual assault are 13 times more likely than others to attempt suicide than those who have never been assaulted.

I really hope you read that last sentence again, and realize that hiding behind your computer screen and saying terrible things like this will get you no where in life. Think about your daughter, your wife, you sister, your mother, and any other women you love dearly getting raped and possibly never being the same again. Your comments have led another victim to fall silent, and I hope you can one day change your ways.

Mark, it appears this post attracted some MRAs who don't care what it or your previous one was actually about. Your protestations are unavailing, because all they want is to carry the fight to the International Fem-Lib Conspiracy. I wonder if Rudy Bombast is running for office? He seems to be polishing his message.

I'm thinking so. They definitely have that skeevy MRA vibe that they're so filled with glee to find out this accusation may be inaccurate. We actually don't know if it is an exaggeration, a fabrication, or just an error in memory, the girl is still insistent she was raped although she has now said some of the details may be wrong.

What is disturbing is this insistence that gang rape is somehow unbelievable or just doesn't happen. One just happened on JHU campus, a gang rape of a high school girl, only 16 at a party. Hopkins had even had difficulties within the last year of sweeping other gang rape allegations at the Pike house under the rug spurring a federal investigation.

It is not unbelievable to think a girl can get gang raped at a fraternity, and it is extremely unusual for rape allegations to be false, the figure usually quoted is 2%. Automatically discounting the victim's story because you don't believe such things happen is not admirable, or "skepticism". That's just being a dick.

Some additional issues DD writes:

Without a hint of irony we denounce skepticism on something called the scienceblog. Because skepticism is tantamount to denialism. And denialism is anti-science. Therefore, skepticism is anti-science. Believe. Just believe. Believe unless you have concrete proof to disbelieve.

I didn't denounce skepticism or hint this was denialism. Just because we're at denialism blog doesn't mean that's our one topic. This is a common response from people who don't realize we discuss everything from crankery to health care policy here. All topics aren't denialism all the time, denialism is a very specific behavior and I wasn't alleging it occurred in this instance. Further, skepticism isn't just saying "This doesn't sound right." One of my objections is the doubters kicked in before independent investigation or sourcing suggested there was a problem with the story. Just because, I guess, gang rape just doesn't sound real. Well it happens, it doesn't seem isolated.

Who cares if this farce has real victims in the form of rape victims that will have a harder time being taken seriously in the future?

That's the most upsetting thing about this, I agree, that it validates the instant disbelief of victims, which is precisely the behavior that will make it more difficult for future rape victims to speak out.

Who cares that a group of young men have had to wear a scarlet “R” around campus? Who cares that they have been harassed and shamed? Who cares that they have seen bricks thrown through their windows and their house vandalized? Burn the witch!

No one should have assumed 100% of the fraternity members are rapists, and violence was never an acceptable response. I don't believe the victim has been completely discredited either though. Yes details are wrong, maybe there is exaggeration, or mistakes, we don't know yet. I think it's highly-likely something happened to this girl, we just don't know exactly what. It' unfortunate for all involved.

RH says:

Your style of “ignore the facts if they don’t fit the narrative” bullsh*t is precisely why cases of rape should not be adjudicated on college campuses and why everyone in the United States should be thankful the accused are afforded a presumption of innocence in non-kangaroo courts.

I think we actually have common ground here. I agree, sexual assault boards are kangaroo courts, and universities have no business adjudicating violent crime. Other than that, we seem to disagree. I don't trust Jonah Goldberg and I think that his being an ideologue, and writing such ridiculous tripe in the past is enough to justify that. Ideologues are not impartial, fair, or even frequently honest, and that's whether they're left or right wing. Ideology is what makes people deny science, whether it's a crusty hippy whining about nuclear power and GMOs or a right wing nut ranting about abortion and evolution, the problem is ideology. So yes, ideologues are almost instantly discredited in my view. Especially given the contribution of right wingers to misogyny and MRA bullshit.

" I wonder if Rudy Bombast is running for office? "

Hahahaha, so I was the one smearing people as denialists, casually dropping rape accusations and mocking the very notion of gathering evidence before reporting a story that could destroy the lives of countless individuals? Bombast? Perhaps, but not from me, genius.

"People like you are the ones who force people like me into hiding. I was so afraid of what people would say or think about me, that I did not want to say anything. "

I don't know to whom you are referring, but if your goal is to get me to apologize for slamming someone who made fake rape allegations, it's never going to happen, EVER.

"Your comments have led another victim to fall silent, and I hope you can one day change your ways."

What complete and utter bullsh*t. To summarize, we should just let false rape accusations go unchallenged as it might interfere with the broader narrative. Who cares if people's lives are ruined because of accusations of crimes they didn't commit? The presumption of innocence? That is just a pernicious evil.

Yeah, but you guys had no idea the allegations were false, you just instantly disbelieved it because it was gang rape. Gang rapes happen. They happen in fraternities, just ask JHU as in links above.

Further, you aren't reading replies carefully. And you are the first person to use the word denialist on this thread. Just because it's written about on this blog doesn't make the topic denialism. This is a common troll obsession from people who just come here to shit on one post, it reflects an ignorance of the broad topics we discuss here and denialism. We reserve the right to talk about all sorts of things, and this continued insistence that we've made allegations of denialism are false. Denialism is a very specific set of actions, and was not what I was objecting to, which was victim smearing. I still think that's what this was, but the smearers just got lucky and gaps appeared in her story.

Now there are problems with her story. It's not clear that she's either mistaken about details or more perniciously fabricating. Although the crowing is premature. I suspect though, Rudyard, you probably believe all rape accusations are false. Your consistent nastiness to me and other commenters is getting old. Clean it up or be banned.

The facts have come out: Erdely and Rolling Stone did not due their due diligence; Bradley was correct to point this out and call for more investigation of the facts in the article; after further investigation, RS decided they couldn't stand by their story anymore. It was certainly something other than "typical victim smearing". It was the truth.

Give it up and admit that you were wrong. Until you do that, nothing you say helps. Defensive and evasive comments about the 'real story' do not rebuild the credibility of rape victims that this journalistic fiasco has destroyed. It doesn't matter that Jonah Goldberg is a hack. It's not about him or you or me.

Mark. These are all cheap straw-men arguments. Has anyone here denied that rapes and even gang-rapes happen?

Here is my first comment: "Rape is real. Fantastic claims about premeditated, organized, ritual rape and cruelty are usually false, and folks are right to be skeptical."

I'm not an "MRA" or a Satanist or a Communist-sympathizer (or on the flip side, funded by the KOCH BROTHERS!) or any of the other lame ad hominems you can gin up. I'm just a normal guy with a functioning BS detector.

The people who sniffed out this story as likely fiction did not "get lucky" as you would like to believe. Rather than attacking them with ad hominems, you should take a deep breath and go back and try to read Rolling Stone story again with a more objective eye. Challenge yourself to see if you can spot the many clues that suggested the piece was false.

Then ask yourself the really hard question: did everyone else just "get lucky" or did they see something that you missed the first time around.

It sounds like Jackie was the sole source for virtually everything she told Erdley, from her alleged assault, to the two other victims she met, to her interactions with the school's administration. It's also been reported elsewhere that Jackie wanted to be left out of the story after her interviews with Erdley, but claims she was told the story would go ahead anyway. Assuming her story is at least partly fabricated, as seems to be the case at this point, this isn't so much a false accusation as it is a story that completely got away from her. I feel sorry for everyone involved except the staff at Rolling Stone.

Factual assertions of this author are disconfirmed by legitimate re-reporting by the half-day.

"None of this sounds like this event was cultivated in the individual, further the event can be corroborated by her friends who encountered her after the incident, shoeless and beaten. If her friends came forward and said the facts don’t fit, that would justify evidence of a hoax (per the reporter in this podcast while not identified they know they are part of the story)."

One of the reporters of that podcast has done exactly what you suggest. Your assumption, baldly speculative, is false: as Hanna Rosin reports, Jackie's friends, immediately after the alleged incident, saw her without physical injuries and in no state of dishevelment or undress. Further, her friends say the reporter of the Rolling Stone article never contacted them. The reporter's quotations she ascribed to them in the Rolling Stone article were made up, they say. Go home; you're drunk.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/12/06/rolling_stone_uva_rape_…

Heck, I concur with doubters here: big claims require big evidence and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The burden of proof is on the women to prove a rape occurred and prove who did it. The alleged rapist has no burden of proving his innocence. If she's has no evidence that a crime has occurred than tough luck.

Dear Doctor Hoofnagle,

I disagree with a number of your statements.

The NY Times and others were justified in criticizing Rolling Stone's lax journalistic standards. It is Rolling Stone magazine, in fact, that failed to give campus sexual assault the proper ethical treatment. Addressing a subject with a sensationalist story and questionable fact-checking is not merely disingenuous, but distracts from the crux of the issue. That distraction, as you mentioned, is presently occurring. As others have noted, the fallout from this journalistic lapse may very well result in campus sexual assault being taken less seriously.

Reasonable skepticism, as expressed by Bradley and Soave, should not result in scornful dismissal. In this shameful era of hyperbolic print and news media, it is a very harmful practice to discourage skepticism and journalistic accountability. Even if such skepticism was not vindicated, as it seemingly has been, it was still valid criticism.

Rejecting an argument based on political affiliation or gender advocacy is an ad hominen fallacy, and contributes nothing to a rational debate.

Most importantly, the seriousness of an issue does not justify unethical means. Conversely, the seriousness of an issue demands ethical means.

Sincerely,

Brantforth Maximilian DeWinter III

I don't know what an MRA is, but I do know "Mark" is a moron. "Science" indeed/

Yes Gang rapes do quite often occur. But sadly, especially for Rape Crisis Feminists, the rapists are often anything but "overwhelmingly blonde"

http://www.unz.com/isteve/think-progress-defends-rolling-stone-by-notin…

In England recently two horrific cases of gang rape, one including 1400 mostly underage girls came to light. When you look up the definition of "rape culture" these are the cases to should pop-up. Once again though, these cases did not interest Rubin Erdley. Could race have something to do with it?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2734694/It-hard-appalling-natur…

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2851680/13-Somali-men-convicted…

Please tell me why all these rape advocates are so eager to go after white frat boys even when the accusations are fictional instead of going after actual real cases of gang rape?

Golly: who's engaged in denialism now that we know that the UVA gang rape claim was a hoax, courtesy of the Washington Post's REAL reporting (vs. Rolling Stone's feminist fantasies)?!

They did nothing? The RS story contains plenty of paragraphs about meetings with the Dean who kept telling Jackie that she could press charges. It seems to me like the school was ready and willing to do what Jackie wanted. Where do you get the idea that they didn't do anything?

Mark, I understand what you are saying, but you picked the wrong hill to die on. Yes, some people disbelieve actual rape victims, but there is no value in harping on a case where people disbelieved a fabulated and false report of rape. Yes, many college administrators sweep rapes under the rug, but that fact is hardly relevant to do what administrators did with one attention-seeking teenager who may never have even talked to them.

Totally tangential here, and it might have been a throwaway line by Mark, but abortion is a thorny moral issue, not a scientific one. No one disputes whether a fetus is biologically alive, only whether it has legal rights. If science is to give any agency to only one side in the abortion debate it could quite plausibly be argued that it'd be the pro-lifers.

"When you look at the data if 20-25% of women are being raped while at college..."

Bullshit!! That would be a crime wave of unprecedented proportions, an anomaly against a background of rapidly diminishing violence. The only person harming genuine rape victims here is you with your sensational, unfounded and irrational adherence to what is increasingly likely to have been a false allegation.

The new facts in this case have changed so much in the last 3 days it requires a new post. It will appear tomorrow AM. We'll move comments to that post.

I tried to comment on the other post, but for some reason, by comment has been filtered out.

I think we need to tread very carefully with the notion that "memories are fluid" and trauma causes that much confusion. If the notion that rape-trauma causes victims to be confused about the basic who/where/when of the crime takes root in our collective psyche, no prosecutor will ever get a rape conviction absent DNA evidence. There will always be reasonable doubt that the victim is misremembering the crime due to the trauma. Your heart is clearly in the right place, but this is a reckless idea to advance that you haven't thought all the way through.

You still are not being fair to Bradley and the other skeptics. No one "got lucky." You yourself quote the statistic that 2% of rapes are false. That would mean that the skeptics had a 1 in 50 chance of "beating the odds." You are a scientist. What is more likely: that the skeptics overcame long odds or that they picked up on details that you missed?

Maybe Bradley soft peddled his suspicions ("this doesn't sound right") because he was being polite. Would you rather he have said, "this story fits the pattern of bullshit?"

This was not a story about rape or gang rape, this was a story about brutal gang rape used as a rite of passage. That's the detail that should sound warning bells. Throughout history these types of ghost stories crop up over and over again: this group of OTHERS uses rape, kidnapping, torture and/or murder as a rite of passage or to fulfill some ceremonial purpose. I gave a list of examples in the other thread about similar folklore that ultimately proved false (but not until after many lives were destroyed) but you can trace the pattern back to blood libel in the Middle Ages. I'm sure this motif extends back even further. (I'm no historian).

Why does this matter? Because these tales are used to other-ize groups of innocent people. Those people aren't like us, it's their cultural norm to be cruel sociopaths. The Others are less than civilized people and they are not worthy of being treated as civilized people. Our rules of compassion and empathy don't apply to the Others.

It's okay to harass and threaten the Others. It's okay to throw bricks through their windows and vandalize their home.

We also reflexively believe terrible accusations about the Others. You reference the UW-Milwaukee "mass drugging." A not-even-that-careful reading of that story shows that the "evidence" against the Others is purely conjectural. A follow-up investigation found marijuana and adderall, but no roofies. "The complaint does not accuse Kreinbring of spiking any drinks with drugs."

http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/national-fraternity-suspends-uw-…

Maybe the Others hid the roofies. But then why would they keep other illegal drugs around that could send Others to jail? One theory would be that the Others had a secret meeting and selected a sacrificial lamb to be criminally charged for drug possession to conceal the real crime. Everyone knows that the absence of evidence is proof of the conspiracy.

Smells like Salem.

Rape is real. Gang rape is real. But these are crimes caused by sick, disgusting individuals and not groups of Others.

Finally, I basically agree with you that colleges have little place for ferreting out the facts related to sexual assault. These are crimes and should be handled by police and prosecutors, not academics and certainly not boards of students.

Weird, don't know why its holding you up.

I do get your argument, and its more subtle than the "rape is exaggerated" crowd pushes. In retrospect, yes that detail stands out and I think I'll view it more skeptically. However, as Seccuro's story reveals, every other detail is pretty believable.

As far as the fluidity of memory my experience with that goes all the way back to my public defender days. No one thinks eyewitness testimony is reliable, even that of victims. It is one of the most unreliable forms of evidence despite the weight juries give it.

Do you listen to the serial podcast?

I haven't been following Serial.

Do I take your query as a recommendation?

Most studies show the faux-rape rate at between 2-8%.

Let's make a comparison to a similar lopsided level of crime -- black murders. 94% of blacks are killed by other blacks. That means only 6% of blacks are killed by non-whites so let's say 5% are killed by whites. This 5% number is well within the range of faux rape accusations as well.

Using your method that we must privilege the vast majority of cases; people who accused the white Darrell Wilson of murdering the black Michael Brown were engaging in black-on-black-murder denialism.

So if for example, despite the fact that many witnesses saw the white man murder the black man, if Rolling Stone wrote an article claiming it was a black-on-black crime, and some critics questioned the truth of this article, saying they suspect the article is incorrect and perhaps a white man killed Brown, would you accuse them of denialism?

If not why not. Even if you hold fast to your 2% number, is the difference between 2% (your percentage of faux-rape reports) and 5% (the percentage of white killing blacks) really enough to totally change the intellectual attitude you would take towards deciding either case?

Going back to Jackie / Rubin Erdely case, people were basing their criticism on the total implausibility of the story -- which is glaringly obvious now in light of the fact that it has come out that she is the biggest liar since Casey Anthony.

Only the weakest intellects would hide behind a totalitarian concept of "denialism" to scare people away from searching for the truth no matter what the case is.

I don't know what it is about trolls but they can't ever seem to get past the title of the blog seeming to think that if it's written here it must be about denialism 100% of the time. The whole "totalitarian" thing is a dead giveaway too, very cranky. In the seven years we've been in existence we have written on an enormous diversity of topics, all of which are easy to see in our archives. And even within this thread I've pointed this out before, I never described this as denialism, because it isn't. Denialism has a specific definition, and this doesn't fit.

The only people talking about denialism have been the drive-by trolls who clearly are just doing drive-bys on all the posts on the topic. It adds nothing to the conversation, it's irrelevant and a straw man. I'll just delete such comments here on out, not that saying this will likely help because consistently trolls have shown zero reading comprehension, and basically ignore all responses preferring to just piss on the comments before walking off.

New homebirth statistics show it's way too dangerous, and Mike Shermer on liberal denialism

denialism — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:23:52 +0000

New homebirth statistics show it's way too dangerous, and Mike Shermer on liberal denialism

Two links today for denialism blog readers, both are pretty thought provoking. The first, from Amy Tuteur, on the newly-released statistics on homebirth in Oregon. It seems that her crusade to have the midwives share their mortality data is justified, as when they were forced to release this data in Oregon, planned homebirth was about 7-10 times more likely to result in neonatal mortality than planned hospital birth.

I'm sure Tuteur won't mind me stealing her figure and showing it here (original source of data is Judith Rooks testimony):

Oregon homebirth neonatal mortality statistics, from the Skeptical OB.

Armed with data such as these, it needs to become a point of discussion for both obstetricians and midwives that out of hospital births have a dramatically-higher neonatal mortality, and this is worse for midwives without nursing training (the DEM or direct-entry-midwives). It's their body and their decision, but this information should be crucial to informing women as to whether or not they should take this risk. It also is only a reflection of neonatal mortality, one could also assume it speaks to higher rates of morbidity as well, as longer distances and poorer recognition of fetal distress and complications will lead to worse outcomes when the child survives. It should be noted this data is also consistent with nationwide CDC data on homebirth DEMs, and actually better than midwife data for some states like Colorado.

The second article worth pointing out today (even though it's old) is from Michael Shermer in Scientific American on the liberal war on science. Regular readers know that I'm of the belief there isn't really a difference between left and right-wing ideology on acceptance of science, it just means they just reject different findings that collide with their ideology.

The left's war on science begins with the stats cited above: 41 percent of Democrats are young Earth creationists, and 19 percent doubt that Earth is getting warmer. These numbers do not exactly bolster the common belief that liberals are the people of the science book. In addition, consider “cognitive creationists”—whom I define as those who accept the theory of evolution for the human body but not the brain. As Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker documents in his 2002 book The Blank Slate (Viking), belief in the mind as a tabula rasa shaped almost entirely by culture has been mostly the mantra of liberal intellectuals, who in the 1980s and 1990s led an all-out assault against evolutionary psychology via such Orwellian-named far-left groups as Science for the People, for proffering the now uncontroversial idea that human thought and behavior are at least partially the result of our evolutionary past.

There is more, and recent, antiscience fare from far-left progressives, documented in the 2012 book Science Left Behind (PublicAffairs) by science journalists Alex B. Berezow and Hank Campbell, who note that “if it is true that conservatives have declared a war on science, then progressives have declared Armageddon.” On energy issues, for example, the authors contend that progressive liberals tend to be antinuclear because of the waste-disposal problem, anti–fossil fuels because of global warming, antihydroelectric because dams disrupt river ecosystems, and anti–wind power because of avian fatalities. The underlying current is “everything natural is good” and “everything unnatural is bad.”

Whereas conservatives obsess over the purity and sanctity of sex, the left's sacred values seem fixated on the environment, leading to an almost religious fervor over the purity and sanctity of air, water and especially food.

I'm worried that Shermer has confused liberal Luddism with denialism, and I would argue some anti-technology skepticism is healthy and warranted. While I agree that the anti-GMO movement does delve into denialist waters with regularity, these are not good examples he has chosen. One needs to be cautious with technology, and it's a faith-based assumption that technology can solve all ills. I'm with Evgeny Morozov on this one, the assumption there is (or should be) a technological fix for every problem has become almost a religious belief system. Appropriately including the potential perils of a technology in its cost-benefit analysis is not a sign of being anti-science. Even overblowing specific risks because of individual values isn't really anti-science either. It might be anti-human to put birds before human needs as with wind turbines, but no one is denying that wind turbines generate electricity. And while liberals may be overestimating the risk of say, nuclear waste generation over carbon waste generation (guess which is a planet-wide problem!), it doesn't mean they don't think nuclear power works or is real. They just have an arguably-skewed risk perception, which is an established problem in cases of ideological conflict with science or technology. There is also reasonable debate to be had over the business-practices of corporations (Monsanto in his example), which need and deserve strong citizen push-back and regulation to prevent anti-competitive or abusive behavior.

Anti-science requires the specific rejection of data, the scientific method, or strongly-supported scientific theory due to an ideological conflict, not because one possesses superior data or new information. I don't think Shermer actually listed very good examples of this among liberals. If you're going to talk about GMO denialism, don't complain about people fighting with Monsanto, talk about how anti-GMO advocates make up crazy claims about the foods (see natural news for example) such as that they cause autism, or cancer. And even then it's difficult to truly say this is a completely liberal form of denialism as Kahan's work shows again, there is a pretty split ideological divide on GMO.

I agree that liberals are susceptible to anti-science and the mechanism is the same - ideological conflict with scientific results. However, the liberal tendency towards skepticism of technology is healthy in moderation, and anti-corporatism is not automatically anti-science. In an essay that was striving to say we must be less ideological and more pragmatic, Shermer has wrongly lumped in technological skepticism, and anti-corporatism with science denial.

denialism Mon, 03/18/2013 - 08:23

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In studies done between home birth and hospital birth in the Netherlands it was found that comparing the numbers as is done above is misleading. The 40k hospital births will more or less consist of fair representation of society. Not so for the 2k home birthers. These tend to be either people whom for some reason cannot afford hospitals, who home birth out of some conviction (religious or natural) or who tend to be older couples who want to have the comfort of home during birth for the second child. In all these cases the chance of higher child mortality is a given, independent of home or hospital.

Umm, no. The situations are not comparable, and the Netherlands data do not support the safety of midewifery like advocates would like.

In the US, the increase in homebirth is largely from white women, usually multiparous and older. Further, they are selected for low risk births, singletons, and generally in patients with lower risk profile opt for planned home birth. Everything should bias them towards having a lower risk profile than that of hospital birth, and one can't blame this on poverty or rural inaccessibility (even more so in Oregon). CDC statistics over 20 years of births show these births are most common to multiparous, white (81%) women.

In the Netherlands the majority of low-risk pregnancies are attended by midwives (it should be noted they also have the highest perinatal mortality in Europe), with comparable mortality in and out of the hospital. However, the high-risk birth in hospital attended by OBs have a lower mortality that the low risk births attended in hospital by midwives. Worse, the data showing equivalence do so by subtracting out all the situations that occurred out of hospital that contribute to neonatal mortality (congenital anomalies, premature births, intrauterine growth retardation and low Apgar scores), which basically makes the study meaningless. It says, when nothing goes wrong out of the hospital it's about as safe as when nothing goes wrong in the hospital. You don't deliver in the hospital with the expectation nothing will go wrong, you deliver in the hospital knowing childbirth is serious and things can and do go wrong.

You also need to know that in the US, we have the CPM or "Direct entry midwife" certification that has minimal requirements before being allowed to attend births. They only just increased its stringency to require a high school diploma. US DEM practitioners can not be compared to the well-trained midwives in the Netherlands. It's not surprising to see, then, that the DEMs have the worse rate of neonatal mortality based on the Oregon data.

There is no support here for a demographic bias against midwifery, if anything it's the exact opposite.

For me the main point that Shermer misses is that yes, there are individual liberals that may hold un-scientific ideas, but these ideas are not actively pursued and legislated at the highest levels of government by "liberal" politicians ( not that there really are any of those at the highest levels of government). Shermer is engaging in ludicrous false equivalency.

Rebecca Watson fisked the Shermer article back in January:
http://skepchick.org/2013/01/is-there-a-liberal-war-on-science/

With regards to the anti-GMO activists, I do think that anti science and denialism is a good description for at least some of their arguments. A large component of the anti-GMO argument is that there is something inherently different about crops derived from GMO techniques as opposed to standard breeding techniques, even when the actual change to the plant itself is negligible. It's not just that they misrepresent evidence, but that they promote and perpetuate misunderstandings about DNA, reproduction, and evolution.

They also use the tried and true creationist tactics of moving the goalposts. I know people who refuse to believe that any GMO crop is safe until there is a 20 year human feeding study. Never mind the logistical and ethical problems involved, in fact these people claim that if such studies cannot be done, then the crops shouldn't be used. It is denialism, absolutely. There is a difference between someone who says "I am suspicious about food developed with new technology, I would like to see some good safety data" and someone who, upon seeing good safety data, refuses to accept it and demands studies that are impossible to conduct and are far beyond what would be required for hybrid crops, all because of concerns that are scientifically implausible.

And this does have a very real effect when you get groups like Greenpeace urging African leaders to refuse food aid that contains GMOs (which would be most American crops) during famines, or preventing the use of Golden Rice to alleviate vitamin A deficiency in the developing world.

However, as Kerry points out, one major difference is that the Republican Party often panders to their anti science crowd, and even bases policy proposals on those ideas. By contrast, the Democratic Party has been very good about telling the HuffPo crowd to go sit at the childrens' table and not interrupt the adults while they're talking. I do think that this is an important distinction, as I would absolutely be willing to hold my nose and vote Republican if I felt that the Democratic Party was embracing anti-science messages. I think it's important to encourage the Democrats to continue to demand scientific evidence for any policy proposals and I think it would be a good thing to encourage the Republicans to do the same.

I'm afraid all the homebirth stats prove to me yet again is that it is the practitioner who makes birth safe. If you sideline midwifery, make it low status and deny access to good quality training and supervision, mistakes will be made. Countries where midwifery care is central, like the UK, have comparable, on my many levels, better, homebirth stats. Please don't extrapolate the US situation or use it to tell us anything interesting at all about homebirth...and please...not Ms Tuteur! She is the most unscientific person I've ever had the displeasure to bump into on the internet! Her cause has become a religion to her - any any evidence based, rational thought has therefore deserted her.

It is definatly not a trend I would support at all. Although it is sort of in keeping with the "freedom of choice" crowd in the anti-vaccine movement. (I think both definatly were liberal brain children at the start but libertarians love the same things now). Either way, the ideology of the problem matters insomuch as how widespread the thought process is dissiminated. Hopefully, these numbers can be reversed but who knows?

Some people really just do not trust the system and want to be more natural. Not sure how that should be addressed either.

Unfortunately your source for the graphic and information on homebirth infant mortality rates is incorrect. And while Dr. Amy did use the graphic in her blog, it does not come from her, the actual source of this data comes from Judith Rooks: "a certified nurse-midwife, a past-president of the American College of Nurse-Midwives, and a CDC-trained epidemiologist who has published three major studies of out-of-hospital births in this country (US)" You can find the original PDF document here, I suggest you update your information: https://olis.leg.state.or.us/liz/2013R1/Downloads/CommitteeMeetingDocum…

a man wrote this. How can i tell.. yeah read it again. This is a personal choice. They are both safe, Hospitals are dirty , doctors and nurses impersonal. midwifes have passion and love , been doing this since woman have been giving birth,,, mmm think ill take the more natural way ... western medicine, doctors , big pharma .. corrupt money hungry whores ... just sayin .

I’m afraid all the homebirth stats prove to me yet again is that it is the practitioner who makes birth safe. If you sideline midwifery, make it low status and deny access to good quality training and supervision, mistakes will be made.

I would agree, practitioner makes a big difference and OBs are the best practitioners. And who is denying access to RN training? This data demonstrates that even nurse midwives delivering out of hospital have a mortality rate about 7 times higher than in hospital. So here I would argue it's not just a matter of training, it's about ready access to resuscitation, and diagnostic and surgical technology.

Countries where midwifery care is central, like the UK, have comparable, on my many levels, better, homebirth stats.

The Netherlands data would suggest otherwise. However, it's true, when you train people for birth, they will be better at dealing with it and it's potential complications. I'm all for more training. But that's not what's going on here. We have a clear and obvious problem, and the data reflects this. Any conversation about birth location in this country should start with a discussion of risk to the infant, and data such as these demonstrate significant increase in risk to the infant for the sake of a better birth experience.

Please don’t extrapolate the US situation or use it to tell us anything interesting at all about homebirth…

I wasn't aware that I had. But how about we take a look at some British data? Here is the largest study I could find on British homebirth. I wouldn't say that I'd agree that homebirth is equivalent to obstetric supervised birth there either. Based on their primary outcomes:

Primary outcome was perinatal mortality and intrapartum related neonatal morbidities (stillbirth after start of care in labour, early neonatal death, neonatal encephalopathy, meconium aspiration syndrome, brachial plexus injury, fractured humerus or clavicle).

the obstetric rate of events for nulliparous women was significantly higher as obstetric rates were 5.3 per 1000, while home births came in at 9.3 per 1000.

Worse, if you start digging into the supplementary data you see the odds ratio for one of these primary outcome measures for a nulliparous woman at home vs obstetrical unit is 4.6, and 1.9 for all women when you eliminate centers with a low response (decreasing the likelihood of fudging by under-reporting). Uh oh.

I'd say that's better than what we're seeing in our country, but still not perfect. I'd say reasonable advice for homebirth in UK should still include obstetrical unit for first birth, as you may greatly reduce the risk of one of these outcomes.

and please…not Ms Tuteur! She is the most unscientific person I’ve ever had the displeasure to bump into on the internet! Her cause has become a religion to her – any any evidence based, rational thought has therefore deserted her.

She is Dr. Tuteur, by the way, and to date I haven't seen any evidence of unscientific behavior on her part. The midwives, however, slander her, file false DMCA takedown notices on her site, and refuse to release data. One side of this debate is using the literature and data for argument, the other is using what exactly? I'll stick with Tuteur until you show me some actual evidence of unscientific behavior other than "saying things I don't like to hear".

On energy issues, for example, the authors contend that progressive liberals tend to be antinuclear because of the waste-disposal problem, anti–fossil fuels because of global warming, antihydroelectric because dams disrupt river ecosystems, and anti–wind power because of avian fatalities. The underlying current is “everything natural is good” and “everything unnatural is bad.”

Sadly, I have to agree with this assessment, in many cases. Part of the problem being the "assumptions" made. Nuclear - there are "small scale" type designs, where the fuel problem isn't as bad, or the transportation as costly, like say, pebble reactors. They are just not seen as being "cost effective", because you need a lot of them, not just one big one.

The dams... actually are a problem, in many cases, and its not just fish they effect, but, again, some of this is "scale". I suspect there could be ways to provide "local" power instead of "wide scale", which requires a huge dam to produce.

The wind power thing, however, is just pure idiocy. The bigger your blades, the slower the system not only does, but "must" turn, and the problem with existing wind farms is that their design are smaller, and therefor turn so fast that birds can't see them, so run into them.

Most of the anti-science on the left comes from misinformation and a lack of the willingness to check their own facts. The right... tends to reject things on ideology, rejecting not just the idea that they should check their facts, but the facts themselves, when presented, and their reason for not believing something is not "worry about the real dangers", but, all too often, imaginary ones, or worse, a lack of worry, because the same imaginary source of information tells them, "This can't happen, so drill baby drill."

But, yeah, there is a "bit" of that going on on the left, at least as relates to things like so called "natural birth", but such people are "left" only because they right hates everything they stand for. They are certainly not there because they are better informed, have a scientific perspective, etc. And, because of that, you are bound to find that, despite claims to the contrary, there is a wide overlap between their particular delusions and those on the right, who hold similar opinions, even if its only one those "specific" same subjects. Its crank magnetism. Completely apposed political stances are not sufficient to prevent homeopaths, or home birth advocates, or other such people from banding together one moment, when defending a stupid idea, and calling each other fools the next.

We don't know why there is a small but statistically significant difference in adverse events for primips in the UK Birthplace study and I agree it warrants more study. Women deserve to know the facts before making decisions about where they give birth. But it doesn't surprise me that women get vso angry when they read things like this blog - you use our study of 65,000 births to prove a point - that out of hospital birth is more dangerous, when actually the study proved that births in birth centres for all women and homebirth for multips was AS SAFE as hospital birth.
But this stuff doesn't interest me as much as the fact that, whatever the stats, and whatever social engineering you do to encourage hospital birth, women for all sorts of very valid reasons will choose to birth at home. This being the case, we have a social responsibility to make sure they are as safe as humanly possible. I assume that you wouldn't condone them being left to birth unattended, or to be frogmarched into hospital by the maternity police?

"OBs are the best practitioners". Midwives catch almost ALL the babies here in the UK and OBs only help with difficult cases. Our overall stats in all catagories leave the Yanks standing...in fact it's safer to give birth in 40 other countries than the US. I suggest you ask yourself why.
Just for the record, I'm not a 'homebirth advocate' whatever that is. But I am a feminist who's had enough of people telling me where, when and with whom I play out a bodily function. My body, my baby, my choice.

Thanks for the comment Mark. I dont know enough to claim midwifery / homebirth is safer or more dangerous than OBs / hospitals.

All I claim is that without a comparison of population differences any study done is practically meaningless.

The study you quote puts it like this:"
The authors compare their results with other homebirth studies, noting that home and hospital populations differ markedly in risk profile and that any study of homebirth outcomes must correct for these differences."

The second study is worse: "
An important limitation of the study is that aggregated data of a large birth registry database were used and adjustment for confounders and clustering was not possible. "

Meaning that you cannot conclude anything from this data (same as from many studies before this one). Maybe I missed it but I dont see a comparable study done by Dr Tuteur either.

Until an apples to apples study is done over large enough population incorporating the varies factors this will be a debate where both sides are equally right.

And yet again we have another man telling women what they can and can't do with their bodies - it is a woman's right to decide. And the European Court of Human Rights agrees - see their judgment in the case Ternovzsky v Hungary - http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/eng/pages/search.aspx?i=001-102254

By quoting that woman as a credible source you lost all credibility.

I love the reading comprehension michelle. From above:

Armed with data such as these, it needs to become a point of discussion for both obstetricians and midwives that out of hospital births have a dramatically-higher neonatal mortality, and this is worse for midwives without nursing training (the DEM or direct-entry-midwives). It’s their body and their decision, but this information should be crucial to informing women as to whether or not they should take this risk.

Nice try guys. But I'm not telling women what to do with their bodies. If you want to increase the chance of higher morbidity and mortality in your child for a better birth experience that's your choice, I am advocating for it to be an informed one.

As far as the UK direct-entry midwives, looking at their certification, it's a significant process. Based on the wiki if believable, we're talking about 3-5 years of training at universities, with registration and certification that's rigorous. Here in the US it's clearly a less stringent process, and advocates vehemently fight against any additional rigor. To become a CPM you have to take a little test and attend a handful of births. Birth is serious business, and the training for those who attend birth needs to be equally serious. OBs, given their enormous breadth of experience and capacity for surgical action in the face of disaster are clearly the most qualified. While it may not be necessary or possible to have that level of training at bedside at every birth (although I think in the US it is), I think these data in Oregon show a definite benefit of proximity to the experts. The difference seems to have resulted in an extra dozen or so dead infants in 2012.

@Robert 13, the thing with all these studies is that even biasing towards an easier patient population for the midwives (no on thinks they should be delivering high-risk, breech, twins, previa etc), they still have poorer mortality. The OBs, even given the higher risk births, and in the US the transfers from out-of-hospital births gone bad, still have lower mortality rates. The reasons are obvious to me, I've seen them at work, make a decision for surgery in seconds, and have a baby in distress out and breathing in a matter of minutes. Maybe they do too many procedures as a result, but the benefit is clear - more living babies.

You are assuming that the studies bias towards an easier patient for the home birthers and midwife birthers. My point is that no study actually proves that. In earlier studies in the Netherlands it was shown that home birthers are for instance on average 10 years older then hospital birthers. That makes child mortality go up no matter what. Background, ethnicity, etc all can influence the rates as much as having a less risk patient or a better deliverer.

You are probably right that OBs and hospitals are the safer bet. Without actually proving that in a study though, its just talk.

No Robert, Multiparous women are generally less problematic, mortality from congenital abnormalities is being subtracted (so older less of an issue), and this is a predominantly white (80%) population who are electing for homebirth (see the CDC link above). All are factors which are going to bias towards better statistics for homebirth. Additionally, as a matter of course these are low risk pregnancies as even among midwives it's accepted their practice is primarily for low-risk pregnancies. Higher risk pregnancies are delivered in the hospital. Hospitals, even delivering high and moderate risk pregnancies as well as bearing the stats for the transfers from homebirths gone bad, are demonstrating lower infant mortality. Further, just being older doesn't necessarily increase risk, the largest study comparing age versus mortality in 260k women shows older is actually better with the ideal age between 26 and 30. The rate is actually a U-shaped curve, with mortality increasing sharply again after about age 35. Even if 100% of women in homebirth were > 35 years old, this would increase risk by only about 50%, where is the other 650% coming from?

When these are controlled for, as in the BMJ study, or when they are compared to all comers as in the Netherlands or CDC data, the OBs do better. It's not just talk. It's the data.

Talking Gun Control At Scienceblogs

denialism — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 12:46:57 +0000

Talking Gun Control At Scienceblogs

Matt Springer has written a post Against the gun control that won't work, and he correctly points out that previous gun control efforts have been little more than shameless demagoguery, including the totally-worthless assault weapons ban. People must understand that the previous major legislation the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 was an atrociously-stupid piece of legislation. The weapons that fell under the ban were not banned because of function. As Springer points out, the ban focused on cosmetic elements of weapons so that lawmakers could put them on a table and describe how they banned scary guns, but in no way prevented the sale of similar semi-automatic weapons that could accept large capacity magazines and drop lots of rounds, only without folding stocks or flash suppressors.

However, I disagree with his summation that none of the control efforts previously tried has value, or that things like registration and other barriers to ownership won't work. Let's address some of these common arguments and why while they sound appealing, they're an example of "letting the perfect destroy the good".

Starting Gun registration: The shooting was carried out using firearms which were stolen from a person who legally purchased them, had a background check, and filed and was granted a purchase permit. The mass shooter in Norway acquired his weapons under a regulatory regime of full registration, as did the perpetrators of the two infamous school massacres in Germany in the 2000s. Registration of firearms prevents mass shootings in the same sense that automobile registration prevents DUI – they don’t, they can’t, and they’re not intended to.

Well, a highly-motivated individual may accomplish a lot, but that doesn't suggest registration has no role whatsoever in preventing mass shootings. Yes, in these massacres in other countries, the laws were obeyed, as in Connecticut. But creating obstacles to ownership probably decreases the frequency of such incidents, as the differences in gun violence between these countries demonstrate. We have had 4 mass shootings during Obama's presidency, not to mention, our yearly toll of some 30,000 people a year killed by guns. Our per-capita death rate is about 4 times higher than our next door neighbor, Canada, or any of these countries mentioned with death rates in the tens or hundreds, rather than the tens of thousands.

When you make it harder to get guns, it makes it harder for people who are deranged, angry or otherwise dangerous to own them, and you're going to decrease your rates of gun violence. Just because it isn't perfect, and doesn't prevent a highly-motivated individual from doing all the work, doesn't mean that you can't deter dozens of other would-be shooters from mass violence.

Finally the DUI analogy is poor if you point out that some weapons are like giving someone a tank to commit their DUI. A DUI on a tricycle (read black-powder musket), is different from a DUI in 18 wheel tanker truck (your AR-15 might be a good example). Really significant barriers should be put in place to prevent civilian ownership of clip-fed semi-automatic weapons.

Assault weapons ban: Connecticut has one, and the weapon was legal under it. The reason is simple, and common to all versions of the assault weapons ban – “assault weapon” is an inherently meaningless concept whose legal definition is essentially cosmetic.

Agreed, assault weapons bans as they exist are totally useless. However, that doesn't mean an intelligent ban couldn't be designed. I think the sale or ownership of magazine-fed weapons should probably be prohibited or severely restricted for civilians. The ownership of extended magazines such as those used by the shooter in Aurora should be a federal crime. They should cease to exist outside of military use. Allowing ownership of revolvers, bolt and breech-fed rifles and shotguns, would satisfy legitimate home-safety, sporting, and hunting applications that can and should be protected by any gun control regulation. The problem is clip-fed semi-automatic rifles and handguns. These are the guns that do the most damage-per-second, with easy reloading, and the ability to bring and use hundreds or even thousands of rounds by a single person. It would be far more difficult (but still not impossible), for similar events to take place if we severely restricted weapons available to pump, bolt, an breech weapons that do not have the capacity to drop as many rounds per minute. And I would still be able to go skeet shooting, hunt deer, duck, or target shoot to my heart's content.

Total prohibition of firearms: In a country with well over two hundred million firearms, it is logistically impossible. But if it weren’t, there is not much reason to believe it would do any good. Guns can be acquired illegally and are not required for mass murder in the first place. The worst school massacre in US history was carried out by a bomber in Michigan. The Oklahoma City bombing killed nineteen children and a hundred and fifty adults. The Columbine shooters attempted to go down in infamy as the Columbine bombers and would have killed many more people had their improvised propane bombs not mercifully failed. While bombs require a modicum of effort, more lethal than any single mass shooting was the 1990 Happy Land arson, the perpetrator of which killed 87 people with a gallon of gasoline. The most lethal mass shooting prior to the shooting in Norway was carried out by a South Korean police officer in a country where civilian possession of firearms is prohibited. Norway itself does not completely prohibit firearms ownership but the restrictions are extremely tight. Prohibition has a terrible track record at preventing dedicated psychopaths from mass murder. For that matter, is has a terrible track record at preventing violent crime of the more mundane sort.

While I agree prohibition is logistically-impossible, the reason isn't that if we ban guns the loons will just build bombs or burn people alive. Again, a motivated, deranged human is extremely dangerous as long as anything combustible, and anyone vulnerable is in reach. That doesn't mean that forbidding the sale of compact, high-capacity killing machines over the counter won't have an effect. Just because there are alternatives to guns, doesn't mean gun access should be so easy. Take the example of the crazy guy that stabbed 20 kids in China last week at about the same time. Yes, a deranged person just needs a kitchen knife to wreak havoc in a school. However, the difference in death count was significant. No one died. It's actually quite difficult to kill people with a knife, and very difficult to kill lots of people. Just making mass violence more difficult, while not stopping mass violence, will make it less deadly.

We're not talking about perfection here. We're talking about progress. Making it harder, making the violence rarer, will decrease the amount of gun violence, as almost every country besides the US demonstrates every year with their gun violence deaths at a tiny fraction of our own.

Improvement of NICS: If you buy a gun, you have to fill out paperwork and undergo a background check. These checks have been very good at preventing purchase by people who are disqualified by criminal records. But while adjudication as mentally incompetent is also disqualifying, such records are only poorly integrated into the system. This flaw was the source of the Virginia Tech shooter’s weapons.

It's dangerous to create databases of people tied to conditions like mental illness or other discriminatory conditions. The difficulty of making such databases effective will persist because of issues with individual's privacy rights.

Repair of the catastrophically bad US mental health apparatus: There’s a dire article in Gawker making the rounds, a first person account of a mother trying to raise an extremely troubled kid. They have basically two options – prison or muddling through alone. There is almost no systematic way of helping the helpable deranged, and almost no systematic way of containing the non-helpable deranged until they commit a violent crime and get sent to prison. This must be changed, and changed immediately.

I agree, mental health parity should be a focus of this presidency and Obamacare. Mental illness should be treated, insured, paid for and taken care of just like any other illness. Our continued inability to deal with mental illness is a national shame. However, in general, the mentally ill are less likely to be violent and more likely to be victims.

Secure schools: If you’re determined to herd children into buildings with no law enforcement or other responsible armed adults (mass shootings almost exclusively happen in areas that are both 1) “gun free” and 2) don’t have law enforcement presence), at least build the buildings in a safe way.

But then won't the criminals just pick the locks or bring bolt cutters? Interesting how in this instance the suggestion that increasing the difficulty of access works when applied to door access, but not when applied to gun access. You see the flaw there? I also think it's sad that rather than dealing with the threat the suggestion is to continue to fortify our schools, our homes, our neighborhoods. Safety shouldn't mean having to live behind fences and barbed wire.

The flaw in most of his reasoning is to say that because something doesn't work perfectly, means that it has no value. Stringent registration and background checks will fail, but they create a larger obstacle for many who otherwise can just walk into a gun store and buy an incredibly dangerous gun with no questions asked. A prohibition on new sales would not do anything about the existing guns, such as used in this case, but it would, again, make it much harder for those like Cho that had to purchase their own to carry out their crime.

In particular a ban on certain functional aspects of guns could reduce mass violence. Ban extended clips such as were used in aurora, make it a federal crime to own one. Make them nonexistent. Do not allow civilian purchase of weapons that are magazine-fed. Bolt action hunting rifles, guns with a breech, revolvers, shotguns etc, are still deadly, but they have legitimate sport and personal defense uses. There is also no constitutional amendment protecting ownership of magazines or clips, so make it against the law to own one larger than 5 rounds, or to own more than a limited number. That would be completely adequate for sporting uses. Finally, place limits on ammunition purchases and stockpiling. The second amendment says we have the right to keep and bear arms, but says nothing about restrictions on industrially-produced cartridges that feed some of these more deadly weapons. Such cartridges, after all, didn't even exist when the constitution was written, coming almost 100 years later. Make it against the law to own or carry more than 100 rounds of a given ammunition. You could still go to the range, buy and dump lots of rounds in practice, but given the bag limits for deer in any given state, do you really need to keep thousands of rounds at home? What exactly are you preparing for? I realize, bulk purchase of ammo is economically-sensible, and convenient for people who over the years will likely use that ammunition in target practice and hunting. Allow unlimited shotgun rounds of buck or birdshot, and maybe .22 caliber rifle rounds etc., but strongly consider round limitations on 9mm, .357, .223, .45, .50, 7.62mm etc. The more power, speed, and range of the bullet, as well as it's use in clip-fed semi-automatic weapons, the more care we should take to prevent bulk ownership.

There are ways to sensibly and effectively regulate firearms and ammunition. We should engage in this debate though, with adequate information on the function of these firearms, their applications for legitimate sport, and their capacity for rapid fire and reloading. The mass violence problem is one of ready-access to semi-automatic weapons that are magazine fed. Limitations on their access, or outright restriction, while not-perfect, would make mass violence much more difficult, and more unlikely to see the death counts we have seen in recent years.

Disclaimer - I am a gun owner and enthusiast who target and skeet shoots. Weapons I own would become illegal under my suggestions, but I think that's a reasonable sacrifice to prevent the extremes of gun violence. I would happily trade my magazine-fed weapons for a revolver and maybe an over-under shotgun I could use for target and skeet respectively.

denialism Mon, 12/17/2012 - 07:46

Tags

General Discussion

If you and a couple of family members go to a range for a single afternoon, you will go through more than 100 rounds. If you want to hunt and teach your kids to hunt, you have a moral obligation to fire hundreds or thousands of rounds at the range so that when the time comes for you to shoot an animal, you will kill it cleanly and not make it suffer. Make it against the law to buy or possess more than a handful of rounds at a time, and you will add so much cost and hassle to the challenge of becoming a skilled shooter that almost nobody will do so. If you are an urbanite, you may not realize that this would have serious cultural, economic, and even environmental repercussions.

I also don't think that seeing modern clip-fed weapons as magically evil is the answer. My .22 target-shooting pistol would be far less deadly to a human than a .45 revolver. Yes, it can be reloaded quickly with a clip, but revolvers can also be quickly reloaded with speed-loaders. To go through "thousands" of rounds with it, firing as fast as reasonably possible without pause, would take an hour or more - assuming an unlimited supply of loaded clips and no jams. That's not a plausible scenario in my opinion.

Right now, everyone is shocked enough to want to do something about this sort of violence, and to be willing to accept things that they ordinarily wouldn't. The same was true after Sept. 11 and it was regrettable, because what we got was massive violations of civil liberties. In this case, I think there will be much more effective pushback if someone attempts to shove through the Dianne Feinstein fantasy position, of sending the SWAT teams around to round up the gun owners and confiscate their weapons. That is pretty much what you are asking for if you suggest that my possession of a .22 semiautomatic and a brick of ammo for it should be two federal felonies. Such laws will not be passed, because legislators from rural states simply will not let it happen, and those who promote them will miss the chance to pass something less extreme that might have made a meaningful difference.

If you and a couple of family members go to a range for a single afternoon, you will go through more than 100 rounds. If you want to hunt and teach your kids to hunt, you have a moral obligation to fire hundreds or thousands of rounds at the range so that when the time comes for you to shoot an animal, you will kill it cleanly and not make it suffer. Make it against the law to buy or possess more than a handful of rounds at a time, and you will add so much cost and hassle to the challenge of becoming a skilled shooter that almost nobody will do so. If you are an urbanite, you may not realize that this would have serious cultural, economic, and even environmental repercussions.

Agreed, firearms practice is important to safety. The way I worded it I was intending to convey at the range one should have unlimited access to ammo, but at home stockpiling certain kinds of ammunition is not helping public safety.

I also don’t think that seeing modern clip-fed weapons as magically evil is the answer. My .22 target-shooting pistol would be far less deadly to a human than a .45 revolver. Yes, it can be reloaded quickly with a clip, but revolvers can also be quickly reloaded with speed-loaders. To go through “thousands” of rounds with it, firing as fast as reasonably possible without pause, would take an hour or more – assuming an unlimited supply of loaded clips and no jams. That’s not a plausible scenario in my opinion.

As I noted, caliber should be taken into consideration when it comes to regulation of capacity or ammo. In terms of preventing mass violence, a .45 revolver is dangerous, yes, but it cannot be easily used for mass shooting.

In this case, I think there will be much more effective pushback if someone attempts to shove through the Dianne Feinstein fantasy position, of sending the SWAT teams around to round up the gun owners and confiscate their weapons. That is pretty much what you are asking for if you suggest that my possession of a .22 semiautomatic and a brick of ammo for it should be two federal felonies.

Historically implementation of bans grandfathers in existing possession. But still, new laws preventing further accumulation of clips and ammo may be effective. Implementation of bans on ownership of stockpiles of ammunition and clips, even banning existing stocks, does not mean SWAT teams and random searches. In this country we can still assume the majority of people will be law abiding and comply with restrictions without door-to-door searches which is just paranoid fantasy.

I think my point stands. If we want to do something about mass shootings, we have to more effectively regulate the machines that are capable of dropping hundreds of rounds, and rapidly-reload. If we want to decrease gun violence as a whole it will require increasing barriers to ownership and large scale purchasing of guns and ammo, as well as dealers which feed criminal gun use through straw-man purchasing. Tracking the weapons from the store to the crime scene through use of technology, tracking serial numbers, shell imprints and rifling may help. Eliminating the gun show loopholes, and requiring sale of a firearm to be accompanied by transfer of a title - just as you would a car, may also prevent the transfer of legal weapons onto the street. Existing laws on non-permit concealed possession, and use of guns in commission of crimes are already pretty strict and well-enforced. That's dealing with the end point though. Targeting the supply will be important as well.

The government needs revenue, why not put a $1.00 tax on each bullet sold? For a hunter the $10 to $20 needed for a year would not be that much but someone who buys thousands of rounds would pay a lot more.

It's nice to hear the perspective of a gun-owner. I enjoy target shooting and the events in Sandy Hook have made me re-think whether or not I want firearms in the house along with my kids. However, some of the rabid commentary - http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2012/12/17/sandy-hook-their-horror-ou… - adds nothing to the debate and simply alienates law abiding, moderate gun owners.

You wrote that "our yearly toll of some 10,000 people a year killed by guns. Compare this to Canada at 52".

Not sure where you are getting your data but this number does not seem right. There are more than 1000 firearm suicides each year in Canada and typically over 150 firearm homicides. But I suppose your point stands - it's still fewer than the U.S. But then we do have a much smaller population, and we're more spread out so it's harder to shoot each other.

By the way, the AR-15 pattern rifle is legal here, albeit with a restricted magazine capacity, so not sure how that fits into your banning of magazine-fed weapon logic. Canada is full of semi-autos of every flavor, yet we have a fraction of the gun violence. Suggesting a national reduction in mag capacity to 10 rounds seems more likely to gain approval in the U.S. than banning all semi-autos.

I guess this brings me to my point - namely banning semi-automatics, yet dismissing perfectly good suggestions like building more secure schools does not seem logical to me. I'm not wild about the idea of ultra-secure elementary schools, with steel doors, panic buttons and armed guards, but it seems more likely to protect children than banning some firearms and not others, while not addressing the societal issues that feed into mass shootings.

You also diminish the correlation between mental health and mass shooting - I assume from a well-meaning attempt to avoid stigmatizing those with mental illness. However, this ignores the reality that 100% of the mass-shooters that I can recall over the last 10 years have suffered from one form or another of unresolved mental illness.

If the U.S. identified and treated mental illness with any degree of compassion and understanding, the requirement to ban various firearms would be less urgent. As I try to make sense of Sandy Hook, it seems to me that mental health issues are of far greater significance than what type of magazine was used by the shooter.

You wrote that “our yearly toll of some 10,000 people a year killed by guns. Compare this to Canada at 52″.

Not sure where you are getting your data but this number does not seem right. There are more than 1000 firearm suicides each year in Canada and typically over 150 firearm homicides. But I suppose your point stands – it’s still fewer than the U.S. But then we do have a much smaller population, and we’re more spread out so it’s harder to shoot each other.

That should have read handguns. It's from HCI, I'll fix. I think it's a poor stat too, a better comparison may be deathrate per capita, in which we're about 4x higher than Canada and a significant outlier overall. It also focuses only on handguns which are 10k of the 30k we have a year.

The mentally ill might be behind more of the mass shootings, but the overwhelming majority of the 30k deaths a year are by perfectly sane people. I don't know enough about this most recent one, but I'm not sure mental illness is going to be the culprit. We don't know enough yet. I'll give you the Giffords and Aurora shootings too, but Columbine? Or Jonesboro? Not so much.

Fair points. A more complete discussion between the two of us might be interesting. Three things that stuck out to me:

It’s dangerous to create databases of people tied to conditions like mental illness or other discriminatory conditions. The difficulty of making such databases effective will persist because of issues with individual’s privacy rights.

I agree, but my suggestion is not about those with mental conditions generally. It's specifically about those who have been adjudicated mentally incompetent by judicial proceedings. This is much different than a person who's merely autistic or depressed.

Interesting how in this instance the suggestion that increasing the difficulty of access works when applied to door access, but not when applied to gun access. You see the flaw there?

It would indeed be a flaw, if gun control actually increased difficulty of access. I don't believe it does to any significant extent. In the 9/11 analogy, gun control is the TSA's security theater, school door locks are cockpit door locks. This need not turn schools into fortresses, even bringing security to the level of a typical house would be a real improvement.

Finally, place limits on ammunition purchases and stockpiling.

Pretty much nobody is any more dangerous with a million rounds of ammo than they are with about 100. Ammo is heavy, bulky, and unwieldy. Actual infantry soldiers don't even carry much ammo.

Interesting how in this instance the suggestion that increasing the difficulty of access works when applied to door access, but not when applied to gun access. You see the flaw there?

It would indeed be a flaw, if gun control actually increased difficulty of access. I don’t believe it does to any significant extent. In the 9/11 analogy, gun control is the TSA’s security theater, school door locks are cockpit door locks. This need not turn schools into fortresses, even bringing security to the level of a typical house would be a real improvement.

It's a poor analogy because by the time you've passed the screeners you've already been disarmed. Whereas a nut could just shoot the locks, or even drive his car through the school doors then continue on his way. I get that the "target-hardening" approach has merit. But if I were to make an analogy, your door strategy is like suggesting we create the TSA, but refuse to go after Al Qaeda (the rapid-fire/rapid-reload weapons).

Finally, place limits on ammunition purchases and stockpiling.

Pretty much nobody is any more dangerous with a million rounds of ammo than they are with about 100. Ammo is heavy, bulky, and unwieldy. Actual infantry soldiers don’t even carry much ammo.

So far, maybe. We should not only be thinking of yesterday's errors, but tomorrow's as well. A person, or pair of people with a stockpile and access to a high place (as seen in Texas) could lay fire for thousands of yards and shoot for days. We also have to do something about the easy access to ammunition. Making ammo more expensive, more rare, and not allowing bulk purchases may be another way to keep shootings on the street down. The old Chris Rock joke, we need bullet control, not gun control.

In general, if people want to be serious about decreasing gun fatalities we have to see what has worked elsewhere. And it's pretty simple. Large barriers to ownership, including things like registration (or having 2 other people have to vouch for you), requiring permits, tracking weapons, tracking retail as well as individual sales, limits on purchasing, and barriers to large purchases of ammo will make it harder to supply the demand for guns and bullets for illegal use. This is a bit separate from the mass killing issue, which will only be prevented by all of the above, plus the even larger barriers against possession of the rapid fire/reload weapons.

Interesting discussion with you and Matt, and I agree it is a difficult problem. One quibble with one of your sentences, though: "There is also no constitutional amendment protecting ownership of magazines or clips, so make it against the law to own one larger than 5 rounds, or to own more than a limited number." That's like saying there is no constitutional amendment protecting the right to own paper, so the First Amendment could be worked around that way. I have no doubt that magazines and clips are both protected by the second Amendment (though possibly only as a time, place, and manner restriction, but I tend to doubt it).

You think the first amendment protects paper from regulation? That's interesting, I doubt it. IANAL but I don't think that's a valid interpretation of the first amendment, which has all sorts of restrictions, from commercial speech restriction to dangerous or threatening speech. Also, speech is entirely possible without paper. One could even envision a future where to protect trees and habitat, paper is no longer permitted but everyone has a kindle, computer, etc. I think we're already headed that way anyway. Besides, restrictions would not prevent people from owning arms, and have already been tested with a 10-round clip limitation in the 1994 ban which was not even challenged by the NRA (because they would lose). Extended capacity clips, holding as many as 100 rounds (as used in Aurora) should not exist in civilian hands. That's what made Aurora so deadly, and it would have been even worse if his weapon hadn't jammed.

Two more quick comments on your reply:

A person, or pair of people with a stockpile and access to a high place (as seen in Texas) could lay fire for thousands of yards and shoot for days.

Charles Whitman did his sniping with a bolt-action deer rifle. He fired a few dozen shots. Neither type nor quantity restrictions would have affected him.

In general, if people want to be serious about decreasing gun fatalities we have to see what has worked elsewhere. And it’s pretty simple[...]

We should, but this argument tends to be made under the assumption that the world consists of the US and western Europe.

One could (and should) also compare El Paso with Ciudad Juarez. The former has extremely loose laws and low crime, the latter is the opposite. Obviously the cultures, histories, and economies of the US and Mexico are wildly different, but that suggests that gun laws in themselves are much less salient than the "England has few gun homicides" comparison would suggest. The cultures and histories of the US and England are also very different, after all.

You didn't read what I wrote at all. I'm saying we need to think about the future and potential for harm rather than just continuously react to what has been done before, and then you just remind us of what was done before.

How about Australia? They're culturally quite similar to us, lots of guns, had shootings, passed some of these restrictions on these types of rifles and succeeded. And comparison with us and Mexico is far more off base than a comparison of the US and England. Have you been to either? That's just bizarre. This helplessness argument is bogus. "It's culture, we're screwed". Nonsense and evasion.

Where in the US can one just walk into a gun show and walk out with a weapon? I live in Massachusetts and certainly can't do that here. Nor could I do so in Florida as far as I recall; gun show vendors had to run people through the federal database, at least. Just curious where people can walk in and then walk out with an AR-15 no questions asked.

Virginia for one. I could walk into a gunstore, show an in state license, and leave 10 minutes later with an AR-15. It's a semi-automatic rife. If you're curious about other states see here:
Brady scorecards by state. Most states do not require background checks with all gun sales.

Lyle - A hunter who only shoots 10 bullets a year is getting very little practice, which IMHO is immoral. I know a guy who kneecapped a deer. Not a happy occasion and his friends gave him guff about it for months. You only need one bullet to commit an armed robbery (and you can re-use it repeatedly) so steep ammo taxes would place a far higher burden on law-abiding working-class sportsmen and sportswomen than on criminals.

Mark - You spoke in favor of a law that would criminalize possession of a gun that you now own. It is not "paranoid fantasy" to suggest that federal laws might be enforced. BATF will come to your house today and break your door down if they think you have an illegal weapon, just as the DEA will raid or arrest you if they think you have illegal drugs, and so forth. Among the flaws of the proposed approach is the fact that people who are so obedient they would go through their houses looking for bullets to count and turn in, or proactively turn in valued firearms, are not the sort of people who would ever perpetrate mass shootings. [Admittedly, sometimes their kid might be.]

We all would like to "do something" now, but it should be something that actually poses a hindrance to deranged criminals, rather than just making some currently law-abiding people into criminals. Talk of banning high-capacity magazines sounds good, but it's not clear whether such devices made much difference in this massacre. When the victims of a shooting are small children, it may not matter exactly how often the shooter pauses for a couple of seconds to reload; they're not in a position to take him down. A nut opening fire in a kindergarten classroom even with a 28-gauge shotgun, perhaps blocking the door with his body, would create horrific carnage, and nobody has suggested confiscating bird guns. We need mechanisms to either keep any deadly weapon whatsoever out of the hands of the nut, or keep the nut out of the school, or both. I don't know what the best combination of actions might be, but I'll be a lot more willing to make concessions for their sake if they don't seem intended to define people like me - and you! - as the problem.

Mark – You spoke in favor of a law that would criminalize possession of a gun that you now own. It is not “paranoid fantasy” to suggest that federal laws might be enforced. BATF will come to your house today and break your door down if they think you have an illegal weapon, just as the DEA will raid or arrest you if they think you have illegal drugs, and so forth.

Just like with the previous assault weapons ban, existing weapons and clips were grandfathered in. We managed to ban all those scary guns without door to door searches that all the paranoids harp on about. However, I would argue extended clips should be totally banned. I'm sure a grace period , voluntary turn-in programs, etc., could take care of the 100 round drums like used in aurora without the need for all this big brother paranoia.

We all would like to “do something” now, but it should be something that actually poses a hindrance to deranged criminals, rather than just making some currently law-abiding people into criminals.

In all of the mass shootings so far, none was a criminal until the crime.

. A nut opening fire in a kindergarten classroom even with a 28-gauge shotgun, perhaps blocking the door with his body, would create horrific carnage, and nobody has suggested confiscating bird guns.

Alternative scary scenarios are not an argument for making magazine-fed automatic weapons (that have been used in almost all of these recent mass shootings ) easily available. Right now, there are few barriers, and the barriers that exist are a joke as demonstrated here in Connecticut. Just because you can imagine another scenario, just as harmful, using gasoline, or a chainsaw, or whatever, doesn't excuse the easy availability of a machine designed specifically for rapid killing and rapid reloading.

This is the most common recurring argument on this thread and it's bogus. So, there's more than one way to skin a cat, does that mean we should make it so goddamn easy? Is this an argument for deregulating dynamite and c4? Well, someone could kill a bunch of people with a butter knife, so why not let them have c4? Enough already. We've seen the pattern, the ready availability of these weapons is a problem. There isn't a good reason for them to be in civilian hands. They have been repeatedly used for this pattern of violence. If, and the question has been asked, you want to stop mass violence, make the tools of mass violence more difficult to obtain. It won't be a 100% perfect intervention - there is no such thing - but it would be an improvement.

If on the other hand you don't care about mass killings, or it's more important to you to own magazine-fed semi-automatic weapons, then fine, keep at it. It's a perfectly valid point of view, just not one most of us share.

I appreciate the thoughtful columns from both of you and the intelligent comments. I am glad to see another woman comment. I see hardly anyone addressing the primary reason that I own a gun-- I am a single woman who lives alone and need to be able to defend myself or home if necessary--or at least to feel that way. I plan on continuing to live alone and in rural areas and a gun allows me to feel/be safer. I used to have both a shotgun (clay targets, I don't hunt) and a handgun, now just my handgun, but I would not be opposed to having more guns. I don't shoot much anymore, but enjoyed going to the range. The media made such a big deal out of the mother enjoying guns and having several--a man would not have raised any eyebrows if he had owned those guns. I have also carried a gun when doing work in remote parts of southeast Alaska, mostly to scare off bears if they came close. Single women may be some of the people most justified in having guns for self defense. What's sort of interesting is that all this talk of banning guns is going to result in a booming gun market. Maybe it will fix the economy.

And comparison with us and Mexico is far more off base than a comparison of the US and England. Have you been to either? That’s just bizarre. This helplessness argument is bogus. “It’s culture, we’re screwed”. Nonsense and evasion.

Perhaps I have done so incorrectly, but I interpreted your argument as "countries with tougher gun laws have lower homicide rates". I'm just pointing out that this is not in fact true unless one cherry-picks data points. There are other, stronger variables and yes, culture is one of them.

The Australian example is interesting, and probably the best pro-gun-control example. I have seen good data indicating that violent crime in general and gun crime in particular dropped after the post-Port Arthur regulatory regime. I have also seen the claim that there have been no subsequent mass shootings. That latter claim is incorrect, though as far as I know this is the only counterexample. But both gun crime and mass shootings rates sharply declined in the US over the same period as well, which puts the causality in doubt.

Slightly off-topic, but you'll recognise some of the tactics described here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/sep/21/to-keep-and-bear-a…

The call to ban firearms to ensure the safety of the citizenry is hypocritical. Why not ban beers, liquors or any product containing alcohol? 75,000 Americans each year die from alcohol consumption and domestic abuse is often connected to alcohol consumption. Alcohol is addictive (AA anyone?).

Alcohol kills 2.5 million (est. see below) each year! How many were children?

Yet the anti-gun people would never tolerate such a ban.

"...Alcohol abuse is killing 2.5 million people each year and governments must do more to prevent it, the World Health Organization said Friday. Some 4 per cent of all deaths worldwide are attributable to alcohol, the U.N. body said..."

Well... no one needs assault weapons, ban them. Just because assault weapons are "more deadly"? Well... no one needs a drink with more than 2% alcohol, ban anything over 2%.

Worldview at the Washington Post had an interesting series of graphs showing how the US compares to the rest of the world in terms of private ownership of guns. The US has so many more guns in total and on a per capita basis. With this discrepancy with other countries, disarming the US of all semi automatics (mostly magazine fed) seems impossible.

I doubt that citizens would be as compliant as the author suggests. It is one thing for a person to not buy a semi automatic gun because it is illegal. It is another to own a gun like that for decades and then be told you are no longer allowed to own it.

I just can't believe that there is so much discussion regarding "the gun". There is one solution, fix crazy. We can't do that though because we may offend someone, label someone, or not be politically correct. How do you stop someone that is willing to die? These discussions of bans and stiffer penalties for offenders does nothing, lets remember, they killed themselves.

Lets look at our penal system now. We have convicted people of violent crimes serving 2-5 years, several repeat offenders, rap sheets five feet long that we, the tax payers support daily. I thought murder was already illegal? Passing more legislation will affect law abiding citizens only! By definition, we are the group of society that follows the laws.

We can't keep drugs out of maximum security prisons, and a study in 2009 showed over 37,000 prescription drug related deaths in our country. Maybe we should only give patients one pill a week, keep them under lock and key to protect bystanders, or at least maintain a database to ensure who has these drugs. Lets blame Pfizer for those commercials of healthy, happy people portraying these items as safe!

Several comments along the lines of "we don't need" and "no one needs" are frustrating to listen too. We don't need alcohol, tobacco, fast cars, and numerous other items that are harmful to ourselves and others. I would like to thank people for letting me know what I need and what I don't need though. It's comforting to know Diane Feinstein is so knowledgeable on guns how my hobbies are so unfriendly.

Feel like I'm rambling so I'll self edit; find a cure for crazy and quit treating inanimate objects as solutions.

Mark

you insanely said " do you really need to keep thousands of rounds at home? What exactly are you preparing for? I realize, bulk purchase of ammo is economically-sensible, and convenient for people who over the years will likely use that ammunition in target practice and hunting. Allow unlimited shotgun rounds of buck or birdshot, and maybe .22 caliber rifle rounds etc., but strongly consider round limitations on 9mm, .357, .223, .45, .50, 7.62mm etc. The more power, speed, and range of the bullet, as well as it’s use in clip-fed semi-automatic weapons, the more care we should take to prevent bulk ownership. "

First of all there is no such thing as a semi-auto 357 magnum except for one and it only holds 7 rounds of ammo. It also weighs as much as some rifles and costs more than $2300. The Magnum Research Desert Eagle. Not a likely choice of criminals due t cost, bulk, recoil, and noise.

Second of all, most poepledo not store thousands of rounds of ammo. It is not uncommon to have a few boxes of ammo for each caliber gun owned since different styles of ammo serve different puroposes. A bonded hollow point and a Jacketed soft point do not serve the same purpose. If I wanted to use my 357 Magnum revolver for home defense I would load it with 125 grain Speer Gold Dot bonded hollowpoints designed to explode insides for deadly one shot defense kills. If I wanted to take that same wepaon camping where Bears and Moose lurked, a bear or Moose would laugh at that same bullet. I would have to load it with a 180 grain lead hardcast round in order to penetrate tough animal muscle and bone to get penetration to vital organs. My Speer hollowpoint bullet would just piss off a bear becuase it would expand before hitting vital organs.

Same thing goes with the 223. Some people actally hunt feral hogs with an AR-15. For that purpose, again the hollow point is useless. A special designed bonded soft point from Winchester or Buffalo Bore is needed. That same AR-15 used to defend citizens against tyranny would be loaded with hollow points or spire tips for long range accuracy and and expansion upon impact.

So, different caliber firearms require different style ammo for various purposes. The 9mm is all but useless in most any situation besides human contact. It will kill the occassional stray dog, coyote or wolf, but anything larger and you get into trouble.

The 45 ACP like mine does not even offer soft point bullets for naimal hunting becuase it is an Army round designed for massive impact and knockdown power. Of copurse 230 grain bonded hollow points will kill a feral hog at dangerously close ranges, but is primarily used in human to human self defense.

My favorite rifle caliber, the 308, has been implemented as a sniper round becuase of accuracy, enormous knockdown power, and explosive terminal performance. Many white taiel deer hunters and feral hog hunters and even some Moose hunters use this caliber in the AR-15, but primarily hunters use this round in a bolt action rifle that only holds four rounds.

Mark, telling people that the cannot have ammo at home is like telling them they cannot keep gasoline at home for their cars either.

The little remar that you made about "what are they preparing for". Well some insane people, druggies, and demon possessed people and Islamic terrorists may be planning a sisniter event. However, most people who buy 223 and 7.62x39 rounds in bulk do so becuase it is cheaper to buy that way and in fact the ammo that they buy in bulk is TARGET only rounds. People who own these firearms buy seperate ammo like bonded soft points, spie tips, and bonded hollow points, for actual hunting/defense use.

I am quite surpiised a cime hass not been commited with the Taurus Judge. it is a revolver that holds five rounds of 410 shotgun shells. You can use any number bird/ squirrel shot, buckshot, or slugs in it. Of course the worst thung about it is the short range use. Outside of 15 yards it is useless even with the buckshot. The rifled barel spreads the shot too far out too quickly to be of any use other than close quarter combat situations.

Your comment about limiting how much ammo people can buy sounds a little tyrannical to me. Mark, this is NOT 1984. Let's please keep it that way.

If you wish to do something about these crimes, try banning Prozac, Celexa, Welbutrim, Lexapro, Requip, and some other mind altering drugs from the market.

Instead of infringing on the rights of the people, how about infringng on mind altering drugs and getting these drugs banned. That would be my first step in this whole thing, not infringing upon rights.

As far as Britian and Canada goes, they are not free countries like we are. Britain used to be. The only way to be free in britian is to be Muslim, then they roll the red carpet out for you. Mark, this is NOT Britain. We are not a nation of restrictions. Our forfathers left a nation of restrictions to get away from the very types of government that you are promoting. Let's please re-instate the Bill of Rights and not infringe them.

First of all there is no such thing as a semi-auto 357 magnum except for one and it only holds 7 rounds of ammo. It also weighs as much as some rifles and costs more than $2300. The Magnum Research Desert Eagle. Not a likely choice of criminals due t cost, bulk, recoil, and noise.

The problem only exists if you read my sentence as if requiring all said conditions for each round of ammo. Instead, each of the three factors independently should be associated with regulation for higher risk. I'm making the point, even a revolver hand-cannon should be thought of as potentially more prone to abuse than a little .22 squirrel gun.

Mark, telling people that the cannot have ammo at home is like telling them they cannot keep gasoline at home for their cars either.

I think having a few gas cans at home is fine. How about storing 2000 gallons of diesel fuel for no clear purpose? That might be of concern to the neighbors.\

Your comment about limiting how much ammo people can buy sounds a little tyrannical to me. Mark, this is NOT 1984. Let’s please keep it that way.

This is the extremity of the anti-regulation position. Any attempt, any attempt at all to regulate guns is compared to 1984. What hyperbole. I'm not even saying that there should necessarily be a ban, but if you want to prevent mass shootings, make the weapons used in mass shootings harder to obtain, and make it harder for rapid-fire/rapid reload weapons to be fed by 100 round drums. I'm not saying all arms should be taken away, I think the Taurus Judge is an awesome gun, I've fired it. It's neat, and is probably the most solid home defense piece one could own.

If you wish to do something about these crimes, try banning Prozac, Celexa, Welbutrim, Lexapro, Requip, and some other mind altering drugs from the market.

And now here we have it. It's the Mike Adams crowd. It's not the guns, it's the doctors trying to help the mentally ill! Kevin, you are no longer welcome at this blog.

oh and one other thing ...

eft wing rights grabbers have been trying to outlaw the 50 BMG for years even though not a single crime has ever been committed with one since it has been legal to own by civilians.

The 50 BMG is an enormous rifle. The round was made to penetrate tank armor in WW1. It is basically an anti-aircraft round. It is what some Air Force jets and chopper use to shoot down other aircraft.

This rifle in most cases except two only holds one round. The other two cases, the massive clip holds five rounds and the rifle is still a bolt action except for one barret which is a semi-auto.

This Barret 50 BMG weighs about 40 pounds without being loaded and without any accessories, scope, etc. With all accessories, rounds, and scope this rifle will weih in at nearly 50 pounds, is longer than some small cars, and has a recoil so massive that the shooter has to mount the firearm ona tripod and fire it from a lying down poisition in order not to get knocked down by it.

To give you an estimation of its lethal range a marine sniper in Afghanistan killed a Taliban terrorist from over two miles away with it. The taliban person was dead before he even heard the shot.

It is legal for civilians to own these, but beware. The cheapest version, a basic rifle with no scope or acessories cost more than $4,000. A fully loaded 50BMG from Barrett with the computer miitary scope will cost around $14,000.

Not many people own one of these expensive brutes, but they are legal. We are beginning to see Moose hunt competitons with them. Last year a hunter killed a large moose at around 1,100 yards with his. We are also seeing African safari hunters strapping these bad biys to the top of their Jeeps to hunt Hippos, Rhonos, Elephants and hyenas. That's right. You can almost explode a hyena with one.

Lucky for these 50 BMG owners. When the sh-ite hits the fan and black helicopters and paramilitary DHS stormtrooprs decend on American citizens, at least some people will be able to shoot them down and defend themselves, which of course, is the entire intent of the second amendment. Hunting has nothing to do with it.

I do not own a 50 BMG, not a .416, not even a 338 Lapua.

You made mention of the 22 rifle. This handy little survival rifle gets overlooked. Anyone in the family down to the smallest child can shoot one at any invading threat to that family/home. Oh and if you think the 22 is something to laugh about, ask a surgeon what it's like when a human gets shot in the gut with a 40 grain Velocitor hollow point 22 Long Rifle bullet traveling at 1850 FPS. Does more damage than some calibers three times its size. Velocity in small calibers is as deadly as size in larger calibers.

Even here in the south fathers train their sons young as 5 to shoot the 22 rilfe and if you think that 5 year old has not been taught to kill invading UN soldiers or other forces, think again. Down here, people are prepared for whatever tyranny the left wing has in store for this country. You may find taking guns away from southerners is as hard to do as taming Iraq.

Not saying an even like this will happen, but if tyranny like gun confiscation goes too far, do not be surpirsed to see people seek retaliation for the infringement of their rights. I am not advocating such measures, but I would not be surprised to see it happen down here in the deep south.

I think, for those who haven't seen Kevin replying here of late, he actually does believe this crap. So it's not a poe.

Kevin, seek professional help.

I think most of you have missed the point. A stolen gun was taken from the home where it was registered. Solution? No guns sold. What are guns for? Ornaments? Hundreds of people are shot every year, thousands of animals. Killing is wrong, OK? Leftovers from a society that refuses to evolve socially. Stuck back in the days of the wild west when disagreements were settled with a shootout. Guns and gun use are empowering to people, especially those who have never accomplished much else in their lives. So I say, get a life. Help others, do volunteer work. Guns are just part of a twisted economy.

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How about just limiting size of magazines - to 3 or 4 rounds. That would solve almost all the concerns. Gun nuts could keep their AK47's and even machine guns, but just 3 rounds at a time. This is best solution.

Ok - 4 or 5 or 6 rounds. How many is enough to kill deers or burglers.

The point isn't so much to prevent the mass murders that draw the public's attention as the daily killing that takes a far greater toll. Steps like limiting large-capacity magazines and restriction of ammunition sales might eventually help the first goal but promise less for the second.

What might help would be providing enough funding for ATF to trace every gun used in a crime back to its source, and thus to put the straw buyers and the bad gun dealers (and perhaps even some manufacturers) out of business. This is suggested by this 1993 article from the Atlantic, recommended by James Fallows.

How many ardent exponents of the Second Amendment are willing to say they stand foursquare behind the right of criminals to arm themselves with the very deadly weapons the law now allows?

Thank you for this article. I'm impressed with the thoughtfulness and intelligence of your efforts here as well as with many of the respondents contributing.
It's refreshing when a hot-button topic such as this is met with continuing level-headedness and intent.

I'm no longer a gun owner simply for the fact I generally feel no need and I've never personally been a hunter. This does not mean I may never again own a firearm, there have been many times in the past when I've enjoyed the occasional target shoot or day of sporting clays. I fully understand the concept of self-defense and support it.

Your points on the availability of existing firearms within this country is relevant. Your points on the availability of ammunition and a possible restriction on various types and amounts ammunition and weaponry makes a good deal of sense to me as well.
I'm not averse to the introduction of new and particularly well thought out legislation controlling availability and registration of certain weapons.

We're living in a new world, brave or not, and I believe we're scheduled to experience the effects of modifying societal pressures. To deny this is to deny historical president.
I welcome it. Others may not.

The one thing I continue to struggle with as each of these horrible incidents necessitates our collective attention is an evident lack, a compelling lack, of a search for answers beyond an understandable reflex and a call for new legislation possibly aimed at limiting a society's prior freedoms while once again failing to successfully examine whatever underlying factors have now placed us within this worsening environment.

It would seem it's been long coming and would also seem, to me, to require more than a continual lessoning of the availability of whatever material aspects which represent the problem and more a look at what factors there are of causality. (I just blundered into that old rediculous saw didn't I?)
But we're missing something here. We seem to be avoiding something maybe much more important.

Yet I can't quite say what that is.

Perhaps make the tax depend on the kind of bullet, things like hollow points and other bullets designed primarily for law enforcement use carry a high tax, a simple bullet for hunting a lower tax, Perhaps start where Kevin suggests. Shotgun shells could also pay the lower tax of maybe .01 per bullet.

I suspect hashing out reasonable limits on guns and ammunition are domed to fail simply because people are not rational about guns and ammunition. I've seen this tendency to fetishize objects in people around me.

I knew a writer who would end her infrequent but stubborn writer's block by buying expensive fountain pens, leather bound writing pads, and other equipment related to writing. Doing it made her feel more like a writer and more confident in her ability.

I've seen the same thing when acquaintances suffer a knock in their romantic relationships or set back at work that shakes their confidence in themselves as competent, potent, capable men. Buying a gun, or stockpiling ammunition, or buying a really nice knife was what they did to regain a sense of control, potency, masculinity. Yes, almost to a man, they disguised this fetishism by claiming they might really need a firearm, or explain how they were investments, or part of a patriotic/civil duty as citizen to be armed.

None of that is strictly logical. It is, however, quite real. This sort of thing is hard wired into the base operating system of the turtle brain. Magic, primitive religion, and most woo, depend on this deep wiring to maintain belief.

Unfortunately, those connection cannot be changed through the use of logical argument. They are emotion based. Sure, nobody really needs 5000 rounds of 7.62mm if you don't have a realistic expectation of participating in a war or some Mad Max scenario. But that isn't how it feels to people who buy thousands of rounds at a time.

Same thing with 100 round magazines. Nobody really needs them. Even the military doesn't use them. But when someone says you can't have them there is a deep down part of the brain that shouts that you just have to have them. That part of the brain isn't subject to reason and logic. Not being able to get one feels like having a manly and wholesome civil right denied. But also like it feels when you find out that growing up means giving up on childish dreams of being a bad ass and macho hero. It feels a bit like when a mother figure told you you shouldn't run with scissors.

Of course few people can really articulate these feelings and there are precious few who on the anti-regulation side who will not conflate the strictures with a loss of freedom and tyranny simply because those are the terms that avoid the touchy subject of feelings and the fact that guns are not just tools. They are symbols of potency, power, and enfranchisement and deeply meaningful to the primitive brain.

Mark,
You wrote: "our yearly toll of some 30,000 people a year killed by guns."

Your data is inaccurate.

According to the FBI report on Crime in the United States, Table 20, Weapons, there were 12,664 murders in the US in 2011. That includes all weapons. Only 8583 of those were due to firearms of all kinds. Accidental firearms deaths in 2010, the last year reported, totaled about 600, for a grand total of slightly more than 9000 deaths resulting from firearms, far, far less than your figure of 30,000.

If you combine murders and non-negligent (criminal) manslaughter, the total is still only 14,022, less than half your number, and that includes criminal vehicular homicide.

You wrote, "Our per-capita death rate is about 4 times higher than our next door neighbor, Canada, or any of these countries mentioned with death rates in the tens or hundreds, rather than the tens of thousands."

The murder rate in Canada was 1.6 per 100,000; in the US it was 4.2. Canada, therefore, has a rate of about one-third the US. Mexico had a murder rate of 16.9! By any calculation, the US murder rate is not four times Canada's, and all murders in the US are not the result of firearms.

You wrote, "The flaw in most of [Matt Springer's] reasoning is to say that because something doesn't work perfectly, means that it has no value."

That is not what he wrote. Springer stated, "What I do oppose are laws that sacrifice freedom but don’t actually hinder people who might be inclined to commit similar atrocities. "

If you are going to attack a person's argument, please try to state it accurately. Also, if you are going to cite data, cite the truth, not some fiction that better suits your purposes.

You have overlooked the most important question that must be answered before the passage of any law, criminal or civil, and that is, "What will be the unintended consequences of this law?"

Would you pass a law that would confiscate billions of dollars of personal property yet not be shown to produce any benefit?
Would you pass a law that overnight turned milliions of law-abiding citizens into felons?
Would you pass yet another victimless law, make yet another victimless circumstance a crime?
Would you pass a law that levied punishment on people for the crimes they could possibly commit?
Would you pass a law that would leave the citizens of the United States at the mercy of the government?
Would you willingly pass a law that would give the government an overwhelming advantage in the use of force against its citizens?
Would you willingly disregard the first clause of the Second Amendment, "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State..."?

Mark, remember this, governments are the worst murderers in history. During the 20th Century alone, governments killed more people than did the Crusades, the Islamic invasions, and all the other "holy" wars combined since the birth of Jesus Christ.

Governments commonly use the laws to their own purposes, and then willfully disregard those laws if it serves them to do so. Do you wish to give yet more power to the same government that showed such contempt for the laws we already have with its "Fast and Furious" program?

Do you want to give any government, even you own, total power over you and your life? Especially considering their record in the last few years?

You're not including suicides.

"Would you pass a law that would confiscate billions of dollars of personal property yet not be shown to produce any benefit?"
This assumes that decreasing gun violence is impossible. The international experience seems to contradict this.

"Would you pass a law that overnight turned milliions of law-abiding citizens into felons?"
This assumes no grace period, no grandfather clauses, no intelligent implementation at all, another straw man argument.

"Would you pass yet another victimless law, make yet another victimless circumstance a crime?"
I don't even understand this one.

"Would you pass a law that levied punishment on people for the crimes they could possibly commit?"
Actually yes, it's quite common to pass laws in which preparation for a behavior is evidence of plans for that behavior. Consider possession with intent. Or possession of explosives.

"Would you pass a law that would leeave the citizens of the United States at the mercy of the government?"
Bullshit. There is no evidence that armed citizenry is a requirement for democracy, or prevents tyranny. You think Canada is about to be overrun by fascists, or England? Or even Germany these days? Then look at countries that have overthrown dictators, like in Egypt. Was that an armed conflict? How many dictators have been overthrown by an armed populace as opposed to foreign or domestic military coup?

"Would you willingly pass a law that would give the government an overwhelming advantage in the use of force against its citizens?"
If you think they don't already have it, you're a fool. Red dawn fan maybe? You're living in a fantasy if you think even your peashooter will match even light US military forces, artillery, air force etc. The answer isn't that we should be in an arms race with our own military.

"Would you willingly disregard the first clause of the Second Amendment, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State…”?"

Are you part of a militia i.e. the National Guard? If you are I'm fine with that. I am arguing against civilian ownership of military hardware. There's just no need. Also, the right to keep and bare arms doesn't necessary mean any and all arms. How about anti-aircraft missiles? Tanks? Cannons? Where do we draw the line?

Governments commonly use the laws to their own purposes, and then willfully disregard those laws if it serves them to do so. Do you wish to give yet more power to the same government that showed such contempt for the laws we already have with its “Fast and Furious” program?

Do you want to give any government, even you own, total power over you and your life? Especially considering their record in the last few years?

The idea that America is nearly in the grasp of tyrannical dictatorship is a laugh. And the idea that it's the armed citizenry that keeps it at bay is even more ludicrous.

Thank you for writing this piece and giving so much information. I appreciate the effort and thought placed into such an article.

First off for disclosure purposes, I am probably considered a left-wing crazy. I am fairly liberal in just about every issue. In particular to this issue, I truly believe that more guns do not make things safer and only create more danger and more chaos. That aside, my comment is not about arguing that point. The argument of gun control is in such a cluster of disarray that I feel nothing ever gets done. As has been stated before and in the article, the assault rifle ban was just for show. The magazine or clip ban was regardless as one could simply make their own. What I believe is that a true conversation needs to be had about how to create safety while including everyone in the conversation.

I can also state that I am not a gun owner nor will I be and I have not had the experience of shooting a gun, unless you include my failed attempt of paint balling.

In all my thoughts and discussions about gun control, I have always believed in ammunition control.

"I think the sale or ownership of magazine-fed weapons should probably be prohibited or severely restricted for civilians. The ownership of extended magazines such as those used by the shooter in Aurora should be a federal crime. They should cease to exist outside of military use. Allowing ownership of revolvers, bolt and breech-fed rifles and shotguns, would satisfy legitimate home-safety, sporting, and hunting applications that can and should be protected by any gun control regulation. The problem is clip-fed semi-automatic rifles and handguns. These are the guns that do the most damage-per-second, with easy reloading, and the ability to bring and use hundreds or even thousands of rounds by a single person."

I believe that we can have a full system that limits the ammunition one purchases without limiting those with true intentions:

"I would still be able to go skeet shooting, hunt deer, duck, or target shoot to my heart’s content."

The system could be like this, a license to purchase specific ammunition for the gun license you carry. A control over the flow of ammunition, a total limit of the amount of ammunition that you purchase. Every box of ammunition that is sold has to have the license number with it. Certain medication needs to have the ID scanned before it is sold, a similar system can be placed here. That system will then know if the threshold is meet. There is automatic reporting if there are high sales number of total ammunition.

" Finally, place limits on ammunition purchases and stockpiling. The second amendment says we have the right to keep and bear arms, but says nothing about restrictions on industrially-produced cartridges that feed some of these more deadly weapons. Such cartridges, after all, didn’t even exist when the constitution was written, coming almost 100 years later. Make it against the law to own or carry more than 100 rounds of a given ammunition. You could still go to the range, buy and dump lots of rounds in practice, but given the bag limits for deer in any given state, do you really need to keep thousands of rounds at home? What exactly are you preparing for? I realize, bulk purchase of ammo is economically-sensible, and convenient for people who over the years will likely use that ammunition in target practice and hunting. Allow unlimited shotgun rounds of buck or birdshot, and maybe .22 caliber rifle rounds etc., but strongly consider round limitations on 9mm, .357, .223, .45, .50, 7.62mm etc. The more power, speed, and range of the bullet, as well as it’s use in clip-fed semi-automatic weapons, the more care we should take to prevent bulk ownership."

So sell ammunition at the gun ranges in groupings of say 70-100 rounds. If you go through it, go and purchase more at the same range. This simply adds five extra minutes to the time spent at the range for better safety. Could a person still walk out with ammunition here? Of course but it is still without a better threshold than before. All it is, is a better control system over the flow of ammunition. Not limiting those that will to take on the sport and get good solid practice while limiting it outside of that.

We’re not talking about perfection here. We’re talking about progress. Making it harder, making the violence rarer, will decrease the amount of gun violence, as almost every country besides the US demonstrates every year with their gun violence deaths at a tiny fraction of our own.

This is really the gust of my thought, we need to make progress. Every discussion on gun control before gets silenced, quieted down, or forgotten. An Ammunition control debate is something that if done intelligently will have a bipartisan agreement. It will help keep the discussion moving. It will be a first step towards further gun control is desire but at least a progress. No matter what side you are on, you have to agree we need something to change, this can be a first good change. Its kinda like Tommie Lee Jones, Stevens, in Lincoln. Take the first step towards progess.

As I do not have a platform for my opinions I placed them under the petition website, if you agree help me push for at least a response and at least the knowledge that we agree, Sign It and Share it, much appreciated:

http://wh.gov/RJOq

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/take-first-step-bipartisan-di…

OK, I gave a lousy example regarding the penumbras of the First Amendment. Change it to newsprint, with the specific goal of hindering the right to publish. The Supreme Court has repeated ruled that when a burden is placed on the exercise of a fundamental right that a heightened scrutiny applies. For instance, here's a story about a (lower) court ruling regarding newspaper boxes. Applying that to the right to keep and bear arms, the exceedingly small magazine size (which also obsoletes nearly every existing semi-automatic) that you are suggesting is just such a burden. That's not to say that there might be a magazine that the court's would find too large (and fit under the wire), but under heightened scrutiny of some sort (either strict or intermediate), something like a limit of 5 would be very, very closely examined. As I said, I really doubt it would hold up.

And by the way, such penumbras also already exist for 2nd Amendment law: one of the troubles DC and Chicago got into was that they also made it impossible to buy a gun in their cities. I'm pretty sure in the Chicago case such a complete ban was overturned.

Thank you for your reply, Mark.

Concerning suicides. I discounted them intentionally based upon the experience of Japan. In Japan, the suicide rate is somewhat more than twice what we have here in the US, but private gun ownership is virtually nonexistent.

I believe this makes a very good case that gun or no gun, someone bent on suicide will succeed. Thus, it having been established that the method is insignificant, suicide is not a valid part of this equation as it would not be affected by any gun control.

“Would you pass a law that would confiscate billions of dollars of personal property yet not be shown to produce any benefit?”
This assumes that decreasing gun violence is impossible. The international experience seems to contradict this.

I believe that decreasing violence of all kinds is possible, but probably not through the method of limiting access to weapons.

Actually, the international experience refutes your theory.

Let's look at Russia where private firearms ownership, as a legacy of the Soviet ban on firearms, is only 4,000 per 100,000, and most of those firearms are either rifles or shotguns. Their murder rate is about 10/100K, more than double ours.

Luxembourg,where handguns are totally banned and ownership of any kind of gun is minimal, the murder rate was 9 per 100K the same year.

In the US, this figure is 4.2 per 100K.

Let's consider Finland, Norway, Germany, and France where their gun ownership rates are all above 30,000 per 100,000. In none of these countries does the murder rate exceed 1.98 per 100k, less than half that of the US.

The correlation between number of weapons and murder rate is negative.

Let's look at Japan again. Overall, the murder rate there is 0.3 per 100k. If we subtracted all the firearms related murders from the US rate, we'd still be left with a murder rate of many times that of Japan.

So means is shown to be of minimal consequence in determining the murder rate. I think this would be true for the overall violent crime rate, as well.

“Would you willingly disregard the first clause of the Second Amendment, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State…”?”

Are you part of a militia i.e. the National Guard? If you are I’m fine with that. I am arguing against civilian ownership of military hardware. There’s just no need. Also, the right to keep and bare arms doesn’t necessary mean any and all arms. How about anti-aircraft missiles?

First and foremost, the National Guard is not a militia; it is a federal military force. Second, please cite some authority on exactly what arms are covered by the Second Amendment. In 1789 when the Bill of Rights was passed, militias composed of private citizens possessed and trained with all of the arms used by the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War: cannons, warships, rifles, muskets, bayonets, swords...everything. This state of affairs continued until 1934 when the National Firearms Act was passed into law.

“Would you willingly pass a law that would give the government an overwhelming advantage in the use of force against its citizens?”
If you think they don’t already have it, you’re a fool. Red dawn fan maybe? You’re living in a fantasy if you think even your peashooter will match even light US military forces, artillery, air force etc. The answer isn’t that we should be in an arms race with our own military.

I was not referring to the US military. I was referring to the government. My thoughts were more toward the deterrence of illegal search and seizure and similar violations of our civil rights.

I know from experience as a police officer that law enforcement personnel greatly respect the armed citizen. Strange that you assumed I meant the military when the other was so obvious.

A victimless crime is a crime which does not conform to the common law assumption that an injury or harm be done before a crime is seen to have occurred. A victimless crime is something like violation of laws prohibiting the ownership of pornography, making homosexuality illegal, banning the possession of the Christian Bible, or making the possession of a gun with a magazine holding more than 10 rounds a felony. The first three of those examples are reality in the Muslim world today; two of them once were in the US.

“Would you pass a law that levied punishment on people for the crimes they could possibly commit?”
Actually yes, it’s quite common to pass laws in which preparation for a behavior is evidence of plans for that behavior. Consider possession with intent. Or possession of explosives.

You examples here are faulty. Possession with intent requires proof of intent, not possession. There's a big difference there. Possession of explosives is not a crime so long as the required conditions have been met, just like possession of a fire arm. With the proper training and qualifications, anyone can acquire a license to possess and use explosives.

Here's what I'm driving at: there are far better, more productive ways than gun control to reduce violent crime in the United States. Spending further billions of dollars on a method that so far has produced no benefit is contraindicated. There are other, more promising ways to use our limited resources.

Promoting a more homogeneous, cooperative society immediately comes to mind since it is so obvious. The countries of the world with the lowest violent crime rate also have the most homogeneous populations. The most cooperative. The most voluntarily conforming.

Experience has shown that gun control, so far, has not worked. How then could more of a failure suddenly produce positive results?

The definition of insanity, it is said, is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result each time.

This shooting was an example of a failure of *every* argument the pro-gun people make. The first victim was the one who should have been "protected" by supposedly owning a gun. She had three, and it didn't do her any damn good at all. Second, there *was* security at the school, from what I understand, and they waved the person through, instead of doing there damn job.

Now, a few things - First off, the idea that banning assault weapons, and I don't mean with a grandfather clause, unless it includes disabling the gun, and something specifying that re-enabling it, even temporarily, other than at, say, a gun range, should itself be considered, 'Intent to commit violence", or something like that, is only stupid because all gun laws end up being stupid, with loopholes you can drive trucks through, to pander to the small percentage of politically powerful gun nuts.

Second - While violence happens in other countries, including mass shootings like this, hell.. especially mass shootings like this, outside of the Middle East, where terrorists are practically a nation sporting event, they are ***very rare***. Rare, as in 1-2 a decade, not 2-3 a year.

Third - in places where gun ownership comes even *close* to what it is in the US: a) all guns *must* be registered, b) anyone owning one has to be certified, not just passing some background checks, c) certification doesn't mean some 10 minute lecture, and then being handed a conceal carry permit, the way it is in the US, it means a "mandatory" handling and safety course, as well as verification that you don't point the thing at the instructor, and can hit something with it, and you know and understand the consequences, and finally, d) its like a drivers license, or at least like one in places where they bother to take those bloody seriously either, and you have to renew it, by being retested. Oh, and.. bets that they even allow anyone, outside their military, to own assault weapons...

But, in the good old US, you don't even have to go through the background check, as long as your buddy does, and he "changes his mind" about owning them, in the parking lot (Arizona law), and hands them out to every idiot that wants one, as gifts.

Yeah.. no idea why the hell we have a problem, and a lot of the rest of the world doesn't. It couldn't be, like usual, the idio... sorry, right wi..., uh.. "pro-gun" people are doing the same thing with this as they do with everything else, and cherry pick their facts, when talking about how much "like" the US some other country is, while, simultaneously, insisting that the problems we have have nothing at all to do with the differences. Unless, of course, we are talking about the differences, and then, well, that is why they are not like us, and, somehow, we are *better* for it, somehow. :head->desk:

I can now argue that all Muslim Americans need to have defense guns in their homes, because some bigot like Kevin Sanders might be living nearby and mean them harm. Sheesh, quit while you're ahead, dude, you were sounding very sensible for a while.

Glen - The idea that we make shooters buy their ammo at the range (and then, I suppose, have their bags searched to confirm that they fired it all rather than smuggling it out) is not practical. Most shooting does not take place at indoor ranges with full-time staff onsite. Most ranges are simply pieces of rural land with wood frames for targets set up and berms behind them. If they are private, e.g., Ikes ranges, you pay your dues and get the combination to the driveway lock. Nobody is paid to stand there all day to watch anyone who might show up to shoot. Such would make shooting, again, far more difficult and expensive. Sweeping proposals made by people who don't know much about the subject are always going to have huge unintended [?] consequences.

Mark - Please don't conflate automatic and semi-automatic weapons. I would be tentatively willing to support a ban on ultra-high-capacity magazines or the equivalent, such as these drums. However, it will only make a difference if the victims of a mass shooting are able and willing to attack a shooter very aggressively during the brief periods he spends reloading. You could probably get most gun owners to back that, if they were convinced it might make a difference. But when you call them "paranoid" for thinking that bans might someday be enforced, you increase concern that the real purpose is to move toward total disarmament via the salami-slice approach. If you want political success in a country where close to 50% of homes may have firearms, you need to approach law-abiding gun owners with an attitude of "How can you help to make it harder for bad guys to use guns to do harm?" and not "How can we keep stupid crazy people like you from harming us more rational folks?"

Mark – Please don’t conflate automatic and semi-automatic weapons. I would be tentatively willing to support a ban on ultra-high-capacity magazines or the equivalent, such as these drums. However, it will only make a difference if the victims of a mass shooting are able and willing to attack a shooter very aggressively during the brief periods he spends reloading.

At no point do I conflate the two. I own two semi-automatic weapons. Automatic weapons have been illegal since 1934. And it's not about attacking the shooter during reloading, it's about damage per second. The damage in mass killings is related to ones ability to drop rounds, fast. Rapid fire/reload weapons like semi-automatic AR-15 style rifles have the capacity to drop a lot of rounds. Combine that with a dozen 30 round clips, and your looking at the ability to drop hundreds of rounds before anyone, such as law enforcement and first responders have a chance to arrive.

The idea that anyone, other than those trained as police or military, are realistically going to tackle someone laying about with a semi-automatic rifle is ludicrous.

Kevin on other threads has discussed his mind control prevention helmet. It took us a few days to figure out he was serious.

Well Jane, I suppose the fact that you would purchase the ammunition on site would mean that you would have some one there. So with paying the same dues and the ammunition on site, that idea seems much safer and frankly fairly easy. And while I never mentioned checking bags since I alluded to the fact that the sales are already below thresholds, if Costco can easily do it because they are members, I would imagine this would be just as simple, but of course I am one of those
people who don’t know much about the subject are always going to have huge unintended [?] consequences.
I am not quite sure how this would be an huge unintended consequence in the first place? 5 extra minutes and one more job in the world? If it is a bill it would not increase the dues so don't worry about your costs increasing.

There are many ways to do this, and it is quite disheartening to hear a person push this under simply because one is not a gun owner. The concept is a discussion, while I may not know the inner workings of a rifle, I know for certain that limiting ammunition is an important and vital step that needs to be taken. I also know that multiple viewpoints are necessary for any progress in this nation. Even with a gun control bill, that would be proactive, the lack of an ammunition control bill would not change the current gun situation.

"mind control prevention helmet" - Er, would that be a tinfoil hat? Too late to get the patent on that, I think. Heh.

You did say in one message above that almost all of the recent mass shootings had used "magazine-fed automatic weapons" - presumably a typographical error in your case, but a mistake that's often made by gun control advocates either deliberately or out of abysmal ignorance.

Again, I think a case can be made for the banning of large-capacity magazines and clips - but for it to make a big difference in mass shooting events, you have to presume that untrained (unarmed) people will tackle someone laying about with a revolver or lower-capacity rifle, and I'm not sure that's true either. The self-defense case that has been made against such bans in the past is that if you or your home were threatened by a large group, which does sometimes happen in real life, having more than 5 or 6 rounds available gives you the luxury of firing warning shots rather than immediately shooting to kill. It seems plausible that more total lives would be saved by the absence of such capacity, but I suspect that the net number would be small. Most murders using guns do not depend upon the capacity to fire 30 rounds without a reload.

Most semi-automatic guns don't require a 30-round magazine or clip, so a ban on large-capacity magazines wouldn't significantly harm most gun owners and they could probably support it if they were convinced that it might help reduce the toll of random violence. But if it sounds like it's going to sooner or later include anything that fires more rounds without reloading than a revolver or two-barreled shotgun, well, that's my .22 target pistol and rifle, whose standard clips hold over 6 rounds, and now you're talking about confiscation of almost every modern model of gun. This is not politically acceptable. So I encourage you to avoid demonizing the semi-automatic mechanism itself and focus on optional high-capacity magazines.

ah, I see, yes I dropped the semi. But I do know the difference.

I think we might have to accept limitations on all semi-automatics. Maybe based on caliber, but maybe also as a whole. Since it's difficult to distinguish between the target shooting application, and the killing lots of people application based on simple criteria, we have to face that the semi-automatic function combined with magazines is the problem here. At VA tech the shooter used the gun I have after all, and just brought multiple clips, and was able to create havoc. With the glock and a walther .22 semiautomatic he shot 49 and killed 32. He committed most of the murders in Norris hall in 12 minutes. In 12 minutes an untrained civilian managed to shoot about 45 people and kill nearly 30.

Shots per second, that's what has accelerated the lethality of these incidents. I certainly don't need the gun I have. I bought it because it's a fun, well-balanced gun, and 9mm ammo is relatively cheap target ammo while still giving a little kick. But in the end, it's a ridiculous and unsafe weapon for a civilian to own. It has no thumb safety, it holds 15 rounds, it's really more of an appropriate gun for police or military use.

With regard to the equating of the National Guard and the milita:
This is correct, largely, and an indication that - in reality - the original intent of the second amendment has been silently abandoned, since the National Guard reports first to the federal government.

Time to discard the rest of it. It is ridiculous to regard the possession of weapons as an intrinsic right on a level with other fundamental rights.

[And yes, I know it's not going to happen any time soon. That doesn't change my opinion.]

Mark, this statement of yours is simply wrong.

OleanderTea asked you,

"Just curious where people can walk in and then walk out with an AR-15 no questions asked."

and you replied,

"Virginia for one. I could walk into a gunstore, show an in state license, and leave 10 minutes later with an AR-15. It’s a semi-automatic rife."

You might leave in ten minutes, but you would have had to pass a NICS background check in the meantime.

You also wrote, "Most states do not require background checks with all gun sales."

No, you are right, the states generally do not, but the federal government does.

Sorry, Mark, but if this is an indication of the quality of your firearms knowledge, you get an F.

The key word is all. We do not federally regulate private sale. Hence the problem with straw man purchases.

The data I've seen indicates that the primary source of guns for felons is straw purchases at FFLs. Ie, a crook talks his girlfriend into buying a gun for him at a licensed dealer. Theft is another source. Face-to-face private party sales doesn't seem to be that big of a source. I don't think any of the recent infamous mass shooters have acquired their weapons that way.

But I'd be fine with opening NICS for private party sales, provided it didn't introduce any additional costs and had privacy safeguards in place.

Hence, the straw man purchase restriction having absolutely no teeth. Yes, it's against the law, but it's unenforceable since there is no tracking. And "theft" is often straw man sale as well. Someone buys a gun, reports it stolen, when they've actually sold it to someone unreputable. It's a common scam, and another one that would be harder to do if there were serious tracking of guns after sale from an FFL. The felon who bought it can't complain because it was an illegal purchase. The person selling it gets paid twice for the sale - once by his insurance, and once by the felon.

If it means anything to the constitution grabbers out there who use "hunting" as their view on the right to own firearms, Remington manufactures what is called an R-15 and an R-25 rifle. They are camo colored and are based off of an AR-15 platform, but the magazines are a DPMS style that only holds four rounds plus one in the chamber. The calibers range from the popular AR-15 5.56 NATO round all the way up to 7mm-08 and even .308 which are both potent animal stoppers - even bears and moose. These rifles are designed for hunting even though they are semi-auto. FYI most serious hunters could care less about semi-auto becuase one the trigger is pulled and the loud boom noise is made, if you miss your deer, the sound will run him off usually without getting a second shot anyway. Many hunters I know hunt with a single shot break open style rifle in 7mm-08 or 35 whelen calibers.

Many gun grabbers and human rights destroyers do not have a problem with rifles that only hold one bullet. However, that rifle may not come in too handy if tyranny were implemented or massive invading army were headed our way. Granted that single shot rifle would do ok since you could pick off the enemy at 300 yards, but once they started pouring in, you would need a semi-auto or a pump shotgun using buckshot to be able to get two or three at a time. By the way, most shotguns used by hunters are either single shot break open, over/under barrel which only holds two shells, or a pump that uses four shells in the mag and one in the chamber. You can get the "tactical" model that adds more and you can up to eight shells plus one in the barrel in some "tactical" models. However most hunters will not buy the "tactical" model becuase they are cyliner bored which means out side of 12 yards the enemy will jsut stand there and laugh at you becuase the shot will spread out too far missing the target. However shotguns like mine have a screw in choke system that can be used to chnage the constriction of the shot. With xx full constriction I can sling 00 buckshot 12 pellets downrange to around 65 yards and still get 9 out of 12 pellets to hit center mass. If I want to hit more targets close up, change the choke to full or modified which is good for 35 yards and closer. These chokes were not designed to kill people. They were designed to hunt waterfowl and turkeys, but more and more people choose to buy pup shotguns with interchangeble chokes becuase they can use it for any type of hunting or defense purposes.

Many people who talk about "survivor kits" often overlook a shot gun as part of the kit. It is the most versatile weapon available. You can hunt small game like rabbits, quail, pheasant, squirrel, or large game like deer. At the same time it can be used as a personal defense weapon. It is the ultimate survival gun. Poeple talk about the 22 LR. it can also be used for hunting small game, self defense, and deer sized game at reasonable close range, but whn one encounters a large pack of coyotes, wolves, or a mountain lion, the 12 gauge buckshot will end that situation quick and decisively. Not recommended for bears and moose though. You will end up running.

Just though i would throw in the fact that AR style weapons are in fact used for some types of hunting such as for feral hogs, coyotes, varmints, pests, etc. So, there are legitimate hunters who purchased AR-15s to hunt coyote packs and hogs with becuase of the high capacity clips and long range accuracy. Most of these shooters except for one were using standard 20 or 30 round AR magazines. Most people do not even know that 90 round drums are available at most gun dealers. 75 round drums are available for AK-47s and 100 round drums are available for Tommy guns that use 45 ACP ammo. Yes they still make tommy guns. They are expensive and weigh more than 5 AR-15 rifles. They are not too popular becuase of cost, weight, and bulk. The high capacity drums are not popular eitheer for the same reason. extra weight and bulk.

There is a weapon avaiable to the general public that not many people know about, even avid gun nuts. Most every has heard of the Ruger 10/22. It is simply a small lightweight 22 caliber rifle. Nothing fancy. However, there is one company that takes two of these and strips them down and puts the triger assemblies and barrels and two 25 round maganzines together. It is mounted on a tripod with a WW2 era style cross hair sight. The triggers are utilized by way for a rotator. You rotate a handle that then fires BOTH barrels from BOTH 25 round magazines at the same time firing it four times as fast as a human can pull the trigger. You can literlly empty 50 round in 5 seconds. It is a mini double barrel gatlin gun in 22 long rifle caliber mounted ona tripod. It costs an enormous amount, but would chase off most anything it fired upon. As I recal you may not be able to purchase one at this time due to slow sales and demand of this item. Slow sales were due to cost. it costs more than some hardcore tricked out AR-15s. The cost killed the item, but just letting you know what human ingenuity can do. http://ab9d.com/photogallery/photo00024505/rugerggl.htm

You can still order kits to make your own.

... I see now that they have replaced the two 25 round magazines with two 50 round drums.

I'm tolerating this post Kevin because unlike your other crank piece it's informational. I'm not about to turn this thread into a Mike Adams style crank attack on psychiatry. On topic only.

Mark,

Come on, you didn't write that. You stated that anyone with an ID could walk into "a gunstore [sic]" and purchase a firearm without a background check. And that applies to ALL sales in licensed gun stores.
You cannot do that in Virginia, New Jersey, or any other state or territory of the United States.

You are also in error about strawman purchases. Those are defined as purchases in which a third party, acting as an agent of a person prohibited from buying or possessing a firearm, intentionally purchases and takes possession of a firearm from a federally licensed firearms dealer with the intent to transfer it to the unqualified individual.

This is entirely different than a private sale.

Private sales are not subject to federal regulations, so long as they do not involve interstate sales, because they do not fall under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, and thus are not under federal jurisdiction.

Get yourself a copy of the latest ATF Publication 5300.4 Federal Firearms Regulations Reference Guide and do a little reading. I believe you can order a copy from the BATFE website at www.atfonline.gov

Also, if you'd like to discuss any particular subject, email me directly. I believe you have my address, and I'd be happy to correspond.

Surprisingly, I think that a few (very few) of your ideas are not complete nonsense. ;>)

The question asked was could you buy a gun no questions asked from a gun show (I blindly just wrote gunstore after that). And, you're right, I'm wrong, but only at an FFL. They do ask one question. Can I see your ID? They then run the background check, and barring a criminal record you get one of these guns. To me, that's still "no questions asked". They don't ask, what are you going to use this for? or not planning to climb a tower are ya?

Transfer of firearms then between private individuals is not regulated and even though straw man purchase is illegal from an FFL, it has no teeth (not to mention the gunshow loophole). If I sell you my car in Maryland I have to engage in far more steps than for private sale of a firearm. On the car I have to transfer title, I have to perform safety inspection, the car then has to be registered under the new owner, there needs to be prooof of insurance etc.

I could sell a gun to my next door neighbor, and no piece of paper need ever track the gun from there. Don't believe me, read the ATF rules for private transfer of guns.

To whom may an unlicensed person transfer firearms under the GCA?

A person may sell a firearm to an unlicensed resident of his State, if he does not know or have reasonable cause to believe the person is prohibited from receiving or possessing firearms under Federal law. A person may loan or rent a firearm to a resident of any State for temporary use for lawful sporting purposes, if he does not know or have reasonable cause to believe the person is prohibited from receiving or possessing firearms under Federal law. A person may sell or transfer a firearm to a licensee in any State. However, a firearm other than a curio or relic may not be transferred interstate to a licensed collector.
...
What record-keeping procedures should be followed when two private individuals want to engage in a firearms transaction?

When a transaction takes place between private (unlicensed) persons who reside in the same State, the Gun Control Act (GCA) does not require any record keeping. A private person may sell a firearm to another private individual in his or her State of residence and, similarly, a private individual may buy a firearm from another private person who resides in the same State. It is not necessary under Federal law for a Federal firearms licensee (FFL) to assist in the sale or transfer when the buyer and seller are “same-State” residents. Of course, the transferor/seller may not knowingly transfer a firearm to someone who falls within any of the categories of prohibited persons contained in the GCA. See 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(g) and (n). However, as stated above, there are no GCA-required records to be completed by either party to the transfer.

And the key word, the only word, that is dangerous for me there is "knowingly". After the gun is eventually used in a crime? "Well shucks officer, he seemed like a nice guy" will pretty much cover you, because there is no expectation of a private background check under the law. That's nuts. It sure saved Robyn Anderson's ass after Columbine for three of the weapons used by the shooters were straw man purchased by her from a gunshow - which also is legal (the guy that bought them the Tec9 from an FFL went to jail in an unusual example of the law being applied).

From the gunshow wiki:

Presently, 17 states regulate private firearm sales at gun shows. Seven states require background checks on all gun sales at gun shows (California, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Oregon, New York, Illinois and Colorado). Four states (Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) require background checks on all handgun, but not long gun, purchasers at gun shows. Six states require individuals to obtain a permit to purchase handguns that involves a background check (Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Iowa, Nebraska). Certain counties in Florida require background checks on all private sales of handguns at gun shows. The remaining 33 states do not restrict private, intrastate sales of firearms at gun shows in any manner.[16][17]

When I bought my weapons (from an FFL) originally in Virginia I was stunned at how easy it was. I went into a store, asked to see it, bought it, they ran my license, sure, but never was I asked do I know how to use this gun? Have I ever fired a handgun or rifle before? You aren't mad at your wife or anything right now are ya?

So you're right, one question is asked at the gun store. I think a few more need to be. And still no questions are asked in private sale including gun shows.

Mark - Straw man purchases are illegal, and we do federally regulate private sale. You may not knowingly sell a firearm to (or someone you have a reasonable suspicion of being) a felon, person conviceted of domestic violence, mentally defective, illegal alien, etc... You may not sell a handgun to a resident of a different state without transferring the weapon through a FFL holder (which triggers a form 4473).

See above, the key word is "knowingly". This is flimsy regulation, and no record of transfer need be kept, nor tracking of the firearm from person to person.

If we were serious about keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, every state would require a title transfer - just like for a car - with each sale.

I am all for fair, equitable, and effective laws. Society must have them to function effectively.
However, I strongly oppose open-ended, vague, or duplicitous laws that are intended either to trap the unwary citizen or provide more power to the government.

The word "knowingly" is contained in these laws to prevent someone being punished for a crime they did not intend to commit and could not have reasonably anticipated. As such, it is a fair and necessary provision of the law.

Let me state this right out in the open: NO, I do not trust government. Yes, I do believe that government will use whatever laws it can to further its own ends and increase its power and control over the citizen.

I don't trust government, but I trust the average citizen to carry a hand cannon around me less. What amazes me is the continued defense of the clip-fed semi-automatics as hunting weapons. I wouldn't want to be hunting within 100 miles of some lunatic moron, dumping ammo into the woods at god knows what.

It seems reasonable that to purchase some weapons, people should have to jump through as many hoops as they do to drive a car. (To drive, not to own - you actually do not need a valid driver's license or insurance to be the legal owner of a car that is kept in your garage, comparable to a gun kept in your gun safe.) In most states you already have to jump through equivalent hoops to get a carry permit, and that too seems reasonable. As a responsible gun owner, I'd support new laws that were pitched that way.

However, Americans will not accept a catch-22 situation in which you must have proven expertise to buy a gun, yet you have to get a gun and work with it for a long time to possess that skill. We do not require individuals to go to private driving school at great cost to their families before they can attempt to get a driver's license. Driver's ed is usually provided to all students free in schools. (In my home state it was a mandatory course.) Could high school PE classes perhaps include a unit on the safe handling of firearms, sufficient to allow those who eventually wish to purchase guns to pass whatever tests might be imposed? Boy Scouts and junior ROTC programs used to teach that subject as a matter of course. Some people will object to any suggestion that it's okay to own guns or hunt, but I'd say it's at least equally wrong for schools to encourage widespread use of private cars, when in the near future Americans will demonstrably be killing far more people with climate change than with guns.

Mark - Great blog and dialogue. I agree with most of your opinions and appreciate your thoughtful responses. I have owned a gun in the past, and generally do not want the government taking away my rights. At the same time, we all (including the victims, have the right to not get shot at school or the movie theater, ...etc). If we have learned anything from what happened, it is that access to these types of guns is way too easy. Most of the people who oppose your thoughts appear to have their minds made up, and then search for ways to bolster their beliefs. Most of the time the argument is based on emotion and rarely on facts. There are bad apples out there, and we are obligated to do whatever we can to prevent (or reduce the chances of) them from doing something like this again.

Take a look at this.
http://www.standeyo.com/NEWS/12_Pics_of_Day/121214.pic.of.day.c.html

Here's another good article.

http://www.examiner.com/article/arming-teachers-worked-for-israel-and-t…

Sorry, but you're so far off here it's ridiculous. One, we don't live in freaking Isreal which is basically in constant armed conflict with it's neighbors and terrorist groups. Two, it's a terrible analogy! In Israel, to have those weapons they have to register them all with the government, and re-register and qualify every three years! Applicants for a gun owner's licence in Isreal (you have to be licensed just to own one), have to prove a legitimate need, have to be at least 27 unless they served in the military, and best of all, they're only allowed to keep a limited amount of ammunition!

Israel's gun laws are the exact ones I've been advocating, and the exact ones that you people are attacking. Yes, they are under a constant external threat, they carry guns more readily in public. But their citizens have almost all served in the military. They know how to use those guns. They could probably use them effectively even while under fire - a thing the pathetic NRA fantasists think they could do but would probably just shit their pants in a real live-fire situation. They have very stringent regulation of the firearms and possession of ammunition. And finally, they actually have a legitimate reason to be so armed. We do not. We create the reason, by creating easy access to these weapons, then the gun obstructionists refuse to acknowledge any responsibility due to access.

Mark, Mike Adams may be your enemy, but he is right on many things includng mass shooting and drugs. MOST of the mass shhoting within the last ten years were carried out by young men who were either under supervsion of mental health professionals or were on Prozac, Zoloft, and other drugs.

In the following exceprt we see one thing in common that is not being addressed - getting mind altering drugs out of the hands of young adults and children :

Huntsville, Alabama – February 5, 2010: 15-year-old Hammad Memon shot and killed another Discover Middle School student Todd Brown. Memon had a history for being treated for ADHD and depression. He was taking the antidepressant Zoloft and “other drugs for the conditions.” He had been seeing a psychiatrist and psychologist.

2. Kauhajoki, Finland – September 23, 2008: 22-year-old culinary student Matti Saari shot and killed 9 students and a teacher, and wounded another student, before killing himself. Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazapine. He was also seeing a psychologist.

3. Dekalb, Illinois – February 14, 2008: 27-year-old Steven Kazmierczak shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amount of Xanax in his system. He had been seeing a psychiatrist.

4. Jokela, Finland – November 7, 2007: 18-year-old Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School in southern Finland, then committed suicide.

5. Cleveland, Ohio – October 10, 2007: 14-year-old Asa Coon stormed through his school with a gun in each hand, shooting and wounding four before taking his own life. Court records show Coon had been placed on the antidepressant Trazodone.

6. Red Lake, Minnesota – March 2005: 16-year-old Jeff Weise, on Prozac, shot and killed his grandparents, then went to his school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation where he shot dead 7 students and a teacher, and wounded 7 before killing himself.

7. Greenbush, New York – February 2004: 16-year-old Jon Romano strolled into his high school in east Greenbush and opened fire with a shotgun. Special education teacher Michael Bennett was hit in the leg. Romano had been taking “medication for depression”. He had previously seen a psychiatrist.

8. Wahluke, Washington – April 10, 2001: Sixteen-year-old Cory Baadsgaard took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates and a teacher hostage. He had been taking the antidepressant Effexor.

9. El Cajon, California – March 22, 2001: 18-year-old Jason Hoffman, on the antidepressants Celexa and Effexor, opened fire on his classmates, wounding three students and two teachers at Granite Hills High School. He had been seeing a psychiatrist before the shooting.

10. Williamsport, Pennsylvania – March 7, 2001: 14-year-old Elizabeth Bush was taking the antidepressant Prozac when she shot at fellow students, wounding one.

11. Conyers, Georgia – May 20, 1999: 15-year-old T.J. Solomon was being treated with the stimulant Ritalin when he opened fire on and wounded six of his classmates.

12. Columbine, Colorado – April 20, 1999: 18-year-old Eric Harris and his accomplice, Dylan Klebold, killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 26 others before killing themselves. Harris was on the antidepressant Luvox. Klebold’s medical records remain sealed. Both shooters had been in anger-management classes and had undergone counseling. Harris had been seeing a psychiatrist before the shooting.

13. Notus, Idaho – April 16, 1999: 15-year-old Shawn Cooper fired two shotgun rounds in his school, narrowly missing students. He was taking a prescribed SSRI antidepressant and Ritalin.

14. Springfield, Oregon – May 21, 1998: 15-year-old Kip Kinkel murdered his parents and then proceeded to school where he opened fire on students in the cafeteria, killing two and wounding 25. Kinkel had been taking the antidepressant Prozac. Kinkel had been attending “anger control classes” and was under the care of a psychologist.

It's incredibly sad that Mike Adams uses his FBI staging and mind control arguments and people like you then defend it. I think you have a correlation here between mental illness and these incidents, but the one thing that may help stop these cases is the thing you blame.

It's amazing. On the one hand we have the gun nuts saying, ad nauseum, nothing works, nothing works, do nothing, work on mental health never gun laws. Then on the other hand you have the doctor/pharma cranks saying it's the psychiatrists! It's the drugs! Pathetic.

It's kind of a catch 22.

The saddest thing about this conversation and the complete unwillingness of the gun advocates to accept any regulation is that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their worldview that the only way to deal with this problem is an arms race, where we continue to arm more and more people, and put guns in more and more places, including the classroom, ultimately will create a place where the only way to deal with the problem will be to arm everybody, including teachers. All the while their narcissistic fantasy that if they were armed and under fire, they could take out a gunman laying about with a semi-automatic. They would be the hero in the movie theater that would shoot back, with a handgun, in the dark, under fire, and not just hit more victims, but hit the gunman and save the day.

The reality is that facing fire from a gunman is terrifying. That to adequately respond to situations like these with more armed conflict takes more that every jackass and Homer being armed but people that are trained specifically to take out people that are shooting at them, like cops and soldiers. The reality is that having guns on every idiot in the state leads to teenagers being shot for having their radios too loud, teenagers being shot for cutting through someone's yard while wearing a hoodie, and escalation of what would be non-lethal disputes into lethal ones.

i love how you gun control nuts like to avoid certain details of these incidences of violence in order to meet your need to scare people into believing guns, whether of a certain model, or otherwise, or the clips and magazines used in them, are evil.

FACT: We in America have already had gun control laws. They didn't work, which you libtards so conveniently leave out.

FACT: almost all of the recent mass shootings in the last decade and a half, have been perpetrated in "Gun Free Zones."

FACT: Even all the mass shootings in the history of America's free reign added together make only a small percentage of annual causes of death. a percentage which has been steadily shrinking without gun bans in effect.

FACT: Our current president, his advisers, and fellow gun ban pro congress and senate buddies know, without a doubt, that a gun ban will solve nothing. The government of our nation has been advised on this many times in the last 40 years, always with the same results.

FACT: the only reason Obama wants gun control, is so the government doesn't need to worry about the people getting pushed too far and uprising against government tyranny.

FACT: Big Governments have always feared an armed populace, because its not as easy to force your will upon others if they have the means to fight you.

You said that none of these shooters weren't criminals before their shootings?
In Clackamas Or a man stole a friend's ar type weapon (theft is a crime) and used it to kill two people and himself (After confronted by a law abiding citizen armed with a pistlol) in what is being erroneously called a "mass shooting."

In Conneticut, A 20 year old man stole his mother's guns, (theft is still a crime) killed her, (murder is a crime) went on school grounds with weapons, (another crime) and killed 20 children and six adults, primarily with pistols. then killed self.

I could go on, but I like to keep it short and sweet. The facts of these two cases alone invalidate all argument for gun control to prevent mass shootings. in one instant, where another citizen also posessed a gun and used it to end the situation, there were fewer deaths. In the other instant, where, and I know you'll probably argue this one with me, only the criminal had firearms, there were substantially more deaths.

Empirically speaking, the evidence does NOT favor gun control.

What it actually does favor, is education about firearms, and how and when to use them.

What it does favor, is extra screening, then training, then arming the teachers of our nation's public schools. Since teachers, carrying concealed weapons, won't distract students by reminding them there is an armed thug in the building and that (usually) one armed thug, is going to be able to somehow protect (NOT) all entrances into the school.

Finally, what the evidence favors is that we as a society can no longer afford to look to the government to provide for us. We as a nation need to take responsibility, for all aspects of our lives, and get back on track to where we need to be.

FACT: The gun control laws we do have are a joke, and are constantly undermined before they're even implemented by the gun lobbby. The assault weapons ban, for instance, only bans scary looking guns, and the manufacturers only have to cosmetically-alter them before selling the exact same functional piece.

FACT: The nonsense that it's the second amendment that prevents tyranny is the most absurd, and unsupported argument of all. This is "the big lie". When one looks around the world you see country after country that is free and democratic without everyone being armed. You see that when dictators are overthrown it's not from an armed populace, but from military siding with the people over the government, conflict with armed and militarized rebels, external government intervention, or mass unarmed civilian protest. Our military so far outclasses the citizenry on arms it's a joke. How is your AR-15 going to protect you from the robots in the sky? The answer is not an arms race with our military, or the delusion that we're all just in the prelude to a Red Dawn scenario.

This is the embarrassing fantasy world of the gun fundamentalist. They're just Patrick Swayze waiting to happen, when in reality under live fire, pretty much anyone without military or police training (and arguable not even police training - I've seen how bad they shoot) will be next to useless and will probably just shoot more victims.

FACT: The US government isn't close to being a tyranny, it's an insult to people who actually live under tyranny, and more paranoid anti-Obama conspiracy mongering that's little more than hatred for our first black president.

FACT: None of the shooters we had discussed so far had a criminal record. You found an example of one. Bully for you, it's besides the point.

FACT: Arming teachers will have no effect, as unless you're a country like Israel, with near-universal military service, the teacher is just going to be another average citizen, and won't be of any value under fire. All you're doing is putting a dangerous weapon in the hands of more untrained and undertrained people. Putting dangerous machines closer and closer to the kids. All of this to feed the fantasy, and it is a total fantasy, that you, the hero of your internal Red Dawn movie, will one day be the hero and save the day. What we see instead is that having more armament is turning more non-lethal disputes lethal. People shooting at teenagers over their radio being too loud. People pulling guns in line at black friday.

To those sane readers out there, recognize how this paranoid fantasy world the gun fundamentalist advocate is self-fulfilling. When you put guns everywhere, yes, eventually you will need them in schools, but only because of decades of tragic under-regulation of this problem.

Mark - You say Israelis have a "legitimate reason" to be armed. Do Israelis (particularly Jewish Israelis, pretty much the only group who can easily bear arms) actually suffer a higher homicide rate than urban Americans? Especially, do they suffer more homicides or other violent assaults of a sort from which one might defend oneself with a gun? I recognize that Israelis (of all ethnic and religious affiliations) are at risk from terrorism and warfare, but you can't shoot a bus bomb or a rocket. If a Detroit resident's risk of being shot, stabbed, or stomped on the street is as high as a Tel Aviv resident's, and the latter have a "legitimate reason" to be armed, then so do the former. The ingroup affiliations of the potential attackers and victims are utterly irrelevant.

While we're on the subject of Israel, what would you think of instituting universal military service or substitute national service in the U.S. - here, of course, including all ethnic/religious groups? Safe and responsible use of firearms would be included in basic training for most. Completion of some form of service could for future generations be a requirement for later purchase of firearms, as you would identify many with mental or social problems among those who couldn't hack it. And it would help to ensure long-term national security through a "well-regulated" militia in the traditional meaning of the term. (I point out to the leftists among us that if this disintegrating empire of ours ever falls into an outright civil war, they'll be very unhappy with the outcome if only right-wing rednecks know which end of a gun you point at a bad guy.)

The amount of gun carrying in Israel is being exaggerated. Most of the weapons you see on the streets are going to be in uniform, not private individuals, even though many private individuals own weapons.

I love the idea of military training, only compulsory military service does create constitutional issues of course. I think it would discourage all these stupid wars of opportunity. I do believe that military training should be a prerequisite for owning some of this hardware, which in the end are military weapons "adapted" for civilian use.

One of the most offensive things that happens after these shootings are the "why didn't someone just charge him" accusers, or the idiot who said we should train children to rush assailants, and also the people that say there should have been guns everywhere. Without military training in responding to shots while under fire, it's a ridiculous expectation to believe that even armed civilians should realistically be able to fight back while under semi-automatic weapons fire. People have just seen to many damn movies. When I think back to the women and men that educated me in public school, the idea of any of them even wielding a .22 pistol is ludicrous. The idea that they could stand up to armed assailants? Poor old Mrs. Tucker. I doubt she could have seen through those coke bottles she wore for glasses to tell the difference between the boys and the girls in the class. You've got to be a mental defective to think that the people that go into teaching are signing up for paramilitary child protective service. It's just nuts.

"The gun control laws we do have are a joke, and are constantly undermined before they’re even implemented by the gun lobbby. The assault weapons ban, for instance, only bans scary looking guns, and the manufacturers only have to cosmetically-alter them before selling the exact same functional piece."

How would a gun ban have stopped someone bent on killing as many of people as possible? I could leave work today and have a dozen pipe bombs built by the weekend. I could get a big knife, hijack a school bus of kids and drive it off a cliff. Chain the doors shut and set the building on fire. If I plan on dying in the process, there are countless means that do not rely on a gun.

A gun ban would have done nothing but slow him down for a few weeks while he put together a far more deadly plan.

" Our military so far outclasses the citizenry on arms it’s a joke. How is your AR-15 going to protect you from the robots in the sky? The answer is not an arms race with our military, or the delusion that we’re all just in the prelude to a Red Dawn scenario. "

Then explain how the US military lost Iraq and Afghanistan? Their most advanced weapons date from 50 years ago or earlier. If a large portion of the population sees an authority as illegitimate and are willing to take the casualties necessary to fight against it then all the weapons in the world are not going to help you.

Those "robots in the sky" are a white elephant. They cost more than far more capable manned aircraft and are far less capable. You can buy two tricked out F-16s for the price of a single Reaper drone. It is simply not possible for them to be everywhere at once. Just like with drugs on our border, you may intercept 10%, but 90% still get through.

"The US government isn’t close to being a tyranny, it’s an insult to people who actually live under tyranny, and more paranoid anti-Obama conspiracy mongering that’s little more than hatred for our first black president"

Try to operate a business and then say that with a straight face. I've looked at starting my own business, but the overbearing regulations that exist in the US today make that impossible for me. If you don't have economic freedom, political freedom is meaningless and a lack of economic freedom is just one form of tyranny. I was saying the exact same things under George Bush, and Obama's policies are nothing more than expanded Bush policies, so don't think your race card is gonna get you anywhere.

All I have time for right now, good day.

How would a gun ban have stopped someone bent on killing as many of people as possible? I could leave work today and have a dozen pipe bombs built by the weekend. I could get a big knife, hijack a school bus of kids and drive it off a cliff. Chain the doors shut and set the building on fire. If I plan on dying in the process, there are countless means that do not rely on a gun.

This is the same, tired, repetitive argument being made by the gun fundamentalist to resist any regulation. But why not ask, should C4 be available over the counter? Why not cannons? Why not anti-aircraft? Sure, those are dangerous, but a motivated person can kill with gasoline, why not make machines capable of killing freely available since they'll do it anyway? Nonsense. Yeah someone could plan, and gather materials, and people might notice, have a chance to detect and respond to some bomber (or not as with Tim McVeigh - the true face of the Tea Party). Or you can just make a killing machine available to anyone over 18, with only a criminal background check.

The point isn't that motivated people can't do terrible things. The point is, clearly it's too easy for them to do it this way. If pipe bombs become a problem, we'll deal with that next, but for now, it seems clear that the ability to kill dozens of people in minutes with these machines designed for killing is the problem.

Then explain how the US military lost Iraq and Afghanistan? Their most advanced weapons date from 50 years ago or earlier. If a large portion of the population sees an authority as illegitimate and are willing to take the casualties necessary to fight against it then all the weapons in the world are not going to help you.

Wow, the tea party really is the American Taliban.

Our army knows our territory, outclasses us in weapons, and would wreck any civilian group thinking for a second they could stand a chance. It's not comparable to a mountainous hellhole that has been fighting with foreign invaders for centuries.

The second amendment doesn't keep us free, and if you feel like you live under tyranny now, clearly it didn't prevent anything. As far as the race card, people didn't truly start going crazy over this stuff until we had a black president. Gun sales have gone through the roof. The reason is people have overreacted to a rather moderate democratic candidate, who has done far less to restrict liberty than say, pass the patriot act.

Mark,

We do accept regulation. Americans are over regulated now. We have the largest government regulation sqaud in the history of mankind. If you are speaking of regulation, why not regulate Prozac and other dangerous mind altering/personality altering drugs? A drug that can make a person become violent is as dangerous as the guns you wish to ban.

Banning 30 round clips for supposed "assault" rifles will not stop shooting or crime at all. If the cause of the crime is still there, that is. 9/11 was carried out by radical muslims weilding boxcutters. Not a single gun was used. The Oklahoma City Bombing was carried out by homeade fertizer bombs, not a single AR-15 was used. Two quite deadly attacks I might add. This proves that people hell bent for destruction do not have to use guns to carry out mass killings.

When you ban AR-15s, people who already own them number in the millions. When you ban high capacity clips, what's to say the magazine manufacturer will still sell high cap clips to police and military? I say if you wsh to ban these clips, then fine, but let us ban them for cops and soldiers as well. I do not trust a gobvernment that does not trust its citizens with firearms. Too many genocides have been carried out when a government disarms its citizens.

Let me give you an example of whta has happned and what should continue to happen in the future:

Sometime in the late 1990s the Los Angeles police wanted their SWAT snipers to have more powerful, longr range firearms, so they placed an order for a Barret 50 BMG. They were denied. Why? This is a $10,000 doallr firearm, but Barret canceled their order. The owner, Mr. Barret got involved and assesed the situation that went something like this:

LA Police: Sir we placed an order with your company for a 50 BMG rifle and found out that the order was cancled.

Mr. Barrett: Yes I know. I told my staff to cancel that order.

LA Police: Why?

Mr. Barrett: That weapin is banned in Califirnia and Massachusetts.

LA Police: But we are the Los Angeles Police Department, SWAT team, not civilians.

Mr. Barrett: Then go talk to your state government. If the citizens in your state cannot own our firearms, then will not seel our firearms to any branch of government in that state. If your citizens are not good enough to own one, then neiother are you. We have enough sales in free states to make up for the loss of sales in your state.

To make a long story short, firearms manufactuers may retaliate on government ban by not selling to police and military. And they should. Mr. Barrett done the right thing by forbiding states to own goods that are banned for everyone else. Shame on California for their crimes against the constitution as well as the Bible. It's okay for gay people to screw each other in public, but heaven forbid someone own a firearm. That state is just backwards. It is basically a country all on its own. There are about 3 states in the USA that I and anumber of firends refuse to recognize as real states becuase of their infatuation with communism. vermont, massachussetts, california. We should just wall them off and count them as a loss.

As far as regulation of firearms, there is already plenty of regulation. You cannot own a REAL assault weapon without a liscense from the ATF. The semi-auto AR-15 is not an assault weapon. It is not full auto and does not comply with the ability to attach a grenade launcher to it. The only reason that it is referred to as an assault weapon is becuase of its appearance. Example:

Mark: The Corvette is a race car.

Me: No it is not. It is a sports car.

Mark, not it looks like a race race and goes fast, so it must be a race car.

Same thing with guns mark. Years ago gun grabbing constitution haters decided they would employ propoganda to disarm the people. So they decided to call these rifles assault weapons becuase they looked menacing. The media, being mostly comprised of left wing democrats, caught on and the war on the constitutional human right to own a gun still goes on.

Hello,

Just a few comments.

As an outsider, from Australia, the US just looks completely mad. It seems as though the country has developed a sense of paranoia, expressed by Kevin Sanders above with this statement: "We have the largest government regulation sqaud in the history of mankind."

Which is obviously completely mad.

In the Build on Facts Blog, Matt has 4 points on why he owns a gun, the first three are moderately sane, but point 4, is mad paranoia.

So my question is where does this paranoia come from? It doesn't exist in Australia, Great Britain, Canada or any other 'equivalent' culture. This is the reason that people feel they need to carry powerful weapons, because their paranoia makes them very frightened.

Oh, and no country has become less safe because they imposed gun control.

Aagh. Mr. Sanders, if you really are a gun-rights activist you jolly well should have heard of VERMONT CARRY. Vermont is the only state in the Union where any competent law-abiding adult can conceal-carry a gun without permits or hoop-jumping. Good luck walling them off.

And please, please keep irrelevant mentions of religion out of this. It makes it look like you only care about preserving the ability of people like you to use violence against envisioned threats from people unlike you. In a multiracial, multireligious democracy, either self-defense is a right for everybody, or it will be a right for nobody. Florida's Stand Your Ground law sounded great - but if it keeps being interpreted to cover only the use of force, however questionable, by white men, then everyone else in the state is going to get together and vote it out by ballot initiative, or vote for representatives who will vote it out. You need to decide what's more important to you here, your group identity or your Second Amendment rights, because you cannot promote both at the same time.

The last time tyranny came to the USA, armed private citizens didn't lift a finger to stop it. It was the Union Army that overthrew it.

Jane "We do not require individuals to go to private driving school at great cost to their families before they can attempt to get a driver’s license. Driver’s ed is usually provided to all students free in schools."

Well that's not true for Australia. Most states have quite onerous conditions for getting a probationary license - 120 hours for some - but doing this with a professional driving instructor means one hour counts for 2 or 3 depending on the state. Some families do the learner driver training themselves to save money but it really is quite a commitment. And onerous conditions (like zero blood alcohol) for the whole of the probationary/provisional period.

And for all those people worrying about their homes being invaded by officials confiscating their guns, Australia used a buy-back system for the initial implementation - we did take back the guns that were banned. Since then we've had several amnesties in different states at different times - but you don't get paid for any guns you put through this process.

"Oh, and no country has become less safe because they imposed gun control."

Tell that to the German Jews in 1933.

This tired old trope of the NRA. It was because the Jews weren't well enough armed that the Nazis were able to steamroll over them. Classic blaming the victim.

The last time tyranny came to the USA it was the Union Army that brought it.

So, freeing slaves is tyranny? The 14th amendment is tyranny? The South fired the first shots after all.

I think we know where Charlie Tall stands now.

We are forgetting the thousands of people who are saved from death or serious harm by their firearms.

I am one of them.

Sandy Hook was indisputable proof that when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

And again fits with the NRA fantasy of armed citizens standing up under fire against semi-automatics in the hands of madmen. It's total nonsense. There is also precedent from previous shootings, including Columbine, that even trained, armed police have a great deal of difficulty standing up to these kinds of assaults. A Jefferson County sheriff was there, exchanged shots, and failed to hit the shooters, or stop the incident. It also speaks to the foolishness of the "I could just make bombs" argument, because the Columbine killers did make bombs, unsuccessfully. Bombs are actually quite difficult to make and trigger successfully. All of their deaths were from the weapons bought for them, illegally, by straw men from dealers and gun shows. Our current laws are ineffective.

This is the delusional NRA fantasy. That shooting armed assailants is easy, that any citizen can do it, that what we need are just more armed civilians because in a crisis such as this they are going to be effective. Nonsense. Even the cops have a great deal of difficulty, even with arms, even with their training, when standing up to fire from a gunman. This is why that have things like S.W.A.T. teams for when situations like these arise.

Enough fantasy. Life is not a movie. Gun wielding citizens are not going to be the future heroes stopping these school shootings after we arm schoolteachers.

"There is also precedent from previous shootings, including Columbine, that even trained, armed police have a great deal of difficulty standing up to these kinds of assaults. A Jefferson County sheriff was there, exchanged shots, and failed to hit the shooters, or stop the incident."

Exactly. These people are not just arguing for "guns". If they want guns to be used to defend little children, what we really want is people qualified to the level of protective service agents or VIP bodyguards. You need extremely fast reaction times and extremely accurate shooting in chaotic, noisy environments and detailed plans for evacuating or otherwise shielding the people you want to protect.

People who are advocating armed guards and/ or teachers in schools need to think seriously about the high level skill set needed to fend off the threat they claim to be concerned about. If they're arguing that teachers would be better employed spending an evening a week maintaining the high fitness levels or shooting accuracy required for this sideline of their job rather than preparing or marking schoolwork for their real job, they need to rethink what they value about schools, teaching and learning.

I also wonder if these people have any memory of just how awful they were to some of their teachers. Any of them or their friends or relatives ever know of someone who got/ tricked/ stole something from a teacher and messed about with it. Anyone ever seen or heard of shenanigans in a laboratory or cooking or shop class? Do you really want to see what happens if you add a loaded gun into this childish, irresponsible mix?

Or how some of their 11 yr old or 15 yr old friends gleefully reported that Mr Xyz had finally lost it and shouted or thrown a pen at someone. Teachers are human and, let me assure you, some classes of kids are barely human when mob mentality takes over. Certainly not considerate of a tired adult who's at the end of their tether at the end of a trying day/ semester. Adding the loaded gun option onto a stressed out teacher's plate is not clever. There are 7 million teachers across the country, about half of them in middle or primary schools - and what % of them at any time are dealing with marital or health or bereavement or family or financial or other problems? Or several of these problems at once. Think about 1 or 5 or 10% of teachers in financial or other stress at any one time. Most of them keep their tears and their temper in check at school. Some of them can't keep that up all day every day, year in, year out. Shouting and slamming doors is as bad as it should get when the eleventeenth stroppy kid of the day swears at a teacher on a hot afternoon. A gun in the classroom can be as bad an option for a stressed teacher as it is for a silly student.

>The point isn’t that motivated people can’t do terrible things. The point is, clearly it’s too easy for them to do it this way. If pipe bombs become a problem, we’ll deal with that next....

It is easy to dismiss this part of the debate, but one important part of the debate that is flying under the radar is that it is technologically feasible to 3D print a "high capacity" magazine. It is even possible to 3D print an AR or AK receiver. And with some simple machine tools, you can make barrels and other essential parts. tl;dr - anyone with a couple thousand dollars and a brain can make an assault weapon. http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/16/gun-control/

Easily.

This is exactly what happened with alcohol prohibition. It isn't hard to make alcohol. All you need is a bottle, airborne yeast, and something to ferment over time.

So, assuming that we could constitutionally ban an entire class of magazine fed weapons (which we can't under Heller), the ban would be ineffective, since it is so easy circumvented.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/12/19/3d-printing-startu…

The upshot is that once we realize that current "gun control" laws prohibit an object, rather than a technological phenomenon, we can have an effective gun control debate.

Thus, the problem isn't an object. It is an idea. It is impossible to stop ideas. Except with education and carefully crafted legislation. Ideas exist at the individual and societal level. You can make antisemitism illegal. You can ban swastikas and other Nazi memorabilia. But it is people's hearts and minds that need to change. Chemical and nuclear weapons aren't used because of the threat of MAD and the stigma attached to them. So, how do you get people to change their minds?

There are lots of serious things wrong with the mentality that currently exist in the USA. One of them is how violent our society is. Kids are taught, through a variety of mechanisms, that tattling on others is wrong, and that fighting is an acceptable way to solve a problem. Many think that prison rape is an important part of how criminals are punished. Retribution, rather than rehabilitation or forgiveness, is a major meme in our society.

Some people blame other technologies, like video games or TV. These are technologies too - and banning violent videogames would not only be unconstitutional, but wouldn't even address the underlying problems.

It is easy to dismiss this part of the debate, but one important part of the debate that is flying under the radar is that it is technologically feasible to 3D print a “high capacity” magazine. It is even possible to 3D print an AR or AK receiver. And with some simple machine tools, you can make barrels and other essential parts. tl;dr – anyone with a couple thousand dollars and a brain can make an assault weapon. http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/16/gun-control/

Easily.

I reject the notion this can be done "easily".

In the future if machines like this cause a ruckus because they can generate all sorts of dangerous stuff, maybe they will need regulation as well. But this is clearly not "easy". Certainly not easy like walking into a store, or buying out of a secondary market, the complete, functional, tested, durable weapons that are available now. Further, if these machines can truly develop this capability, they will need to be tightly regulated, possibly with an FFL for possession. After all, what would stop someone with this machine from selling guns illegally, to minors, to felons etc. This isn't an argument for doing nothing people. It's an argument for doing more.

This is also quite different from alcohol prohibition. There are dozens of modern, industrialized countries with virtually no guns, and I have yet to hear of any English gun speakeasies. Guns are different from drugs and alcohol this way, I feel it's sad this even needs to be pointed out in this debate.

@ Jane.

Vermone is already walled off as far as I am concerned. They left this union decades ago. So did Massachustts and California. I do not accept these tyrant nations as states any longer. I will not do business with anyone who lives in those wretched places.

Oh one more thing. I have been reading about the fake sentaor diane frankenstein and her pathetic attemp to "finger print" and "register" sovereign individuals who own guns. Ok, I give in senator. You can fingerprint me, starting with the MIDDLE finger.

I do have a better idea of what to do about the situation though. I say we register and fingerprint a left wing constituion haters so that we will know who to deny service to and who to lock up for being mentally defective. I do hink left wingers should be registered to that we will know who to avoid when we take our kids out. They are dangerous.

Senator Frankenstein, let me know how your registration goes. I am so looking forward to showing my papers to the authorities whenever I travel or buy something.

http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/assault-weapons

WARNING: Every genocide in history has occured after the disarmament of civilians. Just sayin ...

@ mark,

Yeah. Those same swat teams you speak of also raid old ladies vegetable gardens in Michigan and vitamin stores who sells vitamin C to help with the Flu. Methinks our government has a bit too much authority these days. Take away citizen arms, and we might be looking at a new tyranny. Time to take our country back and take away some of those powers that they gave themselves.

oh and a nice little message to the posers in government ...

Provided that you succeed in disarming America and putting patriots in your concentration/re-education camps, if i should end up in one of those camps or die at the hands of a fake cop or a fake soldier, aka those who commit treason by turning their guns on patriot citizens, rest assued mark my words. There is an afterlife. I assure you that if I die by your hands, I will be waiting for you on the other side and there difinitely will be hell to pay. Before the archangl throws you into the lake of fire, I would ask him if I could have fun with you first. Rest assured, judgement will not be avoided. I will be waiting for you on the other side. Then it's my turn. You will not like my turn.

Then after I am done with you, millions more will want their way wityh you too. Then we will let the arch angel throw what's left of your sorry carcass to the demons of hell, after we torture you first. mark my world. Agents of this new world order will not go unpunished forever. Eventually, you WILL answer for your crimes, in this life or the judgement to come. If killed by a fake soldier of the new world order, you better pray that I have no great powers in the afterlife. Becuase if I do, your behind is mine and you will beg God to send you to hell before I am done with you.

Oh and for the record, I am not afraid of your soul trapper machine in Dulce either. I have figured out a way to relase the ones you already have and you better pray they are not vengeful spirits either. Your lizards scare me not. They can fall quicker than a man if you know where the Rhodesian Teakwood spear is carefully thrusted. Can you say orgone?

Oh goody I see mark blustewred my posts. That's ok. You advocate taking my second amendment rights away and now looks like you are after the first amendment too. That's ok though. I know what I said.

Oh and the remark about "the south fired the first shots". ... Well, they sort of had to, they were being invaded by illegal armed men - northern forces. It was a warning shot to keep out of their business and thanks to our no guts generals we lost the war. If the general had not surrendered after gettysburg, Lincoln would have eventually been killed and the north would have eventually given in due to the excessive cost of the war and the excessive loss of union soldiers. If our generals had not been so quick to surrender, we might have won.

Guns are not evil. Some people are. Guns are inanimate objects incapabile of committing crimes. Oh and people facing heavy gunfire with just a handgun is nothing out of the ordinary. Soldiers do it for a living. Usually they hide out until the armed man gos past and shoots the bastard in the back. There are tactical ways of facing an enemy that is better armed and defeating that enemy.

Gideaon faced over 10,000 men and only had 300 to fight with. Yet, his forces prevailed. It was wit, wisdom, experience, and the will to defeat the enemy at all costs and the fact that God was on his side.

Then again, God was not present at Sandy Hook. Liberals kicked Him out years ago, then had the gall to pray to Him after this incident happened.

Yes 3d and 4d printings of weapons are becomeing popular and of course your answer is to regulate it. I bet you regulate how much air we breathe if you could.

I am proud of one moment this week. A bloggr retaliated against the Journal News turds who named gun owners in their report. The blogger retaliated by giving out the personal addresses of the eidtor and the reporter responsible. That was the proper move to make. Now every time a reporter takes it upon their left wing selves to do these things, they run the risk of having the favor returned.

Mark do you think congress should ban tomahawks? knives? spears? swords? sheilds< body armor (medeivial)?

If so you might know that someone can kill another person with a banana. Freeze it, sharpern it, stab with it. bam. instsant weapon. Let's get all banana eaters to register in a federal regsitry! You can also use golf balls as ammunition in homeade potato guns that fire by CO2 cartridge. Golf ball will travel over 100 yards with lethal force. Let's ban golf balls.

Kevin, now you're starting to sockpuppet. This is a ban-worthy behavior. The first amendment does not give you the right to bluster all over my forum. You clearly don't understand what that amendment means either. I own this forum, I control it, and sockpuppeting on it is completely unacceptable. Granted, considering how it's obvious the same person is getting progressively more unhinged in each comment, I doubt anyone was fooled.

Also, in general, I'm busy. I don't moderate comments every hour. As always people, chill out. Every time a crank has to wait an hour for a comment I'm accused of censorship. It's tiresome.

Finally, I think there's no better evidence that there is simply no arguing with the gun nuts when they get this extreme. It's amazing, the total illogic of "bans on assault weapons" = "ban on bananas". This is, again, the exact same argument, ad nauseum, that none of us accept. It's basically that because there is more than one way to kill somebody, you can't regulate any weapon ever. However, then one must ask, why not legalize dynamite? C4? Nuclear weapons? After all, if you can kill people with frozen bananas, why regulate civilian ownership of biological weapons, and homegrown nuclear arsenals?

It makes no sense. No matter how many times you repeat this argument Kevin, it doesn't get any better. I think you've also lost everyone with half a brain with the secession talk anyway. Not to mention, it's a good thing the south lost, unless you really like slavery, which I guess Kevin must.

Then after I am done with you, millions more will want their way wityh you too. Then we will let the arch angel throw what’s left of your sorry carcass to the demons of hell, after we torture you first. mark my world. Agents of this new world order will not go unpunished forever. Eventually, you WILL answer for your crimes, in this life or the judgement to come. If killed by a fake soldier of the new world order, you better pray that I have no great powers in the afterlife. Becuase if I do, your behind is mine and you will beg God to send you to hell before I am done with you.

Oh and for the record, I am not afraid of your soul trapper machine in Dulce either. I have figured out a way to relase the ones you already have and you better pray they are not vengeful spirits either. Your lizards scare me not. They can fall quicker than a man if you know where the Rhodesian Teakwood spear is carefully thrusted. Can you say orgone?

I think Kevin might just be the single best argument for gun control ever. This guy is the one who clearly wants a lot of guns. Seriously. This guy. I think we just witnessed a psychotic break mid-comment. Kevin, you remind me of these crazed shooters, or at least Mel Gibson. It's freaking scary.

Anyway, this thread has served it's purpose, it's closed.

Rebecca Watson's Skepticon talk is NOT an example of science denialism

denialism — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 17:45:56 +0000

Rebecca Watson's Skepticon talk is NOT an example of science denialism

I was recently pointed to this post by Edward Clint which purports to show Rebecca Watson using the 5 tactics of science denialism during her talk "How Girls Evolved to Shop" which was critical of evolutionary psychology at Skepticon.

I watched her talk, found it entertaining, informative, wondered why I haven't been invited to Skepticon, and I found I agreed with many of her examples of really bad pop psychology nonsense that's filtered into the media through both scientists, press-release journalism, and marketing disguised as science. In particular the "pink is for girls" idiocy, which when I wrote about it at the time I came to the same conclusions as Watson that it was a stupid interpretation of the data, and the researcher who was actually promoting this glib, incorrect, and historically-bogus interpretation was a fool. It was unusual in that it was an example of the scientist herself, not even the media, disastrously misinterpreting the data to make it meld with a specific societal bias about females.

The problem with this talk was that Watson used specific examples, especially those made prominent by the media, as indicative of the entire field of evolutionary psychology, and thus may have over-generalized about the field as a whole. Even though at the end when asked if there are any good evolutionary biology papers, she suggests there likely are but that's not what makes it into the media because they're probably boring (lies are often more entertaining), it was too late. The thrust of her talk probably was too one-sided, and suggested the nonsense that idiot journalists latch onto, and some of the more oddball researchers are indicative of an entire field, which is unfair. Edward Clint takes this as a sign of science denialism, however, and tries to fit the 5 tactics to her talk. While I agree that Watson may have over-generalized, this isn't denialism. Let's go over his points and discuss why I don't think her talk crosses this line.

Clint states:

The denialism brought to Skepticon was to the field of evolutionary psychology, a thriving social science with roots going back to Charles Darwin himself. The critic was internet pundit and self-described feminist and skeptic Rebecca Watson. Watson is known for her blog website, as co-host of a popular skeptic podcast, and for speaking at secular and skeptic conferences. But Watson holds no scientific training or experience. The charge of science denialism is a serious one, and I will support the claim with a preponderance of evidence.

Ok, first of all, you don't need to be a scientist or an expert in a particular field to be critical of it. At no point does Watson suggest she's an expert, which would have been the only reason why such a critique is relevant. A layperson is perfectly entitled to research a field, and then give a talk such as this critical of a systematic bias towards women present in the field. I think she actually makes a compelling argument that there is a bias problem in the interpretation of the data coming out of these papers, and a big PR problem for evolutionary psych in that it's especially the biased, stupid, and inane studies the media latches onto and amplifies for lay consumption. She doesn't say it exactly like that, but that's how I interpreted her talk.

He continues:

The main points Watson wants to drive home are that evolutionary psychology isn’t science (as indicated by the quotes in the subtitle), and that researchers involved in it work deliberately to reinforce stereotypes and to oppress women. Watson frequently makes overly broad claims about the “they” or “it” of evolutionary psychology without further specificity, leading her audience to assume she simply refers to the entirety of the field, or to a large majority of it.

This is an unfair evaluation of her talk. I don't think at any point Watson indicates this behavior is deliberate, malicious, or dishonest. It's clear that she's exposing a systematic bias in the interpretation of the data from these studies. She is not suggesting fabrication, tweaking, or dishonesty, just stupid conclusions, and flawed study designs, and I agree with her that in these examples, she makes the case, these particular researchers are either idiots or blind to bias.

Now we may ask, how would an (apparently) expert skeptic investigate the domain of evolutionary psychology to reach and support the conclusions that Watson has? The first step should be having a firm grasp on what evolutionary psychology is, and to have a working familiarity with the subject. Since we are talking about a scientific field, this at least would mean reading some papers, or maybe at a minimum, some scholarly reviews and meta-analyses. And they should be typical of the field, meaning from reputable journals and mainstream researchers. It would be silly to call biologists creationists and religiously motivated while pointing to Michael Behe and Francis Collins as examples of biologists as a whole.

As far as Watson's over-generalization of her findings to the field I agree with this criticism, however, my interpretation of the talk as a whole was about how when it came to ascribing differences in behavior due to sex that evolutionary psych has some big problems with systematic bias towards affirming societal stereotypes about women. I think she makes a compelling case for this, but it is possible, of course, that the cases she listed are the glaring exceptions. Clearly with regard to Kanazawa, the guy is a crackpot, but she also had some pretty deadly critiques of other more legitimate researcher's conclusions.

However, Watson seems to have only the most superficial understanding of evolutionary psychology and it isn’t clear that she’s read even one paper in the field.

This is unfair and disproven by the talk in which she provides specific critiques and interpretations of data where they conflict with the author's conclusions. It's very hard to do this without reading the paper.

There are many reasons to think this. She cited no sources during her 48-minute talk beyond what is mentioned in newspapers and other media or publicly available abstracts. While she derided media distortion in one part of the talk, she implicitly trusted media reports for the bulk of it, and rather uncritically.

I don't understand this because it's clear from the video that her slides actually have several of the papers up and clearly visible. I also don't think she blindly trusted media reports either, as she cites specific instances, like the "pink is for girls" study, in which the media cooverage, and the author's own conclusions differed from the data.

At the end of her talk, an audience member asks Watson if there is any “good evolutionary psychology”. Watson throws up her hands while saying “prooobably? I’m guessing yes, but it’s so boring.. because you can only make it interesting if you make up everything. [...] if there is good evolutionary psychology, it’s not in the media[...]” (see index 47:30)

Setting aside the striking anti-science attitude that only media-hypable science can be interesting, as well as the jarring ignorance that a scientific field composed of thousands of researchers working for decades and publishing in numerous reputable science journals only “probably” has some good work being done, Watson clearly reveals that she is only familiar with evolutionary psychology in the “media,” having moments before shown incontrovertibly how unreliable the media is.

I don't think she expresses the attitude that media hype is only sign of interesting science. I think her talk should have been narrowed, however, to specifically address how evolutionary psychology has major bias problems when it attempts to explain differences between male and female behavior.

The first work she mentions in her talk is important because it sets the tone and is, presumably, important to her thesis that evolutionary psychology is pseudoscientific and sexist. She cites a Telegraph article referring to a study done by one Dr. David Holmes about the psychology of shopping. However, this is an unpublished, non-peer-reviewed study conducted by a non-evolutionary psychologist paid for by a business to help them sell things better. This has no relevance to Watson’s thesis, unless it’s also true that Colgate’s “9 out of 10 dentists recommend you give us your toothpaste money” studies prove that dental science is bunk.

Again this is an unfair criticism, because she specifically addressed that this was marketing disguised as science. Watson states:

"all of the best studies I think are commissioned by shopping centers, so no this is actually marketing disguised as science, which is a trend that is becoming more and more popular as mainstream new outlets phase out any and all support for actual journalists that understand science."

The strength of her point was how she moved from the obvious, BS, marketing-driven science and compared it directly to actual academic evolutionary psych purporting to show the exact same thing.

Supporting the extraordinary claims that a large scientific domain is sexist in general and methodologically bereft requires extraordinary evidence. It should entail a very serious, careful look at the nuts and bolts. How is peer-review accomplished? How well does it function? Are many awful studies passing it? How many? How easily? How is it that thousands of people, women and men, in dozens of countries across decades of time are all morally compromised in the same way? Did she speak to even one person who actually does evolutionary psychology?

I agree with Clint here that she needs more evidence before she castigates the entire field, however, I do think that she makes a compelling argument that (1) evolutionary psych has issues with injecting societal bias towards women into its conclusions - and this is actually not an extraordinary idea given the long history of psych and bias towards women, non-whites, immigrants etc (I would suggest a read of "Mismeasure of Man") . If it been completely eradicated, I'd be shocked. Her failing was she generalized this flaw to evolutionary psych as a whole, and not just this subset of papers dealing with sex differences in behavior in which the findings always seem to conform with the most recent societal biases. (2) I think she shows, and this is not in dispute, that findings which reinforce a stereotype about women are widely circulated in a credulous media, and this is harmful.

Finally, let's address Clint's critiques that this actually represents the 5 tactics.

Clint Writes:

In 2007 Scienceblogs writer Mark Hoofnagle wrote an oft-cited essay about 5 general tactics used by denialists to sow confusion. John Cook distilled these a bit for an article in 2010 which discusses climate science denial.
...
It is useful to cite Hoofnagle here because Rebecca Watson demonstrates all five of these in a single presentation and because climate science and evolutionary psychology have a lot in common.
...
Watson’s denialist tactics

1. Conspiracy theories
Watson frequently spoke of a shadowy, diffuse “they” of evolutionary psychology. When she cited researchers by name, they were held as examples of the they, and not distinguished as a subclass. She also often spoke to their devious, immoral intentions. Not just that they’re mistaken about their claim or that their method is flawed, but that they actively wanted to oppress women and reinforce harmful stereotypes. Thousands of people in dozens of countries, women and men all working together toward goals such as defending rape as “natural” and therefore good (see video indices 20:07, 22:43, 23:41, 35:40, 36:08, 38:40). No evidence was presented which could establish these ulterior motives in such a large group, and as I shall explain, they are entirely false. Mark Hoofnagle wrote the following on Scienceblogs about conspiracy theories; not Watson’s, but his words fit equally well here:

[...] But how could it be possible, for instance, for every nearly every scientist in a field be working together to promote a falsehood? People who believe this is possible simply have no practical understanding of how science works as a discipline.

The problem with Clint's analysis is that at no point does Watson ascribe conspiratorial behavior to these scientists typical of a denialist argument. I think she's ascribing a systematic bias towards women, and given the issues that science has had in the past with systematic bias towards less-valued groups in society, this is not either out of the realm of possibility or even surprising that it's still persistent in psychology. This is where a reading of SJ Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" would come in handy to understand how these biases are propagated. What was amazing was how Gould, in his description of the science behind alleged-differences in races, showed that the researchers weren't fabricating or being outright deceptive, but were led by bias into over-interpreting data, throwing out inconsistent data, and methodological errors that would affirm their prior conclusions. Conspiracy in science is frankly absurd, but bias in science is a constant struggle, and one should, if anything, suspect its presence until proven otherwise. Contrast this to the global warming conspiracism of cranks such as Inhofe, who describe the entire field as a "hoax", which suggests active deception for an alterior motive.

Denialist conspiracy theories are non-parsimonious. That is they raise more questions than they answer, because they're generally being used to explain the absence of data, rather than fit together existing data into an explanation of reality. This is why it's so absurd when denialists talk about actual conspiracies, like criminal conspiracies, or the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Those are not "conspiracy theories" in the modern parlance, because they provide an explanation that fits the data, the results of investigation, motives, etc. They don't create more questions, like, "how could all those thousands of people keep quiet." The answer is they can't. Just ask Lance Armstrong, the tobacco companies, or any gangster that's had their operation undone by a snitch. Secrets are pretty hard to keep.

Watson is not proposing a non-parsimonious conspiracy theory here, instead she's demonstrating examples in which authors are clearly overinterpreting their data to conform to societal assumptions about women. This is far from an extraordinary claim about psychology, it's been demonstrated in the past, and is something psychologists should be on constant guard against, because it is more likely than not that at some point bias will enter their interpretation of data. Watson's case is pretty solid, in regards to these examples, that the bias is plain to see.

Fake experts are not featured prominently in Watson’s talk. However, at the end Watson cites several fake experts whose opinions on the science are inconsistent with established, uncontroversial knowledge. She implores the audience to read Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender, a book seeking to justify a radical social constructionist view of gender differences. While Fine makes some reasonable points about some flawed studies, scholarly reviews have criticized Fine for cherry-picking studies as examples which are amenable to her conclusion and ignoring the rest
...
Watson goes on to suggest Greg Laden’s blog. Laden is a bioanthropologist who is on record uttering unscientific opinions such as that men are testosterone-damaged women.

Clint acknowledges these examples are weak, and in particular picking on Greg is really just a smear. I think it's hard to interpret his post on "men as testosterone-damaged women" as serious, as he himself says:

e. Or whatever. Other people were more thoughtful about it and objected to the statement because it is wrong. Well, that’s good, because it is in a way wrong, because it is an oversimplification. But it was not meant to be a description of the biological and cultural processes associated with the development of individual personality, culture, and society. I am a little surprised that people thought it was such a statement, because it is so obviously a remark designed to poke certain men in the eye.

It was a shock-statement, not a serious statement of scientific fact, and it's unfair of Clint to be dismissive of Laden over such a triviality. Only the MRAs seem to take that statement seriously, and they, as a group, should be ignored whenever possible. As far as Cordelia Fine, I have a great deal of trouble speaking with any confidence on her position in the field as a non-expert myself. However, reading Diane Halpern's review in Science (no denialist rag) I find it to be more-nuanced that Clint's quote suggested. Halpern writes:

Cleverly written with engaging prose, Delusions of Gender and Brain Storm contain enough citations and end notes to signal that they are also serious academic books. Fine and Jordan-Young ferret out exaggerated, unreplicated claims and other silliness regarding research on sex differences. The books are strongest in exposing research conclusions that are closer to fiction than science. They are weakest in failing to also point out differences that are supported by a body of carefully conducted and well-replicated research.

I think a book described by an expert reviewer as a "serious academic book" but flawed in one regard shouldn't be so easily dismissed, as this reviewer in Science, while critical, was mostly positive about her book. I think the fake expert moniker should not be applied to either of these two, and frankly, considering true fake experts out there like Monckton, the assertion is somewhat laughable.

3. Cherry picking
As outlined in part II, Watson restricted her citations to stories that appear in the general media and critical popular science books. She focused on some of the worst possible examples that could be found, such as the interviews (not publications) with the disgraced Satoshi Kanazawa, instead of focusing on mainstream, reputable researchers. She also limited her citations to the sub-topic of sex and gender differences. While it is understandable that she may choose a narrow topic to present to a conference, she frequently makes her claims about the field in general, not merely as it pertains to sex and gender differences. For example, she rehashes Stephen Jay Gould’s “just so stories” criticism, (long debunked by biologists and others), but then uses as examples only sex and gender claims.

Now here I agree with Clint, Watson should have limited her remarks to evolutionary psych and the "sub-topic" of sex gender differences, as it's clear that there is more to evolutionary psych than this idiotic "girls like pink" crap. But I'm also going to disagree with him that Stephen Jay Gould's criticism has been "debunked" based on his provided link I actually agree more with Gould than I do the author. While Gould was clearly proven wrong in a few instances, I think his criticism of "just-so stories" is actually quite-compelling, and is an attempt to try to avoid a biased understanding of evolutionary mechanisms to try to find a purpose to every behavior, or every evolutionary modification. This criticism reads truer to me than many of the post-hoc explanations I've seen in evolutionary biology, and if anything should be internalized by researchers in this field. To reject the possibility that one is telling a "just-so story" without adequate evidence is to reject the null hypothesis prematurely. While it is clear from the essay that this evolutionary psych can have its hypotheses tested, and even that Gould was wrong in one instance, doesn't mean that it's a tendency in the field and one that needs to be addressed.

4. Impossible expectations of what research can deliver
Some of Watson’s criticisms would un-make many sciences were we to take them seriously. For example she says (13:27) “they never tell us what genes” as if this is a grand indictment of evolutionary psychology. There are scientists making in-roads in this area, but tracing the path from genes to structures to behavior is difficult-to-impossible, except in the case of disease and disorder. Further, we certainly don’t hold any other sciences to that standard, even the ones for which genes and adaptation are critical. Does anyone know precisely which genes make a cheetah fast, and exactly how they accomplish that? The peacock’s feathers, the fish’s gills? Shall we toss out all the evolutionary biology for which we do not have genetic bases identified? I should think not. Cognitive science also focuses on models divorced from physical stuff like genes and even neurons, but no one doubts that genes and neurons make cognitive capabilities possible (which is why genetic illnesses can severely impact them).

While it's true that it would be unreasonable to posit a genetic explanation for each trait since so many traits are polygenic, and we have a very incomplete understanding of the function of much of the genome, this criticism shouldn't be dismissed so easily. Eventually this field will have to incorporate genome-wide analysis into our understanding of human behavior, although Clint is right, not every finding in biology that's important or worth publishing about needs to be explained down to the last atom.

At 15:41 Watson derisively explained her view of the method of evolutionary psychology as picking a behavior, assuming it is evolved, and then find “anything” in the past that might be relevant to it. Setting aside the inaccuracy of her summary, she seemed to be balking that such an hypothesis is just totally made up. Yes, Ms. Watson, it is. That is how science works. It is not known what the answers are before starting, so a researcher makes as good a guess as they can and then tests it.

Yes, but the real criticism here is the absence of testing the null hypothesis, as I explained above. This should be a critical component of hypothesis testing. She also has a point that if there are too many explanations for the data, all of them consistent, the finding isn't of particular value.

At 13:39 Watson says that we can’t know enough about the distant past to make assessments of what might have been adaptive. She refers to variation in climate and “environment” and that the lives of our ancestors also “varied”. In other words, evolutionary psychologists can’t make any assumptions. We can’t assume women got pregnant and men didn’t, or that predators needed to be avoided, or that sustenance needed to be secured through hunting or foraging; these are real assumptions evolutionary psychologists use. If we were to toss out evolutionary psychology for this reason, we must also toss out much of biology, archaeology as well as paleoanthropology. Much care must be used in deciding what can and can’t be assumed about the past, but archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, biologists and evolutionary psychologists know this quite well.

This is a valid point.

Last but not least:

5. Misrepresentations and logical fallacies
Please see section V. 25 False and misleading statements made by Watson. In that list, items 1, 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 18, 19, 20 and 25 are misleading statements. This is not a comprehensive list. Watson makes liberal use of logical fallacies. I will describe just one for the sake of brevity.

The naturalistic fallacy. One can hardly find a more pristine example of this fallacy than in criticism of evolutionary psychology, and Watson’s remarks were no exception. She spelled it out clearly at 38:30 “men evolved to rape… it was used as a well it’s natural for men to rape”. The problem to Watson is that some evolutionary psychologists study the phenomena of rape as a potential adaptation, or a product of adaptations such as the use of violence to obtain what one wants. Watson assumes that if rape is about sex, and sex is good because sex is natural, then rape must be natural and therefore good. This is an absurdity of course; it’s every shade of wrong from the rainbow of ultimate wrongness.

Yes, but Watson was describing it as a natural fallacy herself! You two are actually agreeing with each other.

I also think that his list of false or misleading claims by Watson is worth reading and it really should have been the starting point for the discussion about Watson's talk. They actually have a lot of common ground between them, and frankly evolutionary psych needs a wake up call to its public image problem. Instead Clint clumsily tries to fit the tactics of denialism to her talk, and in my opinion, fails. Yes there are problems here, and he raises valid points. But the presence of denialism is not one of them.

denialism Wed, 12/05/2012 - 12:45

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Very odd when a scienceblog author defends a google-U person's critique of a field she has no clue about. Or are you afraid the FTB hordes will descent on you if you don't disown this use of your own methodology?

No, I just don't think the allegations of conspiracy, false experts, or moving goalposts are credible. I do give him credit for having several valid points in critique of her talk, but I think if anything she's guilty of over-generalization, not denialism.

Having read Gould -- and liking him a lot -- I'll thow this out there: evolutionary psychology has more than an image problem.

I don't doubt for a moment that evolutionary pressures could create certain behavioral traits. Lord knows that has been a well-trodden path in evolutionary biology forever. And there's actually been a lot of good science fiction written on that topic (Octavia Butler for one, and a little bit of Ian McDonald).

If you are in a situation where it's really easy to find "outlier" studies like the ones Watson talks about, and hard to find the good ones, then you have a serious problem. It isn't just the media's fault.

So much of our behavior is culturally determined -- the sheer variety of human societal structures is testament to that. But a lot of evo-psych glosses that over. Even the studies I've looked at -- and that isn't many -- I managed to ask "well, hey, did these guys ever travel to X place where the behavior is utterly different?" At a bare minimum ANY evo-psych study that purports to say a damned thing should test a few people from wildly different cultures.

At the very least I'd argue that the discipline needs a serious overhaul.

(I will admit a further bias on my part: I have issues with psychology as a field, and I am not so sure it quite qualifies as a science yet).

Anyone taking bets on whether Mu accepts that response?

It was a bit conspiratorial itself wasn't it? I'm pretty sure I'm mostly off the FtB radar although I read Zvan's response is well. I think Zvan was actually being too forgiving by saying Watson was only talking about pop psych. No, she did attribute these findings to evo psych as a whole and that is somewhat unfair.

Jesse, I agree, the "just so story" criticism has not been debunked as Clint claims. If anything, it should serve as a null hupothesis for evo psych researchers. The first question they should ask should be, "am I just studying personal or cultural biases?". In regards to human behavior it's far more likely that you'll end up studying a cultural artifact before you come to some unversal behavior with a specific impact on natural selection. I don't envy their field, when I run a PCR or a Western or create a surgical model, I can pretty reliably describe what I did and other researchers should be able to replicate with relative ease. While I have many opportunities for bias as well, it's nothing like studying psychology, with it's implicit personal and cultural biases, as well as an extensive history of abuse of biased findings to justify discrimination and abuse.

"The problem with this talk was that Watson used specific examples, especially those made prominent by the media, as indicative of the entire field of evolutionary psychology, and thus may have over-generalized about the field as a whole."

If this is true, then it's the understatement of the day. Such a "problem" is actually a pretty fatal one.

I have no opinion on "evol psych," actually. The scientists will sort the wheat from the chaff. Watson is just not someone I'd listen to on the subject. I do like Steven Pinker a lot.

I agree with Jesse. I can't say that I have read a lot of them myself, but I do read PZ's site, and others, and they post these things a fair amount, especially "gender" related ones. And.. almost invariably, the result of the "study" is a bit like listening to a right wing talk show host, who can't figure out why its insane to, on one hand, dismiss the idea that we need to look at Europe as a possible example of some social/health/etc., they are after all, all too "communist", and "unstable", and so on, solutions, and on the other hand, when they need to use something outside the US to babble about, declare, "Those places are just like the US and they are a fine example of why there is nothing wrong with the US!", even when what they are talking about is **not** the same over there at all.

The question I, as Jesse, ask, when ever I see this stuff is, "What, do these people never actually visit any place outside what ever tony pocket universe they did the "study" in? Because, you can't have it both ways, in the case of the political nonsense, and you can't, in the case of conducting "science":

1. Treat the entire rest of the planet as though its some other species, and therefor none of the differences count.

2. The other side of the coin - deny that differences exist, by ignoring places where the behavior doesn't happen, and instead only focusing on examples of places where people do the same stupid things.

Good example - Where is the study on "rape" which examines why the never even had a word for it, in the one obscure culture they talked about not long ago on one of the science channels, where the "behavior" of the fathers wasn't to isolate girls from boys, but actually build them their own special hut, to "talk" to them in, without parental interference? Did these people just "evolve" differently, somehow, or is "rape" actually a consequence of all the rest of the worlds bullshit obsessions over inheritance, purity, and fear of sex? Now, that is the bloody evo psych study I would like to see. But, instead we get idiot papers that ***assume*** that rape is adaptive, because, like... it happens every place, right? And, that is the exact bloody problem.

Wow this stuff is still going on? If I tried to follow this whole debate I'd go nuts! It's pretty obvious that people are most biased and delusional about the facts when it comes to evolutionary psychology, we have more personally invested in what the facts really are than any other subject in science.

I mean on one side you have actual scientists, journals that conduct real debates, people who are actually qualified to be working with the information etc , and on the other side you have a lot of blogs and activist books and philosophers commenting, constant debates and drama and attacks... Who in their right mind would even listen to a person with this kind of background?

Some people get something out of this side of the fence, this aspect of culture. You've got the people who are clearly too obsessed with an idea to really understand what other people are saying, and then you've got, you know, real science debate.

Ah! I must turn away

I think, he was being kind. The talk wasn't as bad as one side said, but was not at all a professional level first tier talk one would expect at a skeptic conference. What I've heard said is "Watson is a seat filler". Or even a seat emptier, as when she told everyone to go to the bar at a recent talk (leaving the last speaker with a half empty audience to speak to). She's the name you put on for the hipster crowd that wants a talk that will perk them up and is a speaker they can identify with. She's not a scientist (She kept saying it), and she's what she is...sort of an Anne Coulter sensation. We don't expect from her the level of science we'd get from Dr. DeGrasse Tyson or Dr.Dawkins. She's more the Adam Savage "going to give a talk that will keep you awake" type. Expecting a level or seriousness or science or investigation or work that one expects from another speaker is un realistic. She is asked to speak as she fills seats and is fun. No one gets mad when Adam Savage gives a fluff speech, same with Rebecca.

" She’s not a scientist (She kept saying it), and she’s what she is…sort of an Anne Coulter sensation."

Rebecca Watson as the left/feminist answer to Ann Coulter? Good analogy, actually - I may be repeating that one.

I think that's a bit much. No one is as horrific as that woman.

She’s not a scientist (She kept saying it), and she’s what she is…sort of an Anne Coulter sensation.

How lovely. I suppose Jesse Jackson is also the black community's Rush Limbaugh.

Expecting a level or seriousness or science or investigation or work that one expects from another speaker is un realistic.

That wouldn't (and doesn't) absolve her of responsibility. This is an important topic. This is a topic she recognizes as being incredibly important. She should do her best to represent it as fairly a possible.

I don't mean with kindness or any level of reverence, but a deeper understanding of the subject would better equip her to deal with EP and explain to others the shortcomings of EP. Watson doesn't need anything approaching a PhD for that. She jut needs to consider her topic a little more and be a little more conservative in her statements.

Anyway sorry for the off topic

Thanks for a reasonable rebuttal to the ongoing controversy surrounding Rebecca's talk. I've been following this with interest, as a skeptic and a person who, for several years, was pretty heavily involved in evolutionary psychology. I worked with the father of many ridiculous sex-difference EP theories, Gordon Gallup Jr., and attended multiple conferences dedicated to evolutionary psychology, so I'd like to think I've seen a lot of this up close and personal.

I found Rebecca's talk, while a bit sweeping and simplistic at times, to be a pretty fair representation of the state of research in evolutionary psychology. Of course the media exacerbates any published research dealing with sex differences, but the more time I spent in the field, I became acutely aware of how insular EP really was. Many of the research hypotheses are conceived in an echo chamber where just-so explanations were thrown out, and, lacking anyone with any training/experience in cultural studies or even anthropology to offer a counter-explanation, ended up roundly praised and accepted as brilliant insights into human evolution. While first embracing EP as a way to understand human sex differences, the skeptic in me became suspicious that research *always* fit preconceived cultural norms. I sat in disbelief and listened to sweeping conclusions being made based on results from MRIs done on 8 subjects (a "study" accepted for a conference talk, no less).

While there is a lot of interesting EP research literature out there, particularly around cheater detection, in-group/out-group perceptions, and decision-making, I left the field because I felt they were not interested in critically assessing their own preconceived biases, particularly around sex differences. The result is an idea death-spiral, where those who don't buy into the large assumptions being made get silenced, dismissed, or ignored, and ultimately, leave the field. Those that remain happily plod along with their research, surrounded by others who serve not to criticize, but reinforce their own biases. If EP would just start talking to people in other fields (biology, anthropology, sociology) who are asking the same questions, they might be able to conduct meaningful, informed studies instead of the bunk that gets passed off as research today.

"Ok, first of all, you don’t need to be a scientist or an expert in a particular field to be critical of it."

Yes, but if you criticize from a position of total ignorance, your criticism has no validity and is not worth anyone's time listening to it.

I don't think her position was one of total ignorance. I think she leveled a fair critique at how the field deals with female behavior. Rather than digging in and refusing to acknowledge there is a problem, critiques like this should result in reflection on what they're purporting to show. She's not just making fun of news items, she making fun of peer-reviewed papers. Now if you're peer-reviewed literature is contaminated with garbage like this, even a little, you've got a problem. I become infuriated when our literature is contaminated with pop and political nonsense, like the Seralini anti-GMO paper. Worse, when the majority of your findings that make in the lay press are from such absurd findings, you've got a big PR problem. She was damning the research with their own findings and the researcher's own, often strikingly ignorant, statements.

I'm curious to see PZ's follow up critique against EP. I'm not saying either is right or wrong, but their criticism doesn't represent science denial. The attempt to label it as such strikes me as being an excess of defensiveness. And these critiques aren't new, coming from excellent scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould. These criticisms, rather than being addressed by the field, appear to have just been ignored and deflected, see Clint's example of how they are "debunked". Not from my read, I think it should be a source of continuing debate. Perhaps the field strives on inadequate scrutiny? We shall see.

Good article in general, but one criticism:

Ed Clint's criticism about "varied environments" is a "valid point"? Really?

Yes, scientists can assume with a high degree of accuracy that only women got pregnant, that predators needed to be avoided, and that food needed to be obtained. But the problem with saying that is, you can say that of ALL mammals (many other animals as well, but definitely all mammals), including modern humans. If you could draw meaningful conclusions based only on those assumptions you'd expect all mammals behavior to be about the same, and that's most definitely not the case.

So then, if we can't make conclusions based on broad generalizations like that then we have to know something about humans specifically in order to draw conclusions about human behavior. And now we've established that, Watson's critique that we don't actually know anything about humans specifically carries a lot of weight.

(Often what kind of assumptions EPers make about behavior has a great deal to do with details beyond the basic assumptions. Yes only women get pregnant, but how often, and what does that do? Yes, predators need to be avoided, but how often, which predators, and how? Yes food needs to be obtained, what food is available, how easy is it to obtain, how much do you need, and how do you obtain it? Different assumptions in response to these questions give very different models of human behavior, and the crucial thing about these questions is that the answers to all of them differ for different human populations. A situation where women get pregnant about as often as they want to, what predators exist can be fought off easily, and food is so easy to obtain only a fraction of the population needs to do any work to obtain it is perfectly consistent with those three assumptions (and is in fact how modern humans answer those questions) but is almost never assumed by EPers.

I attended Rebecca’s talk in Christchurch. Noticed a few tweaks had been made that addressed some of the criticisms, as you’d expect from someone not being a science denialist.

The lecture room was packed, but this did not appear to be entirely with indignantly muttering Evolutionary Psychologists. My impression was that, like me, most were there because they didn’t know a lot about the topic but it interested them and because they had seen Rebecca’s other work. And it was a fun talk that raised some points worth thinking about – appropriately data-lite for a hot Saturday afternoon.

What I learned about EvPsych was not surprising – like any other field of science, it has some bad practitioners, some assumption-ridden or confounded experimental designs, some studies with small or biased samples, some instances where peer review has borked… and that such findings can be misused and manipulated. the overall Bad Things for science, if you don’t want Dr Bunsen Honeydew endorsing untrue and harmful stereotypes about women and men.

A detailed point rebuttal affixing ‘science denialism’ to what Rebecca actually presented seems, weirdly, defensive. Sure, no-one likes to hear negative things about their hobby horse, but if I was an Evolutionary Psychologist, I’d be thinking ‘crikey! (cos that’s we think down here), that’s no good. How can we make sure that our field doesn’t let this type of thing continue? wonder if I can find some good robust examples of EvPsych to highlight what not to do?’

Mentioning that the dodgy Kanazawa (?) guy was discredited and kicked out by his colleagues seems a little like a token downward glance at own EvPsych navel before once more hefting the lightsabre to en garde. ‘How did he get there in the first place and how can we avoid that in future?’ would be the science-y response.

HE started: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/12/10/ep-the-fundamental-fa…

It doesn't look good for EP so far.
NOW this is really going to be fun.

And it looks like Larry Moran is a "science denialist" too: http://sandwalk.blogspot.com.br/2012/12/the-best-of-evolutionary-psycho…

What do you think of Laden's "men have a rape switch" assertion? Also, what do you think of Stephanie Zvan's "scientific" defense of Laden's statement that "men are damaged women"? Do you agree with Zvan's analysis? Do you really think Laden is an expert in the field and a proper reference for those who want to learn about EP?

Good piece, the only one to substantively address Clint's so far. I tend to lean with you on the denialism portion, but don't understand the reasons for the misrepresentations and factual errors in her talk.

PZ Myers went so far as to make the claims that 90% (exactly) of all EP is bad EP, and if a hypothesis has to do with human gender or race, it's automatically bad. That's his test. Seriously. Do you agree with this?

For those who don't know both Jerry Coyne and John Wilkins have posted excellent pieces in defense of Evolutionary Psychology, and Coyne apparently teaches it in his introductory evolution course. He admits to not having watched Watson talk, but has read PZ's posts on the subject.

"This is unfair and disproven by the talk in which she provides specific critiques and interpretations of data where they conflict with the author’s conclusions. It’s very hard to do this without reading the paper."

I can give you a critique of many papers without reading them by simply using Google. Since Watson used the most common examples of the criticisms leveled against EP, I see no evidence that she read the papers she talks about, and plenty of evidence that she didn't due to her errors about them.

"I don’t understand this because it’s clear from the video that her slides actually have several of the papers up and clearly visible. I also don’t think she blindly trusted media reports either, as she cites specific instances, like the “pink is for girls” study, in which the media cooverage, and the author’s own conclusions differed from the data."

Actually, there's only one slide of showing an abstract (easily found on the web via Google). There are no actual papers. The pink study is a newspaper clipping. Can you tell me what you're referring to here?

"However, Watson seems to have only the most superficial understanding of evolutionary psychology and it isn’t clear that she’s read even one paper in the field."

Having spent about 15 minutes on Wiki, and having read several recent blog posts and the referenced papers, I think this is likely true. She's clearly read Fine's book, OTH.

"I also think that his list of false or misleading claims by Watson is worth reading and it really should have been the starting point for the discussion about Watson’s talk."

Agreed. Do you think 48 minute talk with (being generous to your argument) 24 errors is a good talk? The naturalistic fallacy point goes to the fact that just because something's natural doesn't make it good. There are lots of allegations that EP is rape-enabling and so on, when actually the reverse is true; if we could better asses criminal behaviors and why they occur, we could find solutions more easily.

Do you think science departments at universities should have their own PR departments? Aren't you blaming, as it were, the victim for an unwarranted reputation? Do you think that talks about papers that are in no way representative of the field as being representative of the field further the goals of science education?

Final point: while I don't support the MRA movement in any way, I think that acronym has been thrown around so much as to render it as meaningless as "misogynist." Questioning theories and being skeptical of claims made by a woman (or even being extremely abusive) doesn't automatically turn people into MRAs unless many of the online gender feminists I've spoken to are MRAs too. You should make sure someone is actually affiliated with that movement before bringing it up.

It was a shock-statement, not a serious statement of scientific fact, and it’s unfair of Clint to be dismissive of Laden over such a triviality. Only the MRAs seem to take that statement seriously, and they, as a group, should be ignored whenever possible

I am an MRA, and also an atheist who spends time in the atheist community. I will let you in on an open secret. MRAs by and large arent proactive about what the feminists do in your community.. i.e they dont butt in and argue against Laden et al.. you know why? the rest of the atheist community is doing it, spearheaded by the slimepit in the beginning.. while we sit back and LOL.
dude.. it really takes a lot of knowledge and time to figure out what exactly is going on in society, and the anti-FTB atheists are still in the first or second leg.
As James Onen (allegedly) said "Rebecca Watson has created more MRAs than Paul Elam ever could".
Old timer MRAs have a maxim.. "we dont go out to them (i.e those who can see through feminist lies). we let them come to us".

Good luck "ignoring us".

“This is unfair and disproven by the talk in which she provides specific critiques and interpretations of data where they conflict with the author’s conclusions. It’s very hard to do this without reading the paper.”

I can give you a critique of many papers without reading them by simply using Google. Since Watson used the most common examples of the criticisms leveled against EP, I see no evidence that she read the papers she talks about, and plenty of evidence that she didn’t due to her errors about them.

This is possible, certainly, but Clint shouldn't allege either way without evidence. When someone quotes specific aspects that require internal reading to have been done, I don't automatically assume plagiarism via Google.

“I don’t understand this because it’s clear from the video that her slides actually have several of the papers up and clearly visible. I also don’t think she blindly trusted media reports either, as she cites specific instances, like the “pink is for girls” study, in which the media cooverage, and the author’s own conclusions differed from the data.”

Actually, there’s only one slide of showing an abstract (easily found on the web via Google). There are no actual papers. The pink study is a newspaper clipping. Can you tell me what you’re referring to here?

Showing the abstract and title is adequate to serve as a reference during a talk, I frequently show papers in that form while I reference them in talks. Clint asserted she cited no sources. Clearly, a slide with a paper, title and abstract, is a citation. I don't know what you mean by citation, if showing the title page of a paper isn't adequate. As far as the pink study, Watson specifically refers to how their data conflicts with their conclusions because the effect was reversed in other countries. Sure, this could be from google too, but shows that, at some point, analysis deeper than newspaper level was done. Since Clint is making claims about her analysis he should be providing the evidence that she hasn't done her own research into these papers. As far as I can tell from the video, she has references, she cites data not discussed in the lay press etc. To automatically assume this is all from googling is not a fair assertion without evidence to back the accusation.

Also, the complaint over citation is totally besides the point. What is the point of citations? To give credit where it should be attributed, and to help people find the sources. So, she gave a talk where it might take some work to find the sources. Non-ideal, so what. And if I were these researchers I'd be kind of glad if someone made it harder to trace these things back to me. Her lack of citation doesn't signal the papers she described don't exist (they all do), or that they're jokes (they are).

Having spent about 15 minutes on Wiki, and having read several recent blog posts and the referenced papers, I think this is likely true. She’s clearly read Fine’s book, OTH.

What's wrong with reading Fine's book? The review that Clint links from Science was actually positive about her book. Clint just cherry-picked the critical line from an otherwise positive review to suggest she's a "fake expert". Who is using selective evidence here?

“I also think that his list of false or misleading claims by Watson is worth reading and it really should have been the starting point for the discussion about Watson’s talk.”

Agreed. Do you think 48 minute talk with (being generous to your argument) 24 errors is a good talk? The naturalistic fallacy point goes to the fact that just because something’s natural doesn’t make it good. There are lots of allegations that EP is rape-enabling and so on, when actually the reverse is true; if we could better asses criminal behaviors and why they occur, we could find solutions more easily.

Ah yes, they are a starting point, I didn't acknowledge all 24 are correct. And Watson is critical of the naturalistic fallacy too. She's not proposing that because it's natural it's good, or normal. She's objecting to the naturalistic fallacy.

Do you think science departments at universities should have their own PR departments? Aren’t you blaming, as it were, the victim for an unwarranted reputation? Do you think that talks about papers that are in no way representative of the field as being representative of the field further the goals of science education?

I think university PR departments are a big problem. Both here, and a lot over at Orac's blog, and at other scienceblogs there have been multiple complaints about how universities oversell, misrepresent, and outright bullshit in order to increase their profile. Science by press release does not have a very good reputation or history. From cold fusion to sasquatch DNA, it's a bad sign when this is where reporters are getting their leads. So while it's every university's right to have a PR department, it's a poor journalist that actually gives credence to their press releases without follow up, and sadly, that's what happens much of the time.

Several of the examples that Watson cited were of EP's engaging in the behavior specifically - not the pop media. In particular, the "pink is for girls", Kanazawa's nonsense, and "girls evolved to shop" conclusions were specifically endorsed by the researchers in question, suggesting that they, and not their PR departments, are to blame. So no, it's not EP's being victimized by bad university PR. It's idiot EPs.

I think it's debatable whether these papers represent the field or not. From recent evidence of "good" EP that's been put out, as well as some of the criticisms linked above by PZ, Moran, etc., I think there are big fundamental problems with the field. I'd like to see the EP advocates address them without claiming denialism, because, especially with PZ's article, he raises valid points. This is what scientific debate should look like. This is not denialism. This is challenging the field based on its product, and based on certain key assumptions, like adaptationism, which the critics, I feel, are making very strong points about. As far as PZ claiming it's 90% bad? Well, that's actually not a good claim to make without testing, and it wouldn't be hard to do. Just search out the papers, get a sample, read them, determine which deserve to be scrapped, and calculate a percentage. 90% may be high, or low.

The percentage of papers that are crap generally in the biological literature is probably around 40-50% if you examine analyses such as those by John Ioannidas. And that's not to say the data are bad, or the researcher's conclusions are bad, but that's probably about how often what we report often ends up not holding up. Things like the file-drawer effect are largely to blame. It's only by repetition, replication, and expansion upon results that one finds the "good" papers and a lot of crap passes peer review that has problems. PZ's criticism is different however. I don't think anyone doubts the data the researchers are coming up with. No one is fabricating here. Although there have been some critiques of study design, the main claim being made is misinterpretation based on flawed assemptions. I could see how they could easily hit 90% based on a systematic problem with certain axioms the EPs are working with, but one should test claims, sure.

I'll check out the defenses by Coyne etc. I actually find this debate pretty interesting because it is a valid debate.

I have not seen an EP show up here, link articles, and say "here's examples of good EP" Watson is wrong. If anything, the EP's showing up here are saying, "yeah, the field's got problem." The articles linked by Clint I thought were actually quite poor and did not support his points, including a failure to adequately address Gould's "just so" criticism. They may have convinced themselves that they've rebuffed these criticisms, but the evidence raised by Watson and others suggests this is still a big problem for the field.

Final point: while I don’t support the MRA movement in any way, I think that acronym has been thrown around so much as to render it as meaningless as “misogynist.” Questioning theories and being skeptical of claims made by a woman (or even being extremely abusive) doesn’t automatically turn people into MRAs unless many of the online gender feminists I’ve spoken to are MRAs too. You should make sure someone is actually affiliated with that movement before bringing it up.

I was specifically referring to critiques of Laden for that statement coming from MRAs, which is where it came from. That was factual. I wasn't calling Clint one, as I consider the label equivalent to sexist, I'm just saying, the only people that thought Greg actually believed that were these warped loonies, so he shouldn't cite that as an example of how Laden is a fake expert. Laden is not a fake expert, and even if you point out examples of where he's been in error, or even a little nutty, that doesn't diminish the fact that he has specific knowledge relevant to these discussions. Everyone makes mistakes, and if you write long enough you'll say something stupid (See James Randi on climate change), that doesn't mean you're a fake expert. We've written about what defines fake experts, and neither of Clint's examples were good, or even close. I haven't read Svan's defense of it either. It seems all rather silly to me considering Laden himself says the statement wasn't being made seriously.

In his article, Clint is alleging denialism, falsely, to avoid discussing valid critiques of EP's products. This is not denialism. This is the opposite. This has actually spurred what I think is a very healthy debate about the field, by people with real knowledge of evolution, like PZ and Moran, and can only help the field - if they don't dig in and ignore these criticisms.

Astrokid, I will happily ignore disgusting misogynists like the MRA's as long as I can. You guys are just like "White rights activists" (like Vox Day), claiming they're not racist while basically saying everything a racist white nationalist would. People who react to equality as if it's oppression are just objecting to the loss of their unfair advantage, or any attempts to counteract institutionalized disadvantage.

"And Watson is critical of the naturalistic fallacy too. She’s not proposing that because it’s natural it’s good, or normal. She’s objecting to the naturalistic fallacy."

The problem is that not even the evolutionary psychologists are saying that rape is good. You are right that she's presuming that the evolutionary psychologists are using the fallacy, and she even goes on to claim [around 38:22 in the talk] that they say that "it's natural for men to rape, therefore we don't need to look into ways in which we can change our culture to stop men from raping." Yet in Coyne's critique of sloppy science within Thornhill and Palmer's book _A Natural History of Rape_, he nonetheless quotes the authors as saying the very opposite of Watson's allegation: "Not only does an evolutionary approach generate new knowledge that could be used to decrease the incidence of rape; some of the proposals put forth by individuals uninformed by evolutionary theory may actually increase it." Oops.

I suspect that Clint thinks that Watson is projecting her own use of the naturalistic fallacy onto EP, that is, she reads "rape is natural" as implying "rape is good," and then assumes that this is what those studying EP are thinking.

@Arstrokid.NJ
A really convincing MRA gloating comes off so much better with a ‘muahahahaaaa’ at the end. Last time I looked, Paul Elam’s maxim on the ‘Voice for Men’ site was “F*** Their Shit Up”. Or is that new-school MRA ?

And as for the (alleged – nicely distanced there) quote “Rebecca Watson has created more MRAs than Paul Elam ever could” ? Condensed : the ole ‘look what you made me do!’ defense (Rebecca made me a MRA! ).

Well, this is a blog about denialism – just sorry that it’s been pugged with MRA –flavoured rather than straight science denialism, Mark. Although perhaps you expected as much by mentioning Rebecca, given her talk included the concept of insulting women.

Arstrokid, you’re suggesting something Rebecca Watson does (guys- don’t do that) or something Paul Elam, or Honey Boo Boo for that matter does, has the power to *create* an MRA. I’d contend said candidate already was one and just didn’t have the lexicon – a ‘created’ MRA has finally found an excuse and appropriate acronym to rally their values behind. It’s just something they’ve never had to actively explain or justify before, sort of like a flushing process (just not the becomingly-complexioned kind).

@Bluharmony
“Final point: while I don’t support the MRA movement in any way, I think that acronym has been thrown around so much as to render it as meaningless as “misogynist.”

Yeah, but you don’t unsupport the MRA movement either. or define the your take on the term ‘misogynist’ And then, just to completely obscure any intent, use the word ‘meaningless’ in the same sentence.

Whether or not Rebecca’s was a ‘good’ talk scientifically– it was never sold or promoted as such. from attendance, certainly seemed like one that the skep community here wanted to hear. And if you check the title, it was very much about how in general science (not EvPysch in particular) can reinforce sexist biases. EvPsych seems to be one of main offending fields.

"Condensed : the ole ‘look what you made me do!’ defense (Rebecca made me a MRA! )."

Rebecca certainly forced me to look at the facts, and she has been found extremely wanting.

A whole year of rape cries and not one police report. These victim players don't even play the victim right. They are just harassing bullies with nothing better to do. They are the reason men will claim every rape accusation may not be true.

Reality in a civilized country needs MRAs.

@Tom
so are you saying Rebecca made you an MRA?
do you think if I sent her some wool and bile, she'd make me one too?

J. J. Ramsey - "Yet in Coyne’s critique of sloppy science within Thornhill and Palmer’s book _A Natural History of Rape_, he nonetheless quotes the authors as saying the very opposite of Watson’s allegation."

Only if you take it out of context of what they are arguing, and only selectively quote from the article. They are indeed saying rape is favoured by natural selection, and therefore the conclusion can be drawn that it's an entirely natural act to engage in. The argument about motives that the author's make removes cultural and sociological arguments that can also apply, even the fact that a significant fraction of rape victims are either too young or too old for reproductive strategies to apply. I'd say rather than sloppy, it's a correct assertion to say “it’s natural for men to rape, therefore we don’t need to look into ways in which we can change our culture to stop men from raping.” They do say that, and even worse make out any cultural or sociological changes that don't take into account their "theory" on rape could increase rape, rather than decrease it. Unfortunately for the authors, as Coyne proves, the claims are weak and as he points out near the end of the article: "While denouncing feminists and sociologists for their misguided and scientifically uninformed attempts to deal with rape, Thornhill and Palmer overlook the major improvements that these groups effected in legal
and cultural attitudes toward rape."

More from the article: "...Thornhill and palmer perform a rather ingenious trick by advancing two disparate theories, both in support of the idea that rape is "natural and biological." The first is called the "byproduct hypothesis," which maintains simply that rape is a side effect of other evolved human traits. In other words, rape is "evolutionary" because it is performed by men whose brains, bodies, and behavior have evolved to a point at which rape is physically and emotionally possible. This is a reasonable view--indeed, a tautology--that few biologists will find objectionable. The second hypothesis is called "direct adaptation," and it maintains that rape is much more than an evolutionary by-product: it is a direct adaptation installed by natural selection to allow sexually disenfranchised men to produce children. This latter view is far more controversial, and it is clearly the centerpiece of Thornhill and Palmer's book. Nearly all of the discussion and the cited evidence are directed at proving the truth of this second theory...."

"...But they do declare that social policies to eliminate rape will not work unless they take into account the crime's evolutionary origin. Their "evolutionarily-informed" suggestions are either obvious and derivable from non-evolutionary views of rape (punish rapists more harshly, teach young men not to rape, urge women to avoid secluded spots) or fatuous (build male and female summer camps farther apart, use chaperones early in a relationship) or invidious (counsel rape victims by telling them that their trauma is adaptive).

Thornhill and Palmer justify Darwinian anti-rape courses for men by noting that "individuals who really understood the evolutionary bases of their actions might be better able to avoid behaving in an `adaptive' fashion that is damaging to others." Does anyone imagine that young men will be less inclined to rape when they are told that it is in their genes? Or that rape victims will be consoled by knowing that their trauma and their depression have evolutionary roots? Thornhill and Palmer also claim that women in scanty dress are more likely to be raped, and should keep this risk in mind when picking their clothes. The reader will search in vain, however, for any evidence that more skin provokes more rape. The source of Thornhill and Palmer's advice on this point is a mystery..."
http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/coynefte.html

Mitch: "They are indeed saying rape is favoured by natural selection, and therefore the conclusion can be drawn that it’s an entirely natural act to engage in."

Yes, they are, but they are *not* saying, as Watson alleges, that rape is *good*. Nor, contrary to what Watson said, are they saying that "we don’t need to look into ways in which we can change our culture to stop men from raping.” Indeed, you yourself point out some of Thornhill and Palmer's advice on change the culture. As far as I can tell, the advice is _bad_, but the very existence of such advice contradicts what Watson had said. She didn't even accurately portray what evolutionary psychologists like Thornhill and Palmer were getting wrong.

Tribalism, Cultural Cognition, Ideology, we're all talking about the same thing here

denialism — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 10:12:51 +0000

Tribalism, Cultural Cognition, Ideology, we're all talking about the same thing here

From Revkin I see yet another attempt to misunderstand the problem of communicating science vs anti-science.

The author, Dan Kahan, summarizes his explanation for the science communication problem, as well as 4 other "not so good" explanations in this slide:

He then describes "Identity-protective cognition" thus:

Identity-protective cognition (a species of motivated reasoning) reflects the tendency of individuals to form perceptions of fact that promote their connection to, and standing in, important groups.

There are lots of instances of this. Consider sports fans who genuinely see contentious officiating calls as correct or incorrect depending on whether those calls go for or against their favorite team.

The cultural cognition thesis posits that many contested issues of risk—from climate change to nuclear power, from gun control to the HPV vaccine—involve this same dynamic. The “teams,” in this setting, are the groups that subscribe to one or another of the cultural worldviews associated with “hierarchy-egalitarianism” and “individualism-communitarianism.”

CCP has performed many studies to test this hypothesis. In one, we examined perceptions of scientific consensus. Like fans who see the disputed calls of a referree as correct depending on whether they favor their team or its opponent, the subjects in our study perceived scientists as credible experts depending on whether the scientists’conclusions supported the position favored by members of the subjects’ cultural group or the one favored by the members of a rival one on climate change, nuclear power, and gun control.

Does anyone else think that maybe they're unnecessarily complicating this? First, denialism is not an explanation for the science communication problem. It is a description of tactics used by those promoting bogus theories. Denialism is the symptom, ideology is the cause, and what we consider ideology seems more or less synonymous with this "identity-protective cognition", while being less of a mouthful.

Call it what you will, when you have ideology, or religion, or politics, or other deeply held beliefs which define your existence and your concept of "truth", conflicts with this central belief are not just upsetting, they create an existential crisis. When science conflicts with your ideology, it conflicts with who you are as person, how you believe you should live your life, what you've been raised to believe. And, almost no matter what ideology you subscribe to, eventually science will come in conflict with it, because no ideology, religion, or political philosophy is perfect. Eventually, they will all jar with reality. And what do most people do when science creates such a conflict? Do they change who they are, fundamentally, as a person? Of course not. They just deny the science.

Denialism is the symptom of these conflicts, and this is where the problem with the term "anti-science" comes in. Most denialists and pseudoscientists aren't against science as the term suggests. I think of "anti-science" as being in conflict with established, verifiable science, without good cause. But most people read it as being against science as some kind of belief system or philosophy, which it usually isn't. And while some people do promote the "other ways of knowing" nonsense, for the most part, even among denialists, there is acceptance that the scientific method (which is all science is) is superior at determining what is real versus what is not real. That is why they are pseudoscientists. They try to make their arguments sound as if they are scientifically valid by cherry-picking papers from the literature, by using science jargon (even if they don't understand it), or by pointing to fake experts that they think confer additional scientific strength to their arguments. They crave the validity that science confers on facts, and everyone craves scientific validation (or at least consistency) with their ideology or religious beliefs. It sucks when science conflicts with whatever nonsense you believe in because science is just so damn good at figuring stuff out, not to mention providing you with neat things like longer life expectancy, sterile surgery, computers, cell phones, satellites, and effective and fun pharmaceuticals. This is why (most) pseudoscientists and denialists insist that the science is really on their side, not that science isn't real, or that it doesn't work. We know it works, the evidence is all around us, you are using a computer, after all, to read this. Anti-science as a term is too-frequently misunderstood, or inaccurate.

Pseudoscientists and denialists don't hate science, that's not why they're anti-science. They crave the validity that science confers, and want it to apply to their nonsense as well. Sadly, for about 99.9% of us, at some point, science will likely conflict with something we really, really want to be true. What I hope to accomplish with this blog is to communicate what it looks like when people are so tested, and fail. And I suspect the majority of people fail, because in my experience almost everyone has at least one cranky belief, or bizarre political theory. Hopefully when people learn to recognize denialist arguments as fundamentally inferior, they will then be less likely to accept them, and when it's their turn to be tested, hopefully they will do better.

denialism Thu, 11/01/2012 - 06:12

Tags

Can you explain more about why you think the researchers on this topic are complicating things? I can't understand how your points relate to the actual research done by Kahan and his collaborators. Can you elaborate on what of his research studies you've read, and what you feel is missing or too complicated?

I hate to sound judgmental here, but he's the one doing actual research in the area. What weaknesses have you seen in his published research papers that lead you to these conclusions?

I am not disagreeing with the research, I'm disagreeing with the jargon! Why say in three words what you can say in one? Just call it ideology. I like his research, I think it's neat, I mostly agree with his conclusions. I think it validates what we've been saying is the likely cause of denialist argumentation.

The misunderstanding of the science/anti-science debate I was critical of was from his presentation which suggested denialism as an explanation for the "science communication problem". I don't think anyone suggests denialism as an explanation, it's a symptom. No pseudoscientist sets out to be a denialist, but those are the kinds of arguments that you are left with when one lacks facts. I think he mischaracterized the denialism thesis, which I think fits 100% with his work.

My complaint is that every time I see the word "cognition" I want to scream. Add "cultural" in front of it and the effect is amplified. Why use labels like "hierarch individualists" and "egalitarian communitarians." I'm not particularly stupid or uneducated, but these terms are just meaningless to me. Why do academics feel the need to jargonize simple concepts so that they're more turgid? It's like they're being purposefully obtuse to make the work sound more important. I'd say it far more simply. Ideological extremity causes people to behave in an irrational fashion with regard to risk and adversely affects their judgment of the validity of scientific information as they will chose "their side" over the argument backed up by facts and data. I think this is actually pretty obvious, and as I'm a big fan of Jonathan Haidt (who does a great job dropping the jargon), I think it follows from how humans actually appear to form opinions. The ideology comes first, and reason is used to dig in. It's all backwards. Training in science and scientific thinking in general is very counter-intuitive and unnatural for humans, this is likely why it's both uncommon and frequently discounted by the majority who are just cruising on their ideological short-bus.

We've talked about Kahan's research here before see here, and I admit I'm a fan even though I do have some criticisms about how far you can extend his conclusions based on the questions asked in his study. I still am not entirely convinced that liberals are more inclined to accept scientific information to inform their risk assessments compared to conservatives, because the question was regarding nuclear power. A better question would have been to ask about GMOs...oh wait he does!. Surprisingly, GMOs seem to set off both sides of the ideological divide, hrmmph. I'm sure there is some legitimate bogus risk assessment you can the liberals to flip over that's better than nuclear power. I'll have to think about it some more.

You have pegged my number one complaint about scientific papers. There seems to be something in the training of such people, or in their dealing with others in the same field, which renders them incapable of stating things in terms someone with normal, or even above average, intelligence can comprehend, instead of only people in their own field.

You want my take on the "problem" with the communication of science? The fact that, had I taken different courses, could have become one of them, but, because I chose computer science, and don't have all the math, and the complicated dictionary in my head, and so on, I need a damn translator to comprehend some of the stuff they write. Someone who barely passed high school... doesn't have any damn chance to understand even a fraction of what I do.

The number of people capable, and willing, to use common language, and understandable explanation... is a bit like finding English lyrics for Japanese pop music. Someone has probably done it right. But.. You wouldn't believe the "professional" attempts made, to produce such versions, by the actual companies that sell the originals. Its not that they use the wrong words, so much as too few, or too many, and it resembles someone looking through a dictionary, trying to find the most improbable combination of words possible, while still, more or less, if you quint hard, actually saying the same thing.

Kudos. I'm all for less needless academic jargon. It really doesn't contribute to anything except egos.

Just on something you said above. It's merely anecdote, but all the denialists I know personally - the anti-vaxers, the 911 truthers, microwaving water makes it poisonous, etc - are either post-modernists who are openly anti-science in the sense that they deny the value of the scientific method, or they are anti-science in the sense that they have mystic, supernatural beliefs and they see science as a threat unless it is drastically reinterpreted to incorporate woo. In this sense, I'm quite wary of conspiracy theorists and denialists who claim to be big fans of science. I've found what they call "science" is invariably remote from the scientific method, usually it boils down to making appeals from authority because they believe that's what science is. Most people in general aren't anti-science, but the people I know who are into pseudoscience definitely literally are "anti-science".

I study "cognition" (specifically, cognitive development), so I admit that I'm a little taken back by the fact that you hate the term so. I'm guessing you hate when it's used for evil (i.e., making concepts seem overly complicated) than for good (i.e., in limited amounts that don't mean anything more or less than the word implies).

I admit being a bit bogged down by the terms Kahan uses as well. I think he's trying to clarify the different kinds of backgrounds that people can bring to the table when they are evaluating claims from others, but the terms could be more transparent.

Part of my job as a teacher and mentor is to encourage my students to clearly and concisely state their ideas. We spend some time in my classes reviewing how science is communicated in the public, and it's both fascinating and frightening how the process goes wrong. And part of the problem is certainly on our end: we make claims that are unclear and leave room for doubt.

I disagree to the extent that "ideology", like "denialism", is a loaded term. The use of a phrase like “Identity-protective cognition” takes away the potentially pejorative sense. A religious person would likely take exception to their beliefs being dismissed as ideology.

There are ideological fads in science too. Think of eugenics, and other forms of social darwinism as well as almost the entire field of neo-classical economics, as well as Austrian economics, Marxism, Freudian psychology Gaia Theory etc. All of them elaborate castles in the air that don't seem to be too bothered by any connection to reality. Karl Popper, Austrian philosopher of science came up with the idea of basing science on refutability. Many of these pseudo-sciences are not refutable, that is, no matter what happens it never disproves this type of theory. Therefore, Popper reasoned these theories are not telling us anything.

On the other hand Gaia Theory led directly to Earth Systems Science, based on the idea that the physical earth and living systems are constantly interacting and changing each other. This has revolutionized the science of geology.

Jargon always starts out with good intentions, as a way to clarify by specifying. Invariably it leads to more confusion, as further specifying leads to jargon "splitters", while the confused reactionaries become jargon "lumpers". I'm on the side of the lumpers, myself - even relatively simple language becomes intolerably confusing since we all frequently use words for which each of us have slightly different definitions. "Inigo's Observation" should be in daily use for all of us. Better for all of us to reflexively specify what we mean when we talk - even among members of the same group, terms can unintentionally mislead.
Also, too, I believe you're on the right track with this "it's all the same thing!" approach; it's like "racism", which is merely one of the many forms of "groupism" we show. Anything we use to distinguish "Us" from "Them", whether it's language, skin color, ideological (=religious) beliefs, or any other detectable characteristic, operates under the same set of rules. Basically, "I'm normal and right; you're weird and wrong (and probably dangerous)". It's a hind-brain thing, and easy to overlook.

By saying "ideology" is the problem, you are dangerously close to saying that having principals is a problem. Likewise, you are broad-brushing all ideologies, and they are not created equal. Liberalism and democracy (in the broad global, not narrow US sense) are ideologies which promote human freedom. And freedom of thought is needed for the scientific method. Compare to fascist or stalinist states, where science was always bent to the needs of ideologues in power. We cannot say "having an ideology is dangerous to scientific progress" just so. That statement, at the very least, needs some huge qualifications.

There are ideological fads in science too. Think of eugenics, and other forms of social darwinism as well as almost the entire field of neo-classical economics, as well as Austrian economics, Marxism, Freudian psychology Gaia Theory etc. All of them elaborate castles in the air that don’t seem to be too bothered by any connection to reality.

But as biologists like Stephen J Gould have pointed out, the eugenics scientists really weren't scientists but pseudoscientists, who cherry-picked results, skewed data, and generally fudged to create the impression of differences between races. They weren't scientists who came across data demonstrating a difference between the races, but racists who wanted to solidify their superiority by fudging the science. The ideology came first, and systematically biased their research. Read the Mismeasure of Man, it's wonderful.

By saying “ideology” is the problem, you are dangerously close to saying that having principals is a problem. Likewise, you are broad-brushing all ideologies, and they are not created equal.

This is the eternal argument when I criticize ideology on this blog. Which ideology is the least full of crap? That was the target of our original discussion of Kahan's paper.

It would be an enormous mistake to suggest there is parity between ideologies and their unscientific tendencies. Nothing is further from the truth. Right wing Christian fundamentalism, for instance, will have far more conflicts with established science than a left wing hippy. However, the hippy is going to still think some weird stuff about GMOs and animal research, and have some interesting anti-corporate conspiracy theories that are fed by ideology.

Certain ideologies have science built into their philosophy which allows for a certain degree of self-correction. And right now it's true, reality has a liberal bias. But it hasn't always been the case, and I don't know that it always will be the case. After all, the anti-science postmodernist movement was the invention of a left-wing academia. The war on science in the 60s and 70s was from the left. Domestic terrorism in this country and others has come from both the left and right, from the Weather Underground to Timothy McVeigh. More recently it seems more right wing, with the likes of Eric Rudolph and Tim McVeigh, but that wasn't the case when it was the radical left angry about the state of the nation.

We cannot say “having an ideology is dangerous to scientific progress” just so. That statement, at the very least, needs some huge qualifications.

I don't know, I think you can live a moral, ideology-free existence and it would be better for all of us if we engaged in more self examination of the overvalued ideas we have banging around in their brains. I don't think of ideology as being principled or necessarily consistent with principles. If anything, I think it's the opposite. It's lazy. It's an intellectual and moral short cut. It makes people do immoral things for the sake of some higher truth. How, after all, does a man get on a school bus and shoot a little girl in the face because she wants to educate herself? Not because he's principled but because he's a believer of a radical, misogynistic ideology that believes in forced submission of others to fundamentalist religion. Now, most ideology is not so severe, but I think it's all as illogical. Sometimes socialistic stuff works, sometimes free markets work, sometimes some utilitarian solution is good, sometimes a utilitarian solution is awful or unfair, sometimes having some stupid tradition works. I can't say the British have done poorly with their bizarre constitutional monarchy. There isn't a political philosophy, and certainly no religion, that is always right for all people, at all times, everywhere. Not even close.

Principles are things like believing in fairness, equality, justice, the common good. Most ideologues would say their ideology is the most perfect expression of one or more of these principles, and are wrong 90% of the time.

Ideology is poison to reason. It shuts off your brain. And it's the opposite of being principled. Instead of trying to find the "right" ideology why don't we explore things like "what works" or "what does the evidence show" or at least "what doesn't cause harm". Then, maybe I'm just expressing a belief in a ideology of radical pragmatism.

What I take away from this is that many of the mistakes people make that lead them to reject well-supported science is a result of strongly identifying with a group. If there's a unifying explanation for a lot of the resistance, that's good news rhetorically because we can build approaches that counter it.

You can't live an ideology-free existence; you have to have SOME set of basic beliefs. Explaining all opinions that you don't like with "They have an ideology" is almost content-free. It has no predictive power and provides no insights into how others' opinions might be changed, if that is your goal. To take the case of climate change denialism, it isn't helpful just to say that an average (non-1%) denialist has been infected with some sort of inferior ideology. (Where do you go from there? You instruct him to change his no-good ideology; he instructs you to change yours. Stalemate.) Suppose you instead recognize that the real desire underlying his opinion, let's say if he is from a Western state, may be to preserve both his livelihood and his self-image as part of a group that is rural and self-sufficient, living in wide-open spaces and traveling freely. Whether that's really true or not, it's important to him that he can think of himself that way. Then you can ask, how can he be persuaded to care about specific environmental problems while remaining within and honoring that fundamental framework?
Usually, this bites both ways. Just as everybody has ideologies, everybody has ingroups. Kahan mentioned gun control. He may have meant to imply that Americans who want to keep their guns do so to protect ingroup identity, e.g. as rural people who hunt or should do so; certainly, many of his liberal readers will take it that way. But it's equally true that supporters of gun control may reject evidence that gun control doesn't really reduce violent crime because they think of themselves as belonging to a "tribe" of peaceful, civilized urban people who would never want to kill an animal for food or to hurt another human even in self-defense. To own a weapon would imply rejection of a belief that's important to that ingroup, threatening one's status. The 1990s-era gun-control debate was often actually a debate about cultures, with each side not just demanding legal concessions of the other but insulting their whole cultural identity and implying that they should give it up altogether. No wonder that it was so acrimonious and ultimately led to few gains for either side.

You can’t live an ideology-free existence; you have to have SOME set of basic beliefs. Explaining all opinions that you don’t like with “They have an ideology” is almost content-free. It has no predictive power and provides no insights into how others’ opinions might be changed, if that is your goal.

You misunderstand me, or are attacking a straw man. I realize that we are products of our culture, our upbringing, and group-identity. The problem is when the assumptions and axioms one develops as a member of such a group come in conflict with measureable, verifiable facts it's clear ideology is the source of the problem. All our thinking and opinion is necessarily shaped by environment and yes ideology, but that's no reason we can't do better. It's no reason we should just throw our hands up in the air and say we can't improve. And further, when you come across denialism and anti-science, in most people you can almost always trace the issue back to a specific ideological conflict with reality (I think this is what Kahan's research shows systematically), although I think there is also a subset of folks with ingrained and otherwise inexplicable conflicts with reality (cranks) that may have roots in mental illness or personality disorders. And it's not opinions I don't like that are the problem, it's denialism, a specific, flawed set of tactics people use to entrench around a scientifically-indefensible idea.

Via wikipedia ideology:

An ideology is a set of ideas that constitute one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology is a comprehensive vision, a way of looking at things (compare worldview) as in several philosophical tendencies (see political ideologies), or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society (a "received consciousness" or product of socialization).

Ideologies are systems of abstract thought applied to public matters and thus make this concept central to politics. Implicitly every political or economic tendency entails an ideology whether or not it is propounded as an explicit system of thought.
...
Political Ideology is a certain ethical set of ideals, principles, doctrines, myths, or symbols of a social movement, institution, class, or large group that explains how society should work, and offers some political and cultural blueprint for a certain social order. A political ideology largely concerns itself with how to allocate power and to what ends it should be used. Some parties follow a certain ideology very closely, while others may take broad inspiration from a group of related ideologies without specifically embracing any one of them.

So basically, everyone's got one. Like opinions, and assholes, they're universal. The question is, given how most ideologies are different, and all are flawed, perhaps there 's a better way to try to view and run the world? Is it possible to make decisions and political choices while purposefully using science, insight, and rationality to avoid falling in the traps your ideology will invariably set for you?

Thinking ideologically is what comes naturally to us but, depending on how flawed the ideology, it periodically makes us reach the wrong conclusions, then dig in when challenged. This is exactly what Kahan's research shows. People side with the group over reality. I say the problem is ideology, group identity, tribalism, whatever the hell you want to call it, it's all bad. It's all sloppy thinking. And even when a given ideology is wrong less than some other flawed ideology, it's still going to be wrong more than the measure which it's being applied to, which is verifiable scientific facts. Think about how to test this hypothesis. One could ask, if this is true, then we should be predictably be able to figure, based on one's stated ideological agenda, area's in which an individual has beliefs that are in conflict with the observed reality. Hence Kahan's research, he shows everybody is susceptible to this flaw. It's also consistent with what other like Haidt, and Mooney are showing us that ideology causes people to have scientific blind spots, because human reasoning is not scientific, but completely backwards, and worse when people are stuck in ideological echo chambers, the irrational pattern of thought can be further aggravated.

I, like Kahan in his post, am proposing we take the ambitious step of a post-ideological political and societal agenda. We acknowledge we bring bias, opinion, and rationalizations to a given debate, but that's no excuse to give up, or to disagree on facts. Facts need to be separated from the debate over what to do with those facts. We acknowledge that ideology is universal, but inferior, to truly rational (not rationalized) and pragmatic politics and culture. We should say, no matter what I believe, I'm willing to change when my beliefs and expectations are negated by reality, or when an idea I might not like on the face of it is shown to work. We need to all acknowledge that science should be separated from politics/ideology etc., and that it's the best system at providing an agreed upon set of facts.

It's like political skepticism, or ideological atheism. I realize ideology exists, but these ideal societies and structures they espouse are mythical, and flawed. I'd suspect the ideal social structures will likely never be found, but we can improve a given one by by observation, experimentation, and study of efficacy of specific interventions. You can call that an ideology, and that's fine, members or religions often try to impute religious behavior to atheists, but it really is not. I want to endeavor to evaluate new facts and information separate from my personal biases, emotion, and overvalued ideas (and I know I have them, ask me what I think of vegans sometime). I may not always succeed, but I will endeavor to try. I won't believe in some ideal organizing principle out of faith that if everyone just thought like I did, the world will be great. Guess what, it'll never happen, and it probably wouldn't work anyway.

This goal in action is probably best demonstrated by my views on the healthcare debate. I would personally prefer a public option, but not necessarily single-payer, and I'm willing to be happy about the ACA's mixed private insurance model. Why? I think the data from the experience of other countries around the world show single-payer systems have access flaws, that public option choices in places similar to the US in culture and beliefs like Australia have been quite successful, but ultimately anything (the ACA) is better than a non-universal system. A system like the ACA exists - I'd say what we're making looks pretty similar to the Netherlands system, and appears to work quite well. Now, while I'm personally convinced a different plan might be better, it's not really a scientific belief, it's an opinion. We don't know what kind of system will work best in the US, but we do know, every other system in the world appears to perform better than ours on cost and access and likely on quality in several. We could end up stunned and find that going universal will make care worse, more expensive per capita etc., and then we should change again either back to our flawed system, or to experiment with another model. But I'm willing to try any, and be proven wrong about any. I'm not motivated by a belief in a right to healthcare. I just think what we're doing now is so freaking stupid, costly, and backwards, we should be embarrassed to be seen in public.

Anyway, a wordy reply, but my thoughts on this are still being worked out.

If I'm misunderstanding, it's perhaps because you don't seem to be clear about what you believe, and so contradict yourself (can the superior sort of people "live [an] ideology-free existence" or are ideologies "universal"?). Certainly, everyone has one or more; it's been wisely said that "humans think with stories." Almost anyone might agree in the abstract that ideologies that conflict more with observable facts are less useful. However, then the question of which people are the arbiters of what is factual becomes an ideological one. I have seen many specific topics for which different people who would claim science as their primary ideology strongly disagree on which observations and publications qualify as "verifiable scientific facts" and which do not. There's no way to avoid bias; even if you were to have a computer make the call, it would have to be programmed according to somebody's values.
For example, neuroscience is not only confirming that nonhuman animals engage in emotion-motivated actions, but reporting that human beings make better decisions when they are using emotion rather than pure reason. In other words, we have and use emotion because it benefits us. Therefore, from one perspective, condeming "human" reasoning (as opposed to "scientific" reasoning!) as "completely backwards," "irrational" and "inferior" is basically saying that all those humans around you are inferior to you for being normal members of the very successful species they were born to. Little wonder if they don't then hop to change their treasured beliefs at your say-so. Again, to return to the climate-change case, you might get farther if you recognize that opponents have feelings and beliefs that matter, and that some of those feelings and beliefs could actually be used as levers to encourage environmental concern. You will not get very far in training a cat if you pretend that she doesn't or shouldn't have feelings and preferences; surely humans deserve the same respect.

Almost anyone might agree in the abstract that ideologies that conflict more with observable facts are less useful. However, then the question of which people are the arbiters of what is factual becomes an ideological one. I have seen many specific topics for which different people who would claim science as their primary ideology strongly disagree on which observations and publications qualify as “verifiable scientific facts” and which do not.

Science is not an ideology, it's a method. As far as disagreements about observations and publications what are we talking about? Of course there is debate in science, but not over things like "does evolution happen", "is quantum mechanics real" etc. We debate over the interpretation, or methodological issues, but not over the reality of the data. And certain theories become strong enough that the dissenters are just boring cranks. Like evolution denialists.

There’s no way to avoid bias; even if you were to have a computer make the call, it would have to be programmed according to somebody’s values.

This is starting to smell an awful lot like post-modernism. While it is true there are debates in science, and you can say that there is disagreement among scientists on certain topics, certain theories reach a point where further debate is not held by anybody but cranks. There also is the issue that even while significant changes may occur in theory like the transition from classical to quantum and relativistic mechanics, that has not made the findings of classical mechanics incorrect, merely incomplete in terms of their descriptions of motion of small objects or very fast/heavy objects respectively. The data stay true. The method is reliable. We can argue about interpretation, but at a certain point things become settled, even if they are incomplete.

For example, neuroscience is not only confirming that nonhuman animals engage in emotion-motivated actions, but reporting that human beings make better decisions when they are using emotion rather than pure reason. In other words, we have and use emotion because it benefits us.

This is one interpretation. Emotional and pattern recognition heuristics are more rapid, and for certain types of decision making this may be valuable. However, I would say, when making decisions like "should I buy a ferrari today" they may be inferior.

Therefore, from one perspective, condeming “human” reasoning (as opposed to “scientific” reasoning!) as “completely backwards,” “irrational” and “inferior” is basically saying that all those humans around you are inferior to you for being normal members of the very successful species they were born to.

Yes, but what comes naturally to us isn't always what's best. This is an appeal to nature, and total bullshit. To the extent we can observe and measure the tendency of individuals to incorrectly interpret science based on ideology/group identity whatever, that's a sign that human reasoning is often defective. Our heuristics are imperfect. No one should be surprised. The Gaga hypothesis of "born that way" doesn't make it alright. No, we can do better. The scientific method should be the way out, and part of teaching people to be truly rational and scientific is to train ourselves to understand how frequently we will be victims of this phenomenon and become irrational when ideology/group identity is threatened. Read the findings of Jon Haidt if you want to get the background on what I'm talking about. Just because it's what we do naturally doesn't make this better, it's clearly flawed and the evidence is the obvious ideological underpinnings of the various forms of scientific denialism.

Little wonder if they don’t then hop to change their treasured beliefs at your say-so.

I am not trying to create such an appeal to authority. I'm just saying people should recognize that one's ideology puts one at risk of becoming anti-science, to the extent any given ideology puts one at odds with verifiable science (and yes verifiable science exists). I then describe the pattern of argumentation that denialists engage in to defend their untenable views.

Again, to return to the climate-change case, you might get farther if you recognize that opponents have feelings and beliefs that matter, and that some of those feelings and beliefs could actually be used as levers to encourage environmental concern. You will not get very far in training a cat if you pretend that she doesn’t or shouldn’t have feelings and preferences; surely humans deserve the same respect.

Well, hopefully humans are easier to train than cats. I have two and it's totally hopeless.

This is the old "framing" argument of Nisbet. Rather than saying people are wrong, or defending the validity of the scientific method, find the emotional lever that works on them. It's true, this probably works better, but it strikes me as being, well, creepy, manipulative and wrong. Not to mention Nisbet has subsequently been shown to be a hack.

I'm not trying to train people to have no preferences , or ignore their preferences or beliefs. I'm trying to say, everyone should acknowledge, at one time or another, their deeply-held and beloved beliefs are likely to come into conflict with some finding of science. The appropriate response to such a conflict isn't just wrote denial, but investigation of the result and self-examination. That should not be such a revolutionary idea. To be proactive, along this line of reasoning, one should continuously examine their own beliefs and try to separate what is emotional, ideological, etc., from what is actually demonstrable, testable, and therefore, far more likely to be true.

It's not practical. Firstly, some of the folks on ScienceBlogs who claim to have superior abilities to judge issues using pure reason and science have been seen reflexively rejecting published scientific data that support hypotheses they don't like. If these folks, some of whom have advanced degrees in science, can't overcome their emotional attachment to their beliefs, how do you expect less-educated people to do so? And since their tribal identity includes "we are more open-minded and rational than others", they have to make a pretense of considering ideas they don't like. People whose ideology includes pride in NOT questioning their beliefs are not going to do that. Sure they should, but most of them won't. So saying they can't be dealt with until their ideology has changed is a recipe for stalemate.
You may call it creepy and wrong, let us say, to try to persuade a creationist to care about mass extinction by pointing out how much he should value species that were purposefully created by his deity. He would say it was creepy and wrong to try to badger him or his kids into giving up their religion before they could be considered smart enough to reason with on environmental issues. You yourself note above "how frequently we will ... become irrational when ideology/group identity is threatened." That's kind of conceding the importance of the point that Dan Kahan made in using the terminology that you initially rejected. If your goal is to attack a belief that is really relatively peripheral, but you do it in such a way that you appear to be defining a person's basic identity as inferior and unacceptable, you will get much more pushback. Likewise, if people feel that "experts" are being portrayed as the sole appropriate arbiters of not only factual questions but values questions, they will rightly resent this, Nobody wants to be assigned the status of a passive lump, even if in fact he's let TV turn him into one.

Some examples of scienceblogs rejecting published data just based on dislike of hypotheses? We often will reject interpretaions, question methodology, or terminology as I did with Kahan, but we rarely reject the data itself as fabricated or fundamentally false. And again, I reject the idea that I'm appealing to experts. Which experts?

I'm not saying people have to give up ideology, or judge ideologies based on their scientific merit. I'm just saying all people must acknowledge ideology will pull them into situations where they will become unable to judge science rationally. I'm agreeing with Kahan here. If we recognize that fact it will allow us to recognize when we see that behavior in others, and ideally, allow us to recognize it when we do it ourselves.

Interestingly reading over at Big Think they uncovered a Bertram Russel interview and I think he makes my point better than I do:

At the end of his 1959 TV interview “Face to Face” on BBC, Bertrand Russell was asked the following question.

“One last question. Suppose, Lord Russell, this film were to be looked at by our descendants, like a dead sea scroll in a thousand years’ time. What would you think it’s worth telling that generation about the life you’ve lived and the lessons you’ve learned from it?”

This was the first part of Russell’s answer.

“I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral. The intellectual thing I should want to say to them is this. When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only “What are the facts? And what is the truth that the facts bear out?” Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe or by what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only and solely at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say.”

I'll agree that it is philosophically superior for people to ponder how their pre-existing beliefs might bias their judgement on any issue whatsoever. (Whether "science" should be the ultimate authority in our lives is one of those specific issues that there's no point in arguing about.) However, despite your feeling that "all people must" do this, most people usually don't. In fact, in the post-TV era, many Americans never seem to spend any time contemplating philosophical issues. And, again speaking pragmatically, we live in a system where no matter how dull-minded you are, you still have the right to a voice in your government.

So to take climate denialism, rural red-staters see it implied not only that they personally are too dumb or deluded to have opinions worth expressing, but that there is nobody in their local community (i.e., their "tribe") who is knowledgeable and right-thinking enough to determine what should be done. Instead, top-down decisions need to be made by distant technocrats (i.e., members of another "tribe", one that may not have their needs at heart). Contrary to popular wisdom, most commons in functioning societies are not "tragedies," because most people are willing to accept restrictions on behavior that are imposed by their own group for the sake of that group. But when a whole group feels that they are being defined as the problem, or that restrictions might be imposed on them by outsiders to benefit outsiders, there will be fear and anger. (This is particularly true when they observe hypocritical behavior by people from the supposedly superior group.) The more they feel disrespected, the more they will vote for demagogic politicians who claim to be defending their ingroup. If you can't engage with these people as they are, you only guarantee stalemate, because you don't have the numbers to outvote them consistently. Is it better to make modest but real political progress by identifying common ground, or to sit around accomplishing nothing until your political opponents acknowledge your intellectual superiority and offer unconditional surrender?

However, despite your feeling that “all people must” do this, most people usually don’t. In fact, in the post-TV era, many Americans never seem to spend any time contemplating philosophical issues.

I wouldn't blog if I didn't think I could have some influence on people's behavior or how they think about these problems.

Is it better to make modest but real political progress by identifying common ground, or to sit around accomplishing nothing until your political opponents acknowledge your intellectual superiority and offer unconditional surrender?

Again it seems as though you think I'm making an appeal to my own opinions or intellect and I'm not. I acknowledge I can be a victim of this type of thinking too, and I sometimes have to concentrate specifically on dividing my feelings from topics that irritate me.

Every time I've been successful in changing the mind of someone who has been duped by the denialists, it's been with someone that I've been able to calmly explain what the science shows (in my very limited expertise) and why the arguments used by the opponents of the science are based on a ludicrous conspiracy theory, combined with sloppy arguments cherry-picking etc. I often explain why the alternative explanation is appealing to those who want less government, and how that's a reasonable political position, but has no bearing on the facts of the science, nor does it forgive the irresponsible tactics of the denialists.

The common ground is science, and people's respect for it. Pseudoscientists wouldn't insist the science is on their side if they didn't believe that science is superior at determining fact versus fiction. The denialists have been enormously successful against global warming by accusing the researchers of political contamination of science as part of their conspiracy theory against climate change research as a liberal environmentalist hoax. Everyone wants to be on the side of science. Luckily, their talking points are relatively easily debunked and dismissed, and I've found conversion relatively easy for all but the true believers.

I don't think the common ground has to be ideological or political, people can believe things that are contrary to their ideal political outlook if people take the time to explain the science. Most people, even ideologues, recognize when science and ideology conflict, science should win.

Fair enough, although you're not going to get enough people to fundamentally change their philosophies of living to make a noticeable difference in a polity of 300 million people. For the remaining majority who don't want to think about most issues carefully, I fear that invoking "science" to tell them how they should vote will have increasingly little effect. Americans traditionally valued science because technology (a different but related animal) was making their lives ever better, and because they were a well-educated people who prided themselves on learning about and discussing serious issues. Neither of those things is generally true any more. IMHO, science might have a more lasting reputation if average people were taught to use science-as-process just as they are (or should be) taught to use logic - which is also sometimes treated as a tool for use by an elite.

Scientific American addresses denialism in politics - says it jeopardizes democracy

denialism — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:32:12 +0000

Scientific American addresses denialism in politics - says it jeopardizes democracy

Scientific American evaluates the candidates on their answers to Sciencedebate 2012 and evaluates ideology-based denialism as a whole:

Today's denial of inconvenient science comes from partisans on both ends of the political spectrum. Science denialism among Democrats tends to be motivated by unsupported suspicions of hidden dangers to health and the environment. Common examples include the belief that cell phones cause brain cancer (high school physics shows why this is impossible) or that vaccines cause autism (science has shown no link whatsoever). Republican science denialism tends to be motivated by antiregulatory fervor and fundamentalist concerns over control of the reproductive cycle. Examples are the conviction that global warming is a hoax (billions of measurements show it is a fact) or that we should “teach the controversy” to schoolchildren over whether life on the planet was shaped by evolution over millions of years or an intelligent designer over thousands of years (scientists agree evolution is real). Of these two forms of science denialism, the Republican version is more dangerous because the party has taken to attacking the validity of science itself as a basis for public policy when science disagrees with its ideology.

I agree. We've debated on this site the prevalence of denialism on the left vs. the right, but I think it's a distraction from the central point which I think is being argued most effectively by Jonathan Haidt. That is, humans are not rational beings and most uses of reason are to rationalize positions that we arrived at by intuitive means. That means all ideology is going to strain your relationship with science. Humans tend to hold positions based on shortcuts, or heuristics, that lead them to what feels right, then they use reason to dig in to those positions. It is extremely difficult, and uncommon, for people to change their minds based on reason and evidence. So, any time you have political ideology as the source of people's positions, you will encounter anti-science when those ideologies conflict with the science. Just like right-wingers have a big problem with climate change and evolution, left-wingers have a big problem with a kind of food religion, GMO and toxin paranoia, and other health and environmental denialism. I think the author here, Shawn Otto, has it exactly right.

His argument to tie the problem into encroaching authoritarianism might be more of a stretch:

By falsely equating knowledge with opinion, postmodernists and antiscience conservatives alike collapse our thinking back to a pre-Enlightenment era, leaving no common basis for public policy. Public discourse is reduced to endless warring opinions, none seen as more valid than another. Policy is determined by the loudest voices, reducing us to a world in which might makes right—the classic definition of authoritarianism.

I don't know if authoritarianism is the destiny of a population that rejects science. Surely we are at greater risk of manipulation by those that control the message most effectively. More likely, we would be easily manipulated into supporting an oligarchy or plutocracy of those at the top of society who can manage media and politicians through money and influence, or at worst we might get a kakistocracy if the likes of the tea party come to power. Otto is right, however, when empiricism and facts are no longer important, the likelihood that the unqualified, the unprincipled, and the ignorant coming to power will increase.

denialism Fri, 10/19/2012 - 06:32

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Liberals are no more likely to believe in anti-vaxism than conservatives are. This is a hollow trope done just for the sake of false balance.

Michelle Bachmann and Donald Trump are both anti-vaxers. And you can rest assured that so are many among the YEC and militia / New World Order conspiracy crowd.

Hey, I don't want to get in this stupid fight about who is more denialist about what. The fact is, liberal and conservative, ideology draws people into anti-science positions. Bachmann got to it through anti-sex republican BS, and Jenny McCarthy got there through liberal anti-toxin paranoia and "other ways of knowing"/mommy-knowledge. I don't care which end they come from and I'm not trying to seek "balance". I'm arguing that ideology is the problem, not the specific end of the spectrum you're on. Read some of my GMO or animal rights threads sometime, there is plenty of liberal denialism out there. It just isn't as damaging.

Chris Mooney has made the point in "the Republican Brain" that the two ends of the spectrum probably started out with about the same amount of crankery, but worsening the Republican side are exterior factors, like fox news and the right wing echo chamber that reinforce delusional beliefs about science while preventing contamination with legitimate scientific information. It's entirely possible the only real reason for the difference is the liberals don't have as effective an echo chamber on the left.

You may be correct about the echo chamber effect, but.. there is a description often applied to certain liberal circles, "Herding cats." The right, as part of their prime ideology, is one of authority figures. Nearly every attack against science, or atheism, or anything else that tends to be "left", is based not on attacking the facts of the position, but the "person" that presented it. Its seen as better, or as important, to discredit the source, than it is to discredit the idea. The left tends to be far more random, and less tied to specific authorities. If one is undermined, there are still others. If X idea is discredited, then that doesn't automatically discredit idea Y, which is nearly identical, etc. Often, even if the person behind an idea is shown to be totally wrong, the ideology survives. Authorities tend to be distrusted, and its not that one single person supports the idea for someone on the left to be convinced, its that ***lots*** of people agree with it, so, even if the ideology came from one person, and that person is totally discredited, the 10,000 people claiming it worked anyway are more important than who, or where, the idea came from.

This makes attacks by the left one the right's positions, or visa versa, an exercise in absurdity. Both sides attack the other based on what they value, more often than not. So, if the right is attacking, they target the core person they imagine is behind it, whether it be Darwin, or Dawkins, etc., attacking them on the basis of not being 100% right, or perfect, and therefor their ideas must all be suspect. The left.. more often than not will attack an idea based purely on how many people follow it. If its a lot of people, it must be true, or, alternatively, if a lot of people seem to be "conspiring" to hide something, it must be a real conspiracy.

They have one echo chamber, we have thousands, but, each of those thousands contain vast numbers of "believers", and that is way more important than *who* is in charge, what other things they believe (up to a certain point), or even, in some cases, holding to completely conflicting theories. As echo chambers go, the left isn't "efficient", simply because it is, essentially, three things - widely dispersed and scattered, semi-leaderless, and, finally, not having to conform to authority means you can be completely (more or less) rational about one thing, and completely bloody nuts about 50 others, and not be "outside" the echo chamber(s). You can't be that random and even come close to the right wing's echo chamber.

Lo, verily it is written, "What ideology lops apart, crank magnetism glops together."

P.C.- B.S. Science Is Running Amok

1. P.C. - B.S.S. ranted incessantly during the Gulf Spill that it would take more than a 100 years for the gulf to recover. Now, these same scientists are spending millions more tax dollars searching for traces of the spill.

2. For decades enviro-wackos wanted to close off the deserts to mining, off-roading, road building and development. Now they say nothing when tens of thousands of acres are covered with whirling, bird killing monsters and glaring solar panels - beneath which nothing lives.

3. Rachel Carson's hysteria led to the deaths of millions of children as the result of the P.C. B.S.S. DDT ban. The death toll continues to this day. More lives have been saved than by any other chemical invention in human history.

4. More birds have been killed by windmills than DDT ever killed - Not to mention the permanent habitat destruction or the fact the wind energy provides very little "net energy". What little is extremely expensive.

5. I note Obama has spoken of vaccines being linked to autism. Although there is no evidence. Why doesn't the left call him out.... I also note our facile," Huckster in Chief " has no idea of when life begins - claiming that knowledge is above his pay grade.

Really? Authentic science knows when life begins - However, P.C. - B.S. Science seems more than a little fuzzy on the issue.

P.C.- B.S. Science Is Running Amok

1. P.C. – B.S.S. ranted incessantly during the Gulf Spill that it would take more than a 100 years for the gulf to recover. Now, these same scientists are spending millions more tax dollars searching for traces of the spill.

Not an expert on this issue, but my understanding is that whole swaths of gulf are still not fishable, and oil balls are still washing up everywhere. Although I admit the damage does not appear to have been as bad as one would have expected, but again, not an expert.

2. For decades enviro-wackos wanted to close off the deserts to mining, off-roading, road building and development. Now they say nothing when tens of thousands of acres are covered with whirling, bird killing monsters and glaring solar panels – beneath which nothing lives.

First I've heard of solar panels as an environmental threat. If the worst windfarms do is kill some birds I think we'll somehow manage to get over it. It's not like the costs of other methods of fuel production aren't rife with secondary costs like wars in the middle east, mine collapses, oil spills, etc.

3. Rachel Carson’s hysteria led to the deaths of millions of children as the result of the P.C. B.S.S. DDT ban. The death toll continues to this day. More lives have been saved than by any other chemical invention in human history.

This is a classic BS argument from the antienvironmental right. DDT was never banned and continues to be used around the world. It was banned in the US. More lives have been saved, further, by soap ala Lister.

4. More birds have been killed by windmills than DDT ever killed – Not to mention the permanent habitat destruction or the fact the wind energy provides very little “net energy”. What little is extremely expensive.

Prices are coming down on wind, with greater deployment, economic efficiency will improve. Current cost per watt of energy generated is not necessarily a valid criticism of the potential of the technology. It's also important to note the hidden costs of oil and coal are also very high (wars, oil spills, environmental contamination, mining accidents, strip mining, etc).

5. I note Obama has spoken of vaccines being linked to autism. Although there is no evidence. Why doesn’t the left call him out…. I also note our facile,”

The only reference I can find to such a statement is here and from the video it appears Obama was quoted out of context. Certainly as a matter of policy the administration has not been anti-vaccine.

Huckster in Chief ” has no idea of when life begins – claiming that knowledge is above his pay grade.

Really? Authentic science knows when life begins – However, P.C. – B.S. Science seems more than a little fuzzy on the issue.

Authentic science points out that the distinction is fundamentally unscientific. Life does not begin, it is continuous. The sperm is alive, the egg is alive, the combination of the two is also alive. At no point does life begin, it has been an uninterrupted continuous stream.

The Crackpot Caucus

denialism — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 13:06:36 +0000

The Crackpot Caucus

Timothy Egan nails it, the Republican caucus is composed of crackpots and cranks.

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?

denialism Fri, 08/24/2012 - 09:06

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These American versions of Lysenkoism (and look what that did to the Soviet Union) seems to be rife in the GOP (Gross Old Party). Hopefully they will not succeed in November as they truly are sabotaging the future of this country.

oh Mark, you are way too optimistic.

No one in this world, so far as I know--and I have researched the record for years, and employed agents to help me--has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
-H. L. Mencken

If Romney with his magic underpants and his backward mates gain control of your country, you will not only have a weird sort of theocracy but your country will become a laughing stock as you step boldly into the 1950's.

An idle question: Has anyone actually tried to "back up" Akin with the "your system has to (immunologically) get used to the sperm" angle?

Lately I’ve begun to be glad that I’m old (and closer to not having any of it matter anymore).

Does this really event matter? Republican or Democrat they are both leading the United States into countless wars based on lies and fabrication of evidence. They constantly try to overthrow other nations and incite instability in various regions.

From Ragan to Obama there were Democrat and Republican presidents and they all had the same goal but went about it using different means. So does it really matter if one believes some crap and other not when in reality they're both as guilty as the other when it comes to foreign policy.

Mooney now agrees with us - Denialists deserve ridicule, not debate

denialism — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:07:13 +0000

Mooney now agrees with us - Denialists deserve ridicule, not debate

He had to realize Nisbett's framing was worthless and write a whole book on defective Republican reasoning to realize it but it sounds like Chris Mooney has come around to the right way to confront denialism:

The only solution, then, is to make organized climate denial simply beyond the pale. It has to be the case that taking such a stand is tantamount to asserting that smoking is completely safe, no big deal, go ahead and have two packs a day.

Sounds a little bit like what I wrote in 2007 when I pointed out denialists should not even be debated:

The goal instead must be to enforce standards of scientific debate, to delimit sharply what kind of evidence and argument is worthy of being listened to, to educate people about the form of pseudoscientific arguments, and when these arguments are proffered, to refuse to engage on the grounds they aren't even worthy of consideration.

Don't mistake denialism for debate...

The whole goal of denialists is to create the appearance of a legitimate debate when there is in fact no legitimate scientific debate to be had. What is the point of arguing with someone who denies the moon landing? Or evolution? Or that HIV causes AIDS? Or the holocaust? They get real angry when you mention that one as they feel it creates a moral equivalence between the types of denial. But the operative word is "denial" which is totally unrelated to whatever specific topic one denies. It's just another helpful distracting strategy, to try to prevent critics from using the legitimate word to describe their pathology - denial - by suggesting it's a wrongful comparison to one specific type of denial.

The solution to these problems is not in confrontations or debates or even necessarily careful fisking of their arguments every time they appear in the blogosphere. For one, it's somewhat futile. They're cranks. They will just go on and on, immune to any new data, scientific findings, or any evidence the real world can present. Worse, evidence suggests that repetition of false claims reinforces them even if you are debunking the claim. So debating them to supposedly educate those around you is not a legitimate reason because it's probably making things worse, not to mention legitimizing the denialist. It's a constant struggle I have to try to write about things in such a way as to reinforce positive true claims rather than repeat false claims with correction. It's natural, but it doesn't work.

Chris is right, the only way to address denialism is to call it what it is and ridicule it. People have to understand the difference between denialism and debate, and when they encounter denialism expose and attack the tactics. Denialism is an established strategy, likely ancient, honed to a science by tobacco companies, and now used by those attacking everything from global warming to evolution. Some of the same fake experts for the tobacco companies are now working for the global warming denialists. The way to win is to remember the way tobacco science was eventually beaten, and that was with exposure of their deceptive techniques, and public ridicule for denial of the obvious reality.

denialism Mon, 03/26/2012 - 09:07

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The only way to kill a troll is to ignore it.

@JPGK
The only way to kill a troll is to ignore it.

Sounds good, but I'm not sure it means much. The only way to cure cancer is to ignore it so that it goes away?

I think Mooney and Hoofnagle are right: The only way to kill the troll of science denialism is actively to ridicule it. If you choose just to ignore it, it grows bigger and bigger while you're not looking.

JPGK is right. Cancer is not a troll. Trolls feed on attention, any kind of attention. Ridiculing a troll is the same as praising one, it doesn't matter. The only way to deal with it is to ignore it.

Ridiculing people is not the answer to disagreement. If you present the facts and explain the science, and the other person still refuses to believe you, then the best response is to make sure that they do not spread their nonsense unchecked. Do not acknowledge them or their arguments, even in ridicule; do not debate them, as that lends credence to their words; but make sure that the facts are widely available and easily understood. Education is the only response to ignorance, ridicule will simply reinforce the perception of elitism and snobbery and drive people away from the facts you are presenting.

Not pure trolls. Cranks with a political agenda. Different kinda critter.

Mikey, Chris Mooney would disagree with you.

Education solves nothing. If anything, the evidence he shows is the more educated the crank, the more they use their knowledge to reinforce their arguments rather than examine their core beliefs.

It has to do with the way we think. More and more, we see the failure of reason. Humans think in terms of heuristics, coming up with answers to moral questions, ethical dilemmas, political decisions etc., based on emotion, culture, upbringing etc., and then they use reason to justify a forgone conclusion. Reason is actually a very weak tool to use to change someone's mind, because, sadly, most people are not responsive to it, and those that believe this kind of crap, or are susceptible to it, aren't arriving at these conclusions because reason led them to it. No, they latch onto the crankery that fits their ideology, then use all their powers of reason to dig in.

I'm going to write a post about this soon. But I think it's a mistake to think the psychology of denial is susceptible to reasoned argumentation. I was at reason-rally this weekend and couldn't help wondering why all those atheists bothered arguing with the Phelps protesters. You think they made a dent? They probably loved it! They live for it. Probably far more effective was Tim Minchin just ridiculing their ideas, ridicule is harder to fend off.

Ridicule is actually a powerful tool. When ideas are found to be ridiculous the emotional response to them is balanced against a desire not to be made a fool of. I think it's probably more powerful than reason against a crank or crank ideas.

Completely agree with this approach. Cranks like Ken Ham, Christopher Monckton or Deepak Chopra do not deserve to be treated as just having a different "point of view". They deserve to have their bullshit ripped to shreds. It's the reason I love going to Pharyngula as these lying morons are giving no respect at all. In a sane world, that should be the default reaction to their inane drivel.

One thing I slightly disagree with however, is that reason is always useless to persuade a denialist that they are wrong. They have been many cases of creationists accepting evolution or climate change deniers accepting the evidence for AGW. Some of these would have been pretty hardcore in their belief as well. So reason should still be used in the battle against reality. But yes, let's deploy ridicule a bit more.

Troll is entirely the wrong word for these people. I am sure there is some specific name from Asia, for the sort these type are, but the more common term we should be using is vampire. The distinction being that the "troll" is there to feed itself, and nothing else, and only needs to just sit there to do it. A vampire is feeding with the clear intent to create more victims, and use its powers to confuse and mesmerize people into doing what they want.

Hmm. Maybe Adze (a vampire that attacks mainly children), or Jiang Shi (a vampire that sucks the life force out of others, but doesn't have any real will/mind of its own). I suspect there are cranks that fit both. lol

In general when I rebut creationists in public venues--discussion boards, blogs, newspaper LTEs--my intended audience is not the creationist, it's the other readers, many of whom are not so embedded in creationism that they won't consider counter-arguments. In the mantra of the late lamented Internet Infidels Discussion Board, "Remember the lurkers!"

Recently I had a recent multi-letter exchange with a fundamentalist Christian creationist in the local newspaper. My letters were ostensibly addressed to him, but were written specifically with the larger community of moderate Christians in mind. The creationist's letters were not my target; he was merely a vehicle to speak to other readers. I wanted to educate them by identifying the fatal ignorance in the creationist's letters and pointing them to accessible resources, and also to subtly but unmistakably make him look ridiculous in their eyes. The informal feedback I've received suggested that it was successful for some, at least. Several people told me (unprompted) that they appreciated the resources and wondered aloud how my opponent could believe what he wrote.

"Troll is entirely the wrong word for these people."

Definitely this. Never underestimate the extent of peoples' stupidity. They're full blown cranks and no amount of evidence will persuade them to change their views.

Nisbet is the real virus here - before their BFF period, Mooney was a reliable and useful advocate of scientific accuracy and honesty, and he's mostly back to being one now; I will never completely forgive him but I'm grateful for any improvement.

Meanwhile Nisbet is worse than ever. With his recent "Climate Shift" report (the one saying green groups had access to the entire marketing budgets of giant companies that cut PSAs for them, such as Walmart and GE, and therefore they could never be outspent) I believe he is deliberately trying to confuse the global warming issue and "arm" the denialists in order to broaden the debate and make his own services (*cough*) as a messaging coach seem more relevant.

Like the Butter Battle Book.

I know it's cynical, but can anyone find another explanation for his m.o.?

Re TTT @ #10

It has always been my contention that Mooney was brainwashed by Nisbet over the phony issue of "framing". The discussions between him and, for instance, PZ Myers were a perfect example of much sound and fury signifying nothing.

The only way to kill a troll is to ignore it.

This remark strongly reflects the use of a false analogy to justify a wrong approach to major problems.

In the early days of the internet, "troll" did indeed refer to a type of person who simply tried to disrupt discussion boards with outrageous statements, in the hopes of provoking comically outraged responses from then-naive internet users.

Obvious, the way to deal with that type of "troll" was to ignore them.

However, even in the context of internet discussion discussion, the definition of the word "troll" has changed.

Denialists and others who make false statements, but with the intent to convince others or show solidarity with other denialists, not merely to disrupt, are routinely referred to as "trolls". However, while such individuals may use verbosity and repetition in an effort to shut down logical discourse, and may eventually need to be eliminated by a moderator, and while attention may be part of their motivation, they are not the equivalent of old fashioned "making trouble for the sake of making trouble" trolls.

"Do not feed the trolls" has gone from being good advice about attention seekers, to often being an unintelligent and/or insincere effort to shut down effective rebuttals of denialists.

In fact, a significant number of those who resort to wringing their hands and demanding "DNFTT" are themselves "concern trolls", consciously or unconsciously seeking to help advance denialism, by selectively demanding that those who rebut denialism be silent. Yet these concern trolls never do anything like making pro-science posts on creationist boards, for example, and ignore the fact the pro-science sites tend to allow dispute, while anti-science are usually heavily censored.

If we take the advice of the "DNFTT" concern trolls to its logical extension, even with regard to internet posting, eventually, every pro-science comments section will be filled with denialist comments that can't be "fed" with a rebuttal. Meanwhile, censored anti-science comments sections will also be filled with denialism.

Taken beyond the context of internet discussion boards, the idea harmful social movements are best addressed by ignoring rather than responding to them is patently absurd.

I don't necessarily use or promote "mockery"; it is often more effective to use a civil but rigorously skeptical style of rebuttal.

""Do not feed the trolls" has gone from being good advice about attention seekers, to often being an unintelligent and/or insincere effort to shut down effective rebuttals of denialists."

Plenty of this.

It's the basis and reason for the topic of this post and Chris' change of mind over "rapport" with denialists and why, before, his calls for "calm" were both wrong and uncalled for attacks on those giving the deniers the DISrespect they deserve.

And was also used by many fellow trollers or sockpuppets to do exactly this: stop the ridicule because it was working.

Thanks for this, Mark.

An interesting observation: when I drift into ridicule of denialism on my blog at Fortune.com, I get slammed for reducing the level of debate. I probably have gone too far on occasion, but I've also had to remind myself that we are not trying to reach the rational; we're trying to engage the emotional.

I wish I'd found your site sooner. Thanks for the good work.

Are Liberals really more likely to accept science than conservatives Part II?

denialism — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 12:33:08 +0000

Are Liberals really more likely to accept science than conservatives Part II?

About a month ago I asked if denialism is truly more frequent on the right or is it that the issues of the day are ones that are more likely to be targets of right wing denialism? After all, one can think of slightly more left wing sources of denialism like GMO paranoia, 9/11 conspiracies, altie-meds, and toxin fear-mongering. The mental heuristics that cause people to believe, and then entrench themselves, in nonsense seem generalizable to humanity rather than just those attracted to conservative politics. Why should those who identify as liberal be any different? Wouldn't they just believe in nonsense with a liberal bias?

Lately, Chris Mooney has been taking a different tact on explaining the apparent discrepancy between liberal vs conservative rejection of science with the suggestion the conservative brain is fundamentally different.

First of all, it's not a matter of education. Whenever people complain that disbelief in evolution or climate change or whatever is a matter of education, they're simply wrong. We can not educate our way out of this mess, and the problem isn't that the Republicans arguing this nonsense are any less educated. Chris agrees and cites evidence:

Buried in the Pew report was a little chart showing the relationship between one's political party affiliation, one's acceptance that humans are causing global warming, and one's level of education. And here's the mind-blowing surprise: For Republicans, having a college degree didn't appear to make one any more open to what scientists have to say. On the contrary, better-educated Republicans were more skeptical of modern climate science than their less educated brethren. Only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college-educated Republicans.

For Democrats and Independents, the opposite was the case. More education correlated with being more accepting of climate science--among Democrats, dramatically so. The difference in acceptance between more and less educated Democrats was 23 percentage points.

And it's not specifically education on or awareness of the specific topic, as self-reported knowledge of the topic resulted in opinions among conservatives more likely to be aligned against the scientific mainstream. Orac points out this is not an old phenomenon and maybe the Dunning-Kruger effect which we incorporated into our unified theory of the crank. This is the "incompetent but unaware of it" phenomenon, that the more incompetent people are, the more likely they are to be falsely confident of their own abilities and unable to recognize competence in others..

But the most fascinating part of this article is when Mooney mentions a study to see if liberals were comparatively incompetent in judging the science in an area of high liberal bias - Nuclear power. This would seem to provide an answer to the question from my earlier post, that is, are we missing an equivalent liberal tendency towards denialism because we're not asking the right questions?

It looks like my hypothesis of possible equivalence might have to be rejected ...

Mooney writes:

But there are also reason to think that, with liberals, there is something else going on. Liberals, to quote George Lakoff, subscribe to a view that might be dubbed "Old Enlightenment reason." They really do seem to like facts; it seems to be part of who they are. And fascinatingly, in Kahan's study liberals did not act like smart idiots when the question posed was about the safety of nuclear power.

Nuclear power is a classic test case for liberal biases--kind of the flipside of the global warming issue--for the following reason. It's well known that liberals tend to start out distrustful of nuclear energy: There's a long history of this on the left. But this impulse puts them at odds with the views of the scientific community on the matter (scientists tend to think nuclear power risks are overblown, especially in light of the dangers of other energy sources, like coal).

So are liberals "smart idiots" on nukes? Not in Kahan's study. As members of the "egalitarian communitarian" group in the study--people with more liberal values--knew more science and math, they did not become more worried, overall, about the risks of nuclear power. Rather, they moved in the opposite direction from where these initial impulses would have taken them. They become less worried--and, I might add, closer to the opinion of the scientific community on the matter.

Liberals therefore might start with an unscientific bias consistent with their political orientation, but the difference is education works on them. As they are more informed, they reject their rapid-response liberal heuristic conclusions and generate a more balanced view.

Upon reading the study I'm willing to accept my hypothesis of liberal/conservative denialist equivalence has taken a hit. But this is still just one question - Nuclear power. Also if you examine figure 4 which demonstrates this effect, the liberal perception of risk does not, with education, even approach the conservative impression of nuclear power. This suggests liberals are still excessively concerned with risk or conservatives are too dismissive. It's hard given these figures to determine if liberals acquire and appropriate amount of caution with education or they just have a trend towards being less alarmed by nuclear power with education.

I'm also still curious to see more of a survey on areas of clear-cut denialism and see the relative rates of denialism between the two groups. Nuclear power is a complicated issue and concern for safety given last year's tsunami in Japan seems to be warranted. Further, is it possible that liberals and conservatives both have a tendency to believe anti-science based on their biases, it's just that liberals have a higher capacity to recover and be educated to reject the false conclusions their biases lead them to? So, is it possible a baseline of denialism might exist between the two groups with a seemingly lower prevalence among liberals because with time and information they tend to reject denialism? There are still many questions to be answered here and I hope Kahan continues probing this issue so we have more answers.

After all the data so far suggests the conservative brain, as Mooney puts it, is irredeemably incompetent at accepting scientific information that conflicts with their bias. If true, a this represents a staggering problem. How does one fight anti-science when the brains of one's opponents are hard-wired to reject evidence?

It seems this view of conservative brains is now Mooney's belief, and that he's changed his mind to come around to denialism blog's strategy for dealing with denialism. After all, a few years ago there was some argument between Mooney and his colleagues that the anti-antiscience folks like myself and Orac were hurting the cause by insulting denialists with labels like "crank" or "denier". Now Mooney says:

On global warming, Santorum definitely has an argument, and he has "facts" to cite. And he is obviously intelligent and capable--but not, apparently, able to see past his ideological biases. Santorum's argument ultimately comes down to a dismissal of climate science and climate scientists, and even the embrace of a conspiracy theory, one in which the scientists of the world are conspiring to subvert economic growth (yeah, right).

Viewing all this as an ideologically defensive maneuver not only explains a lot, it helps us realize that refuting Santorum probably serves little purpose. He'd just come up with another argument and response, probably even cleverer than the last, and certainly just as appealing to his audience. We'd be much better concentrating our energies elsewhere, where people are more persuadable.

There is no point arguing with cranks. I agree. And now Chris Mooney does too. I feel at redeemed that at least one of my hypotheses seems to be holding up. The only effective strategy when one faces cranks and denialist ideas is to create awareness of the problem of denialist arguments themselves and to teach people, from an early age, not to respond to these forms of defective reasoning. If there is a broader rejection of these types of arguments, and promoters of denialist arguments are marginalized and excluded from reasoned debate for the cranks they are, then maybe we will have some chance of bringing public debates on science back into some semblance of sanity.

Study Cited:
Kahan, Dan M., Wittlin, Maggie, Peters, Ellen, Slovic, Paul, Ouellette, Lisa Larrimore, Braman, Donald and Mandel, Gregory N., The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change (2011). Temple University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2011-26; Cultural Cognition Project Working Paper No. 89; Yale Law & Economics Research Paper No. 435; Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 230. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1871503 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1871503

denialism Thu, 03/01/2012 - 07:33

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Education

I'm not entirely sold on the idea that the study addresses liberal denialism per se, rather than some combination of 1) ignorance and 2) risk aversion. Isn't liberalism generally supposed to be associated with low(er) risk tolerance?

So It's not clear to me that exaggerated estimations of the dangers of nuclear power connect up directly with anything that could be called an ideologically motivated thinking process, in a way that creationism or AGW-denial more obviously are. I think a comparable study on GMOs would be much more probative, since the anti-corporatist connections are a lot more visible.

I think there are at least three meanings of Education and people aren't clear in what definition they are using.

1) Education as measured by the study-i.e. general scholastic achievement.

2) Education from disseminating information about a specific topic. If climate scientists could educate the public better the average person would know that most heat goes into the oceans and that CO2 absorbs infrared but not ultraviolet radiation (as an example).

This wouldn't change the minds of those already committed to their crankery but would inoculate against new denialists.

3) Education targeted at learning how to recognize bad arguments. "create awareness of the problem of denialist arguments themselves and to teach people, from an early age, not to respond to these forms of defective reasoning"

scientists tend to think nuclear power risks are overblown

That is irrelevant; what is relevant is what the science shows, and it's not entirely consistent with the prevailing attitude among scientists. For one thing, scientists are often more familiar with the safest theoretical nuclear technologies than the average citizen, but those scientists are often naive about real-world implementations and the demonstrated corruption and corner cutting in the industry. Scientists will say that Fukushima isn't relevant because it's old technology, but it's a lot more relevant in the real world than they credit.

especially in light of the dangers of other energy sources, like coal

False dichotomy and strawman. No one doubts the dangers of coal, but that's not what they are comparing nuclear to. There are important economic and engineering questions related to alternatives that those scientists discussing the relative safety of nuclear are not particularly expert in.

The Sierra Club takes a hard-line stance against nuclear. That's not because they are head-in-the-sand Luddites ... their level of knowledge and sophistication and openness to valid arguments is in fact quite high.

@blueshift

Quite so ... most AGW deniers are grossly ignorant of the relevant facts; talking about whether they have a college degree is just dense. It also ignores what they studied in college ... majoring in economics or business is liable to leave one knowing less about climate change than not going to college at all, due to the social networks that one joins ... that's where most people get their information and their determination of what sources to trust. This stuff about "conservative brains" being "irredeemably incompetent" is foolish and intellectually dishonest, as it ignores lots of real world data, such as numerous "deconversion" stories.

I think the study you site is greatly flawed in its conclusion that the minds of conservatives are somehow hardwired differently than liberals.

It's not that conservatives have a different capacity to think through information, it's that they fundementally don't trust science...so of course just giving them more science isn't going to change their opinion. In their mind you are just presenting them with more information that comes from the sources they don't trust. Now if that info was presented by a pastor (or some other figure that they actually trusted)...you'd be in business.

As a conservative scientist, I have to say there's some really stupid generalization going on in the comment section here. But to get to the actual blog post...

We saw some remarkable liberal denialism in action during the Keystone XL debate here in Nebraska. We had a large number of people claiming a leak in the pipeline would contaminate the aquifer and contaminate drinking water for millions of people, despite the fact that for a multitude of reasons groundwater experts concluded that was impossible. Worse, we had one engineer with scientific training do a 'study' that ostensibly claimed the risks of the pipeline were being underestimated, but in fact contradicted most of the claims made by most of the pipeline opponents. And this is where I think leftist denialism is most at fault. Highly educated liberals who know their own side's arguments are fallacious may not use them, but they will refrain from contradicting them. This post claims that leftists will change their views in repines to contrary evidence, but who is going to provide them with that evidence?

Another area of leftist denialism is w.r.t. genetic modification, where (more in Europe than here) the left has greatly exaggerated the risks. And one sees it in the US in the embrace of wildly unlikely and/or exaggerated theories about the effects of pollutants - for example, BPA. Most leftist scientists know how to do rational risk assessment, and can spot tendentious data analysis, but they're strangely silent on the subject. Another area is the tendency, even when against the preponderance of the evidence, to take the nurture side in virtually any nature/nurture debate.

However, the one area where leftists have conservatives beaten is smugness. It never fails to amuse me that a BS in English has no problem calling a Harvard Ph.D. in the hard sciences a 'smart idiot'. I'm inclined to reciprocate, but omitting the adjective.

Well I for one am glad to see a that name-dropping (Harvard) and comparative degree-dropping (Ph.D. vs B.S.) are apparently adequate substitutes for evidence.

"First of all, it's not a matter of education. Whenever people complain that disbelief in evolution or climate change or whatever is a matter of education, they're simply wrong. We can not educate our way out of this mess, and the problem isn't that the Republicans arguing this nonsense are any less educated."

Well, college education is not a generic commodity. E.E. and business majors can generally avoid any exposure to biology if they want to.

How about a look at the split among people who have at least taken a 200 level life science course that could be expected to cover evolution?

Think two factors might be involved. On the liberal side the "tendency" is to look at risk factors are plausible, whether they are or not. The conservative side on the other hand has a combination of a) risk factors they ****absolutely**** believe in, and b) a total and complete denial of the actual level of risk in everything else.

This means that while there are *real* risks for something like nuclear power, the left will exaggerate it, while the right might flat out deny it even exists, but if you are talking about say.. sex education, then the "risks" of people doing it anyway outways the risks of teaching it, for the liberal, while the conservative will tend to exaggerate the risks of educating anyone, since, for them, the risk of sex *period* automatically outways all other possibilities.

In short, its a bit more complicated than simple denial. Its also about dogmas. And, yeah, the liberal side does have certain dogmas that crop up, whether it be, "natural is healthy, though we can't really define the term sensibly", or a literal, "it feels good, so there can't be anything wrong with it". It might be a "slightly" saner position than what is jokingly presented as, "It feels good, so God would be real unhappy if someone, someplace, was doing it.", that you sometimes get from the conservative side of things, but its still... not always true.

And, we also have to remember, "educated", can also mean, "Degree from some place that we, sadly, accept as accredited, even though it also emphasizes total nonsense, like faith healing, or scriptural interpretation of reality."

The Kahan paper is a bit squishy, coming from the viewpoint of lawyers and psychologists, but it was worth reading. I agree with hiero5ant in #1 that researching any one particular issue can't be generalized very well to the whole spectrum of liberal vs. conservative viewpoints. A lot of what comes to be the standard "party line" is contingent, I think. One influential person makes up his mind on an issue at some point, and the whole group adopts that view.

When I was studying atmospheric physics way back in the 1970's, if you had asked anybody in the field whether increased atmospheric carbon dioxide leading to higher temperatures was a liberal/conservative issue, they would have been dumbfounded.

The best advice when asked a question by a climate change denier in a public forum: Don't get angry. You will not change their mind. Attacking or arguing with them will make you look mean and other people won't listen to you. Instead take it as an opportunity to teach the science to the rest of the audience in a cheerful, upbeat voice.

"After all, one can think of slightly more left wing sources of denialism like GMO paranoia, 9/11 conspiracies, altie-meds, and toxin fear-mongering"

Those, however, are all fair game to be called idiotic freakish conspiracy theories.

The right wing ones instead get lauded on TV, radio AND IN YOUR PARLIAMENT!

This is quite a huge difference.

PS It's pretty lazy to call all those whacky conspiracy theories. GMOs are very evidently used for purposes other than the altruistic ones used to fluff the ideas for passing in the houses. RoundupReady crops sell far far more than any other GMO crop, and its only use is to lock you in to another product.

It isn't that GMOs have opportunities, but those opportunities are squandered. In much the same way as drug research has led to Viagra, a treatment for an old rich guy to maintain the illusion of youthful vigour in bed.

How much more health could be had if they put the effort in refining and selling Viagra into, say, HIV cures.

The mechanism is even one that everyone who loves GMOs or hates them agree: the company is *perceived* to have a *legally mandated requirement* to maximis profits. Pro-corporationists use it to excuse the vile excesses of corporations, anti-corporationists use it to point out their inherent sociopathy.

"But this impulse puts them at odds with the views of the scientific community on the matter"

Being part of the scientific community, this is bullshit. The problem is there aren't really enough facts available to find out the problems. They're all national security.

"(scientists tend to think nuclear power risks are overblown, especially in light of the dangers of other energy sources, like coal)"

Non sequitor.

Eating Radium is less destructive than drinking neat bleach, but we don't bother discussing them in relative risks.

"Attacking or arguing with them will make you look mean and other people won't listen to you"

Why doesn't it apply to the denialists who get angry ALL THE PIGGING TIME?

You are playing with yourself. It's making you blind.

Intelligence isn't a quota of wisdom, wisdom is being true to yourself.

Wow, I agree, there are problems with GMOs, but they are economic ones. GMOs allow companies like ADM and Monsanto to consolidate market share by creating dependence on their seeds, their chemicals etc. Questions of toxicities of bt toxin to other animals in the environment etc, might be relevant areas of concern. But the GMO conspiracy fear mongering that they are outright poison and are being used for population control and will turn your kids into zombies stuff is what I'm generally referring to.

I hope you're not defending 9/11 conspiracy theories at all.

Not really (IMO) economic, but ones pressed on as the only way markets are allowed to work.

Look at Jerry Yang. Refused to sell out to Microsoft because, although this would mean a spike in the personal profit of the CEO, it would lead within a few years at most to the death of the company, therefore the integrated cost over time outweighed the benefit in the short term.

Vilified, and ousted for DARING to think of the company rather than the sharebagging shareholders who don't give a flying fig for a company, only its share price.

As to 11/9 (please, get the dates in the right order :-) ) I have a rather different view, neither the one normally referred to as the crank, nor the one usually referred to as the ignorant (to the ones on "the other side"):

11/9 was two things, unrelated

1) Terrorists flying into a building sold under a design proposal that will survive such a collision

2) A building built to a design that wouldn't

There IS a cover-up, as evidenced by the actual facts (as opposed to the conclusions, as this one is, mind) proposed by the 11/9 cranks. Too many odd and unexplained breeches of SOP happened for this to be anything other than a cover-up of *something*.

What was covered up is someone(s) well connected gypped the taxpayer when building the towers by cutting corners and pocketing the cost difference. Safe in the knowledge that the buildings will survive anything ever thrown at a skyscraper before.

Nobody has EVER flown a jumbo jet into a skyscraper. Why waste good money on a scare that will never happen.

Uh oh.

IMO if the security forces had considered the scenario likely as opposed to just "playing the last war", they would have stomped on the attack well hard. They just didn't consider (like the building contractor didn't) it even REMOTELY feasible that someone would, as opposed to using the people as hostages, to use the plane as a bomb.

A conspiracy? Oh, I think there's enough evidence of avoiding SOP for no damn good reason.

A conspiracy to allow a terrorist attack? Nah. That's a seriously sick person who would do that.

"But the GMO conspiracy fear mongering that they are outright poison"

You know, that's the very first time I've heard that.

Now in a species that believe that "Jesus loves you, go to Hell", I can quite believe that there ARE people who believe that.

However, the ones labelled in the same pen as those people are far far more numerous than those, as evidenced by the fact I have never once seen that style of GMO paranoia. I don't doubt I could find someone saying it if I looked, but the point is you don't have to look to find people against GMOs who don't believe anything of the sort.

But they're still getting lumped in with them.

I ought to clarify. In post 17, point 2 is a conclusion. The actual fact should be:

2) A building sold on a design that would survive the impact that didn't.

That's a fact. Evidence is in the nonexistence of the twin towers and the marketing bumpf that is public knowledge when they were proposed to be built.

If this was a genuine oversight, then the wreckage would have been analysed like nothing ever before to find out WHY, on god's green earth, a design that engineers KNEW could manage the incident failed to manage it.

That the evidence of what happened was buried (literally!) is also a fact and inconsistent with an honest error in engineering design. It points very strongly toward the error being in foreknowledge, therefore of embarrassment.

These are conclusions, but ones that are both very believable and parsimonious.

Well I for one am glad to see a that name-dropping (Harvard) and comparative degree-dropping (Ph.D. vs B.S.) are apparently adequate substitutes for evidence.

They're not meant to be. They're meant to be a counter for snark.

Let's face it, when Mooney starts by calling his opponents 'smart idiots', there's no prospect for an intelligent discussion.

I'm just a lay skeptic, a gay atheist farmer and writing teacher. This topic fascinates me.

Most of my friends are "liberal" and I just can't stand to talk politics with them.

Yes, they all accept evolution, AGW, gay equality, etc.

But the liberal mindset, if there is such a thing, such generalizations are difficult to support, is a farrago of belief, superstition, ignorance and fear.

For starters: I was once part of the "organic" set, but the more I looked at it (particularly when investigating certification for my own farm), the more crazy it looked. It's full of liberal assumptions, bad ones:

--Natural, good; "synthetic," bad.

--Teh Toxins! Teh Toxins!

--No "routine allopathic medications" for animals; give 'em homeopathy and herbs.

--Icky chemicals, no good. Use poop instead.

--Micrograms of "pesticides," DANGEROUS! Our food is safer, better-tasting, more nutritious.

I've also realized it's absolutely pointless to try to argue about the issue. I just farm and don't talk about it.

There's a whole cult out there involving many of my friends. It starts with "Nature," involves "alternative, complementary" entities, digs "therapy" of all sorts, and ends with anti-corporate conspiracy-mongering and environmental apocalypticism.

I think there is a big difference with the way the conservative reactionary mind and liberal mind view sciences. On well established theories like evolution and climate change liberal minded people accept the much easier because the concepts are simple to understand for a college graduate and even HS graduates. But the reactionary conservative who can even understand these concepts refuses to accept them based on their right wing bias.

The point is liberals have to understand the theory to accept it as fact. But let's face complex pharmacologies is terribly difficult to understand even if you are a college grad and the science behind who drugs work is not easily available like it is with things like climate change. Not to mention that every category of drug is a science unto itself and even drug experts are not sure how many drugs work. So it's a more black box science to liberals that they have to take more on faith than understanding the science. Add the fact that drugs come from institutions that liberals don't trust and this creates the fertile ground around accepting non-traditional treatments.

Don't get me wrong I don't defend people on the left that put their faith in crackpot cures because they are hypocritical for accepting a non-scientific belief over the prevailing science. I'm just saying that you cannot really compare the way liberals react to clear cut and more simply scientific theories and more complex issues like pharmacology.

In many ways the perfect progressive for understanding and accepting science is the mainstream progressive attitudes of the French because they have a high esteem for science and scientists compared with the US. That's why they accept things like nuclear energy more even though that's even eroding a bit.

We saw some remarkable liberal denialism in action during the Keystone XL debate here in Nebraska.

The problems I have with the pipeline have "nothing" to do with pollution, other than the bloody stupid idea that we should use more oil on that, instead of reserving it for shit that we will need it for ever *after* we no longer use it in vehicles, like making the dash panel in the vehicle. My problem with it is the absurd claims of how many "permanent", never mind temporary, jobs it would create. Mind, I could be wrong, but I would *bet* that its a ten fold exaggeration, and that something between 60-80% of those jobs would disappear after it was completed. I mean, how the hell many people do you need to inspect every 100 miles of pipe, or run maybe a dozen pumping stations (never mind how many they will bother to keep, even if they should have more, like certain oil rigs...)? The second is the idea that a) the state isn't already in a state where they have more jobs in the industry than they bloody have people to fill them (one of the few industries this is even true about right now) and b) it would really have that big of an impact, given that we are already drilling more, and are buying "less" than 60% of our oil from outside sources, where we used to be.

In short, I think its an over hyped scam, used for politics, when most of the oil companies are otherwise sitting on dozens, if not hundreds, of existing permits, which they are not using (because it admitting that wouldn't present useful politics).

Most of my friends are "liberal" and I just can't stand to talk politics with them.

Yes, they all accept evolution, AGW, gay equality, etc.

But the liberal mindset, if there is such a thing, such generalizations are difficult to support, is a farrago of belief, superstition, ignorance and fear.

For starters: I was once part of the "organic" set, but the more I looked at it (particularly when investigating certification for my own farm), the more crazy it looked. It's full of liberal assumptions, bad ones: ...

Two things with this. First- There is an overlap. Its not all the "left" that falls for this total nonsense, though it is more common. I would say that, the key difference in "dogmas" that lead to such absurdity on both sides, and which overlaps into those who are more in the middle, is that the right sees things in terms of purity of the metaphysical, which somehow translates into purity of the physical, where the left sees things in terms of purity of the physical, which somehow translates into purity of the metaphysical. The problem with "both" sets in that they insist on including the nonsense called "metaphysics" at all.

Thus you get clowns on the right arguing that disease is a direct cause of failing to be sufficiently spiritually pure to avoid committing a "sin", such as sex. Thus, the disease is not a result of the physical behavior, it is a result of the "spiritual" one. The left.. will argue than ones physical purity is key, and that, perhaps, some diseases are a result of this impurity in the physical world translating across into the spiritual. The solutions are, as a result, opposite too. To "purify" oneself on the right means avoiding impure 'actions', thus impure 'thought', and thus disease. The left is about avoiding impure 'things', thus avoiding impure 'energies', thereby preventing diseases that arise from those physical impurities.

Both arguments are completely insane, irrational, and dead wrong, save by the shear accident that, indeed, taking poison will kill you, regardless of how "pure" your thinking, or what you where doing at the time, was. Which doesn't make the left's version any more rational, just marginally less dangerous, most of the time.

But, lets be clear here, we are talking about right and left in this context in terms of the delusions found most commonly on one side, versus the other. Being delusions, its not impossible for some of them to be found on the wrong side of the line, just less common. There is often a test given, to gauge ones political positions, I tend to test center-left. But, it needs another dimension, one where "center" is "skeptical", and the opposite ends are, "metaphysical purity", and, "physical purity", as described above. I suspect that you would find the "majority" of people falling every place other then "skeptic" on that axis.

Its not whether or not conservatives are more prone to certain crazy ideas. Its *what the root principles behind those ideas* are that differs. And, its why you are far more likely to find a Vegan, anti-GMO, organic, Yoga nut on the left, and an anti-public school, anti-stem cell, anti-contraception, NRA member on the right. Its not that some of those things don't exist on the other side, but they don't push the same buttons, in the same list of, "Stuff I believe because everyone else around me seems to, and that makes me feel good." For the rational ones among both sides (as much as I hate to admit such might exist in the right) they are all varying degrees of crazy, its just not.. politically expedient (right), or "PC" (left) to say so.

I kind of think that the tendency to revise one's opinion in the face of new evidence is a much greater explanation of people's views (and personalities!) than the liberal/conservative thing.

Is anyone studying actual people who have changed their minds on nuclear power or climate change, and figuring out what does change people's minds in a general way?

Since the question of the Keystone pipeline has been brought up, here's a link to a thread on Ed Brayton's blog which provides information about the risks of leakage from the pipeline and the environmental effects of extracting oil from the tar sands. It would appear, that there are some legitimate concerns relative to this enterprise. Here's a paragraph from the post and a link to it below.

TransCanadaâs promise that modern pipeline technology makes spills far less likely is simply absurd. They said the same thing when they opened Keystone I, the first phase of the project. That pipeline has leaked more than 30 times since it went online almost two years ago.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2012/02/29/tar-sands-oil-is-real…

With regards to the problem with the Japanese nuclear power plants, it should be noted that the plants themselves came through the earthquake in pretty good shape. It was the 30 foot tsunami that did them in as they had only provided protection for a 15 foot tsunami. Had 30 foot protection been provided, the plants might well be back in production by this time.

On the other hand, the 5.8 earthquake in Central Virginia caused the shutdown of the nuclear power plant at North Anna for some 6 weeks. According to an analysis by the NRC, this is double the the force that the plant was designed for.

Just for the information of folks out west, a 5.8 earthquake in the Eastern US is far more dangerous then a 5.8 earthquake in California because of the stiffer substrate in the east. I was in my basement in Falls Church, more then 100 miles away, and was almost knocked to the floor as the whole house, which is on a cement slab, shook.

It should also be pointed out that the Washington Monument, which was substantially damaged by the earthquake in Virginia has still not reopened and will require some 15 million in repairs. By the way demonstrating the difference between the East and West coasts of the US, the earthquake was felt as far away as New England, more then 500 miles distant. This would be equivalent to a 5.8 earthquake in the San Francisco bay area being felt in San Diego.

Mark,
Do doubt both parties have "many" issues but I have something else to discuss with you.

I have a medical supply retailer that is interested in supporting your blog. We can offer regular guest posts on current events that relate to your website or support you financially in exchange for a simple text link. We would even be interested in you possibly writing a post with a link to us in it. Could you send pricing also on what would it take to get listed under a new category like "Online Supporters" in your sidebar or a footer link?

My client, DME Supply Group, is not just a retailer, they are also involved in reaching out to those less fortunate... from the victims of Haiti's earthquake to those in need through the Samaritan's Purse program.

I look forward to hearing back from you and working together.

Sincerely,
David Patterson
Social Media Coordinator for DME Supply Group

In general, I hypothesize that a conservative trusts government funded research that advocates for greater government control (global warming) to the same extent that a liberal trusts private funded research that advocates for a private product (Monsanto).

In regards to the study discussed in the blog, I suggest that nuclear power is not the best test case in part due to the extensive government regulation of nuclear. That extensive regulation confounds other aspects of liberals compared to conservatives. Better areas would have been genetic modifications of food crops, organic, vaccines, etc.

Accurate enough, MikeS.

But in this specific case, for example, the USA under Bush and Saudi Arabia are both dead set against any government control. Yet still the scientists were showing evidence to the same conclusion.

Even for liberals who DON'T trust government, this is enough to make it evidence this is NOT government-funded research in the way privately-funded research is used.

The problem here is that you are working from the current, weird, definition of "conservative" in US society.

There is a right wing ideology in this country that controls one political party. It is not conservative in the traditional sense. This ideology demands relative purity, we all know that. This ideology is strongly associated with denial of AGW, evolution, cigarettes/health, HIV/AIDS, is rapidly adopting vaccine denial, and is the ideology of choice for almost all faith healers. Furthermore, as I will note again below, non-specific anti-science stuff like astrology, psychics, and so on are common in this group, they just aren't defining. This ideology has also moved into denial of, if not economic reality, at least accounting reality, with constant claims that we can reduce tax revenue and fund constant wars of aggression, by cutting low cost social programs.

If this is the definition of "conservative" that you start with, you are going to find that "conservative" associates with a lot of irrational beliefs.

GMO paranoia, 9/11 conspiracies, altie-meds, and toxin fear-mongering

First of all, no political party I am aware of, not the Democratic Party, nor even the Green Party, nor even to the best of my knowledge, the Revolutionary Worker's Communist Party, endorses all of these, or requires any of these in its candidates. Meanwhile AGW denial, creationism, aNd even old fashioned obstruction/denialism of public health warnings about cigarettes, are sources of proposed legislation for the Republican Party. And HIV/AIDS denial has always come from the right. Vaccine denial does not associate with left or right, and some right wingers have taken it up prominently.

Of thes examples you give, only 9/11 conspiracies can even be strongly associated with political liberalism (but only a tiny, tiny proportion of liberals accept it); if you don't think that some right wingers use alt meds and obsess over "toxins", I assure you that they do.

We saw some remarkable liberal denialism in action during the Keystone XL debate here in Nebraska.

You may be right, but it sounds as if what you saw was disagreement about ground water contamination potential, which is just one aspect of a complex public policy decision.

Most of my friends are "liberal" and I just can't stand to talk politics with them.
Yes, they all accept evolution, AGW, gay equality, etc.

But the liberal mindset, if there is such a thing, such generalizations are difficult to support, is a farrago of belief, superstition, ignorance and fear.

For starters: I was once part of the "organic" set, but the more I looked at it (particularly when investigating certification for my own farm), the more crazy it looked. It's full of liberal assumptions, bad ones: ...

This was one of the more obnoxious comments I have seen in a long time. I can only imagine what you say about your enemies.

Bottom line - your friends use organic methods, and you choose not to, so therefore the mindset of all liberals is a "farrago of belief, superstition, ignorance and fear".

In summary - if by "conservative" one means the weird Fox News/Right Wing Talk Radio/Tea Party/Religious right ideology that has taken ahold of the Republican party, then, yes, THAT mindset likely correlates with rigid denial of inconvenient reality. Whether the word "conservative" is appropriate is another question.

I would also note that extreme anti-medicine types tend to show authoritarian and manipulative traits; I would not expect them to necessarily adhere to a coherent, humane progressive political stance.

I'm a progressive who has problems with nuclear energy not because it is inherently unsafe but because of two factors that go against my personal and yes, emotional, values.

First, anything humans can do that has the potential of making waste that my distant ancestors will have to hire people to track bothers me--if this problem is solved my objections go away. I'm not a "sustainability" true believer, but I don't want my ancestors to be saying "what we're they thinking? We have to watch this crap forever because they wanted cheap air-conditioning?"

And then there is the issue of losing hundreds and possibly thousands of square miles of earth for use for tens of thousands of years. What is the cost then? Do we have that moral right? To take the land forever that has been taken in Japan and Russia? Really these are my issues.

There are a lot of generalizations on this website. For what it is worth here is mine: My anecdotally drawn opinions are that facing any life threatening or critical issue and thinking about all of the liberals and conservatives I've known across my life and if forced to choose only one group to face reality with (although I don't like that thought either) it is without a doubt and in a heartbeat going to be the liberals I place my bets with. I just see much less denial of basic reality in the people I've known who call themselves liberal than in the ones I've known who call themselves conservatives.

PS: we do need to be careful here however--we've never seen a left wing even as remotely far left in this country as are the conservatives of today. I'm not sure what we are even thinking about as "conservatives" today have an equivalent IN THIS COUNTRY on the left--I suspect if they were equally far left they would start sounding pretty crazy too.

"First, anything humans can do that has the potential of making waste that my distant ancestors will have to hire people to track bothers me"

It OUGHT to bother conservatives, too. You know, those people who whine about female healthcare such as the pill or abortion because this, to them, is refusal to take responsibility for their actions.

Well, what about your actions that lead to a 10,000 year legacy to clean up?

Do you have ANY data showing that 9/11Trutherism is a "liberal" form of denialism?

In my experience it is thoroughly bipartisan. It is commonly found among the Alex Jones / Rense / PrisonPlanet militia-paleocon far right. It is in fact so well-entrenched there that the topic came up several times during the 2008 GOP primary as an attack against Ron Paul, who is no one's liberal.

Mark,I'd like to complement you on this posting,its the best piece of satirical writing I've read for some years.
Thank you.

TTT, my statement doesn't need to assume conservatives aren't part or even a majority of 9/11 conspiracists. But it is an example where you find liberals believing in nonsense. Now if people want to say reality has a liberal bias, or that liberals aren't susceptible to conspiracy theories and denialism then I think it's a legitimate example where many liberals have wacky ideas about Bush causing 9/11 or letting it happen. There are degrees between the relative proportion of liberal and conservative contribution to any given form of denialism. For instance, birthers, virtually zero liberals buy into it. Global warming, the minority of adherents are liberals, like Cockburn, but mostly conservatives buy into the conspiracy theory. 9/11 and anti-vax it's probably equivocal, they come to it from different directions. From extreme libertarianism and paranoia from the right, to anti-semitism and anti-Bush paranoia coming from the left. The spectrum I think will trend towards even more liberals being cranky when it comes to GMO conspiracism, altie-meds, naturopathy, and etc. But we don't have good hard data, that's my impression from personal experience and from tracking different sources of denialism for the last 5 years or so. I'd like to see some hard data on this and I don't think it's been vigorously tested. That's why I keep reiterating this is a hypothesis.

This is relatively simple. Some portion of society has always been really interested in the questions of why are we here, where did we come from, what's the purpose of life, etc. That portion - in most of the history of man - has had the same options as those who do not naturally think of those questions, or who give them little thought: Religion as an explanation, non-scientific guesses, tradition, old-wives tales, superstition, etc.

We live in a time where most of the fundamental questions about life have answers. Real, solid answers.

Those who are interested in those questions are able to now know the answers to those questions, thanks to the advances of science. When you know these answers, you don't have to turn to religion to answer them.

Religious people - for the most part, and ironically - do not really have these questions. They are not motivated to find the answers because they aren't really concerned with the questions. So they don't look. They aren't curious. They don't seek out or come to understand the answers science has given us.

They make up the majority of conservatives. Liberals are the ones who are interested in these questions, and more so, really interested in the well-being of other people, unlike the religious people and conservatives who say they do but don't.

"Now if people want to say reality has a liberal bias, or that liberals aren't susceptible to conspiracy theories and denialism"

And if nobody wants to say that, your post is now redundant...

Look at the title you gave to this thread:

"Are liberals really *more likely* ..."

Note that the entire thread is talking about a situation that doesn't specifically preclude "all liberals", but out of the indefinite buy large number of liberals "all liberals" is a very very small possibility.

"and anti-Bush paranoia coming from the left."

If you were an environmentalist working for the Bush government, it wasn't paranoia, he WAS out to get you.

Myself I suspect I wouldn't mind the guy if it weren't for his family. Without them, he'd be flipping burgers and no danger to anyone. However, he's as thick as a yard of lard and has lived with entitlement all his life. And he was in charge of the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.

This is not a healthy situation.

"when it comes to GMO conspiracism"

When Monsato get laws passed that help them lock in even unwilling "customers" (whose land gets infected by their patented DNA, again: where is "conspiracy theory" wrong?

Sometimes the answer ISN'T "somewhere in the middle". Sometimes a compromise IS THE WRONG ANSWER. Sometimes there's right, then wrong and no shade of grey. And sometimes you need to think of whether you're ladling on a crank theory just because you want to pretend to be "moderate". Look up False Balance, kid.

Wow, I accept Monsanto's business practices are despicable, and that is the best argument against GMO. However, I think the arguments that GMOs are unsafe is specious. Unjust, maybe, in fact, almost certainly. But that's a law problem, not a science problem.

As a wise man once said, beware conflicts of interest: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_beware_conflicts_of_interest.html

Stephanie Erev

I've got a minor quibble with associating 9/11 conspiracy theories with the left. Take a look at whom the top 9/11 conspiracy gurus are endorsing for president: Ron Paul the most radicaly right wing candidate in view. Just because these people think Bush was an evil pawn doesn't make them left wing.

And a hearty me too on disagreeing with concerns about nuclear with AGW denialism. There's a whole basket of issues involved here which can't just be brushed away as irrational. There are native people who have been hard done by Uranium mining on their lands, the issue of subsidies and concerns about long term storage of nuclear waste (Chernobyl for instance hasn't been dealt with, just deferred for a few more generations at great expense). However I would agree that the reactors themselves are safe and I've always been a big fan of nuclear power. I'd get my Dad to drive me out to the Pickering Nuclear Power plant when I was a kid so I could marvel at it all. Nowadays however I favour renewables over nuclear.

One good litmus tests would be the GMO toxicity fear (seperate this out from disgust at suicide genes) or the antivax conspiracy theories. These are comparably irrational to AGW denialism but aren't as feverently held as you might think. I live in one of the most liberal towns in the UK and I rarely hear about them.