Talk about anything you’d like. Also, if you have good links to share — either your own stuff, or someone else’s — don’t selfishly keep ’em to yourselves.
Faux Real presents: Help Us Help Ourselves #1
New Blog: Junkfood Science
A blog by one of my favorite writers about fat acceptance and health issues, Sandy Szwarc.
New to the Blogroll: Ebogjonson.com
One of the sharpest writers about race in the blogosphere.
New to the Blogroll: Masculinity and its Discontents.
Abstract Nonsense: Six Policies To Reduce The Gender Wage Gap
Balloon Juice: Best Quote Ever From A Right-Winger About Iraq
I really don’t know why anyone would listen to me anyway. My credibility on this issue should hover between snake-oil and used-car salesmen- as recently as a year ago I was flaying Murtha.
Positive Liberty: Debunking Right-Wing Myths About The History Of The Separation Of Church & State
Sex And Race: A Guide To The Art Of Defending Racism
Racialicious: Regarding “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs”
Very interesting analysis of a racist Warner Brothers animation from 1943 (a video of the animation is embedded in the post).
Thus Spake Zuska: Republican Senator Claims Global Warming Is A UN Plot.
He also claimed that working against global warming is Idolatry. Is there any chance Senator Inhofe’s flight from reality will hurt him with right-wing voters?
Trash Talks Back: 13 Tips For Non-Fat People When Dealing With Fat People
Rape Trial – The Reality TV Series! With A Jury Of Celebs!
Whenever you think reality TV has bottomed out, it surprises you. (Curtsy: Bean.)
The Debate Link: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Does AA Lead To An Increase In Racism?
The Debate Link: An Anti-Heteronormative Reading of Leviticus 18:22
By the way, The Debate Link has been nominated for an award, and is seeking votes – you can vote for The Debate Link (or the other nominees) here. And Mozil Tov to David on the nomination, regardless of how the vote goes.
Contexts Magazine: Married People Have Less Commitment To Friends, Family and Community
On average, that is. Of course, all married “Alas” readers are outliers.
Living On Less: Consumerism Is Not A Sin
If the feminist movement can make it acceptable to be hairy, why doesn’t the anti-capitalist movement take a page from their book and work to make it acceptable to be poor? We’re poor already — the median income in the US is $23,000 a year — we just aren’t allowed to walk around looking like we’re poor without being made to feel ashamed. The feminist message that you are acceptable just the way you are is fundamentally a compassionate message. It’s not that you can’t doll yourself up if you enjoy doing so — though there are some who take that stance — what’s important is for you to have a choice: being dolled up is not an imperative, and it isn’t shameful to just go out in public looking like yourself. Movements like Voluntary Simplicity, which Levine discusses, are very much centered on the individual, not on society’s responsibility to address inequality nor to help make the outward appearance of poverty socially accepted.
Echidne: How Homophobia and Sexism Are Linked
Obsidian Wings: Must-Read Post About The Tampon Shortage Crisis In Zimbabwe
Box Turtle Bulletin: Family Research Council Cites Ludicrously Bad Research To Smear Gay Men
Official Shrub.com: The Female Gamer Archetypes
Matt Yglesias: The Green Lantern Theory Of Geopolitics
Willpower alone won’t make impossible wars winnable.
New York Times: Good Article About Transgendered Girls And Boys, And Their Parents
Damned Interesting: Study Shows, Most People Think They’re Above Average
And furthermore, in many cases, the problem is that they’re too incompetent to be able to recognize their own incompetence.
Lorielle on WordPress: The Growing Problem of RSS Feed Fatigue
The problem with my RSS reader is that if I miss a day or a week of blogreading, the posts I miss don’t disappear. They just build up.
Abstract Nonsense: Iranian Elections 101
The upcoming general election in Iran is a good opportunity to explain how Iranian politics works. In principle, there’s an elected President, right now Ahmadinejad. In practice, the President is a pretty face, whose job is to represent Iran internationally and exercise minor influence on policy. The American equivalent would be electing a pundit to make statements about world affairs and pretend to lead, while reserving real power to an unelected President.
Reappropriate: Spike Lee To Direct Film About 1992 LA Riots
Jenn wonders if the film will present a balanced portrait of Koreans, rather than ignoring or demonizing them.
Ezra Klein: Study Shows Car Drivers Drive Closer To Helmet-Wearing Bicyclists
Just goes to show, there’s a down side to everything.
NY Times: The $100 $150 Laptop
Remember the much-discussed $100 laptop, to be mass-manufactured and sold to third world governments, to be given away to third world schoolchildren? It’s now $150, but plans are going forward. I think this is a good idea, although obviously it’s not a solution to anything by itself. There is some interesting reader comments and debate on the Times site, as well.
Even The Devils Believe: Could Judge Roy Moore Swear To Uphold The US Constitution?
Equality Loudoun: Yet More Christians Lying About What Social Science Says About Gay Parenting
Obsidian Wings: Glenn Reynalds Thinks That Southerners Didn’t Hold Much Of A Grudge After The Civil War.
See also this post at Sadly, No! For someone who’s pretty smart, Reynalds is an idiot.
Weblog Tools Collection: Bloggers, please. Stop using Captchas.
They don’t work well, they’re often bad for accessibility, and they’re a big pain in the neck. Other than that, they’re swell.
Racialicious: More On Gwen Stefani and Racism
A topic I know is near and dear to some “Alas” readers’ itty bitty hearts.
NY Times: Review of the new production of Sondheim’s “Company”
Another the-cast-is-the-orchestra Sondheim production, from the same director as the recent “Sweeny” revival. The review makes the new “Company” sound excellent; the gimmick is put to good use to emphasize Bobby’s isolation (Bobby is the one character who doesn’t play an instrument). I hope the production is still playing this summer, when I’ll be in NYC.
[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, where we gave up freedom for ease. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]
Pingback: feminist blogs
“Right-Wing Econ 101: Consumers Registering Preferences Through Their Purchasing Choices Is A Good Thing, Unless They Do It In Support Of Decent Labor Conditions,” isn’t an accurate characterization of Harford’s argument. Putting aside the question of whether “right-wing” is an accurate description or just a dysphemism, Harford was speaking only of the pricing aspect of the “Fair Trade” approach, which, rightly or wrongly, is what most people think of as its most significant aspect. And it is first on the list of aims on the Fair Trade web site.
No one is arguing that expressing preferences through purchasing choices is bad in any circumstances. The argument is that at least one the goals consumers of these “Fair Trade” products are trying to achieve—paying above-market prices to select providers of certain goods—has unintended and undesirable consequences, and is therefore a bad way to pursue the underlying goal of raising standards of living in these countries.
And the general form of this observation—that interfering with market processes often has unintentional and undesirable consequences—applies to the rest of hilzoy’s post. Briefly:
There’s a pretty strong correlation between per-capita GDP and labor conditions. This is because at any given level of labor productivity, there’s a trade-off between labor conditions and wages. The current balance is probably more or less in line with the preferences of most of the workers, so chances are that conscientious consumers are likely to do more harm than good by insisting that the balance be shifted. Of course, they could insist that wages and working conditions both be improved, or that one be improved with no change in the other, but then that runs up against the problems mentioned in Harford’s original argument.
There are ways to help accelerate the development of third-world countries, e.g., direct foreign investment. But the merits of the “Fair Trade” approach are dubious.
Thanks for the link to Damn Interesting, Amp! (Damn Interesting, not Damned Interesting, BTW)
There’s lots of good stuff there, but then again, I’m biased, I’ve been writing for them for about a year. Good times.
Thanks for the link to Damn Interesting, Amp! (Damn Interesting, not Damned Interesting, BTW)
There’s lots of good stuff there, but then again, I’m biased, I’ve been writing for them for about a year. Good times. When I joined in I was the only woman of nine writers, and now we have three!
Sorry about the double-post. My computer was being weird.
Racialicious: Regarding “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs”
Link is broken.
[Thanks, Daran! I’ve fixed the link! –Amp]
Thank you for the link to our site. I just wanted to comment on one item you also linked:
“We’re poor already — the median income in the US is $23,000 a year”
This, viewed globally, is a sick joke. A substantial fraction of the world’s population gets by on a dollar a day.
So, since I am pro-market rather than anti-market, I would say: Fine, dress and live as you think best, and if this means refusing to emulate the ultra-rich, well, that’s probably a wise decision.
But just one question: What are the reasons that some countries are poor, while other countries are rich (making you, by the way, quite rich as well)?
Property rights. Rule of law. And — therefore — the free market.
Amp, I’m getting disconnects every time I try to post for the past couple of days. A short comment will get through, but a long comment won’t. Is this happening to other people? Could you look into it?
New Blog: Junkfood Science
Corporate shill alarm!
This site set my BS meter humming with widespread use of Republican catch phrases “sound science” and “junk science” along with prominent links to global warming denialist/tobacco industry advocate/Cato Institute scholar Steven Milloy’s junkscience.com and other similar (widely discredited) sites under the “Anti-quackery and Critical Thinking on Science and Health” heading.
To be fair I don’t know if this woman is definitely an industry lobbyist on this issue but a quick google search show’s that she’s a Tech Central Station columnist, Competitive Enterprise Institute member and National Review Online contributor so that’s a big, big hint she is. Even if she’s not directly a lobbyist then the links to JunkScience.com and use of Republican anti-science buzzwords are enough to discredit her to anyone scientifically minded.
Not someone to pick for an ally, Amp.
Bad Amp! Pick your allies from the approved list of Mother Jones contributors, or don’t pick any allies at all! The Thoughtcontrol Group has sent you memos about this before, you know.
That’s only part of the story. The other is that in Latin America, property rights have always been respected, and at least originally there was strong rule of law. But the local elites were too strong, so while the US and Europe consistently had downward redistribution of wealth, Latin America never did, instead producing aristocracies as powerful as Medieval Europe’s.
Most rich countries got that way by following a path of regulated capitalism, consisting of not just property rights and free enterprise, but also a social safety net and unions. Of all countries that can be considered first-world, only two developed using the growth-oriented methods that the IMF recommends, Singapore and Hong Kong. But these were individual cities that were never burdened with a hinterland to support; if Singapore were part of Malaysia, it would be only marginally richer than Malaysia now.
Daran:
I’m getting it, too. All of my posts have gone through, though, even #1 above, which is fairly long.
Also, I disagree with Abyss2hope’s take on the Green River case:
Ridgway didn’t say that he killed prostitutes because he considered them less than human. This was a man who claimed that he’d had sex with a corpse just outside of a car in which his son was sleeping, and that he would have killed his son had he awoken.
He said he killed prostitutes because it was easy to get away with it. This is true, but not because most people think that prostitutes deserve to die. It’s because street prostitutes are often alienated from their family and friends (except other prostitutes, who are afraid to go to the police for fear of being arrested themselves). Even if they aren’t, I can’t imagine that they’re very specific about telling people where they’ll be going and what they’ll be doing when they go out to work.
In fact, there’s considerable evidence that the public at large does care about prostitutes. The police spent about ten years and $15 million on the Green River case back in the ’80s, and then more when Dave Reichert reopened the case in 2001, several years after the last murder attributed to the Green River Killer. News of the case’s solution was celebrated in Seattle, and Reichert won a Congressional seat due in part to his role in the case. Norm Mailing’s decision not to pursue the death penalty (in exchange for help in locating bodies) was widely denounced by those on the right (and presumably by those members of the left and center who support the death penalty).
And I’m not seeing any lack of sympathy for the prostitutes who’ve been killed in England this month.
Alon:
Tell you what: You name a few Latin American countries in which you think property rights have always been respected, and I’ll tell you how property rights in those countries have been disrespected.
How do social safety nets and unions contribute to growth in per-capita GDP?
How do social safety nets and unions contribute to growth in per-capita GDP?
They forestall the socialist or communist revolutions which would absolutely destroy per-capita GDP.
It sounds glib, but I think it’s got a chunk of truth in it.
Robert:
Good point. But I wonder if it’s really true, partly for reasons I mention here.
Well, you’re certainly right that it’s not like the Red Army was coming up on the outskirts of Washington, and then they announced the prescription drug bill, and so everybody went home instead. It’s more subtle than that, and more on the front-end of the revolutionary/radicalizing process for an individual.
To use the dichotomization from your post, in 1917 Russia you don’t have to be a moron to think that violent socialist revolution is the only way to improve your society. In USA 2007, you do. Part of that is the fact that in the US it’s possible to implement at least part of the lefty agenda in a democratic fashion. Being able to make changes incrementally takes a lot of wind out of the sails of people who want to do it all at once, which buys time for capitalism to make the society still richer, which in turn allows us to afford a few more shekels worth of poverty alleviation, which buys more time…
After reading your post, we basically agree I think.
Jason:
I think it’s obvious that even bottom-decile folks in the US have more material wealth than a huge portion of the world’s population. So we don’t disagree on that.
That said, the dollar-for-dollar comparison you bring up is a bit odd, because the cost of living in the US is significantly higher. Even a poor person in the US has to come up with $300+ a month in utilities and rent to avoid homelessness, for example.
If you were getting by on $5000 a year in the USA, Jason, would you really feel that you weren’t poor in any significant fashion just because elsewhere in the world, $5000 a year would be about ten times the average income?
And you’re welcome for the link. I love your blog.
Morph:
I agree that all of that is good reason to view Sandy’s work with caution, if you’re not familiar with it. I don’t think it’s a good reason to dismiss her work unread.
I’ve read her work on obesity for years, and I’m convinced that she frequently does a good job with research and gets her facts straight. Even though I agree with you that she has some unfortunate connections to some genuinely terrible anti-global-warming nonsense.
Fat politics is interesting in this way; it frequently cuts across the usual partisan dividing lines.
For example, there is not much, if any, daylight between what you think about fat politics and what I think about fat politics.
Except that I’m more likely to punch somebody one of these days.
Brandon wrote:
If Harford really meant to speak only of pricing, then his criticism is based on false premises, and is therefore wrong. Fair Trade is about more than pricing.
What “most people” think is irrelevant in this context (ignoring that you have no way of knowing what most people – or, more to the point, what most consumers who’d consider buying Fair Trade coffee – think); and which item is first on the list you linked to isn’t relevant, because the other items on the list are still requirements for fair trade certification, and cannot reasonably be ignored when analyzing how fair trade operates.
The price I pay for Fair Trade coffee beans at Costco is set by the usual process of supply and demand; by definition, that is the market price.
There only way there could be widespread above-market prices is if we have some reason to think that the market for Fair Trade coffee beans is not operating efficiently (compared to the norm for the economy) – for example, if there were a monopoly producer or distributor of Fair Trade coffee beans, or if the government set a price floor on Fair Trade coffee beans. As far as I know, no such price distortion is taking place.
Hilzoy’s point is that no market process is being interfered with, in the case of Fair Trade coffee. If you think she’s wrong, you have to address that argument. In what specific way does Fair Trade coffee interfere with market prices?
Fair Trade requires that both wages and working conditions meet minimum standards (among other things). So, if we assume that monitoring is sufficient to prevent producers from lying about labor conditions, it can’t be the case that workers who get paid higher wages due to working for a producer of Fair Trade coffee will suffer worse working conditions as a result.
Now you’re simply contradicting yourself. Earlier you claimed that Hartford’s argument “was speaking only of the pricing aspect of the ‘Fair Trade’ approach”; now you claim that Hartford’s argument applies to consumers preferring products in which “wages and working conditions” are both improved.
You haven’t produced even a glimmer of a coherent explanation of the alleged harms of Fair Trade coffee. Would you like to try again?
There’s also an important distinction to be drawn between fat politics and fat science. I think that obesity is, if not unhealthful in a causal sense, then at least correlated with health problems due to a shared causal factor. I think that studies often understate or fail to show this correlation due to the use of BMI rather than body fat percentage or WHR, due to the inclusion of underweight individuals in the “Normal” category, and also due to the fact that many people can eat unhealthful diets and not get fat.
Why this is supposed to lead me to conclude that the government has any legitimate role to play in reducing obesity is a mystery to me.
How are you defining “underweight”? Most studies do separate underweight from “normal”; are you saying that the definition of “underweight” should be broader?
Morph, I am not a Tech Central Station columnist and haven’t been in a long time since they became a PR vehicle for PHARMA. Rather than shoot lame ad hominem arguments, I would urge you to actually read the content and scientific evidence.
They increase the level of income mobility, which ensures that any smart person can be an innovator, rather than only smart people born in the top quintile. They also ensure that a smart person who’s gotten into temporary trouble can get out with relative ease, making him a more productive person. They redistribute money downward, which helps consumption because the poor consume more relative to their income than the rich. They improve public health while reducing costs, making epidemics less likely, and also increasing net domestic product.
For example, countries with lush unemployment insurance make it easier for an engineer who’s lost his job to take some time to look for work in engineering. If he needs to find a job within the month to be able to eat, he’ll take a low-paying unskilled job instead, where he’ll be less productive since the worker he’ll replace will likely not be qualified to take an engineering job.
Remember: no country has ever developed by following the IMF model of growth, except two that had an immense advantage as predicted by Jane Jacobs.
And if that sounds too theoretical for you, the country with the highest labor productivity in the world is Norway, with a Gini of .30, a unionization rate that competes with the Soviet Union, a guaranteed minimum income, and tax receipts that amount to about half of GDP.
I loved the list of thirteen things not to say to fat people, and thought it was very well-said. But there’s one thing that surprises me, that I actually feel in a position to debate or at least query about despite my privileged non-fat status, in the list.
That’s, “Don’t tell us ‘you’re not fat’,” and the reason why I don’t like that one is because of the narrow venn diagram:
People who think they’re fat / People who are fat enough to run up against significant problems in society, accomodation, etc.
When a friend of mine says “I look fat,” usually they mean they don’t feel beautiful. Sometimes, they mean “I feel I must shrink my body in order to be beautiful.” Some of these people are actually significantly larger than norm; others are really not. Let me rephrase: of the people who have complained to me that they are fat, MOST are people I can lift when in good physical condition. (I’m… not very tall or muscular.)
There are longer ways to say “you don’t have to shrink your body in order to be beautiful; you are beautiful”; but most of the ones I know about sound like excuses.
I see why the wording called out in the article is problematic (it does not encourage size acceptance over about an XL or so) but I can’t think of a better way to answer that immediate concern without either sounding ineffectual or starting the whole lecture on fat acceptance to someone who may not find that modality helpful at the time. I’d love to hear suggestions, naturally.
Robert: It’s not a question of ideological purity, it’s a question of credibility. If you see a neat history blog but notice that it links approvingly to David Irving (famous holocaust denier) under “critical thinking” then you put a big question mark next to that blogs credibility. Especially if it’s on a semi-related topic like Israel-Palestine and again if the author has posted on a media website that’s known to be biased (for this example take Indymedia). That’s the issue here.
It’s not morally equivalent but Steven Milloy brings the same credibility to science (and especially to health issues) that David Irving brings to history and crucially is just as notorious/well known amongst scientists.
My point was that if you are a fat-positive/Palestinian advocate then articles by authors with this kind of question mark are not the ones you want to be linking to to try and convince people. At best people who notice the issues will take the articles (and your issue) with a pinch of salt, at worst an opponent can do a great deal of damage with them.
Sandy: I’m glad to hear that you stopped writting for TCS once they started paid but unacknowledged advocacy on an issue you disagree with. To be honest it would be better never to have written for a media organisation that is known for taking money from James Glassman’s corporate sponsors in exchange for publishing articles promoting their point of view.
You may personally be 100% honest but once you’ve worked for a Pay-to-Play media/lobbying company then I’m afraid your integrity will always be subject to question until the end of your career.
I’m not saying you’re wrong and I’m not disagreeing with the content of your articles. I’m saying that, as far as using your articles to advocate for the fat-positive movement goes, you are damaged goods because of your past links.
On the other hand I would be very interested to hear from you how a bona fide health-issues campaigner and registered nurse can provide approving links to Steven Milloy’s website?
As I’m sure you know, court documents revealed during the 1990s tobacco court cases show that Steven Milloy was secretly employed by the tobacco companies to run a supposedly independent astroturf organisation called The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (there’s your “Sound Science” catch-phrase again – BTW this front group was created by the same PR agency (APCO Associates) that came up with your other catchphrase “Junk Science”). As head of this organisation and a putative neutral, scientific referee, Milloy was paid by the big tobacco companies to try and discredit scientific studies showing the dangers of tobacco by any means, to spread disinformation and generally to run interference against any attempt to bring in legislation on tabacco.
Milloy has now brought this same scientific integrity and honesty to the issue of global warming. He actually started on global warming at much the same time as he did on tobacco, although at that point he was only paid by the tobacco companies and wasn’t yet on the payroll of coal and oil interests – the idea was that trying to create public scepticism of scientific research in other areas would help Milloy and the big tobacco corps to foster scepticism of cancer links with smoking and so to avoid costly regulation.
At best linking to Milloy shows lack of knowledge of industry attempts to avoid regulation by painting health concerns as hype and hysteria. It also calls into question whether you have the scientific judgement to criticise scientific studies (if you take Milloy’s commentary at face value).
At worst, given the way that the corporate anti-regulation campaigns on smoking, pollutants, global warming, etc are interlinked and jointly funded, it could be taken as an indication that you are the same kind of operative as Milloy, involved in a different part of the same campaigns.
Oh great. I was just over at Steven Milloy’s website to see what on earth he was up to now and it turns out that he’s added health/fat issues to his list of topics. I guess there is an industry campaign to avoid regulation of trans-fats, etc, and we’ve got some corporate sponsored disinformation/propagana minefields to avoid to maintain credibility on fat-positive issues (at least health wise, not on fatphobia).
Oh, how cute, Steven Milloy even links back to Sandy’s new blog (low down on the left hand bar).
Morph, you say “once you’ve worked for a Pay-to-Play media/lobbying company, your integrity will always be subject to question until the end of your career.” If every writer was judged by what the management of publications their work appears in did at some later point in the future, then EVERY SINGLE writer in this country would be forever discredited because every media in this country is promoting crap and has sold out. If you’d read my blog you would understand that everything in the media should be seen as a commercial because it’s all sales.
I refuse to ever sell out or compromise the truth in what I say to people to make a buck, hence no one will publish the stuff you’re seeing on my blog.
All your comments demonstrate is an inability and unwillingness to read the actual content and science and think for yourself. You’ve decided what you want to believe, mind closed. Experiential thinkers find it easier to just take sides, make facts an us-and-them issue and political so they don’t have to think or take a stand that might be unpopular with their friends. But not thinking or understanding science just leaves one vulnerable to every bogus scare claim that some special interest cares to toss out there. When things are based on nothing more than beliefs, people tend to not only live in fear of everything, but be awfully negative and nasty because they come to believe everything around them is out to get them. What a sad way to live, rather than understand that the world, their food and their bodies are really pretty special and that things are good.
It appears that you would prefer NO information have reached anyone in the public about the myths of obesity. Because THEY WERE THE ONLY PUBLICATION AT THE TIME THAT WOULD PUBLISH it. I tried all of your liberal publications, I approached every publication and media in the country, I approached every “size acceptance” organization, and they all wanted no part of it or science. During my obesity series, while I was receiving crap from every source under the sun, liberals to science organizations and hundreds of hate letters from fat-bigots — fat and thin —, Steve was a tremendous support because he is about the soundness of the scientific research on its own merits. Like his site, mine is for people willing and able to think critically, question, learn and not just believe everything they hear. It is turning out that the science and medical communities, drawn to my blog thanks to Steve, are actually more open minded and receptive to the truth about weight and food/fat fears and coming along in their understanding of size acceptance than the fat groups are. Your comments about trans fats are simply embarrassing yourself — if you went to original sources and looked at the actual scientific evidence, you would understand that it’s the bogus fears about trans fats that are being overhyped and marketed, not the truth.
You clearly have no idea what the costs to one’s career are to take a stand for the truth and try to help people. I strongly resent judgments based not on the work and its quality, but because you don’t like someone’s politics. What are you doing that puts you out there and sacrifices your entire livelihood? Because the truth counters every special interest marketing and profiting off lies: the healthcare, insurance, government agencies, food politics, health food and health, HAES and size acceptance groups (yes, they “don’t want to be seen as excusing fatness”) and makes one unemployable and unpublishable in this world where it’s all about marketing and not the truth.. I am doing this to help people and am not making any money and have been living on my savings for years. Of course, it is doubtful that for all of your talk about people not making a living by getting paid for anything, you have put forth any money to support such work.
I will keep my blog going for as long as I can afford to survive because I refuse to ever sell out or compromise the truth in what I say to people. People deserve to know the truth and not just what someone who has some agenda is trying to sell them. And unlike you, some people really do care to learn about the truth they’re not hearing anywhere else and are sick of being lied to.
Sandy, undeclared lobbying and corporate PR is not something that TCS did “at some point later in the future”. It’s what it was set up to do in 2000 by DCI Group (a DC lobbying company), it’s the company’s entire purpose. It did it before you started writing columns, while you were writing columns (which I note ended a little over one year ago, not the several years you claim) and it’s still doing it today.
I know damn well from my literature review that Steven is lying about the field I’m doing my PhD in so it’s natural for me to suspect that he’s open to lying about other fields as well. I don’t know the details of the trans-fat issues. I’m not pro-regulation on them. I do know that I wouldn’t trust something in a JunkScience.com article on the subject unless I’d done a thorough review of the academic literature on the subject myself.
Your defence of someone who is proven in court records to have published disinformation for money for the tabacco companies and to have knowingly been trying to prevent action on one of the major health issues of recent years does not speak well for you.
Like I say, I agree with you on the substance of your articles but I’m not just interested in whether articles agree with my point of view, I want accurate articles from reliable sources so that the issues I advocate for are not embarassed by revelations of bought and paid for commentary. Like I said, as far as I know you could be 100% honest, rigourous and correct – BUT – you have strong connections to people and publications that are known for playing fast and loose with the truth on science. That’s very dangerous for an advocacy movement.
Steve was a tremendous support because he is about the soundness of the scientific research on its own merits.
This is probably one of the most farcical statements I’ve read this year.
I will keep my blog going for as long as I can afford to survive because I refuse to ever sell out or compromise the truth in what I say to people.
Good for you. I hope you have an impact. It’s just that you won’t be one of the sites whose links I email to people, because my scientificly minded friends would look at your connections to Steven Milloy and TCS and treat the article (and later stuff I sent to them) as potentially dubious. (They’ll look because tobacco industry and anti-global warming catch phrases like sound and junk science will smell bad to them).
Just wanted to say hi and introduce myself. Glad I found this forum.
Hi there everybody. I’ve been reading this forum for any lengthy time now and not posting anything. I gave in and thought to say hi there and hanging out right here will help me out a ton!
Hey girls! I’m new and happy to be here, you all seem like a friendly, accepting bunch. Until now, I’ve resisted posting on other forums because I always feel like I wouldn’t be accepted there, or be discriminated against in some way.
The only other location I’ve felt comfy putting up till now is really a fat acceptance forum at happyfatgirl.com. Nicely, now which i discovered this location, I am expanding my horizons and searching forward to obtaining to understand you all! :)
http://happyfatgirl.com/image.php?u=2&dateline=1271214925