So on homeopathy and the regulation changes, they helped marshall the scientific objections, set up an online petition, got learned societies onboard to express their views etc. But this only happened because what they were saying expressed what all the scientists believe. Similarly with malaria and the idiocy being promulgated by homeopaths about malaria prophylaxis.

Whether or not an ex-LM-er would naturally hate homeopathy because they would see it as superstition and their strand of leftism takes “progress” as a general good is irrelevant to me. What counts is that they show people, in ways easy to grasp, that homeopathy is bollocks – and so it is.

But…. If they came out and said “Sense About Science believes there is no such things as global warming”, they would be laughed at, and have no chance of representing this as the view of the scientists, because most climate change experts would disagree with them.

So in the end, even if one were to accept that they are dominated by the sort of “entryist” tendency you are arguing for, which I think is rather far-fetched – do we really think Dick Taverne is a LM stooge? – if they are saying common sense things about X or Y, and getting it out there, I can only say “Good on ‘em”.

If he is, he’s welcome to them. I think I’ve made a reasonable case above, at least I think it’s reasonable and I don’t think that it makes much of a difference to my argument who else happens to put forward similar arguments. That would be some sort of guilt by association and I think the argument stands on its own merits.

http://www.naturalmatters.net/article.asp?article=2884&cat=219

Is Zac stealing your lines, Bootboy?

As we live by a loch, one of these friends asked me to get him a swan’s feather. When I asked why he said he’d been asked to bring ’something that goes a long way’ to one of his training sessions. I recommended Fairy Liquid.

I apologise, I’m new here. I hope I’m not repeating anything, but I’ll explain my reasoning in full. Nothing postmodern about it either.

“to elide them in this way is pure conspiracy theory”

I’m not eliding them, although I do think there is a plausible case for a conspiracy of sorts, a conspiracy where a relatively small group of people, acting in a reasonably coordinated way with a common agenda, exert undue influence on wider circles. Such ‘conspiracies’ are a completely ordinary and accepted fact of our society – they are a mainstay of the alternative health movement and the PR industry to give but two examples (think of all their ‘independent’ think tanks and the way that they routinely hide their underlying allegiances and present themselves as concerned independent experts). .

Leninism, and particularly it’s offspring Trotskyism, is pretty much the politics of conspiracy. Have a look at some of Trotsky’s writings – on popular fronts, the crisis of leadership, the transitional demands and pretty much everything else he wrote, not to mention Lenin’s ‘trade union consciousness’ and the history of the bolsheviks, particularly their relationship with the soviets in the 1918-22 period.

The strategy of many trotskyists essentially involves disguising their politics and inveigling themselves into positions of influence where they can act as a coordinated ‘hidden hand’ in guiding the decisions of much bigger and broader organisations. If you take a close look at many of the larger leftist campaigns in the UK in recent years (e.g. Stop the war, Anti-Nazi League, globalise resistance, Respect, UK social forum) you will eventually learn that the major decisions of these organisations are all made by the leadership of the SWP. They use a wide variety of techniques for exercising and disguising their influence – from packing meetings, to rigging agendas, monopolising key organisational roles, slates of hand-picked candidates for committees and so on.

The whole point of their front strategy though, is that you need to attract a whole load more people to the front than would otherwise join the party. To acheive this you have to invite lots of independent people to sit on committees and boards – “useful idiots” was Lenin’s typically forthright moniker for such people. The whole strategy depends on the key insight that it is easy for coordinated groups with shared agendas to dominate much, much bigger uncoordinated groups. It can be broken down into two distinct approaches – entryism, where your small coordinated group infiltrates an existing organisation and attempts to take it over from inside (c.f. militant within the Labour party in the 70s/80s) and popular fronts – where you form a seemingly broad alliance on a particular issue (war, globalisation, environmentalism, whatever) but do so in such a way as to ensure that key decisions will be made by the party.

Now, knowing all this about trotskyism, and having had the misfortune to have encountered it repeatedly over the last 20 years in political life, I have an astonishing amount of distrust for anybody and anything coming from a trotskyist organisational background.

In this particular case, when we’re dealing with the RCP, all of these strategies can be seen in practice.

* They repeatedly attempted both entryism and setting up popular fronts [1]
* They were a ludicrously disciplined bunch, with a dress code and even martial arts courses for members.
* They operated in a culture of secrecy to avoid imagined security service surveillance which involved all of them adopting multiple pseudonyms.
* They were always considered to be just totally weird by anybody who ever encountered them in practice – many people consider them a cult.

So, in this case, we have a group with a theoretical commitment to conspiracies, a practical history of engaging in exactly such conspiracies and one with an unparalleled level of discipline.

I certainly think that it’s worth considering the possibility of continuing conspiratorial behaviour in such circumstances. However, considering the fact that they also

* Underwent a political odyssey which took them from the authoritarian left to the libertarian right without any splits or the whole thing falling apart. Certainly unprecedented and probably impossible for a genuine political group to do.
* Went through a process of moving their political organisation into the background over the move from RCP -> Living Marxism -> LM -> Spiked, despite the fact that there was obviously a unified decision making system throughout (if there wasn’t how did they make the decisions without losing members?) and with the same cast of leading lights throughout.
* Regardless of whether they still form a coherent organisation, they undoubtedly closely share an ideology and have a very long and extensive history of working incredibly intimately together in coordinated and tightly controlled campaigns. Even without an existing organisation, I’d assume that such attributes would allow them to exert enormous influence on broader bodies of independents.

So, to sum it all up, I view the RCP/IoI/LM/Spiked group with an enormous amount of suspicion. This is compounded by the fact that their responses to such claims made in the past have struck me as singularly unimpressive – they normally cry “McCarthyism” and claim that they are being persecuted for their past communism (when they are actually being questioned over their current actions). This is the very same response that I have heard again and again from trots when you try to expose their tomfoolery. Stand up at a Stop the war coalition meeting and say “the last six speakers, scattered strategically around the room and all agreeing with each other, were all members of the SWP” – you’d get exactly the same dishonest response.

“I have no great knowledge of Spiked Online, although I have heard the mutterings about its origins in Living Marxism.. All I can say is that while I don’t buy everything on Spiked Online, some of what it runs strikes me as interesting and often sensible – Michael Fitzpatrick may be an ex-RCP member, but he has writen by miles some of the best reportage and commentary on the MMR vaccine / autism business. Have a look and judge for yourself.”

I also like some of their arguments. However, they mix the good with the awfully one-eyed and my big problem is that they present it all as a pure product of rationalism. I particularly dislike their polemic style and their propensity for adopting inaccurate generalisations against all who disagree with them. As an example, have a look at Fitzpatrick’s review of “The God Delusion” [2]

It actually reads like, say, a review by the sparticist league of a pamphlet by the International Bolsheviks.

“While the author correctly identifies the working class as the revolutionary force, his ahistorical ignorance fails to see that the soviet union was a deformed workers state”

See this from Fitzpatrick:

“When he seeks to explain the terrorist outrages of 9/11 and 7/7 in terms of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ he obscures the more important determinants of these events in the ideology of multiculturalism (part of the liberal consensus regarded by Dawkins as the pinnacle of evolutionary progress).”

He “obscures” my pet theory which is almost infinitely eccentric.

And this:

“In his comments on Catholicism, Dawkins reveals a combination of old-fashioned Protestant anti-Popery with the fashionable contempt of the liberal intelligentsia for any kind of religious faith. Thus he refers to the ‘semi-permanent state of morbid guilt suffered by a Roman Catholic possessed of normal human frailty and less than normal intelligence’ (p167). Discussing the consequences of clerical sexual abuse in Ireland, he suggests that ‘horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place’ (p317). These are statements of such unmitigated prejudice – and indeed absurdity – that it is shocking to find them in a serious book by a reputable author”

He doesn’t say why and it certainly isn’t obvious that such views are absurd or obviously prejudiced – in Ireland the idea that catholicism burdens people with a lot of harmful and pointless guilt would certainly not be considered absurd or prejudiced, even to those that might disagree.

And how about this:

“Dawkins’ patrician scorn for all forms of religion leads him to miss the essential point. Religious faith cannot be dismissed as a manifestation (or as a cause) of psychopathology or stupidity. Religion, in Marx’s words, is ‘the fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality’ (2). It is ‘the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not found himself or has already lost himself again’. In a world in which human beings are estranged from themselves and from others and lack control over their own destiny, they seek refuge and consolation in the worship of divine forces. Religion provides a distraction, an alibi, an evasion, an abdication of responsibility. The persistence of religion poses a range of specific historical and political questions which Dawkins’ resolutely ahistorical approach does not even begin to answer.”

Another case of “The idiot misses the most important point – my pet theory.” Although in this case, he gives us a poetic quote from Marx, to back up his assertions.

Then finally, and inevitably, he has a go at “environmentalism” (whatever he means by that)

“While Dawkins can readily identify common features between South Pacific cargo cults and the Christian churches, he seems oblivious to the religious themes of the environmental movement. Just like evangelical Christians, environmentalists preach a ‘repent, the end is nigh’ message. The movement has its own John the Baptist – George Monbiot – who has come out of the desert (well, Oxfordshire) to warn us of the imminent danger of hellfire (in the form of global warming) if we do not repent and embrace his doctrines of austerity and restraint (3). Beware – the rough beast of the apocalypse is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born!”

Which is just bonkers really. He’s having a go at Dawkins for not having a go at his pet hate in a book on a completely unrelated topic. Not only that, but his attack on environmentalism as a religion is absurd – does anybody actually consider Monbiot a prophet? I seriously doubt it. It’s just a very silly way to debate.

If you look at any of the rest of his stuff it’s chock a block full of the same sort of overblown rhetoric, straw man arguments and just thouroughly ideological (and a very eccentric ideology at that). For example, you can find him declaring that “As the smoker has become a pariah, sufferers from lung cancer have become the lepers of the twenty-first century.” – erm I haven’t seen any lung-cancer colonies recently, nor oncology wards full of people with bells, hell I’ve never even noticed anything but feelings of sympathy towards cancer sufferers in general.

Spiked and all the other LM fronts have a huge and consistent ideological bias. It’s easy to find environmentalists making dodgy scientific claims. It’s also easy to find corporations doing so (I give you the cosmetics industry for example). Spiked and the various LM offshoots go after the former and ignore the latter – who fund them.

“The money to run the show has to come from somewhere, of course, but then you can’t run a charity easily on just tin-rattling unless you’re the British Heart Foundation or Cancer Research.”

You still have to rattle a tin, you’ve just got to do it for a more select crowd. And considering the possibility that funders can influence research adversely is hardly a radical idea, it’s the major thing that undermined Wakefield’s credibility for example.

“And the critique of Sense About Science advanced by Sourcewatch basically comes down to “everyone has some sort of vested interest so we must mistrust them all”. How very postmodern.”

You’ve read that critique into it yourself though. Sourcewatch, to my eyes, just lists various interesting details about the organisation. Where an NGO gets its funding is an obviously interesting point for anybody who wants to understand it.

“For the record, as far as I can see Sense About Science’s vested interest is that it would be better for people to put their faith in evidence-based science, and evidence-based advice, than in cults, woo, snake-oil and celebs selling you nonsense. If that’s a vested interest, then as a professional scientist I plead guilty to having one too.”

Yes, but the question of what amounts to “evidence based science” is hardly uncontested. One of the nice things about science is that it’s open – you trust stuff because the method is transparent and explained in full. Similarly, in the case of a body which promotes sense about science, I’d like to know how it makes decisions about what amounts to “evidence based science” and which bits of nonsense to attack. In my opinion, a significant amount of the scientific nonsense in popular culture can be traced back to large corporations trying to sell stuff via the distorting lens of advertising. Why don’t sense about science go after “anti-wrinkle creams” or even treatments for “bloatedness” and all that mainstream rubbish rather than the easy ‘alternative’ nonsense?

Those are the types of things that one should ask of such an organisation before one trusts it, considering the fact that there are indubitably large numbers of dodgy think tanks and advocacy groups around. As this particular one has a great lack of information about how it functions I’m naturally skeptical.

The fact that it appears to be linked to the LM/RCP/IoI people makes me even more wary, especially when they appear to have been involved in both setting it up and running it.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,295888,00.html
[2] http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2503/

Detox products – surely there’s some Badscience material there Ben – even if you’ve covered it before. Mundus vult decipii, to quote SaS quoting someone quoting some Roman geezer.

Sense About Science are a long way from Spiked and the Living Marxism crew, and to elide them in this way is pure conspiracy theory. I have had some dealings with Sense About Science over the homeopathy business and they seem fundamentally sound to me. The money to run the show has to come from somewhere, of course, but then you can’t run a charity easily on just tin-rattling unless you’re the British Heart Foundation or Cancer Research.

I have no great knowledge of Spiked Online, although I have heard the mutterings about its origins in Living Marxism.. All I can say is that while I don’t buy everything on Spiked Online, some of what it runs strikes me as interesting and often sensible – Michael Fitzpatrick may be an ex-RCP member, but he has writen by miles some of the best reportage and commentary on the MMR vaccine / autism business. Have a look and judge for yourself.

And the critique of Sense About Science advanced by Sourcewatch basically comes down to “everyone has some sort of vested interest so we must mistrust them all”. How very postmodern.

For the record, as far as I can see Sense About Science’s vested interest is that it would be better for people to put their faith in evidence-based science, and evidence-based advice, than in cults, woo, snake-oil and celebs selling you nonsense. If that’s a vested interest, then as a professional scientist I plead guilty to having one too.

Not new and not much hope, in my opinion anyway. It’s a terribly good idea to apply the very same sceptical mind frame to groups that purport to promote a disinterested rationalism as to the obvious snake-oil salespeople. In this case, there is worryingly little information on their site about how the trust works – who makes the decisions and how, who appointed the board, who provides the dosh. To find out that stuff you have to look in places like this: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Sense_about_Science and this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1102753,00.html

A tiny amount of digging shows that this particular outfit (founded 2002 btw) has the grubby pawprints of the fantastically dodgy RCP/LM/IoI/Spiked sect all over it. Although they are a clever lot, they are bonkers on a very deep level (I know a few people who were on the fringes of the RCP in the 80’s) and probably about the least trustworthy folk that the earth has yet seen. People who migrate en masse from revolutionary communism to right wing individualism without breaking their stride aren’t normally very genuine in their beliefs and normally have hidden agendas (which are often as simple as “I want to be noticed” and “I’d like some money”).

It’s always worth remembering that, while promoting themselves as being purely motivated by scientific rationalism, they have conducted a fairly long running campaign, using fairly unpleasantly low tactics, to ridicule climate scientists who support the notion of human-driven global warming. Meanwhile, of course, they are happy to accept corporate funding. For example, have a look around spiked online and note the fact that they variously describe environmentalism as a “sect” and a “cult” – just utterly ridiculous terms to apply to what is, by any measure, a broad and loose movement, particularly by people who trumpet their own scientific rationalism.

The article even lists everyone’s favourite Gillian McKeith.

Happy New Year

Happy new year to you and yours – may T-shirts fill your partner with babies – or something..

Cheers!

Sorry it’s late.

oh, and good luck for the book – when can we expect for it to start flying off the shelves…?

Also, I’m sure you saw this already, but:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2524335,00.html

Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas!

If you didn’t exist, you’d have to be invented.

Thanks for 2006, and looking forward to more cr*picide in 2007.

Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.

Having said that, a Wikipedia writer says “There is some debate as to whether global warming increases the intensity and/or frequency of El Niño episodes.” So you can have it both ways!

I think anthropogenic climate change is a real issue, and it’s probably better if too much bad weather is blamed on it, than too little.

Any weather you don’t like or didn’t expect is bad news.

And a late Reader’s Bad Science Award provisionally to the organisers of Edinburgh’s Hogmanay party who, I understand, declared earlier today that it was “definitely on” despite the poor weather outlook, but have now decided it’s off. It’s the “definitely on” that bothers me, but it may have been misreported, or, frankly, misheard. To fellow readers in Scotland, may your chimney stay up tonight.