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U.S. Pushing Conservative Science
mozumder writes "Does abortion lead to breast cancer? Does condom use lead to increased sexual activity? According to the government, the answer is now inconclusive. The New York Times has a story on how the government is altering low-level scientific conclusions to satisfy conservatives. Will this lead to a mistrust of the government? Or is the government now correct?"
You see, there *are* consequences to *not* voting, Virginia.
What else is there really to comment on?
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
the majority of studies suggesting a link between abortion and cancer
You didn't post any links or references, so I'm curious. Did this "majority of studies" find a link between abortion and breast cancer, or a link between not carrying a pregnancy to term and breast cancer?
Disclaimer: For the last 20 years, I have been a legal resident that cannot vote in the U.S., and on every political placement test I've taken, be they from the right or the left, I have landed smack dab in the middle.(end disclaimer)
That no one ever mentions the idea of "Liberal Science" I find somewhat amusing (and quite frankly, a little biased). Do we all think that products like RU-486 sprung from the ground unaided? The findings of science have ALWAYS been slanted to advance someone's politics, be they environmentalists, cultural conservatives, radical feminists or bomb-throwing moderates such as myself."Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
What never, ever gets taught in SexEd is the concept of risk management.
The pro-chastity crowd try to scare teens into not having sex by showing examples of STDs, cervical cancer, and shouting about teen pregnancy. The other side keep on chanting the mantra that condoms make it safe.
What's needed, but seems to be rarely given, is advice that using contraceptives and being monagamous reduces the *chance* of pregnancy and/or STDs, but the *consequences* if you're unlucky are still severe.
The only thing that can be done is try to supply the facts in a way that some of them might sink in.
This administration is one of the most idealogically fixated administrations in recent history. Ideology always trumps reality in the decision making of this administration. Consider their positions on Iraq vs. North Korea. Consider their positions regarding our signed commitments and treaties vs. our Oil interests (Kyoto treaty). Or "Free Trade" vs. the interests of our Steel and Lumber producers. Or contraception vs. AIDS.
From what I can tell, the basic ideology of this administration seems to be: The interests of the United States of America lie with the interests of it's big companies, it's religious right, and it's rich and powerful.
Of course, now I can expect friendly clicks on my telephone and strange delays to the delivery of my email.
EnkiduEOT ( bomb uranium plutonium smallpox anthrax sarin mustard )
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
I hate to be a party pooper, but there actually may be something to the abortion theory. To be fair, however, it probably has little to do with the act of abortion itself.
The human breast does not reach full maturity until at least one pregnancy is completed. If a person has multiple abortions and never carries a pregnancy to term, their risk for breast cancer COULD be higher, but it may be because of never having children; the fact that the woman aborted all her pregnancies is just the method. She could just as easily be a spinster or nun, and carry the same risk.
It's shortsighted to automatically assume that science is bad, simply because it contradicts some concept one holds dear. Look at the research objectively, and judge it on its merits.
Knowledge is Good.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
How can there be any such thing as liberal or conservative science? If the new conclusions are consistent with scientific principles, then they are scientific. The end.
Oh, you don't like them? BFD. Science doesn't care what you think or what you wish to be true. And guess what -- sometimes science just happens to support the positions of the political right. Anyone who is intellectually honest will just have to accept that.
And I'm not just some right-wing Bible thumper. I happen to be an atheist and a strong advocate of science. But even I can see how the political left in this country has politicized science and it fucking pisses me off. Science isn't about trying to verify your political prejudices and the political left doesn't have a monopoly on science.
Two recent political leaders allegedly had
this nefarious habit:
-: Both came to power after dubious elections,
by non-electorial and irregular methods.
-: Both nations immediately experienced attacks
on famous public buildings.
-: Both blamed an ethnic minority before
forensics had any evidence.
-: Both led "witch-hunts" against the accused
minority.
-: Both suspended civil liberties "temporarily."
-: Both put the citizenry under surveillance.
-: Both maintained secret and clandestine
governments.
-: Both launched wars against most of the world.
One had a funny mustache.
Can you name the other one?
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
The sad thing is that, as the condom information permeates through the population, the message will end up as "condoms aren't any use" and a load of teens won't bother with them (amazingly they'll still have sex) and infection and pregnancy rates will go up. Tom
then guns must lead to more killing, no?
;-P
i'd like to hear the conservative gun crowd scream "it's not the gun, it's the criminal" and then in the same breath tell us it's not the teenager, it's the condom.
so which do we get rid of? condoms? or guns?
that personal accountability thing is pretty sneaky!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As someone wiser than me already noticed: This century, it ain't about xianity vs. islam or any that media bullshit. It's about fundamentalism vs. people-with-brains. There really isn't much difference between xian right or conservatives of the bush streak, or islamist terrorists. They're all bludgoning their world-view into other peoples heads with whatever tools are available, and moral is something that applies only to other people.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Which is EXACTLY what Bush is creating now. Before Saddam was "just" oppressing his own people. He's been happy being dictator of Iraq. Even since 91 when the US attacked and humiliated him he hasn't taken any direct retaliation on the US -- and Bush has been begging the CIA to dig up any evidence that he had to give a pretext for war, I think they would have found it if he had.
But if the tanks and bombs start again with the avowed aim of putting Saddam out of power and killed or imprisoned, he REALLY has no reason not to dispatch a few kilos of anthrax, smallpox, plutonium or whatever other goodies he's put aside for a rainy day.
Land of the free and home of the bullshit...
OK. For some reason, all the posts sem to say the same thing.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I seem to recall that Clinton's entire administration, including Al Gore, was composed of nothing but perpetual liars and thieves. How. about Bush Senior? Or Raegan (ROFL).
Are you even from this country? Nothing to see here, move along.
This isn't insightful, it's out and out bigotry.
"Bigotry" is defined as intolerance. Why the hell should I be tolerant of people who are distorting science, including medical science, in order to push their own political agenda?
All you're saying is that if I don't believe as I do, you're wrong.
I am saying that anyone who believes that scientific studies should be "revised" to fit a political agenda is wrong. And I am saying that anyone who would defend those actions is wrong.
I don't need to be tolerant of deceipt.
More than that, the same thing happened in the opposite direction under the Clinton administration. It is one of the reasons that Ayn Rand (and no, I'm not a Randian; I think her books are lousy) claimed that government-sponsored science cannot be science.
That said, this problem is everywhere. Take a look at science news this week, for example. Every week, at least two of their articles are directly politically topics, mostly on the liberal end.
Or try Scientific American. Just in time for a big Democrat Party gun-control push, they came out with a whole issue complete devoted to the source of terrorist and revolutionary-army weaponry.
I have no inherent reason to believe the latest results any less or any more than the results that came out of the Clinton Administration, "proving" that condom use reduced the incidence of STDs, or anything else of a political nature, for that matter. The real benefit (if you want to call it that) of all this pseudo-scientific politics is that it allows anyone to believe whatever they want, and draws all of society away from reality into a fantasy land.
I'll go one step farther and personalize the statement: if this is the first time that you noticed anything, or if this is the first time you complained -- then you need to rethink whether what you call "science" really is science.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
You say "start a war" like it's a bad thing. I, and many other citizens of the United States, believe that we should have finished the job 10 years ago. As long as Saddam Hussein is in power, Iraq is running scared. Which would you rather have, a scared animal (who believing he has nothing to lose, will stop at nothing) or a dead animal? I can't think of a worse thing than an opponent with nothing to lose by anything up to and including death.
Another decent comment modded down because it disagrees with left-wing opinion on Slashdot.
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
You guys are trying to mix political terms with science in a very odd way just to stir something up here. Anywhere else on here and this would be modded down.
/. editiors it seems, had a political axe to grind.
Conservative science means running the experiment twice instead of once.
It is not the same as conservative politics, which I think all this was supposed to be about. Unfortunatly the author, and the
So now we are left with a parent post that is not a good report on politics, not a good report on science, and is just not good reporting at all.
Or am I wrong? Is it more important to grind the political axe than to have honor in journalism?
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
The cost is already being passed onto me, and other American citizens: In the health damage associated with petro pollution. In the incoherence of foreign policy. In the instability in the Middle East and South America. In the sons and daughters sent to die to maintain our petroleum addicition -- and in the conscience and psyche of our sons and daughters sent to kill others to maintain our petroluem addiction.
Not all value is economic value. We are already paying for these failures... we might as well translate it to simple economic cost (and safeguard the environment while we're at it).
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
"The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth and kill!"
Freedom: "I won't!"
It's funny how people believe in capitalism
In the long term, one of two things happens:
PolluteCo gets wise, invests in cleaner technology, reduces its emissions, and so escapes the need to buy credits. End result: The industry as a whole is cleaner.
PolluteCo never wises up, remains dirty, fails to invest in clean tech, continues to pay for the credits. CleanCo continues to derive economic benefit from its clean technologies, so it maintains its lower prices and draws more of the market to it. PolluteCo ramps down production (due to falling orders) and/or eventually goes out of business. End result: The industry as a whole is cleaner.
Either way, pollution credits lead to the desired result. And amazingly they do so through clear, clean market efficiency. (For those who complain that the setting of credits is an intervention, I riposte that costs and prices are measures of desires, which lie outside the market paradigm. Why did everyone want a beanie baby? Not due to market forces.)
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
They often ask me what Japan can do to improve its economy, and I usually tell them that Japan needs to get all of its eggs out of the US Economic basket and spread them around, so if that basket falls, not all of the eggs will break. They often ask me why I don't like the US and I usually respond by asking them why they aren't afraid of George W. Bush.
Maybe you should advise them to fix their banking system and start dealing with their massive national debt (which, as a percentage of GDP, is more than twice as big as America's). Your platitude sounds meaningful - an American warning about America - but it is actually meaningless. Japan's major problem economically is the domestic basis of its economy.
Yes, if America collapses economically then Japan is screwed. So is the rest of the world. But one of the reasons America's economy is so important to the world right now is because Japan and Europe have not fixed their economies. America, South Korea, China, and India are driving world economic growth right now. But because China and India are mainly exporters, and South Korea isn't that big, only America can really help the rest of the world. Traditionally, when America was going into recession, we could expect European and Japanese growth to help counteract the American recession. But now, because Japan and Europe have been stagnant for years, it is left up to America's economy alone.
What's _pretty_safe_ about those figures?
a ts.html
98%-100%? That's a wide range isn't it? There is a big difference between 1 in 50 being infected and 0 in infinity.
1 in 50 FUBAR rate is a lot worse than skydiving when I last checked (1 in 3800 participants).
http://www.afn.org/skydive/sta/st
People nowadays seem to give more respect to leaping out of an airplane than to sex.
0.5-3% is pretty much in line of typical condom failure rates in various studies. Note for most contraceptive studies failure = pregnancy, not infection. Humans aren't very fertile, so it is likely that the barrier failure rates are higher. While AIDS isn't that infectious, hepatitis B/C and other dangerous STDs are significantly more infectious.
People who keep saying condoms = safe sex are irresponsible.
Hot-blooded youth need to know the true risks. Given a real idea of the risks some may indeed decide to make safer choices.
Saying they'll all be promiscuous anyway is wrong and patronising. Some sex surveys have indicated that in some countries premarital sex isn't that common. If the prevalent culture is risky and the risk/benefit ratio is bad, work to change the culture.
Typical nonsense from the repug dimwits. Your claim that Clinton is a draft dodger is demonstrably false, whereas the Bush AWOL business is directly documented in the archives of the Air National Guard. Lies are lies, however often you repeat them.
As for the lying under oath, well, yes. He did. He lied about fellatio. He didn't want to admit to a BJ. Big fucking whoop. As opposed to the mass of indicted felons in the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I and II juntas this is a relatively minor thing, IMHO. The most they ever managed to come up with after mercilessly hounding the Clinton administration for year after year was one single blowjob. That's it. And they still work that one for everything they can, despite the complete irrelevance of the issue.
Honestly, what a bunch of shameless twats.
And the fore fathers for te screwy election system. If it was decided by a popular vote, Gore would have won.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
The problem is having someone to vote for. While most people think of not voting as a form of laziness, there is also conscientiously looking at the cantidates and deciding that none of them deserve a vote. If 'none of the above' were a meaningful option on the ballot, I'd vote a lot more.
Currently, the best one can do is not vote at all, or game the system by voting for the most contentious rivals and hope they are caught in a hopeless snarl of infighting and don't get to do too much damage.
Currently, we have as close to none of the above as we have ever had, but to little effect. I should think that a vote resulting in a margin smaller than statistical error should send a message, but it seems that the recipiants are oblivious.
As for the issue at hand, this sort of revisionism is truly a cornerstone of the 1984 scenerio, but I have little doubt that Gore would have done it as well.
What you are encouraging your students to do is pseudo-participation at best. To truly participate, they would have to care and actually inform themselves on the issues. That is part of our civic duty - to be citizens and know what is going on as best we can and make the best informed decisions possible. What you suggest is about as bad as a parent that wants the TV to substitute for loving interaction with their children. As long as something is interacting, its called participation, right? Not.
The problem with your approach is that the randomness will be mostly effected by the amount of exposure they have had to a certain name or a catchy slogan. Advertising has a powerful influence.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
All through the '70s and '80s there was a push to fund the panicmonger scientists on the left - The new ice age (switched to global warming, but they will probably be back to Ice Age in a decade or so), Acid Rain (lakes that were highly acid in 1800 but were limed returned to becoming acid, but it was our fault).
The Hyperliberal New York Times is now upset that instead of giving THE LIBERAL PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC LINE they National Cancer Institute is actually looking at data.
Abortion is either a factor or a nonfactor in breast cancer. There have been studies validating both sides, but Bill Clinton will have the NCI say there is no effect, and GWB will have it say there is a clear causal connection.
Condoms are another problem. If they were a drug the FDA would ban them for not being effective or being too hard to use. "Those who used latex condoms correctly and consistently". But how many is that out of everyone who uses condoms? And what of things like HPV that isn't covered by the condom. That, and abstinence. was being censored by the previous administration.
Maybe there will be a page saying "We recommend the use of low-tar cigarettes and filters" and not making any mention of quitting or abstinence of cigarettes if a Tobacco state politician becomes president.
The government should stay out of this too. Where in the constitution does it give them the power to do this?
Ok, agreed.
FWIW: Religous people of all faiths, in general, tend to be nice people.
Some religious leaders want to make your choices for you. Some scientific leaders want to make your choices for you. It doesn't matter who's right about why or what the underlying motives are. What matters is that your choices are yours, and my choices are mine, and trying to take them away is wrong.
"Outright lie"?
This is a political belief. It can be right or wrong, but not true or false.