Slashdot Mirror
In the UK, a Victory For Free Speech
Forget4it was one of several readers to note that British science writer Simon Singh, whose prosecution for libel we have discussed on several occasions, has won an interim victory in a UK appeals court. "The landmark ruling will allow the writer, whose battle has become a catalyst for demands for libel law reform, to rely on a 'fair comment' defense of his statements about chiropractors. It will also strengthen the position of others — from science writers and medical professionals to bloggers — who face libel suits, as the judges made clear the court was not the place to settle scientific controversies."
Well, he can soon publish his papers, meaning you can make your own informed opinion.
Before, it was suppressed, not allowing anyone to make their opinion.
Trolling or just not reading the previous discussions? The issue is indeed about making claims without evidence to back them up: Singh observed that the British Chiropractic Association claims that they can cure a laundry list of medical issues but that there was no evidence to support this. The BCA responded by suing him.
Just to be clear, Dr Singh is not being "prosecuted for libel" - that's only for criminal offences, and libel is not a criminal offence, but a civil wrong. He is being sued for libel, in the civil courts, by the BCA.
And that, in a nutshell, is why you are not a scientist. The efficacy of any treatment needs to be judged by reliable trials, not by what some guy on slashdot said. What did Singh say? The libellous words were "there is not a jot of evidence that chiropractic works", or something to that effect. That's a pretty reasonable summary of the scientific evidence. I'll leave it to you to explain why it's better to respond to such a statement with a lawsuit than a study of your own.
[FUCK BETA]
Yup, the Court used that phrase. The observations on the side aren't legally binding, but they do give a pretty strong indication that the Court was not happy with the insane British libel laws which lead to (as the Court observed) attempting to settle scientific disputes in a court of law.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
It seems to me that if you're going to run a for-pay business that purports to "heal people" then you ought to have at least a little evidence to show that what you're doing is actually working. There is currently no evidence to support Chiropractic's "subluxation" theories. I used to live above a chiropractor who claimed that he could cure diabetes via direct spinal manipulation.
Many of them also refuse to acknowledge Pasteur's Germ Theory of Disease. I'd say that they could use a little bit of evidence on their side instead of hiding behind ridiculous libel laws. I wonder if this post will get me sued in the UK?
A copy of his original article, has been archived here: http://svetlana14s.narod.ru/Simon_Singhs_silenced_paper.html
Freedom of thought of absolute. Action can be regulated by government. Speech is closer to thought than action, and should be as lightly regulated as possible (e.g. forbidding threatening someone with physical harm). It is interesting that no society has explicitly recognized through law freedom of thought. I would guess this is because it seems obvious and what can government do about it anyway? With new technologies coming such as fMRI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fmri, we should be carefully considering these assumptions. Should someone be imprisoned (or perhaps subject to mandatory treatment) for having sexual thoughts about children? Should airline passengers be subject to brain scans to see if they are terrorists? This technology could well come sooner than society and law can adapt.
My SIG is a P226
Chiropractic is quackery. Of course, in the UK, they spend tax money on homeopathy, too.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So, you had a back rub and it felt great. Great, nobody is disputing that back rubs feel great. If you RFTA you'd see that isn't what this is about.
What this is about is claims by the BCA that a nice back rub can cure a laundry list of aliments that have no connection to you back whatsoever such as: ADHD/learning disabilities, dizziness, high blood pressure, vision conditions, asthma, baby colic, bedwetting, carpal tunnel syndrome, fibromyalgia, kinetic imbalance due to suboccipital strain (KISS) in infants and menstrual cramps.
If you can explain how a back rub can cure these conditions, then there's a Nobel prize in medicine with your name on it.
Yeah, because the skeptics are being suppressed by lawsuits for libel.
Oh, wait, they're not! Score 1 for free speech.
Just because we have to let you talk doesn't mean we have to listen.
Hello BadAnalogyGuy,
I'm not a scientist. But I do know that going to my drug dealer leads to feeling great.
There you have your 'bad' analogy
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
They don't need to be suppressed by lawsuits.
They are already suppressed by the AGW proponents' built-in safety clause that "anyone with a non-peer reviewed opinion can safely be labelled as crank".
Here's the pdf of the judgement
It's pretty damn scathing and looks like escalating this further up the court is pointless.
Hate speech, by definition is destroying freedom of speech. Also, note that hate speech is different than threats. No one person is targeted if someone said "I hate Mexicans" but if someone said "I'm going to kill Jose because hes a mexican" that is a threat, and Jose should be allowed to sue if the comment was not said in jest and the person had the means to kill him.
Why should we care what opinions people have? And why waste tax dollars on them? Same thing with "hate" crimes. If someone killed someone, thats bad and you charge them for murder, unless it was on accident. Why does it matter that the person killed them because they were of a different race? They are still just as dead. No one is more dead because someone didn't like their race. Are the Jews in the holocaust more dead than someone who died of old age? I think you will find both are equally dead. Similarly, someone has an equally broken arm if someone broke it in dislike of their race, or if they got into a fight.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Any false and misleading statement made should then be actionable. If you want to sue Singh for questioning chiropracty's scientific validity, then if and when it is proved conclusively to have no scientific value, every single chiropractor should be civilly liable, even criminally liable, for telling the public that it is valid.
Hate speech. Where did they dream that phrase up, anyway? What's wrong with having an opinion, anyway? Should a person go to jail if he says he doesn't like teachers? Lawyers? Police? I don't think so. Why should chiropractors enjoy protection? I think chiropractors are overly expensive, much like doctors. There, have I pissed off almost everyone yet?
Oh, of course not. If I want to piss people off around here, I'll have to point out that nerds and geeks are wierd, IT people are pains in the ass, developers are mostly eccentric twits, and most support personnel (the kind you call on the phone) are totally clueless.
Hate speech. What a sissy concept.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"It is extraordinary that this action has cost £200,000 to establish the meaning of a few words."
Right. If you offend some person or group, you can be bankrupted.
--
BMO
Not exactly. What he said was:
The BCA latched onto the word "bogus". They claimed that it implied intentional deception, that the BCA knew it didn't work but promoted it anyway. It's still stupid, of course. No one reading the piece by Singh will think he accuses them of not believing what they teach.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
But there is no evidence to support any healing properties. You can go get a massage and feel great, but as soon as the masseuse starts saying he has magical healing abilities and can cure illness then they have crossed the line.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So what? The BCA claimed its members could cure just about anything with their techniques, despite these members knowing they can't, and not having "a joy of evidence" to back up their claims. Because the UK has crazy libel laws, the BCA was trying to go after Singh personally, and not the paper that published the piece, which is the normal practice, seeing as the papers have far deeper pockets. The BCA also declined to do a rebuttal in the same paper. I.e. they know they have no evidence that will withstand the slightest scrutiny.
Furthermore, the BCA also contacted all chiropractors in the country, telling them to remove anything advertising or suggesting they could cure what they previously claimed. Why? Because members of the public seeing what was going on started going into these places collecting evidence to demonstrate they were indeed deliverately making false claims. So yes, the chiropractors are being intentionally dishonest when they sell there services claiming they'll cure viral infections, whooping cough, ear infections, et al, and they knew it. Let's be honest, if you are an expensive professional, you have a pretty good idea what works and what doesn't in your chosen field.
The initial judge was a disgrace, he chose to make the worst case assumption, twisted common word usage, and selected archaic disused meanings. I.e. he was buddying up with the BCA, probably via of local lodge membership (yes, the UK is rife with freemasonry favours). Any common sense in this would have had the BCA prove their methods with standard scientific methods, they're the ones making the claims of success going against current science and medical knowledge. Know any real doctors? Ask them what they think about chiropractors.
I generally agree with the GP. When you read his post, I believe there is an implicit meaning that you have missed.
It's not "dead is dead, what does the reason matter". It's "intentionally dead is intentionally dead, except for legitimate self-defense, what does the reason matter". If someone intentionally murders another human being who was no physical threat to them, the purpose of arresting and incarcerating (or executing) that individual is to remove them from society, thereby protecting society from a known murderer and potentially deterring others who would murder.
I don't understand the concern and fascination with what a murderer was thinking. To punish one more severely than another, which would mean one might get out of jail sooner than another, makes no sense to me. To choose whether I want a guy who would murder for money back on the streets, or whether I want a guy who would murder over someone's skin tone back on the streets is like choosing from which bucket of puke to drink. Both are equally unappealing. I don't really want either person to ever walk the streets again.
I'll clarify. You are saying that the motive for the crime matters to "Democrats". So to them, a guy who comes home to find his wife screwing another man and murders his wife is "more understandable" or "less punishable" than a guy who murders a member of a racial minority because he was a member of that minority. But guess what? Other people get cheated on by someone who claimed to love them, and they don't kill over it. Other people have totally inappropriate racism and sexism and other "isms" and manage not to murder anyone. Other people see a rich man walk down the street and envy his wealth and manage not to kill that man.
To worry about the murderer's excuses and justifications is madness. I don't care what the reason is. The point is, other people also have reasons not to like someone, valid and invalid, and they manage to deal with them peacefully. If someone cannot do that, there's something seriously wrong with them and society needs to be protected from them.
Like far too many laws, these "hate crime" concepts were written, voted upon, and made law without first addressing the above. That's a weak form of "might makes right" reasoning. The message is, we have the votes, we have the means, we have the political clout, so we're going to make this law whether we can justify it or not, whether we can answer the objections to it or not. Anytime you're asked to have faith in a concept by a person who cannot address your objections to it, because it sounds good to them but they can't give you a truly good reason for it, what you are dealing with is religion. Even if it doesn't call itself that. To give a hypothetical, let's say that, heaven forbid, a guy is driving down the road, visibility is very low, conditions are bad, and he hits a pedestrian that he honestly did not see. This person had no intention of hitting anyone, and is quite horrified that this happened. That's an honest accident. I would not call this person a murderer.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
In fact, it's the real scientists who are suppressed by lawsuits. The story of Roger Revelle and Justin Lancaster is a particularly ugly example.
Revelle was a conservative climate scientist, who waited quite long with asserting that the world was warming as a result of human actions. He was also the one who taught the climatology course Al Gore took in university. While he lay severly ill and dying, Fred Singer persuaded him to put his name to a paper he had authored, allegedly for helping with some details. Naturally, Fred Singer's paper denied AGW. But Singer was prudent enough to wait until Revelle was dead before starting to cite it (as a Revelle paper) far and wide. Revelle's last student and assistant, Jusin Lancaster, tried to call him on it, saying that Revelle told him he hoped the paper would "sink into the ground" as quickly as possible. Lancaster also disputed its authorship at a congress.
So what did that champion of free discourse, Fred Singer do? He filed a SLAPP libel lawsuit, of course. A student doesn't have the funds to stand up to a think tank veteran like Singer, although it wasn't for lack of trying. He tried to represent himself, and paid court costs for a while, until his wife convinced him to give up. He was forced to retract everything and forbidden from speaking on the issue. Fortunately for us, he did anyway. (Google Cache link, maybe Singer found out as the original's gone)
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
"The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen." - I don't know who said it but it seems the simplest solution.
Jonathanjk.com
There is currently no evidence to support Chiropractic's "subluxation" theories.
You are right, of course, but it would be more complete and accurate to say 'there is currently an abundance of evidence that Chiropractic's "subluxation" theories are false and misleading'. Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack; but in this case there is plenty of evidence of lack.
Some of them are just bad apples in order to lie to people.
But in this case, it's not a few bad apples, it's an entire professional organization that claims to represent chiropractors in Britain.
http://whatstheharm.net/chiropractic.html
"Had this recent ruling gone the other way, Singh would have needed to prove that they *knew* it was all lies which would have been nearly impossible."
Not in the slightest, he simply amasses an army of QUALIFIED doctors who can simply say "No way in hell can they cure a viral infection by adjusting your bones, PERIOD. Even they should know that from the basics of medical school" and that's the end of that bullshit.
I know chiropractors that claim they can cure illnesses by adjusting your back, I saw several after my accident.
Chiropractors are primarily quack doctors that only make money by giving never-lasting relief. The FEW chiropractors that do realize they only provide temporary relief and are honest about it are almost universally fucked by the moron quacks that make their spurious claims.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
How is non-medicine that works 'better' than medicine that works? Surely in the first case, we hvae no idea what happened and don't have much of a chance of successfully repeating it in the future. Surely if it worked, we'd call it just 'medicine'? If we have a situation where the only conclusion we can come to is 'non-medicine worked', we're basically saying 'we don't know what the fuck happened'.
You may have gotten fixed for less money than 'regular medicine'. However, I'm sure you know, this doesn't mean that chiropractice 'works'. And by 'works', I mean we can go and get measurable reproducable results across all sorts of situations, and then actually use those results to help people.
My point about placebos isn't that there's inherently bad or good, but that we should know it when we see it. Doctors use placebos all the time to treat people, and they don't try to dress it up as something different. Chiropractice (and a lot of 'alternative medicine', whatever the hell that means) does exactly that sort of dressing up. If they came right out and said "It works by placebo", most people wouldn't have a problem with that.
Sure, people get hurt by medicine all the time. The key difference is that medicine also makes a demonstrable statistically significant positive difference to millions of people daily. Sure, there's a risk with everything that we try and do to make our lives better, that sometimes it'll go wrong. Usually, that risk is worth taking if the upside is big enough. I'm just saying that for me, the risk of being injured by a guy with no medical qualifications practising something that's never been properly demonstrated to be anything other than the placebo affect is not a risk I'm willing to take. I am willing to go to the hospital if I'm sick though.
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog