In lieu of something substantive

I love you, Canada.

Saskatchewan should keep the bullshit on the wheat fields*

Those of us in Canada (is that really only Sarah and I, and myself only for four more days?) may have noticed a few recent articles in the Globe concerning Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall's decision to finance clinical trials of the so-called Liberation Therapy, a treatment for multiple sclerosis that has been proposed by Italian researcher Paolo Zamboni (yes, really) which claims that some stuff about veins that none of us useless arts kids understand is the main cause of MS and the disease can therefore be treated with an ol' run-of-the-mill angioplasty (which is surgery to widen a blocked or narrow vein.) I've been waiting for a long time to post something about this, actually, but now one of my favourite pseudoscience-bustin' blogs Science-Based Medicine has just done a post about it, so I actually have confirmation on my original suspicion from a real live MD, Steven Novella (who you'll know if you took my advice and started listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast):

Zamboni is also getting attention from neurologists and MS specialists, who remain skeptical because Zamboni’s claims run contrary to years of research and thousands of studies pointing to the current model of MS as an autoimmune disease.

Novella also points out that it's possible the vein stuff is merely a symptom of the disease which could itself lead to a worsening of the other symptoms. However, the vast majority of the research (19 studies, "a pittance") comes from Zamboni's research team himself. Of the four published studies by other researchers that have tried to replicate his theory that MS sufferers have venal blockage, only one has found a significant difference between the veins of MS sufferers and non-MS sufferers.

The stories in the Globe are basically a collection of anecdotes from MS sufferers who usually "know someone" who underwent the therapy and felt a lot better after:

“I still have patches of numbness, those things won’t go away,” said Duncan Thornton, a Winnipeg resident who travelled to Poland for the surgery in March. “But I have more energy than I’ve had for 20 years. I can play with my kids, I can stand up and do dishes, I can live life like a normal parent.”

or sufferers who feel that the government is keeping a promising therapy from being offered to them:

“It’s our bodies. The government should let us see for ourselves if it works,” she said at a small gathering with other MS sufferers. “They want us to wait a few years, but this illness won’t wait. We see this as a way out, the only way out."

MS is, of course, a terrible disease, and all hearts go out to its sufferers. Unfortunately, there's a reason that there are people who go through four years of school and four years of training: it's because, contrary to popular belief, your average person doesn't know what's best for their body. Doctors do. Luckily, the Globe stories have done a fairly good job of keeping Big Pharma conspiracy theories off the pages, but this opinion piece (and a quick Googling) show that they are, of course, alive and well.

Unfortunately, none of these things are in any way scientific justification for the course of action Mr. Wall has steadfastly dedicated himself to: for fuck's sake, look at this quote from Mr. Wall in a July 28 story:

“I heard some stories in church,” he said from a caucus gathering in Saskatoon. “One member shared some stories of a spouse struggling with it and it really stuck with me.”

Um, excuse me? You heard some stories? In church?? This is how you make important decisions about healthcare? Mr. Wall has been framing his decision in many of the terms that purveyors of quackery use: the therapy is giving people "hope," the procedure is "controversial," people "deserve answers." None of this means anything, of course, because the way to give people hope and answers when it comes to controversial therapy is to follow the scientific method. The basic proof-of-concept that underlies rigorously funded clinical trials isn't even close to being there - Zamboni's results have been replicated (in reputable scientific journals, that is) by only one other researcher and three have failed. I'll leave it to Novella to close out:

My open plea to the MS community, especially those who are going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, is to keep this discussion about the scientific evidence. This is not the place for cheap conspiracy theories. I fear my plea will fall on deaf ears, but it never hurts to ask.

* OK, that title might be a little harsh, but I just woke up and it was the only mildly clever thing I could think of.

Links links links

Three things:

1. Ben sent round a previous episode of this RSA Animate series. I know that there are varying degrees of Zizek love amongst us (I myself am not always enamored), but this is certainly a thought-provoking lecture, if maybe a little overboard at the end.



2. I would guess you had all read this by now, but if not, George Packer's article on the American senate and its utter collapse is real good. It's a topic we all often pull our hair out about, but on top of all that Packer is just a really good writer and I have linked to articles of his before.

3. Ezra Klein just linked to this, and it is hell of dry, but if you like your explanations of the roles of the President's economic advisors like you like your martinis, then this is worth reading. The most informative part is the hypothetical NEC Gas Tax meeting, which does a good job of explaining a) who the heck all these people are and b) what the heck they're all doing in the White House.

That's it. I wanted to share, but I don't have much to add, so there.

On Freedom and its Composing Parts

Not to pull a Sol here, but this:

The silly controversy over the downtown mosque is excellent evidence that the conservative movement has become obsessed to the point of derangement with a right-wing version of identity politics that sees everything through the lens of the assumption that American identity is under seige. The modus operandi of the populist right is patriotic semiotics gone wild. 9/11 was a Great Awakening and Ground Zero is a sacred scar representing the sacrifice of those thousands who died in fire in order to shake the rest of us into recognition of the great existential threat to the American Way of Life. To refuse to resist the placement of a mosque next to the grave of those martyred in the Great Awakening is to fail to have heard the call, to fail to understand the battle now underway, to complacently acquiesce to the forces slowly transforming America into something else, into something unAmerican, a place for some other kind of people, a place not worth fighting for. It is to, as they say, “let the terrorists win.”

As Wilkinson notes, this mosque debate (which I assume we are all at least somewhat aware of) is more revealing of Culture War pathologies than it is informative or rationally constructed. More than any other part of the Culture Wars of the last two decades, except maybe the Prop 8 battle, the whole uproar shows that modern American conservatism is much more an identity than an ideology, an identity that worships and fears for a romanticized idea of American liberty. The tenets of religious liberty and property ownership are supposedly uncontroversial parts of American civic thinking, but to conservatives they are actually subservient to this concept. Liberals see these things as fundamental building blocks, without which American freedom doesn't exist, and therefore as important as the "freedom" itself. Conservatives are much more concerned with American freedom as a thing under attack, that needs defending, that cannot possibly flourish without vigilance, the kind of vigilance that may actually require subversion of those underlying principles. While someone who saw religious freedom as a core part of American liberty would be forced to cede that, even if they found Muslims repellent, they simply could not deny them a right to pray where they want, there is no such deference to principles within mainstream conservatism on this issue. Instead, it is the thing itself that is of utmost importance, not the things necessary to make and sustain it.

The same principle is in play in the gay marriage debate. Individual liberty and the right to pursue one's happiness are fundamental building blocks of the American system. The right to marry who you love, especially when it won't affect any other person in your community, is in accordance with these principles. But gay marriage seems to strike at a fundamental part of Americanness, as identified by social conservatives, this thing which is perpetually under assault.

What's truly frustrating, to me, is that opponents of either Lower Manhattan-based mosques or of gay marriage must then reach out to logically incoherent arguments to put some window dressing on their otherwise emotional reactions. I had dinner a few nights back with some folks, just after Prop 8 was overturned, and one of the people there said she opposed the repeal because she expected a future in which churches would be routinely sued by gay couples for refusing to marry them. When I pointed out to her that, like straight people, gay people probably don't want to force someone to marry them, and would rather have a nice, voluntary set-up, she told me that "Americans sue over everything", like "hot coffee on their laps", and that this would be no different. Now, I don't know how conservative she may be in all things, and we didn't really go far enough in the conversation, but there really isn't a lot of sense in this point. Churches that are hostile to gay people are highly unlikely to have gay people in them. I know that were I gay, I wouldn't want my officiant to sulk through the whole proceeding, under threat of lawsuit. Alternatively, the implication may have been that conniving heterosexual people could manipulate their rights to squeeze money out of churches that don't want to marry them, but there's a good chance that they would just be married anyway, and their elaborate plan would backfire.

I realize that, as a liberal person, it's very tempting for me to dismiss opposing arguments as pathological, or emotional, rather than rational. I usually try to avoid that kind of thing because it can just as easily be leveled at me: I know and like Muslims, I know and like gay people, and I want them to have the freedoms I have. But it's been hard, in the last, oh, let's say 7 years, to look at the Culture War and not come away profoundly cynical about the depth and philosophical rigour of social conservatism. Everything always boils down to a variation on the same theme: Here's America, here's freedom, here's a threat, and here's how we must defend freedom from itself. No matter that the threat itself is a feature, not a bug or a foreign virus, of the democratic system, and no matter that by considering it a threat, you're actually being threatened by what you seek to protect.