Author: Ophelia Benson

I thought this was quite interesting too. Just exactly what I thought, when I heard that bit of dialogue the other day.

A number of senior doctors have boycotted a debate to be shown after Channel Five’s drama documentary on Andrew Wakefield, because they say it is biased and emotive in its portrayal of the scientist behind alleged links between the MMR vaccination and autism…David Elliman, consultant community paediatrician at Great Ormond Street children’s hospital, said: “The film is very, very partial. It’s very much this one man against the medical establishment, who is the only man who listens to children and to parents – paediatricians don’t and GPs don’t.

Exactly. And it’s so tediously familiar – Lorenzo’s stinking Oil redux. The medical establishment is all wrong and they don’t pay attention and they’re stuck in their rut and they’re clueless and if only they’d listen and blah blah blah. Yes, if only medical research were done by parents with sick children, how much better everything would be. No possibility of mistakes or confirmation bias or fudging of evidence there! Oh hell no! And the more of this kind of dreck gets made, the more people believe ‘alternative’ medicine is better than the other kind. And of course more of this kind of dreck will get made, because it’s popular, and the entertainment industry tends to do what’s popular, doesn’t it. So public policy, health policy, people’s lives and health, get shaped by people who have no knowledge or expertise about the subject in hand, but just want to tell a good story, and look as if they’re crusading for something or other at the same time. As Neil Postman said, we’re amusing ourselves to death.

Well all right, if you can’t imprison and confine and repress women by putting them in purdah, or making them wear bags whenever they go outside, or slicing their genitals off, or smashing their feet, or whipping them with car antennas if they show a bit of hair or wrist – well hell, just get serious and stab them to death. That’ll teach them! I mean they’ve got a hell of a nerve thinking they get to go outside on their own, haven’t they. Who do they think they are? Adults? Responsible human beings like other people? Of course they’re not! They should be safely inside their houses, preferably in their kitchens, doing what women are supposed to be doing.

Oh, I know, that’s a bit unfair and intemperate. This sort of thing could happen to anyone, really, at least to anyone smaller and weaker and more knifeless than the assailant. But so often it is women it happens to, and then out come the warnings.

Detectives last night warned women not to go jogging on their own after a 39-year-old was left fighting for her life following a knife attack by a man believed to be responsible for murdering another female runner…’While we do not wish to be alarmist, we would ask that women who are jogging in parks or exercising their dogs try to be in the company of a friend,’ he added. ‘There are a large number of similarities between the two attacks. Both involved women of small stature, jogging alone through parks.

Try to be in the company of a friend. But what if walking alone is an activity you happen to enjoy and value? And what if the ability to walk alone is an ability you value even more? What if the idea of deciding to stop walking alone in parks makes you feel like a damn prisoner? What then?

You ignore the warning, that’s what, and go on walking alone whenever and wherever you feel like it, just as you always have. And in truth the warning is slightly absurd. Statistically, what are the odds of getting stabbed to death (or stabbed at all) in the local park, even if you are alone, even if you’re a tiny woman and it’s three in the morning? Not all that likely, surely. It’s not as if every park is stuffed with knife-carrying would-be murderers, just waiting for some fool of a woman to come toddling along, is it. No. There appears to be one out there, who has killed one woman and nearly killed another. That’s horrible and disgusting, obviously, but is it really reason to stop going into parks alone? Surely not. A great many more people are killed in car crashes every day, more people on foot are killed by cars every day, but people don’t stop either driving or crossing the street.

But the mere suggestion makes me indignant – as you may have noticed. Well I don’t like having murderers tell me how I get to live my life, even by implication. I’m nowhere near Clissold Park, or London, but that’s beside the point. This kind of thing is a meme, it spreads, it has to be resisted. I used to do a lot of hitch-hiking in my youth – all the way through my twenties, in fact. Alone. Of course I was warned against it, often by people who gave me lifts, and of course I already knew it was dangerous. But I did it anyway. I would have regretted that decision if anything horrible had happened, and I was aware of that when I did it, but I did it anyway. I did not want to be confined by fears. I wanted the adventure, I wanted the adventure that other people got to have, people called men; I didn’t want to accept limitations. So out I went, on roads and highways in the UK and Ireland and California. Defiantly. I had a good time, too. I had my adventure.

Ah, and just when I was talking about Rwanda, here is this story. How very interesting. The first time media executives have been convicted since the Nurenberg trials. Well that’s too bad, for a start, because Serbian radio was also used to whip up murderous ethnic hatreds. But it’s better than nothing.

In the first verdict of its kind since the Nuremberg trials, an international court today convicted three Rwandan news media executives of genocide for helping to incite a killing spree by machete-wielding gangs who slaughtered about 800,000 Tutsis in neighboring Rwanda in early 1994. A three judge panel found that the three defendants used a radio station and a twice-monthly newspaper to inflame ethnic hatred that eventually led to massacres at churches, schools, hospitals and roadblocks. The radio station, dubbed Radio Machete in Rwanda, guided killers to specific victims, broadcasting the names, license plate numbers and hiding places of Tutsis.

This is the kind of thing I always wonder about when free speech absolutists get wound up.

“The power of the media to create and destroy human values comes with great responsibility,” the court said in a 29-page summary of its judgment. “Those who control the media are accountable for its consequences.”…John Floyd, who defended one of the executives, a newspaper editor named Hassan Ngeze, denounced the verdict as a major setback for free speech and an invitation to dictators to close down any media outlet that is out of favor. “This is a terrible, terrible decision, the worst decision in the history of international justice,” Mr. Floyd said. “This is very, very dangerous. This case would have been laughed out of an American court.”

Would it? I hope not, but maybe it would. Fortunately we haven’t (as far as I know) had a situation like that, but if we did, would judges laugh a prosecution of such media executives out of court? US courts do protect political bribery and various kinds of advertising as free speech in the US, no matter how corrupt and harmful they may be, so…who knows.

Another interesting point at normblog. Well I can’t help it if he says something that catches my attention twice in three days. That’s just how things fall out sometimes. And really, this is something I’ve been mulling over for a couple of weeks or more, ever since re-reading Philip Gourevitch’s book on Rwanda. Longer than that really, maybe since last spring – maybe around the time Fareed Zakaria’s book on democracy was published. It wasn’t the book itself (which I haven’t read in any case) that sparked the pondering, it was the air of surprise in some of the reviews, that someone could make some shrewd and pertinent comments about democracy which recognized that democracy has some tensions or dangers. I was surprised that reviewers were so surprised – as if this were an idea that no one had ever thought of before, or at least as if it were an idea that everyone stopped thinking of once the universal franchise was in place, at least everyone to the left of General Franco. But surely it’s obvious if you think about it for about one quarter of a second that there is no magic law of the universe that prevents a majority from wanting to do things that are bad, oppressive, unfair, cruel to other people.

And that’s where Rwanda comes in. The population of Hutus was about 90%, of Tutsis about 10%. Not all Hutus wanted to slaughter all Tutsis, but a great many of them did. If there had been a referendum and they had voted on it and the kill-Tutsis side won, that would have been democracy.

Now to what Norm said:

If the liberation of the Iraqi people by military intervention was overall wrong, that needs to be argued independently of the circumstance that there were many in Egypt or Jordan or Syria who were likely to be enraged by it.

Just so. Those are two independent things. 1. X is wrong, or right. 2. X will enrage a lot of people.

Everything is going to enrage someone, and a lot of things enrage a lot of people, and some things enrage most people. But whether the things that enrage them are good or bad is a separate question. In fact one could argue that this is one of the drawbacks of democracy: that out of habit or sloppy thinking or good intentions, we mix up voting and public opinion and merit, as if they’re all more or less the same thing. Then we start to think that it’s arrogant and elitist to have an opinion that the majority of people don’t share. Then we start to think it’s arrogant and elitist ever to say anyone is wrong about anything – and then our brains turn to soup.

There was more of interest in that Start the Week than just the tv drama about the MMR issue. There was also a guy who’s written a book called A Dictionary of Idiocy, which is interesting because we have a little dictionary ourselves, so we’re interested in other examples of the genre. This one doesn’t sound much good though, frankly, at least not if the writer is anything to go by. He kept laughing too much, when nothing was all that funny. It’s always so embarrassing when people do that on chat shows and the people they’re chatting with don’t join them, but in fact get less and less giggly as they get more so. There was Stephen Bayley roaring with uninfectious laughter every few seconds and there was Andrew Marr talking soberly away, politely ignoring this odd behavior. Marr ended up saying the book was a bit of a grab bag – the laughter must have gotten on his nerves at last.

And then, much better, there was Jamie Whyte’s book Bad Thoughts: A Guide to Clear Thinking. Well you know what I’m going to say. How interesting! I thought. We’ve got one of those, only it’s called Bad Moves instead of Bad Thoughts, but the idea is exactly the same. And unlike the dictionary guy, Whyte sounds very sensible and clever. And there was a fascinating moment between the two of them…They were obviously bound to get on each other’s nerves anyway, because Bayley thinks opinions are great things and everyone should have more of them, quite regardless of quality. Just more and more opinions, livening up the place. Whyte thinks precisely the opposite, that people have a lot of damn silly opinions based on nothing and they should learn to do better. So he was explaining this line of thought and Bayley interjected with his own, and Whyte replied something to the effect that after all the truth is not a bad thing to aim at, and Bayley said – you know what he’s going to say. ‘But there’s no such thing as truth, is there?’ I waited eagerly for the reaction. There was a frozen pause – then Whyte said, with politely suppressed exasperation, that that would take us too far into philosophy but, etcetera. Highly amusing. And it’s in the archive, there for your listening pleasure.

Front Row yesterday included discussion of and a clip from a Channel 5 drama called ‘Hear the Silence’ about the controversy over the MMR jab and autism. Monday’s Start the Week also discussed the drama, with Juliet Stevenson who stars in it.

The bit of dialogue we heard on Front Row confirmed my worst expectations of what such a drama would be like. Oh great, thought I when Mark Lawson first described the subject matter. Plucky victimized parent takes on medical establishment and shows how wrong it is about everything, thus convincing everyone that MMR jab causes autism. And sure enough – the bit of dialogue was well-acted, to be sure, but it was also utterly predictable. Chilly rational uncaring doctor tells mother some boring facts about autism, passionate upset angry mother tries to convince c.r.u. doctor that the boring facts are beside the point, that her son was fine before the jab and autistic after it. In short, the doctor is repellent and the mother is highly sympathetic. Great. So the audience is manipulated into having an opinion on the link between the MMR jab and autism that has nothing to do with evidence or research and everything to do with the way a screenplay is written and acted. Um, is that really an ideal way to form public opinion?

They did talk about the controversy on Front Row though, and they talked about it more (having more time) on Start the Week. That’s good. But not everyone who sees the drama will have heard the discussion, naturally. And the trouble with this whole subject is that it’s not a situation where one course of action is dangerous and the other is safe. It’s not safe to omit the vaccination(s). So it’s difficult not to think that actors and screenwriters are not really the best people to be shaping the debate at this stage.