Photographing Fairies

I recently had a run-in of sorts with the fine people over at Huffington Post over some comments I tried to post relating to an article they published by one Mr. Dana Ullman concerning what he termed "nanopharmacology". Nanopharmacology is apparently a term which relates to regular pharmacology at the level of nanometers (which is scientifically problematic in and of itself) which purports to be the explanation of why the scientific method generally cannot find any indication of validity to homeopathic medicine. I could write 726 pages of my opinions on why homeopathy is a fraud and at least 16 pages would have some element of fact to them, but it is not my intention to again debate homeopathy per se. Rather, I wish to address the issues of why democracy is a failure, human civilization is doomed and Fox News stays on the air.

First, let me say I am a regular reader of the Huffington Post and I generally appreciate its Liberal bias because it serves to re-enforce conclusions I have already reached even before reading anything. I have known for many years now that Arianna Huffington is something of a flake, like many unrepentant hippies, but I credit her instinct towards humane ideas as well as finding her dreamily hot in a "crap, I am already almost 50 myself" sort of way. So I am not completely surprised that elements of the website tend towards New Age themes and alternative medicine. After all, nobody is perfect. Anyway, I thought this article by Mr. Ullman was particularly egregious in its effort to unscientifically co-op certain concepts that are insurmountably obtuse to most people, such as quantum mechanics and nanotechnology, and use them to vaguely explain away the statistical failure of homeopathy to ever produce anything but anecdotal results. In this context, I wrote a comment on the article which the web administration type dudes declined to publish.

The reason they gave when they kindly responded to the email I wrote protesting this Stalinesque censorship was that my comments violated their rules of polite discourse. They citied my use of terms such as "irrational pseudo-scientific crap" and "malicious fraud" as being inconsistent with the carefully reasoned, fact based commentary that they desired to promote. Fair enough, but I would point out, as I reminded them, that free speech and the democratic process are often less than polite and the social obligation to respect extends only to respect of the right of the individual to hold and express an opinion, not to respect of that opinion itself. The Huffington folks are certainly under no obligation to provide a forum for my views and I concede their right to censor their own content, if not the wisdom of it, but that isn't even what I am really ranting about.

What got me thinking about the decline of the West is this tendency towards binary reasoning that afflicts much of what we think and believe. We often see truth as a straight line that runs from right to wrong, and we set up these bogus dichotomies in our minds such that if "A" is true "B" must be false, when "A" and "B" often have nothing to do with one another. What the hell am I talking about, you ask? My point is that just because the Pharmaceutical Industry may be a soulless enterprise that experiments on man and beast alike and actively seeks to obscenely maximize profit, even at the expense of limiting access to useful new medicines, that doesn't mean homeopathy is anything but a ridiculous load of manure. In my fevered imagination I have ferreted out this logical fallacy that I believe is challenging our ability to progress intellectually and the folks at Huffington post are a prime example.

Needless to say, any thoughtful and caring person will look at our civilization and find much to be desired. I have already postulated frequently that it is human flaws and not autonomously misanthropic institutions which create this reality, but whatever brought us here, a lot of people seek alternative paradigms for managing all aspects of human affairs. Alternate methods of governance have been experimented with throughout the centuries and we have settled on the models that seem to work least poorly, but political truth is not the same as medicine, engineering or other scientifically based endeavors. Whether wealth should be redistributed or health care should be universal are not really issues which can be resolved through observation and experimentation. Science cannot tell us which wars are moral, but it can tell us whether a homeopathically diluted solution of ground nightshade has any effect on nausea, which, by the way, repeated controlled experimentation suggests is not the case. I am concerned that the emerging lack of trust in common sense resulting from rejection of what some see as the sterile, industrial, capitalistic misappropriation of scientific process will just result in further enslavement of the poor and ignorant as they sink into the delusional morass of qi.

Ancient cultures were excellent scientists. They observed and repeated and verified. If by chance they happened to grab a certain leaf in a pinch to apply to a wound as a bandage, and that wound seemed to heal more quickly and completely, they would use that leaf again the next time someone was injured. If the results were repeatable, the medicinal properties of the leaf became an established fact of that culture. This was not some mystical revelation, but good old fashioned scientific method. It did not matter to what the culture ascribed the results; the plant's life force, wood sprites or some god's intervention; they harnessed reason and logic to anticipate the effects of the plant's usage. These were not kinder and gentler cultures; they were just people like us using every physical and intellectual resource at their disposal to survive in an indifferent world. And there is nothing kind and gentle about cancer or diabetes or the Ebola virus; they are vicious, implacable enemies, who must be bludgeoned into submission through force of knowledge, whether that knowledge involves lifestyle, medication or medical procedure. The supposedly primitive cultures that have preceded us would laugh at our growing reliance upon unproven and unverifiable cures in the same way we arrogantly smirk at their myriad ignorant beliefs.

So the Huffington Post can exclude me from the conversation because my tone is not civil if they like; it is, after all, a free country, but I am not going to pretend the Emperor has new clothes just because it brings psychological comfort to some of the desperate and disappointed people who reject the callous inequity, exploitation, destruction and inhumanity of a technological civilization that can and should do better. Retreating from the scientific foundation of human welfare because of the use of good ideas to do bad things is like rejecting your wife because she got raped; you only succeed in blaming the victim and destroying the very thing you sought to preserve. While it certainly could turn out that I, and the world's scientific establishment, are completely wrong and homeopathy is the greatest medical leap forward of modern human civilization, the probability of that is minute; however, the probability that the blind will lead the blind is great, and the probability that exploitive self-interest will masquerade as enlightenment to deprive the foolish and desperate of their lucre is enormous. In that respect, some things never change.