Are you guilty if you don’t know right from wrong?
Not being a lawyer, I don’t know if the inability to tell right from wrong is a sign of insanity. What I know of it comes from TV shows, movies, and written fiction. In those cases not knowing right from wrong is a symptom of either insanity or serious mental defect, which exempts the defendant for responsibility for their acts.
This line of thinking appears to be the line which the defenders of the President are taking. Trump said the phone call was “perfect”—that’s the one where he was shaking down the president of Ukraine for political purposes.
The Republican defenders are now casting this manipulation of the newly elected president of a vulnerable, militarily dependent ally as a proper exercise of diplomacy. No matter that this is preposterous—when you are forced to defend the indefensible, any weapon that comes to hand is better than nothing.
It boils down to, the President gets a pass because he didn’t know what he was doing was wrong. Based on a life in which Donald Trump has been largely unaccountable for his actions, this is perfectly plausible.
By now you have likely heard of a report recently publishedin theAnnals of Internal Medicinethat concludes “there’s no need to reduce red or processed meat consumption for good health,” as summarized in the Washington Post.
Beef: good (for protein), bad (for the environment, and probably for health), and kinda ugly (for aesthetics, if that matters)
Kaboom! Went the plunge of this report into the midst of what had been a gathering consensus about the many ill effects of a meat-heavy diet.
RECOMMENDATION: before you read the full Washington Post piece, first read its last two paragraphs (beginning with “Willettt says the panel’s conclusions and recommendations do not reflect the study’s findings . . .” – emphasis mine). They indicate that the editorial board of the Annalsetc. have spun the data in favor of the red and processed meat industry. In the editorial itself, the writers bury concerns about the environmental impacts of meat consumption in the final paragraph.
If you read the complete piece in the Post, you will see that the conventional nutritional wisdom, that it’s healthier to eat less meat, still has solid support among almost all nutritionists. Walter Willett pointed out that the study itself associates moderate reduction in meat production with a 13 percent lower mortality, and said, “if a drug brought down the number of deaths to that degree . . . it would be heralded as a success.” Certainly such a drug would be heralded as a success by a multi-billion dollar drug company. There is no multi-billion dollar profit-making enterprise to curb the consumption of red meat.
Once the media, always on the hunt for controversy, had taken up the report it went mainstream (as in the Washington Post, the New York Times etc.) accompanied by a glut of social media chatter. And then came a firestorm of backlash such as you can read of in a litany of objections from nutritionists, doctors, and researchers found on this page of WebMd.
The study is tainted by past ties of one of the research’s co-leaders to an industry trade group, the “International Life Sciences Institute” (ILSI)—a connection he did not disclose because technically the connection did not fall within the past-3-year reporting requirement for publication. While the earlier study—which incidentally was an attempt to allay health concerns about sugar additives—was published in December 2016 (less than 3 years ago), researcher Bradley Johnston said he was paid for the research in 2015 (more than 3 years ago). Ergo he was not obliged to disclose the connection because the payment fell outside the 3-year window. . . . Did he really think this was not going to come out? Did he really think that no one would suspect he might be eyeing future funding by the ILSI, having insinuated himself further into their good graces with the red meat study? Maybe in the context of runaway mendacity and moral obtuseness in the twenty-teens he saw no reason to observe the spirit of disclosure rules.
Lots of people—too many—like to pick and choose which science to believe. Don’t just blame climate change deniers. By “lots of people” I mean those who do not recognize the value of real natural science.
According to the New Yorker, astrology is on the rise among millennials who profess to believe in science. Seventy-four percent of Cosmo readers are “obsessed” with astrology. See:
The resurgence has been fueled by fake news/fake information/fake science on the Internet.
Of course there are astrology “apps.”
Some people are making a lot of money out of this. I wonder if they support fellow charlatan Donald Trump who goes by the notion of truth as something you repeat so often that people believe it.
We have desperate humanitarian crises in the Middle East and Africa, and people are throwing their money at astrology.
Is this harmless? No; first because it leads folks to believe in just anything that pops up on the internet that suits their fancy. If they can believe in astrology, why not space aliens? Secondly, it can lead people to make bad decisions—buy a car they can’t afford, marry a criminal, vote for a demagogue, put their children in a school that teaches evolution is a hoax . . . . You name it. All dangerous.
Science denial is a perilous road into the shadows.
