Sat 29 Jan 2005
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an excellent article on the Lancet study and the way it was ignored in the American news media.
Daniel Davies notes that the blogs have just as bad:
Other than that, the response in the world of weblogs has been exactly the same as the rest of the media; in the immediate aftermath of the report, half-assed attempts to rubbish the survey, or links to same. Then, when this didn’t work, just pretend that it’s all been dealt with and move on. Maybe say “I’ll get back to you on that” and never do. After a few months of this concerted inattention, many pro-war voices have even decided it was safe to use the old slogan “well Iraq is certainly a better place because we got rid of Saddam”, when this claim is quite obviously highly debatable (just like “of course the world is a safer place because we got rid of Saddam” …)
It’s an absolute intellectual disgrace.
Yes, it’s an absolute disgrace. One other method that bloggers have used to avoid dealing with the consequences of a war that they supported is to attack the messenger. For example, Currency Lad in this thread:
Glad you’ve found some studies to laughably juggle into a conclusiveness that suits your prejudices Tim. Why not just have the courage to say it? Release Saddam from prison immediately. For the children.or Tim Blair in the same thread:
You should quit this ranting about the Lancet study. People might think you’re obsessed.And those are two of the nicer ones. I was also banned from Blair’s site for defending the Lancet study.
I think this episode can be seen as a test of character for warbloggers. A test that they have largely failed.
Update: Just when you thought you had seen all the bogus arguments against the Lancet study. According to sagenz the study “says Iraqi men had a life expectancy of 698 years”. Well yes, it does say this … provided you believe that Iraq is a magical land where no-one ever gets older. Sagenz then posted a triumphant comment at Crooked Timber, which is kind of like sauntering into the lion’s den after marinading yourself with meat tenderizer and catnip.
And commenter Factcheck finds us Mary Madigan, guest blogging at Michael Totten who goes for the old “La la la I can’t hear you” (down in the comments):
FactCheck - thanks for your input, but do you really expect people to waste hours googling and assimilating data too prove to you that an already discredited study has been discredited? You use links to biased sites like Crooked Timber to prove that your information is not biased. Who do you think you’re fooling?Mary follows up with an argument from authority combined with ad hominem
FactCheck - I’m not accusing the guy who owns the “I hate the JunkScience site cuz it’s run by a right-winger” of dishonesty, I’m just noting that his authority as a news source isn’t comparable to Slate. Neither is “Crooked Timber”. You can link to them if you want, you can link to Carrot Top’s site to prove a point, but that doesn’t make it a reputable or comparable source.Gee, how does the authority of the Lancet on scientific questions compare to that of Slate? (And she has remarkably poor reading skills if she somehow concluded that I hate the Junkscience site because its run by a right winger.)
January 29th, 2005 at 6:46 am
Comments here have me defending the study against a number of people who sound erily familiar to Fumento. link
January 29th, 2005 at 12:15 pm
The Chronicle is correct to ask why the US media down-played the Lancet report.
But it’s equally reaonable to ask why European and other governments haven’t responded to the humanitarian crisis in Iraq as energetically as they did to the tsunami.
I have been intensely critical of the deciison to invade Iraq and I understand the dissatisfaction of many governments with US policy in the region, but point-scoring is surely less important than ending the carnage there.
January 29th, 2005 at 4:23 pm
Wow, Id not read the Kaplan piece in Slate before (cited by oxblog). It never ceases to amaze me what pure garbage passes for journalism these days- Kaplan claims at the end that the Iraq Body Count numbers are much lower, ergo the Lancet study must be flawed- without the simple understanding that IBC only counted violent deaths, while the Lancet counted all fatalities. Heck, it’s spelled out in two of the sites he links to (ie the IBC site which counts Civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq, and a NY times article that explains in the first sentence An estimated 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq as a direct or indirect consequence of the… invasion…
How someone like me who reads this stuff in their spare time knows that, but a journalist (at an ostensibly left-leaning site, no less) doesn’t, baffles the mind.
January 29th, 2005 at 11:55 pm
Factcheck, good job on taking down a whole mob of innumerati. My favourite was Mary Madigan’s comment:
Yeah, who do you think you’re fooling with your America-hating facts? Huh? Huh? Huh?January 30th, 2005 at 2:29 am
Ian Gould wrote, But it’s equally reaonable to ask why European and other governments haven’t responded to the humanitarian crisis in Iraq as energetically as they did to the tsunami.
Maybe it has to do with the relative lack of security in Iraq? Just a thought.
January 30th, 2005 at 4:39 am
Indeed, one is reminded of those letters physics professors get from people claiming to have proven the theory of relativity is mathematically impossible and never have heard of imaginary numbers.
Just posted another comment on crooked timber, cause some people there have a hard time getting to grip with things like Iraq could have a lower death rate than western countries because of its younger demographics, that infant mortality is not a good indicator of overall mortality, and that you don’t get a more reliable figure for last year’s mortality by averaging the mortality for all the years between 1975 and 2000. Sigh.
January 30th, 2005 at 9:13 am
Liberal,
Thst’s part of it, I’m sure. But, for example, the debt relief being offered to Iraq (a graduated 80% reduction over 5 years) is substantially less generous than what’s being proposed for the tsunami-affected countries.
January 31st, 2005 at 3:18 am
If you don� hate the JunkScience site cuz it� run by a right-winger, then why do you hate the JunkScience site?
I could spend half the day reading your whole site to find out myself, and could spend half the day debating the existence of bias behind �acts� but it� a Sunday and I have a life. Maybe later.
One random statistic that was proven true - more the 70% of Iraqis defied the insurgents to vote.
Anyway, here� a response and thanks for the note. Hope it brings up your hitmeter.
January 31st, 2005 at 3:38 am
If you don� hate the JunkScience site cuz it� run by a right-winger, then why do you hate the JunkScience site?
I could spend half the day reading your whole site to find out myself, and could spend half the day debating the existence of bias behind �acts� but it� a Sunday and I have a life. Maybe later.
One random statistic that was proven true - more the 70% of Iraqis defied the insurgents to vote.
Anyway, here� a response and thanks for the note. Hope it brings up your hitmeter.
January 31st, 2005 at 3:42 am
One random statistic that was proven true - more the 70% of Iraqis defied the insurgents to vote.
70% of registered voter, you mean. Despite lotsa lookin’, I couldn’t find an estimate of how many people registered.
January 31st, 2005 at 6:59 am
“If you don� hate the JunkScience site cuz it� run by a right-winger…”
At this point, I imagine Mary staring dumbfoundedly into the screen. She’s trying to think of another reason for Tim’s disdain, but her thoughts keep returning to the same script. “It must be a political agenda… it must be a political agenda…”
Perhaps she could consider that JunkScience really does peddle Junk Science for the highest bidder. In other words, it is a site devoted to scientific prostitution. (The owner sounds like an asshole as well.) Now for you, that may not be enough for derision, but for a lot of people, it is.
January 31st, 2005 at 8:08 am
www.alertnet.org/thenews/…
Iraq’s Electoral Commission backtracked on earlier estimates of voter turnout in the election, saying a previous figure of 72 percent “was just an estimate” and indicated the actual figure was lower.
At a news conference, commission spokesman Farid Ayar called the 72 percent figure a “guess” and said maybe up to 8 million Iraqis voted, which would be a little over 60 percent of registered voters.
Actually compared to many of the figures thrown around on Junkscience 72% is probably pretty clsoe to being accurate.
The CIA world factbook says the population of Iraq is 25 million with roughly 60% aged over 15. So the potential electorate is around 12-15 million. So the actual turn-out is around 40-50%. That’s pretty encouraging under the circumstances but given the high turn-out reported in Shia and Kurdish areas the turn-out in the Sunni areas was probably very low.
January 31st, 2005 at 9:05 am
This topic does seem to have attracted more than its share of the standard fallacies, innumeracy, and sheer intellectual laziness.
Mary Madigan’s “do you really expect people to waste hours googling and assimilating data … ” is of a piece with Louis Hissink’s “I am not wasting my time searching irrelevant waffle for CO2 data.”
It does make everything much easier, doesn’t it?
(a) The well is poisoned.
(b) It’s too much trouble to drink from it, anyway.
February 1st, 2005 at 2:18 am
Don’t worry, Mary has undergone cell division (though she might not believe in cell theory - ITS A THEORY, NOT A FACT), and has doubled down on scientific illiteracy - now she’s tacitly defending the “debunkers” of the HIV/AIDS link by supporting the anti-science blog Dean’s World.
February 1st, 2005 at 10:24 am
I have read some more of your blog. It seems to be dedicated to nasty snipes at anyone who has disagreed with the world according to Tim Lambert. Like an OCD statistics-geek version of Joan Rivers.
I� not the most numerate person in the world, but I do know something about history. Some old �acts�
�S state department�sanctions and Madeline Albright killed a million Iraqi kids.
link
When Bill Clinton bombed an aspirin factor in the Sudan, he caused the deaths of many thousands of Africans.
link
According to statistician Marc Herold, the war in Afghanistan was a racist imperialist war that killed approximately 4,000 Afghan civilians. Of course, racism wasn� the only thing that motivated evil US forces. Capitalism (ie: OIL!!!) was a factor. And let’s not forget the famous Pipeline through Afghanistan.
None of the supposed �acts�were true, all relied on research and statistics and all were used to support Leftist dogma. Like news publications, all statistics are biased. The reader has to choose which bias to believe.
History proves that statistics and facts that, like this ‘Lancet study’ are generated to support a leftist cause are consistantly examples of ‘garbage in, garbage out.’
Lancet� history is also tainted. In February 1998, a five-page research paper by Dr Andrew Wakefield and 12 other doctors from the Royal Free hospital, London, was published in the Lancet medical journal, linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine - MMR - with autism. This one paper triggered a worldwide scare over the vaccine’s safety, and falls in children’s immunizations. Six years later, Brian Deer investigated the research, and exposed its finding as a sham. -> Go to the Lancet fiasco for an overview.
link
February 1st, 2005 at 11:00 am
Like news publications, all statistics are biased. The reader has to choose which bias to believe.
Oh boy. Conservative postmodernism. No doubt in another context she’d be banging on about how relativist leftist professors leave students with no respect for truth.
February 1st, 2005 at 11:04 am
Mary raises an interesting point. Are the more aggressive rightwing bloggers / journos behaving like this because they are evil? Or because, since they make stuff up, obfuscate and abuse they assume everyone else must be doing the same thing?
Of course, the fact that she brings in two links that have nothing to do with Tim Lambert’s views as evidence that he is wrong, should surprise noone - the strawman is de rigeur on those blogs, boards and articles - as should the “fact” that, because the Lancet published the Wakefield study (which, as a nod to Lott, was actually done and which the Lancet, once it was established Wakefield may have had a conflict of interest, disowned) all its work must therefore be rejected out of hand, regarded as tainted. This is ironic given that the papers Deer writes for - the Times and Sunday Times - make the Lancet look like the direct, holy writ of God himself by comparison.
February 1st, 2005 at 11:11 am
Tee hee. It’s always funny and revealing when the uninformed try to fight back. But it’s especially good when they try to fight back by offering “discredited” historical facts that actually happen to be true.
February 1st, 2005 at 11:51 am
I wrote about the Wakefield affair here. Does Mary believe that concealing a conflict of interest is only bad when Wakefield did it, or is it wrong for Steve Milloy as well?
February 1st, 2005 at 11:53 am
Don’t tell me you’ve never noticed this before, Kieran. The most active social constructionists around today write about science for Tech Central Station or JunkScience. Funny to think that the staunchest bastions of post-modern thought are places like the Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute, and all of those other foundations that cut and trim the facts to fit their paymasters’ orthodoxies.
February 1st, 2005 at 12:02 pm
Googlers crack me up. All those facts at your fingertips, but there’s no search engine for context. Kinda makes you look, well, oh…how do I say this in a nice way…ill-informed.
For example, you can find that the Lancet published a bad study. But the Google result doesn’t contextualize that fact (á la Agricola). You can then Google some vestedinterest.com site and find someone ululating against scientific bias.
Put those two facts together, and by gum, your analytical skills are top notch. You can then figger out all on your own (because your analytical skills are top notch, see) that the ding-dang science can’t be trusted because someone was wrong once, thus the journal is tainted.
Hell-ooo Googler: everyone is wrong at least once. That’s one of the things that makes us human, along with admitting mistakes and taking responsibility for them.
Admitting to oneself that you were wrong is, of course, anathema to an entire ideology, but hey.
D
February 1st, 2005 at 3:20 pm
�S state department�sanctions and Madeline Albright killed a million Iraqi kids.
Mary,
As Ronnie Biggs once said: “No one is innocent.” Clinton’s sanctions - aided and abetted by Republican majorities in the House and Senate - did indeed result in the premature death of hundreds of thousands of little kiddies. Can I guess your indignation led you to protesting in the street? Writing letter campaigns? Or do you just use these links tactically to bash Bill Clinton, chosen antichrist of the American Right?
We can probably play tennis with facts, tossing “fact” after “fact” to each other. Unfortunately, we’re playing different games, although I doubt you realize it. You want to prove that you and your ideological brethren are right. I think that ideology is irrelevant to the discussion of fradulent science. Oh, I like being right, but I’d rather be honest with others and myself than always right. In fact, the only serve I feel like making in your direction is here.
February 1st, 2005 at 6:22 pm
Actually, the claim that sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children are highly suspect. The claims are primarily based on theoretical exercise which assuemd that the Iraqi infant mortality rate have continued to fall in the 1990’s at the same rate as in the 1980’s if not for sanctions.
Critics, mainly on the right, pointed out that this was a highls suspect assumption. For one thing, all the arab oil states suffered declining revenues in the 1990’s as oil prices fell sharply in real terms. for another, the Gulf War itself (which I will state now, in a probably futile attempt to avoid this discussion being sidetracking was in my opinion an entirely justified and proportionate response to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait) also resulted in signficant damage to Iraq’s infrastructure.
As for the claim that the bombign of the drug factory in Sudan “killed thosuands of Sudanese”, the link Mary provided is actually to a site which rebuts these claims in detail. I guess Mary didn’t have time to actually read it either.
February 1st, 2005 at 9:15 pm
Interestingly enough, the scientist who did most of the work in reducing the inflated infant mortality claims for Iraqi sanctions (which I was certainly taken in by, in younger and more innocent days) was Professor Richard Garfield … one of the co-authors of the Lancet study.
February 1st, 2005 at 9:45 pm
Mary Madigan is totally twisted. She’s using the same tired arguments that “our crimes are not crimes at all” whereas “when we are attacked, the end of the world is nigh”. Considering how the U.S. has unilaterally attacked some 40 nations since the end of the second world war, and has undermined some 50 populist-nationalist groups trying to overthrow repressive regimes, her arguments are so utterly vacuous as to defy the most extreme logic. Her argument follows, “If we don’t count em’ we didnt kill em’. Thus, the U.S. forces could not have slaughtered up to half a million Phillipinos in 1901-02 as part of the initial westward empire expansion under Roosevelt, because nobody in the government bothered to count the victims. This means that U.S. bombs only ever kill ‘bad guys’; civilians may occasionally ‘get in the way’, but, heck, this is due to ‘friendly fire’. Its like a surgeon amputating the wrong leg of a patient and calling it a “friendly amputation”. Thus, using Madigan’s twisted, bitter logic, the U.S. forces never killed a single non-combatant in Korea, Viet Nam or Iraq, except in cases of “friendly fire”. So U.S. bombers blew Falluja to bits (’Grozny on the Euphrates’), in the process driving hundreds of thousands of refugees into the desert. No ‘official’ count was made of the victims in the city, so there weren’t any. Of course, the deaths of “our killers” (coalition forces) are counted, but as Tommy Franks said smugly at the start of the godfatherly aggression against Iraq, “We don’t do body counts (of Iraqi’s, he might have added, because they are ‘unpeople’”).
I’d like to ask bloody Mary if any one of the nations blown apart by U.S. bombs over the past 100 years decided to retaliate by bombing an arms-manufacturing plant in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh or wherever on the basis that the hi-tech weapons will be used to blow them to smithereens in some future time point (part of the great empire’s eastward expansion), then what would the response of Bush and co. be, even if only one night watchman (as you so vulgarly state in the Sudan episode) was killed? Would Bush and his junta say that we must ‘act with restraint’ or reciprocate only 1,000 times more intensively? Your logic is that it’s fine for the strong to pummel the weak and expect no repercussions, but that the weak attacking the strong is unthinkable. The bombing of the pharamceutical plant in Sudan was an international crime, wholly illegal and an act of war. By the way, an independent German study has verified Chomsky’s claims and concluded that “conservative estimates are that tens of thousands of people have died (as of 2003) as a result of the bombing of the [Sudanese pharmaceutical] plant”. But, of course, because “we don’t do body counts”, nobody died. Similarly, the sanctions on Iraq, that resembled a medievel siege, could not have killed a single child in Mary’s eyes because the victims weren’t ‘officially’ counted. It doesn’t matter that two UN agencies reported at least 6,000 deaths a month as a result of the sanctions, or that two senior UN officials (Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck) in charge of distributing humanitarian aid resigned over what Halliday refereed to as “Complicit genocide” on the part of the U.S. and Britain. No official body count, thus no victims. The bottom line is as described by international law attorney Richard Falk (Princeton University): that we in the west “Are conditioned to see the world through a one-way moral/legal screen, with western values depicted as threatened, justifying a campaign of unlimited violence”. Bravo to the Lancet for making an attempt to quantify ‘our victims’, instead of consigning them to the history bin. And thanks to Tim for your efforts in this regard. There has to be some accountability.
February 1st, 2005 at 11:55 pm
People, Mary was just trying to show her full supoport for the Oil for Food program at the UN with her anti-sanction bromide.
February 2nd, 2005 at 1:37 am
Garfield’s own estimate for the Iraqi sanctions death toll was around 350,000, I think, after revising his earlier estimate of 100,000-225,000. (Numbers from memory). Less than what the anti-sanctions campaigners were saying (and still say sometimes) but higher than a lot of episodes we call genocide when others do it.
It’d be nice to have a final accounting of all the deaths that have occurred in Iraq over the past several decades, with responsibility distributed equitably among the guilty parties, Baathists, Democrats, Republicans, and so forth.
February 2nd, 2005 at 2:36 am
Shorter Mary: People have lied with statistics, so statistics are all lies.
The journal is not the authors. Like I’ve said before, scores of times, do you have any evidence that the authors committed fraud, or are you making accusations of massive academic dishonesty with nothing but your ideology to guide you?