Deborah Lipstadt, my badass hero

For the last week, I've been puzzling over an article by Frank Furedi in Spiked. Furedi argues that in the 21st century, the concept of "denial" -- in the critical sense, as in a "Holocaust denier," an "AIDS denier," or a "climate change denier" -- has become a secular replacement for heresy. The essay alternates between bold, compelling, insightful discussion of the relevant issues and a vague, thin, accusatory rhetoric that reveals a little too much about the author's agenda.

Here are the main points. I'm paraphrasing, and (in some cases) I think I'm presenting the point in a more effective manner, but anyway:

• "Those who question prevailing cultural orthodoxies are treated as immoral, evil people, and their arguments depicted as a form of secular heresy."
• Targeting denial isn't about the highly-charged emotional context of the issues (i.e. genocide, the environment, etc.), but about an intolerance towards free thinking.
• Traditional heresy involves denying an article of religious truth, but those have been supplanted by articles of historical and scientific truth.
• "Heresy-hunters" strive to follow the model of the ultimate 20th-century taboo, Holocaust denial, by constructing new taboos.
• In this way, denial becomes a "generic evil," a "free-floating blasphemy" that can apply to anything.
• Difference of opinion disappears in the context of debate, replaced by accusations of denial.
• The perceived danger of taboo opinions makes it "responsible behavior" to repress those opinions. Hence the wave of existing and proposed anti-denial laws (anti-genocide in the EU, criminalizing AIDS misinformation, etc.)
• These "denial" accusations deliberately conflate the psychological and critical definitions of "denial" in order to discredit a viewpoint, as well as the holder of that viewpoint. Being a denier is like being "in denial." So, as in the psychological case, denial is a disability that results in suppressed information and does damage to society -- which allows the people who subscribe to those articles of historical and scientific truth to justify censoring deniers.
• Moreover, it's not really about the desire to affirm those truths, but about about "moral policing."
• Finally, the secular heresy of "denial" constitutes a serious threat to freedom of speech and thought, one which outweighs the ultimately negligible positive effects of censoring taboo ideas.

On the whole, I find the arguments decent, especially the implied distinction between dismissal and debate, and the effort to point towards the resultant problems regarding free speech/censorship. I also have to reluctantly concede that I admire Furedi for wading into somewhat dangerous waters and sticking to his point, given the fact that he's essentially attacking people who try to speak for genocide victims, AIDS patients, and the health of every organism on the planet.

However, in claiming that accusations of "denial" arise from an intolerance of free thinking, Furedi shortchanges the social, political, and emotional context. People's motives as scholars and scientists are (of course) affected by what they care about and what they believe should take happen in the world. Though censorship might arise from a given situation, not wanting people to get inaccurate information about AIDS doesn't exactly describe an intolerance of free thought.

Which leads me to the article's major flaw: the lack of a critical qualitative distinction between good and bad scholarship or science. One's skill at scientific or historical research should not have any bearing on one's democratic right to free expression, nor should one's personal agenda. But these characteristics may start to explain the vehemence with which people attack revisionist Holocaust historians or industry-backed climate change skeptics. After all, bad science is bad science, and people invested in getting accurate information to the public concerning, say, epidemic disease, might be pretty invested in minimizing the influence of poorly researched, unsupportable conclusions. Again, no effect on the free speech issues, but the argument for the intrinsic value of free thinking loses some integrity when it tries to compare David Irving to Copernicus.

I prefer Deborah Lipstadt's take on this question (also from Spiked...hmm). She has no compunction about calling someone a denier, but she doesn't believe in criminalizing or persecuting genocide denial. She describes the proposed EU genocide denial laws as a "body blow to academic debate." And, though I don't want to revert to using someone's C.V. to support the validity of their claims, she does have a great deal of experience in this matter, and she pursues Holocaust deniers aggressively. But she doesn't want them in jail. because of freedom of speech, because of the need to avoid making deniers into martyrs, and because making a law against genocide-denying speech implies that we don't have the evidence to prove the truth.

I like the third reason best. She's basically saying that she doesn't want to censor deniers, she wants to beat them. Debunk their scholarship, destroy their credibility, prove that they're wrong, and let them "fade into obscurity." I can get behind that, because a) it's the right thing to do; b) it not only preserves freedom of speech, it encourages it; c) it keeps us focused on deepening our knowledge of things like genocide and pollution, thus keeping them in our minds and on our agenda; and d) it places the weight of the argument where it should be -- in the evidence.

I already noted how badass Deborah Lipstadt was, but it's worth mentioning again.

more on squab

I was pretty much completely off track about what a squab actually is.

From Bokhari Squab Farms:

A squab is a 25-30 days old pigeon (nestling).

So...I guess I wasn't totally wrong about it being flightless. Whoa, this blog has taken a weird PETA-ish turn in the last week or so. I'll try to get things together. In the meantime, look up "spatchcock," which is a new word I just learned about poultry preparation.

Incidentally, the Squab Producers of California (located at "www.squab.com," which was a nice shot-in-the-dark for me), have unintentionally produced a hilarious website.

From the homepage:

Welcome to the Internet. This site will provide valuable information for anyone interested in squabs and our cooperative. We are the largest Squab Cooperative of its kind in the world. It is our goal that we would have a global presence in our marketplace. With our recent arrival on the World Wide Web, we are confident in further providing the best services possible for our customers.

Be sure to check out the North American distributor map.

And if I forgot to say it before: Welcome to the Internet, everybody!!

says the sturgeon general...

This broke my heart.

Now how am I gonna pay back my blood debts to the Romanian mafia?

Actually, this is one of those stories that, on the face of it, seems totally normal until you realize that the presence of human beings has caused the world to go totally batshit insane.

I'm not a militant vegetarian. Sometimes I remind Camille that various things on her plate have "a mommy who misses them," but that's just to irritate her. I do subscribe to an eating philosophy that I believe is both ethical and environmentally sustainable, but realistically our bodies are designed to eat meat and I usually don't feel compelled to get in peoples' business.

However, I think the casual consumer needs to be reminded of something:

Commercial caviar production normally involves
stunning the fish (usually with a club to the head)
and extracting the ovaries. (from Wikipedia)

That is flat-out disgusting. This industry, and now this looming environmental hazard, only exist because people like to scoop revolting, briny ovaries out of living fish, put them on toast points, and eat them.

Despite the cultural cache, objectively speaking I have trouble imagining anything less sophisticated.

Maybe you could throw rocks at a squirrel until you knocked it out of a tree, then eat whatever you find in its cheeks.

Anyway, this post is intended as a public service message to caviar eaters:

Attention: THERE IS PLENTY OF FOOD ON LAND.

The Norton Anthology of Total B.S.

Gale Norton and I have something in common. We both did something stupid yesterday. Though sick with flu, I stayed up way too late reading Daredevil comics from the mid-eighties period, when Frank Miller took full creative control and it started getting good.

Gale Norton, meanwhile, embarassed herself in the national press, at the worst possible time. Her editorial, wincingly titled "Call of the Mild," describes all the technological advances that will allow energy companies to drill huge holes in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge while leaving "no significant impact." Perhaps she felt it was well-timed, since Nicholas Kristof just pronounced environmentalism dead in the same paper, and Americans (ever fickle on this issue) don't seem to want oil companies drilling in ANWR at the moment. But her argument is weak, and rather than pushing hard on the foreign-oil dependence (which seems the only likely argument to win the public over) Gail Norton chose to try to convince us that extracting many billions of oil barrels will have no significant environmental impact. The consequences of transporting the oil alone are impossible to accurately gauge, and certainly cannot be guaranteed to have no significant impact, not to mention the exploratory drilling, waste management, risk of contamination.

But there are a few more insidious problems with Norton's direction in this debate, some of which were addressed by today's NYT editorial.

As the NYT points out, the possible yield from ANWR is, at best, only a tiny percentage of our growing oil consumption. Norton implies that drilling ANWR will solve, or at least begin to solve, the problem of foreign oil dependence and consumption growth, but she embeds an enormous lie between the following sentences:

As part of a comprehensive energy strategy of promoting conservation and reducing dependence on foreign oil, we must increase our energy production here at home. The 1002 area is potentially the largest untapped source of oil and gas on American soil

So, first, Norton implies that "increased energy production here at home" refers exclusively to oil. This, of course, is false. Clean and renewable energy stand to increase our energy production far beyond the capacity of a new oil source, with little to no environmental impact. Clean energy doesn't have a strong lobby yet, but that's another matter. Second, Norton implies that our foreign oil dependence is due to a lack of "tapped" resources, rather than to a lack of resources altogether combined with exponential consumption growth. ANWR may be the "largest untapped source" in the country, but that actually says nothing at all about the problem.

The NYT also rightly observes that Norton's aggressive campaign to sell the public on arctic drilling reveals the "shallowness" of Bush's energy plan, particularly its myopic focus on increasing immediate oil supply. While simply condemning this focus as "wrong" is a good start, I think it's worth making perfectly clear why the Bush strategy focuses so hard on increased domestic supply. Domestic energy companies have an enormous influence on politics and campaign finance, and they want to bid on new, lucrative development projects like drilling ANWR. Right now, the oil industry wields a little more power in Washington than bio-diesel advocates, so they're probably gonna get their way on this one. Don't get me wrong, I totally think that Bush is stupid enough to ignore both science and economics, and decide that ANWR oil will actually provide singlehanded solution to the supply problem, but his stupidity has never prevented him from figuring out which side of the bread contains butter.

All things considered I think Norton and Bush will have a tough time convincing the public that ANWR can be safely drilled. However, they're much more likely to be able to convince the public that we don't give a shit about the arctic caribou, especially when placed in the context of skyrocketing prices at the pump. So keep your eyes peeled for more bad science and worse economics from Gale and friends. You'll be able to recognize them because they'll be introduced with awful, awful literary puns.