Thursday: Hili dialogue

54 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

1. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
   We all have handicaps. The difference is that some of us must reveal ours, while others must conceal theirs, to be treated with mercy. -Yahia Lababidi, author (b. 25 Sep 1973)

2. I don’t know anything about the causes of autism, except that it seems to increasingly diagnosed. However, someone dug up this old tweet from Tylenol saying that “We actually don’t recommend using any of our products while pregnant.” There have also been reports of pregnant Tik Tokers making videos of themselves gobbling Tylenol in, what, protest? I swear, if Trump said arsenic was bad, we’d see a rash of self-poisonings.

   1. I saw one such video or picture with a caption implying that the pregnant person was hoping to give birth to a tech billionaire.

   2. ” I swear, if Trump said arsenic was bad, we’d see a rash of self-poisonings.”

      Hahahaha, yep, you’re right. Like when Trump suggested injecting bleach or isopropanol could be a treatment for Covid and poison control centers got inundated.

      Crazies to the right, lunatics to the left. We’re completely surrounded.

   3. Increased diagnosis of autism is primarily associated with broadened diagnostic criteria and greater awareness leading to more opportunity for diagnosis. Fifty years ago, many of the kids being diagnosed and appropriately treated today would have been given one of several other labels, and, in many cases, pipelined out of the general education process in school, or possibly institutionalized.

      The tweet seems to be of the general CYA drug companies use. They NEVER recommend anything for any particular group, but always refer to the physician, FDA guidance, ACOG guidelines, and the like. I am surprised it didn’t specify consult your physician, as well. I don’t think that it is the smoking gun some seem to imply

      As to idiots making ridiculous videos, as noted they come from all sides

      1. That’s my understanding too (increased autism is due to looser conditions for diagnosis).

         Regarding Tylenol, I read that fever during pregnancy can harm the unborn child.

         Also read that autism is believed to be largely genetic.

         But I add that I’m far from an expert.

         1. Up to 90% concordance in identical twins (vs. low concordance in fraternals) is pretty strong evidence for genetics as the primary basis of ASD. The increasing rate of diagnoses may reflect financial incentives in countries where disability support is generous, broadening of diagnostic criteria, and/or older people having children.

      2. Not quite true, although you are right that there is no smoking gun here. Drug companies do recommend, and heavily promote, their products for the indications for which they have been licensed as set out in the product labeling and package inserts. The diagnosis that the patient has an indication to use the drug is up to the doctor. If there is clear evidence of harm in identifiable groups which emerged either from the clinical trials that led to licensing or in post-marketing surveillance, they note that information under “contraindications.” Sometimes the FDA requires them to put this in a black box for emphasis. Allergy is the most familiar contraindication: Don’t prescribe this drug to a patient who says she is allergic to it. If you do, any adverse outcome is your fault, not ours. The propensity of tetracycline to stain the primordial dental enamel in the fetus if taken by a pregnant woman is an example specific to pregnancy. Use something else. (Drugs aren’t removed from the market just because they are dangerous in pregnancy, provided they have safe uses in other patients, tetracycline being an example. Tylenol is not going to be banned.)

         Very few clinical trials enroll pregnant women, or women who are at risk of becoming pregnant. So in most cases, the drug company is not in a position to make any kind of recommendation about safety in pregnancy. This isn’t CYA, a pejorative, just simple prudence. The drug company has no vested interest in encouraging pregnant women to take any of its products, so it has no incentive to venture into that territory. “We’d be happier if no pregnant woman felt the need to take any of our products.”

         Third parties like ACOG can review the evidence, such as it is, and make recommendations about drugs generally recognized as safe (or dangerous) in pregnancy but the drug company has no reason to sign off on these recommendations as it had no hand in creating them. I think it is a general principle that pregnant women should not take any medicines during pregnancy without a compelling reason and then drugs should be carefully chosen to avoid the worst risks to the fetus as long as they are effective in treating the mother. I was therefore surprised to read in the Nature Briefing that half of the world’s pregnant women — the Briefing called them “pregnant people” but that’s Nature — take Tylenol during their pregnancies. What on earth for? When my friends and relatives were having children, they quite literally didn’t want to take even a Tylenol.

         Advising that Tylenol be used in pregnancy only in situations where a clear risk balancing has been done seems reasonable, as for any drug. Unfortunate fetal outcomes can occur unpredictably so why take a chance on the trivial conditions that Tylenol is mostly used for? We’re not talking about sepsis or pulmonary embolism here.

         1. Tylenol doesn’t even do anything for pain unless combined with an opioid – and then the opioid is doing 99% of the work.

3. “I can imagine a two-state solution even if Iran isn’t “totally defeated” (which I suppose means replacing the Jew-hating Palestinian theocracy with a peaceable government),”

   Sure that’s excellent. B/c it is only old Iranian clerics holding back kumbaya peace and love from a thousand miles away. Or…. a tweak of Palestinian “education”, or getting Egyptian state TV to not broadcast Elders of Zion miniseries ever damn year.

   I do admire the above commenter’s sunny optimism from secular westerns who consider there to be rational mechanisms which will solve 1300 years of totalitarian Jew-hate from being the very foundation of “Palestine”. It is its entire moral architecture. (Verses their non-Jew killing cultural aspects and ideas. Can you name any? Seriously. Can you name any cultural stuff “of Palestine” that isn’t kill-joo centered. Their famous dances or cooking stuff? Sports? Nup.)

   Here in secular un-Islamic west we can’t get our heads around “people who value different things” (murderous things).
   Some cultures are inherently individualistic (ours), some are inherently consensus based (China) and some “polite”(Japan, Korea). Some..more murdery. You can’t “negotiate this away.”

   D.A.
   NYC

   1. So basically the Palestinians are Wile E. Coyote, completely defined by their murderous obsession to destroy the Roadrunner. So far thankfully the RR is too quick for them…

      1. So far the Road Runner is batting 1000. Coyote in real life wants to eat the RR.

         I’m saying that we don’t “get” that foundational bases exist in all cultures. There’s a lot of literature on this (consider “WEIRD” countries, or tight/loose cultures, etc.)

         “Palestine” is unique. MANY countries and cultures hate “the idiots over the hill” ,their neighbors. But there is only one I know of whose entire moral and civilizational architecture is devoted to one goal: “Throw the Jews into the sea.”
         Replace them with Islam. But “land” is secondary – Islam is the driving force here.

         Seen how they raise their children? Kids at Jihad camp at 7. For 70 years now.

         I wrote about this in my column. Please read – it has its comedy. 🙂
         https://democracychronicles.org/kindergarten-jihad-who-plays-the-beheaded/

         THey are not “defined by” murderous intentions, they define THEMSELVES for this and they never shut up about it. In English or Arabic… EXCEPT when useful idiots in the west(ern media/campuses) ASSUME it is about land, or poverty, or climate justice or decolonization.

         Wait, there’s more: (here first, widely syndicated elsewhere)
         https://democracychronicles.org/author/david-anderson/

         best regards,
         D.A.
         NYC

   2. Jerry posted about 2 days ago the video of an interview (about 37 mins long, it’s on YouTube) with Einat Wilf, a former Israeli politician (for the Labor Party and then the Independence Party), academic (Ph.d. from the University of Cambridge) and author. It’s a very interesting interview. I’m going to quote from it (slightly edited):

      I’ve come to define Palestinianism as the ideology that connects the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank and millions in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon around the singular idea that their goal as a people is to ensure that the Jews do not have sovereignty in the land of Israel. And if they have sovereignty that it should be undone as soon as possible.

      Now, this is directly related to the idea of a Palestinian state, because the whole notion of a two-state solution is a comforting story that we told ourselves as a logical solution to a conflict, if the conflict is between two peoples who want sovereignty. But I always, in my talks, in my books, quote Ernest Bevin, the British foreign minister after World War II, who goes to the British Parliament in February 1947 to explain why Britain actually failed to fulfill the mandate of the League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations, to help the Jews achieve sovereignty. It didn’t fail the Arabs. That mandate created Jordan and Iraq and Syria and Lebanon with the French, but it failed the Jews. So, he needs to explain the British failure. And he says, “His Majesty’s government is faced with an irreconcilable conflict.”

      Now, the reason I love this quote is that in February 1947, you don’t have any excuses. What are the excuses we hear about why there’s no peace? The occupations, settlements, Binyamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, right-wing government, refugees. We hear a lot of things. In February 1947, none of them exist. So it’s great because there are no excuses. And Bevin says, look, Britain failed because his majesty’s government is faced with an irreconcilable conflict. Now he calls it irreconcilable in February 1947. And then he explains the reason the conflict is irreconcilable is because in the land there are Jews and Arabs. No one of course is called a Palestinian at this point. And he says each one of them has a top priority. The Jews want a state and the Arabs, as their top priority, want the Jews not to have a state. The phrase is “resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of the land.”

      So it turns out that this is not a conflict between two peoples seeking self-determination and statehood in which case a two-state solution makes sense. It’s a conflict between the Jews wanting a state and the Arabs, the Palestine Arabs, wanting the Jews not to have a state. In that case, a two-state solution doesn’t make much sense because for the last century, you can actually show that the Jews have always said yes to every two-state solution, provided one of the two states is the Jewish state. Imagine that. And the Arabs have always rejected every two-state solution if one of the two states is the Jewish state.

      Wilf is the co-author of The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (New York, 2020) in which she argues, quoting from Wikipedia, “that the Palestinian right of return is not a right, but a thinly veiled attempt for the destruction of Israel, and is the most salient reason there has not been peace between Israel and the Palestinians.” (The book has 447 reviews on Amazon, with the average rating being 4.5 out of 5.)

   3. Maintaining the “Palestinian problem” is handy in two ways. First, having an external enemy can subdue a local population somewhat and make them less likely to focus on internal strife. If a Great and Little Satan can always be blamed for our woes, good folk are less likely to notice that despotic regimes have been robbing us blind for generations. Second, it’s a great unifying tool. Our neighbours and the entire region can set aside our differences while we’re all under the spell of said Satans.

      Historically though, and dhimmi/jizya aside, totalitarian Jew-hate seems more of a recent feature (i.e. not a bug) of Arab intellectualism as described here by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour.

      By absorbing the key notions of German historicism, refracted through thinkers such as Karl Marx, G.W.F Hegel, and their secularized, revolutionary, and postmodern heirs, Arab intellectuals began to think of history as an inexorable process moving toward a certain destiny. Applying these ideas to their contemporary situation, they turned Palestine into a metaphysical epicenter, anti-Semitism into a moral imperative, and themselves into the priesthood of a historical religion. Today’s Arab societies are not the product of a mass reconversion to Islam, but the mass conversion from it. Where Lewis focused on cultural resistance to modernity, I here focus on the opposite: modern Arab intellectuals grew enchanted by the most dangerous metaphysical structures of postmodernity.

4. I wonder how the robot umpires actually decide what the strike zone is. The outside edges are easy; the borders of home plate define those. But the upper and lower borders are defined by the batter’s morphology. It is “from the midpoint between a batter’s shoulders and the top of the uniform pants — when the batter is in his stance and prepared to swing at a pitched ball — and a point just below the kneecap.” This is always going to be subjective. Where exactly is the midpoint? Depends on where you start your measurements.

   There was once a manager (I forget who) who used a dwarf as a pinch hitter, mostly (I assume) to be a jerk, thinking it funny, but also for the very reason I cite above; the strike zone is a weird thing and can be messed with.

   I know a computer can do all those estimates of midpoints and faster, but the strike zone is too human to hand over to a machine, IMO. It will make pointless one of the funnest things to do in a ball park; yelling at the ump. I also know my opinion is that of a dinosaur.

   1. Interesting point, Chanclas

      1. That obviously didn’t land where it was intended. Oh, well. Self explanatory, I guess.

   2. Re umpires:
      • Liberal/Reform: “I call it like I see it”
      • Conservative: “I call it like it is”
      • Orthodox: “Until I call it, it ain’t”

      Re leaving the final decision to C3PO, I anticipate a World Series game where the dumbpire has been hacked and makes an in-your-face blatantly false decision.

5. OMG. David Brooks seems to have gone off the deep end of despair. Faith? The belief in something for which there is no reason to believe? You’ve got to be kidding.

   Yes. The recognition of a Palestinian state—a “state” with no borders, no government, no institutions, no nothing—only gives Hamas more reason to delay. The governments advocating for this uniformly say that they want Hamas gone and the hostages returned, but their actions at the UN say otherwise.

   Will baseball be poorer because computers can now call balls and strikes (in a limited way, when a pitch is challenged)? We’ll see. There were mixed opinions regarding how baseball might be debased by larger bases, the banning of the “shift,” limits on throws over to first base, video reviews of close plays, the pitchless intentional walk, the extra-inning runner, and time limits between pitches. Yet the game is thriving. I quickly got used to the changes and am loving the game.

   Of course, I’m biased. The game must be better; after all, our beloved Seattle Mariners clinched the Division last night! So, regarding technology calling balls and strikes, we’ll see how it all plays out. I’m still smarting from the designated hitter rule, but I’m starting to get used to it. It remains to be seen how far the mechanization will go. I do think that the decisions of umpires—including bad decisions (and bad umpires)—are just part of the game of baseball, and that human error has its virtues. But even with machines monitoring balls and strikes there will still be plenty of human error in the game.

   1. I am no baseball aficionado, but another Big Change apparently is this new shape of bat that has a larger sweet spot. So home run records and other records will soon climb and climb. I think that should be more controversial.

      1. Yes. The new bat is the “torpedo bat.” It lies within the norms of the current rules, which don’t fully specify the taper of the bat. It doesn’t seem to be controversial, probably because the option is available to everyone and it also leads to more home runs. And everyone loves home runs, even the rule makers!

6. What happens when people operate without any coherent theory of how religion should relate to politics?

   First, people treat electoral politics as if it were a form of spiritual warfare. A battlefield mentality prevails between the forces of Jesus and the forces of Satan. Fear

   It seems to me that the example he gives coheres very well with a popular version of Christianity held in good faith by many. A tendency to demonize an enemy isn’t mitigated when people believe in actual demons. Why would telling people that they don’t understand God the right way be easier than telling them their ideas don’t stand up to reason?

   The greatest weakness of Christianity is its strengths: whenever it makes sense and promotes values, virtues,and a reasonable understanding of the world and the people in it, you don’t have to be a Christian to notice or agree. The only times being specifically Christian matters is for specific statements or beliefs which can’t be translated into wisdom for all.

   Brooks has the wrong remedy. If it’s Christianity, it would have to be one that adopts humanism and downplays the significance of God.

   1. +1!

   2. I’ll see Babbling Brooks’ Fulton Sheen and raise him CSNY:

      You, who are on the road
      Must have a code
      That you can live by
      And so become yourself
      Because the past
      Is just a goodbye

      1. One of the best songs ever! So much truth so simply stated. How old were those guys when that came out, anyway? So very wise and full of heart, huh?

         1. Teach Your Children came out in 1970. Offhand I don’t know which of C,S,N,Y wrote it (I’d guess Y), or how old they were; I would think a few years older than our host and me. The lyrics of that era were blessed with a lot of insight (apart from the usual 90% crap¹). We really believed we would remake the world. Ahh, youth. Well, as another insightful lyric told us (not by CSNY), “It’s never too late…. No, no, not too late.”

            . . . . .
            ¹ Sturgeon’s Law

            1. I had to look it up: Graham Nash wrote it in 1968 while still in the Hollies though that band never recorded it. He was 26 then

7. Quite surprising to learn that baseball doesn’t have this already. Cricket has had DRS for many years now, and in particular LBW is much harder than any decision in baseball. If anything, DRS has demonstrated how good most top-level umpires are now.

   If baseball isn’t already going this route, I highly recommend including the “umpire’s call” verdict, i.e. it’s tricky/ambiguous so stick with the on-field decision.

   1. It’s been on the pitch for over 20 years. Strange that it took so long to get to baseball…

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk-Eye

8. There is sooo much to object to about Brooks’ op-ed, but I’ll stick to just one sentence:

   You may be religious or not religious, but you have an interest in living in a society that produces people who are spiritually, morally and intellectually healthy.

   I want details. What the hell does Brooks mean by “spiritual health”? And how does he believe it is best achieved?

   Also, he needs to explain what “intellectual health” would look like. My guess it would include an intellectual “openness” to beliefs about ‘unseen realms’ and probably the willingness to adopt non-Aristotelian logic, as well. After all, since there is literally no evidence for ‘spiritual’ beliefs, you can’t become ‘spiritual’ – never mind spiritually ‘healthy’ – if you refuse to believe anything without evidence.

   It has increasingly occurred to me that the ‘religion’ that Brooks is touting is, quite specifically, New Age spirituality (which is, properly speaking, a quasi-religion, since it lacks agreed-upon dogma or leaders or organized churches). If so, he’s being dishonest by not disclosing that fact. But that would be consistent with New Age morality – which explicitly approves of deceit in the service of so-called spiritual evolution. (Actually, it approves of deceit for any purpose, but that’s not relevant here.)

   And what’s up with Rauch (who I don’t know much about)?

   [Rauch] goes on to argue that far from being separate, spirituality and liberal democracy need and rely on each other. Human life revolves around four big questions: What is the meaning of life? What is the ultimate source of right and wrong?… How can we understand the world without resorting to magic, using reason and evidence instead?

   Rauch makes no sense: How can a person believe that reason and evidence is sufficient for understanding the world if they embrace a belief in “spirituality” at the same time? Spirituality, almost by definition, concerns an immaterial realm – a realm that cannot even be accessed, never mind understood, by reason and evidence.

   And I don’t even want to rehash the arguments for why morality has no ‘ultimate’ – or ‘spiritual’ – source. Rather, what’s moral is decided by the most powerful or (in a democracy, in theory) by the majority.

   … Yet, New Agers believe that ‘morality’ is not based on law or rules or a traditional God, but on a feeling of oneness and universal love (aka ‘spirituality’). And they further believe that to access this sense of oneness and universal love, a person must engage in ‘spiritual’ practices (e.g., meditation). Therefore, I get this sneaking suspicion that Rauch believes that spirituality = universal love, and that universal love = universal morality.

   In other words, despite his claim about reason and evidence, I get the feeling that Rauch, too, believes in New Age spirituality.

   This really is something to be concerned about. Despite its claims, the New Age is about as loving as Ebola.

   1. If Mr. Brooks has converted to Christianity from Judaism, I’d like to know why, and why and how he has picked a particular sect.

      In my teens I started to wonder (at the time in dismay) why, if “the true religion” is so (allegedly) manifestly obvious, there were so many sects of so many religions. (This was right after the efficacy of evolutionary theory hit me like a ton of bricks – causing temporary dismay and anxiety – while sitting in the choir loft during a sermon in a Southern Baptist church, soon after I started college.)

      1. I believe… he fell in love with his (assistant, some lower ranked… quite younger… female) whom he left his wife of some decades for. And she was Catholic.

         This just off the top of my head and I’ve never been a big Brooks fan, so check but I think they’re the “contours” (hehehe) of his conversion.

         always thought he was a bright, affable phony.

         D.A.
         NYC

         1. Yes, David. I do believe that’s precisely what happened.

   2. Amen!

      NewAge rhymes with….

      Today’s Scripture McNugget is from Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 11:
      “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

      Wishful thinking + invisible evidence, what could possibly go wrong?

9. There seems to be some evidence linking acetaminophen to autism, but it is probably not conclusive. Do people really feel the government was wrong to draw attention to this result?

   https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/using-acetaminophen-during-pregnancy-may-increase-childrens-autism-and-adhd-risk/

   The study was published August 14 in BMC Environmental Health. Andrea Baccarelli, dean of the faculty at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of environmental health, was senior author. The study was led by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and also included co-authors from other institutions.

   The researchers analyzed results from 46 previous studies worldwide that investigated the potential link between prenatal acetaminophen use and subsequent NDDs in children. The researchers used the Navigation Guide Systematic Review methodology—a gold-standard framework for synthesizing and evaluating environmental health data—which enabled them to conduct a rigorous, comprehensive analysis that supported evidence of an association between acetaminophen exposure during pregnancy and increased incidence of NDDs.

   1. “Do people really feel the government was wrong to draw attention to this result?”

      No, of course not. But that’s not what they did, is it? Look, this nonsense would be much more palatable if they took the approach of informing the medical community about the alleged issue with pregnancy. Instead, faced with the self-imposed idiocy of claiming they would “find a cure for autism” by the end of September, they had to do something to show they weren’t doing exactly what they were doing; blowing smoke out their asses.

      So they just made shit up; they are using ambiguous data on the margins of what might be plausible and inflating it into a national health scare, one that is going to frighten the bejesus out of millions for no good reason other than to serve the vanity of that moron Kennedy. History will not be kind to that idiot.

      There. I’ve vented and feel better. Not that anyone cares.

      1. Regarding mental health, I want to hear Trump hold forth from Mount Olympus on the causes and benefits/consequences of grandiose narcissism. Consider the obsequious fawning and osculating bloviation of his sycophantic cabinet and staff at the conclusion of a recent cabinet meeting.

         I look forward to free speech absolutist Gad Saad (who seems averse to giving Trump the sandpaper) evaluating whether they qualify as “honey badgers.”

      2. Yep, follow the money.
         https://open.substack.com/pub/immunologic/p/the-tylenolautism-pseudoscience-pipeline?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7li62
         Dr Andrea Love, in the above Substack link has quite a bit to say about Junior and a few other cronies, their motivation and it’s not all about health.

   2. Well, that is interesting, but the press release includes this precautionary (my bolding):
      “That association is strongest when acetaminophen is taken for four weeks or longer,” Baccarelli said.
      The statement continued: “Further research is needed to confirm the association and determine causality, but based on existing evidence, I believe that caution about acetaminophen use during pregnancy—especially heavy or prolonged use—is warranted.”
      Baccarelli noted in the “competing interests” section of the research paper that he has served as an expert witness for plaintiffs in a case involving potential links between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and neurodevelopmental disorders.

      To me, the problem is that there are realistic dangers of over-reacting. Pregnant women with high fever put the fetus at risk if they refuse to treat the fever. There may be class-action lawsuits in the future, without sufficient cause.

      1. The question of correlation vs causation is paramount here. The small effect size in and of itself is a concern. Add the established genetic links, the next question is plausibly (this could certainly be worded better….) “Are women with increase likelihood of having autistic children more likely to experience symptoms during pregnancy requiring analgesics such as acetaminophen?”

10. “At this time, no consistent association has been established.
    WHO recommends that all women continue to follow advice of their doctors or health workers, who can help assess individual circumstances and recommend necessary medicines. Any medicine should be used with caution during pregnancy, especially in the first three months, and in line with advice from health professionals.”

    I commented enough about this yesterday, so I will keep this briefer today. “No consistent association.” We call those weasel words, walking back the overstatements by others. True words, yes, but it is not quite “no association” or “no evidence.” Now look at the WHO’s recommendation. I kindly ask interested parties to compare this with the FDA announcement, and its attached “letter to physicians” below, to include its discussion of fever. Then maybe a gracious soul can explain to me the outrage, and the apparently visceral response.

    Did Trump overstate the case when he repeatedly said “Don’t take Tylenol?” only to back up and say talk with your doctor? Duh, what doesn’t he overstate? His advisors were much more measured. And as commenter Phillip Helbig pointed out yesterday, this is, at most, a small piece of the puzzle, but it is not baseless. Everyone should ask themselves this: If I were in a policy position and my view today turns out in ten years to be incorrect, might I wish I had acted differently ten years before? Which side in this argument, if they prove to be wrong, will have made the greater error?

    https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-responds-evidence-possible-association-between-autism-and-acetaminophen-use-during-pregnancy

11. Re boiling lobsters alive causing terrible distress to them — maybe, but maybe not. They obviously show strong panic / avoidance behaviour, but AFAIK we know essentially nothing about the “inner life” of lobsters. Obviously if we were being boiled alive we would be suffering terrible distress, but anthropomorphising has consistently been a dead-end approach in science and philosophy (IMO panpsychism is a current manifestation of this).

    1. If you were boiling alive, you’d show extreme panic/avoidance behavior too, but I would have no access to your inner life so I’d have no proof of your inner distress. Even speech is just another externalized behavior. This problem applies to other humans as well as lobsters. Our only hints as to the “inner life” of others – whatever the animal species – come from observing their behavior and extrapolating from it.

       The accusation of “anthropomorphism” is specious. We share many biological features with so many other species that to deny behavioral evidence of suffering in other species can be rightly dismissed as “speciesism”.

       1. You got me; I’m an unreconstructed human-chauvinist. Of course we currently have no proof of anyone else’s inner life, but the overwhelming physical, neurological, and behavioural similarities among us lead me to give other humans the benefit of the doubt. Not so lobsters (or panpsychic protons).

          I even eagerly poison some invertebrates with synthetic daisy-juice. Bwah-ha-ha-ha!

       2. I’m not so sure about that, Mike. If Barbara was boiling alive, you most certainly would know of her internal distress because you are human, too. Barbara’s point was that lobsters aren’t human, and almost everything about them is different from us, including how they interact with and perceive the world. There are some similarities, of course, and i suspect aversion to being boiled alive is one of them, but we are very different animals. I think trying to compare their “qualia” to ours is probably fruitless and really does risk confusing human perceptions with theirs. It isn’t specious, IMO.

          You don’t have to think they feel pain like us to know they don’t like being boiled. So dispatch them first. Easy peasy.

          1. Agree completely with your last lines. As for me “knowing” that a boiling Barbara would be in distress, I disagree. I would interpret her behavior as indicating distress, likewise a writhing lobster being boiled, but I would not know for sure because none of us has any proof of inner experiences in anyone other than ourselves. If our morality inclines us to minimize suffering in the world whenever possible (as mine does), my view is that it is best to assume that behavioral evidence of suffering in others should be respected as such, and we should attempt to reduce or eliminate it where possible. That is my purely secular morality.

    2. Evolution should make you reconsider. The nervous systems of humans and other animals do not just appear similar, they are similar. The track record is also poor, since it is no longer accepted that babies or fish do not feel pain, and wrt insects the evidence for their ability to suffer is also increasing.

       1. Maybe it should, but it dinnae¹. And AIUI, babies are generally considered to be human.

          . . . . .
          ¹ Ach aye, I’m only part Scots, but it sometimes seems dominant.

          1. A human sperm is also human, but I doubt it feels pain as it lacks a nervous system. Nevertheless there is a nice song about them being sacred.

             1. Ha ha!

    3. I don’t want to cause any animal unnecessary pain in the process of eating it. I’m prepared to assume for this purpose that lobsters do experience pain in a way that they suffer. I’m just skeptical that severing the lobster’s equivalent of its spinal cord in the manner of the chef’s video will protect it from pain. It might stop thrashing just by producing paralysis — “decaplegia”. The cut is too far caudal (taking advantage of the chink between the plates of the carapace.) Only if the cut is carried rostrally and ventrally down through the face between the eyes will the brain be destroyed.

       In any event it won’t kill the lobster. Even people can live for a time without brains, and lobster gills don’t stop breathing without a brain stem keeping time. It’s still going alive into the boiling water.

       But do we know that lobsters experience suffering in their brains? How do we know that each ganglion along the chain doesn’t do enough sensory processing from nociceptors afferent to it to perceive suffering in each one? We don’t do this, because our nervous systems moved all our processing for awareness into our cerebral cortex. (Even pain gating at the spinal synapse level is modulated by cerebral instruction from above.) But in a lobster, severing the connection to the brain, or even destroying the brain, would produce over-all loss of pain sensation in a more diffuse network only if a state of spinal shock (such as occurs in some human patients with acute spinal cord injuries) shut down neurologic activity in those ganglia too. If this could be demonstrated to happen from pithing — no action potentials from subsequent noxious stimuli, say — then I would definitely pith lobsters before cooking them.

       https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/do-lobsters-feel-pain-fighting-cocaine-addiction-monkey-fight-club-for-peace-and-more-1.4489613/do-lobsters-feel-pain-when-we-boil-them-alive-1.4489616

       This article describes a safer method of pithing from the ventral side more rostrally than in the video. It is more likely to disrupt the brain but again, we don’t know if this is sufficient to abolish pain and suffering in lobsters. It might well be that plunging them headfirst into water on a rolling boil kills them just as quickly.

12. Raunch is abit disappointing especially after reading “Kindly Inquisitions” where he propagates liberal science as a way forward.
    Maybe it’s the convenience of Christianity and the better of a bad bunch, who knows.
    It kinda says to me though, he’s not paying attention to history or science, or himself for that matter, possibly getting desperate but hell ain’t we all… sitting here holding our heads flabergasted at what we’re capable of inflicting on each other. Given there is enough resourses, wealth, knowledge to lift on a global stage WTF. As Raunch laid out in KI, isolate, marginalize, and just don’t listen to the cranks (religious, political, or otherwise) and let the reason, science minded, jog on.
    I know I tend to preach without indepth citations, explainations, etc., but I cant help myself.

13. Brooks babbles on:

    , . . American public debate was healthier and the conversation more profound when religious leaders like Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fulton Sheen brought their faith to bear on public questions.

    And Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson, and Jimmy Swaggart.

    I hereby nominate Mr. Brooks for Cherry-picker of the Year.

    1. You forgot to add Osama bin Laden whose Letter to America surely enlivened public debate.

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