Nick Cohen pins some blame on liberals for Trump’s election on the Regressive Left

November 19, 2016 • 12:40 pm

Several commenters on the Internet have blamed the Regressive Left (RL), for contributing to Trump’s victory, asserting that working-class whites, who were Trump’s major supporters, were turned off by the identity politics of liberal young people and Regressive Leftists. This thesis appeals to me because I despise the RL’s hypocrisy and arrogance and would love for Trump’s victory to have one salubrious effect—that of dissolving the RL. But as a scientist and skeptic, I am wary of supporting theses that emotionally appeal to me, and I’ve always doubted whether white working-class Americans even read anything by RLs, including feminists and liberals who support oppressive Muslim ideology.

Yet the RL-created-Trump idea is adumbrated by the estimable Nick Cohen in this week’s Guardian, in a piece called “If liberals want to stop the right winning, we must change.” He first blames Democrats in general for running a poor candidate, one who didn’t appeal to the white working class:

If we were just talking about the United States, we could concentrate on the shocking irresponsibility of the Democratic party in running an establishment candidate in a country that was sick of the status quo. It is bizarre to see people who condemn cultural appropriation engage in political appropriation. But maybe US leftists are right to think that a portion of Trump supporters were secretly on their side and a more radical Democrat would have won them over.

Unfortunately, this is not just an argument about the wretched Clinton campaign. Not only in America, but across the democratic world, liberals and leftists are becoming used to waking up in the early hours and learning that they have lost. Again. They did not expect the Conservatives to win the British general election or the British to vote to leave the EU. They didn’t see Trump coming. They won’t see Le Pen coming. Poland may be the future. In a country that had a centre-left government within recent memory, not one member of the Polish parliament now calls himself or herself a social democrat or socialist. Debate is between the internationalist right in opposition and the authoritarian nationalists in power. Theirs may be our future too.

To suffer such calamitous defeats and not feel the need to change is to behave as irresponsibly as the US Democratic party. It is a myth that Trump and Brexit won because of overwhelming working-class support. Nevertheless, they could win only because a large chunk of the white working class moved rightwards. Debates about how to lure them back ought to reveal the difference between arguing with and arguing against your fellow citizens, which most middle-class leftists have not even begun to think about.

Here I think he’s right. I never was a huge supporter of Hillary Clinton, though I voted for her (and stop blaming me for being tepid in that support!), and the Democrats simply didn’t have an appeal to populism. It’s also true that many Americans who voted for Trump previously voted for Obama, probably because Obama offered hope for the working class, and indeed tried to provide it through initiatives like Obamacare. (Ironically, many of those who voted for Trump were voting for the elimination of their own healthcare).

But then I think Cohen goes too far in blaming the Regressive Left on the calamitous US election as well as the calamitous UK Brexit vote:

You can only argue against committed supporters of Trump. If they believe all Mexicans are rapists and Muslims terrorists, you cannot compromise without betraying your principles. Fair enough. But before you become self-righteous you must accept that the dominant faction on the western left uses language just as suggestive of collective punishment when they talk about their own white working class. Imagine how it must feel for a worker in Bruce Springsteen’s Youngstown to hear college-educated liberals condemn “white privilege” when he has a shit job and a miserable life. Or Google the number of times “straight white males” are denounced by public-school educated women in the liberal media and think how that sounds to an ex-miner coughing his guts up in a Yorkshire council flat. [JAC: have a look at those links.]

Emotionally, as well as rationally, they sense the left, or at least the left they see and hear, is no longer their friend. They are men and women who could be argued with, if the middle classes were willing to treat them decently. You might change their minds. You might even find that they could change yours. Instead of hearing an argument, they see liberals who call the police to suppress not only genuine hate speech that incites violence but any uncouth or “inappropriate” transgression.

For too many in the poor neighbourhoods of the west, middle-class liberals have become like their bosses at work. They tell you what you can and can’t think. They warn that you must accept their superiority and you will be in no end of trouble if you do not.

Cohen offers two solutions, both involving abandoning RL tactics:

There are times when your opponents must be defeated, whatever the cost. Defeating them today involves nothing so violent as necessary murders. Thinking about class, not instead of but along with gender and race, would be a step forward. Realising that every time you ban an opponent you prove you cannot win an argument would be another. I do not doubt history will look back on 2016 and say “alas”. But it will not pardon defeated liberals who never learned that to win they had to change.

And here he’s partly right and partly wrong. RL speaker bans and identity politics that exclude class as a factor may have played a very minor role in both Brexit and the Trump victory; buit the real solution involves in running liberals who have a solid program to help the working class. After all, such a platform is the historical basis of liberalism, but has been abandoned in favor of Clintonian appeals to the rich and to the upper middle class. She had nothing to say to the working class except vague pieties, and while Trump had nothing substantial to offer them either, he represented an alternative, however odious, to the “rich people’s politics” of Hillary Clinton. Remember how much money Clinton made by giving speeches to Wall Street Banks. That was not going to instill confidence in the poor that she was on their side.

Any working class person who voted for Trump probably wasn’t thinking, for Trump is also rich, favors the rich (as does his party), and his pandering to the working class was largely an appeal to prejudice and nativism. But it was still an alternative to the status quo. We, the Left, need to offer something tangible to the poor, both black and white, and not just demonize Republicans or sneer at working-class whites, people who are generally seen by RLs as racist and sexist—and therefore unworthy of consideration.

FTC debunks homeopathy; medical water on the way out

November 19, 2016 • 11:00 am

When I was in Hong Kong, I drove to the Literary Festival Dinner (a fantastic Chinese banquet) in a van with four educated, well-off, and well-traveled women who were on the Festival’s board of directors. Once on our way, they all proceeded to go after me for saying, in my conversation on faith versus science, that Chinese traditional medicine was largely bunk, as was acupuncture.  They were incensed, maintaining that Chinese medicine had been scientifically tested many times (as had acupuncture), and that my statement was simply “ignorant.”  I was shocked and taken aback, particularly because I was their guest. But I regrouped and tried to defend myself, citing the studies of acupuncture showing that it didn’t matter where the needles were inserted (there are specific points for specific ailments) or even whether the needles were inserted; sham and non-insertion acupuncture is no better than a placebo, which means the method doesn’t work as it’s supposed to. (Wikipedia gives a summary of the research with references; the upshot is that acupuncture is no better than a placebo, so the whole “system” with insertion points and so on is bogus.)  The women said I was simply wrong.

Those ladies also told me that Western medicine is largely a sham, that it overtreats patients (sometimes true, but irrelevant when compared to TCM), and that Western (I prefer “scientific”) doctors ignore real cures that work (e.g. dubious cancer treatments) because those doctors are committed to enriching themselves, and don’t want to use cheap but effective treatments.

Further, as I mentioned in an earlier post, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) was criticized by four young Hong Kong doctors in a conversation with me after my tale. The medics agreed that they often had to repair the damage caused by TCM because it was either harmful or (more often) delayed treatment, leading to the death of patients who could have been saved.

TCM involves all kinds of remedies that have not been tested and on first principles seem dumb, like using deer penises to remedy male sexual disorders, snake soup, the “cooling versus warming” effects of foods, and other products that are not only useless, but harmful to wildlife (bear paws, tiger parts, rhino horn, and so on). There may be some TCM remedies that do work (after all, a goodly percentage of scientifically tested drugs are derived from plants), but I know of none that have been tested the right way: double-blind research on patients. Even the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health—the woo-laden branch of the National Institutes of Health whose job is to test “alternative medicine”—and has not, so far as I know, found any of it useful—describes TCM like this (read the whole page):

Is It Effective?

  • For most conditions, there is not enough rigorous scientific evidence to know whether TCM methods work for the conditions for which they are used.

What I learned from that brief ride between bookstore and restaurant was that educated, cosmopolitan, and affluent Chinese people (I count Hong Kong residents as Chinese) can nevertheless fall prey to a form of faith: faith-based and untested medicine. This is something I didn’t deal with in Faith Versus Fact, and should have, for it’s another one of the dangers of faith—even if that faith isn’t religious.

This is all an introduction to another form of ineffective medicine: homeopathy. Most of us know the theoretical basis for this treatment (treat symptoms of illness with a substance whose ingestion can mimic the symptoms) and the “remedies” it inspires (pure water, said to contain some property inspired by the homeopathic substance, which has been diluted out completely). Both of these, as well as empirical tests, show that, like acupuncture, homeopathy is at best a placebo, and at worst can hurt people by delaying proper science-based treatment. Yet homeopathic medicines are sold in many places, including Whole Foods and Target, which should be ashamed of themselves. The Davis Food Coop in California, where I used to shop, is loaded with expensive, dumb, and useless homeopathic remedies. And, I’m told, you can even find some at CVS, though I haven’t seen them there.

Now, in a great move, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued a statement on homeopathic remedies, an enforcement policy for how to deal with those remedies (see overview of enforcement policy here), and a 24-page brochure describing how homeopathic drugs are advertised and how consumers perceive this advertising. The upshot: homeopathic remedies, to be advertised and sold as useful for a condition, must have been scientifically tested, just like regular pharmaceuticals, to determine their efficacy. Here are a few statements from the overviews (emphases are mine):

The Federal Trade Commission today announced a new “Enforcement Policy Statement on Marketing Claims for Over-the-Counter (OTC) Homeopathic Drugs.” The policy statement was informed by an FTC workshop held last year to examine how such drugs are marketed to consumers. The FTC also released its staff report on the workshop, which summarizes the panel presentations and related public comments in addition to describing consumer research commissioned by the FTC.

The policy statement explains that the FTC will hold efficacy and safety claims for OTC homeopathic drugs to the same standard as other products making similar claims. That is, companies must have competent and reliable scientific evidence for health-related claims, including claims that a product can treat specific conditions. The statement describes the type of scientific evidence that the Commission requires of companies making such claims for their products.

. . . You’ll want to read the Enforcement Policy Statement for the full story – it’s short, but packed with detail – but it boils down to this: “Efficacy and safety claims for homeopathic drugs are held to the same standards as similar claims for non-homeopathic drugs” and there’s no basis for treating them differently under the FTC Act.

What are those standards? We’re thumbnailing it here, but according to the FTC’s Advertising Substantiation Policy Statement, if a company conveys that it has a certain level of proof, it must have “at least the advertised level of substantiation.”

If there’s no express or implied reference to a particular level of support, the FTC considers “the type of claim, the product, the consequences of a false claim, the benefits of a truthful claim, the cost of developing substantiation for the claim, and the amount of substantiation experts believe is reasonable.” For health, safety, or efficacy claims, companies need “competent and reliable scientific evidence,” a phrase defined in many recent cases. For claims that a product can treat a disease or its symptoms, that generally means well-designed human clinical testing.

For most OTC [over the counter] homeopathic drugs, the case for efficacy is based solely on traditional homeopathic theories, and not on studies applying current scientific methods. So claims that they have a therapeutic effect lack the reasonable basis required by FTC law, and therefore are likely misleading.

This, I think, is the death knell of homeopathic drugs, and perhaps we should start holding our pharmacies and ripoff companies like Whole Foods accountable if their homeopathic “remedies” are advertised as useful.

Is there any way out for the homeopaths? Can such remedies still be sold? The Enforcement Report gives only one way, but it requires severe qualification:

For the vast majority of OTC homeopathic drugs, the case for efficacy is based solely on traditional homeopathic theories and there are no valid studies using current scientific methods showing the product’s efficacy. Accordingly, marketing claims that such homeopathic products have a therapeutic effect lack a reasonable basis and are likely misleading in violation of Sections 5 and 12 of the FTC Act.14 However, the FTC has long recognized that marketing claims may include additional explanatory information in order to prevent the claims from being misleading. Accordingly, the promotion of an OTC homeopathic product for an indication that is not substantiated by competent and reliable scientific evidence may not be deceptive if that promotion effectively communicates to consumers that: (1) there is no scientific evidence that the product works and (2) the product’s claims are based only on theories of homeopathy from the 1700s that are not accepted by most modern medical experts.15

But even that comes with restrictions—restrictions that may ultimately make the marketing of homeopathic remedies illegal. See especially the bit in bold below:

Perfunctory disclaimers are unlikely to successfully communicate the information necessary to make claims for OTC homeopathic drugs non-misleading. The Commission notes:

• Any disclosure should stand out and be in close proximity to the efficacy message; to be effective, it may actually need to be incorporated into the efficacy message.

• Marketers should not undercut such qualifications with additional positive statements or consumer endorsements reinforcing a product’s efficacy.

• In light of the inherent contradiction in asserting that a product is effective and also disclosing that there is no scientific evidence for such an assertion, it is possible that depending on how they are presented many of these disclosures will be insufficient to prevent consumer deception. Marketers are advised to develop extrinsic evidence, such as consumer surveys, to determine the net impressions communicated by their marketing materials.

• The Commission will carefully scrutinize the net impression of OTC homeopathic advertising or other marketing employing disclosures to ensure that it adequately conveys the extremely limited nature of the health claim being asserted. If, despite a marketer’s disclosures, an ad conveys more substantiation than the marketer has, the marketer will be in violation of the FTC Act.

I’m not sure when this enforcement policy will take effect, but I think we should start pointing out this stuff to the purveyors of these ridiculous remedies.

Here’s a homeopathic “pain remedy” sold at Target. This packaging will soon be illegal:

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h/t: Stephen Barnard

Caturday felid trifecta: Rare cat breeds, sleeve Maru, cats caught mid-pounce

November 19, 2016 • 9:00 am

These are supposedly the 13 rarest breeds of cats. My favorites are the Burmilla, the Chartreux, and the Kurlian bobtail. (and the British shorthair is not to be sniffed at).  The caracal, however, is not a cat breed, but a wild felid species, and shouldn’t be on this list.

Here’s a new Maru, part of which is appealingly titled “Sleeve cat under the buttocks”. The buttocks apparently belong to Hana, Maru’s companion who’s sitting on the sleeve.

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The Guardian features an adorable panoply of kittens caught in mid-leap (and just posing cutely), all taken by Seth Casteel and included in his new book, Pounce.  Here are four of my favorites, along with the kittens’ names:

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Fuzzbucket
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Chicken
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Bug-a-Boo
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Petunia
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Zeppelin

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Lagniappe:The “water cat cake”, from Bored Panda, is a popular kind of ‘mochi’ in Japan now. You can find the recipe here; it’s basically sugar, water, and agar. But you can mold it into cool shapes like this kitty:

 

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h/t: Ivan, Grania, Paul M.

Readers’ wildlife photographs

November 19, 2016 • 7:30 am
Biologist/naturalist/photographer Lou Jost has photographed lots of species at the Tambopata Research Center in Peru (see previous posts here and here). Here’s another installment; his notes are indented:
At the Tambopata Research Center we got up around 4:30 am most days, and evenings after dinner there were often talks, so we had little time to explore the forest at night. But one night before bed I couldn’t resist exploring for an hour. In that hour I found so many things that I only managed to advance about 20 meters from the lodge.
Many big hairy spiders were commonly perched on leaves or branches, probably waiting for one of the Orthoptera I sent earlier [see links above]:
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These membracid treehoppers, and the ants that tended them in exchange for sugar droplets, were very active at night, while during the day they don’t seem to move much.
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This strange insect was also hanging out near the treehoppers. I don’t know if it was eating the plant or the treehoppers. [JAC: does anyone recognize it?]
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Another species of treehopper:
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And a landscape from Stephen Barnard in Idaho, sent October 17. The title is “Fresh snow this morning.”
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Saturday: Hili dialogue

November 19, 2016 • 5:36 am

PCC(E) here, back at the helm. Thanks again to Grania for filling in during my trip!

Today is Saturday, November 19, 2016, and I’m still jet-lagged.  Perhaps I’ll wake up if I have some coffee, for it’s National Macchiato Day. I abjure that form of coffee: I like either no milk (the drug experience) or lots of it (the latte experience).  It’s also World Toilet Day (I am not making this up) as well as International Men’s Day, which, sadly, focuses only on our health and not our general awesomeness.

On this day in 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean became the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon, and I recalled when I read this that no woman has yet set foot on the Moon. I wonder if anyone will during the next several decades? Do you know how many men have set foot on the Moon? The answer is here; they’re all Americans.  On that very same day, November 19,. 1969, Pelé scored his 1000th goal.  Also on this day in 1998, the House Judiciary Committee began impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton with regard to his statements during the Lewinsky affair. (For some reason I just had a moment of panic as I remembered that Donald Trump will be our next President. Woe is we.)

Notables born on this day Indira Gandhi (1917, assassinated by her Sikh guards), Allison Janney (1959♥), and Jodie Foster (1962). Those who died on this day include The Man in the Iron Mask (1703), and Emma Lazarus (1887), author of the sonnet The New Colossus, which contains these familiar and stirring words:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

(We’re now going to keep out the huddled masses with a Big Wall.) Mike Nichols also died on this day in 2014. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, looking wise, has some deep thoughts—or perhaps it’s only a Deepity.

Hili: I do not doubt…
A: What is it you do not doubt?
Hili: That one always has to doubt.
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 In Polish:
Hili: Nie wątpię…
Ja: W co nie wątpisz?
Hili: Że zawsze należy wątpić.
As lagniappe, a picture of Lion Hugs from Grania. We could all use some of these.
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An upcoming book by Dan Dennett

November 18, 2016 • 2:30 pm

Lord is this man prolific! Like Steve Pinker (another man I admire), Dan just keeps cranking out the books, and they’re often very good ones. These two men seem to have books arrayed in their heads like planes coming in for a landing at O’Hare, all arrayed in a sequential order.

Dan’s latest book, which will be out on February 7 of next year, is From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.   Dan never shies away from the hard problems, and, according to the publisher’s site (W. W. Norton), the subject is this:

One of America’s foremost philosophers offers a major new account of the origins of the conscious mind.

How did we come to have minds?

For centuries, this question has intrigued psychologists, physicists, poets, and philosophers, who have wondered how the human mind developed its unrivaled ability to create, imagine, and explain. Disciples of Darwin have long aspired to explain how consciousness, language, and culture could have appeared through natural selection, blazing promising trails that tend, however, to end in confusion and controversy. Even though our understanding of the inner workings of proteins, neurons, and DNA is deeper than ever before, the matter of how our minds came to be has largely remained a mystery.

That is now changing, says Daniel C. Dennett. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, his most comprehensive exploration of evolutionary thinking yet, he builds on ideas from computer science and biology to show how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection. Part philosophical whodunit, part bold scientific conjecture, this landmark work enlarges themes that have sustained Dennett’s legendary career at the forefront of philosophical thought.

In his inimitable style—laced with wit and arresting thought experiments—Dennett explains that a crucial shift occurred when humans developed the ability to share memes, or ways of doing things not based in genetic instinct. Language, itself composed of memes, turbocharged this interplay. Competition among memes—a form of natural selection—produced thinking tools so well-designed that they gave us the power to design our own memes. The result, a mind that not only perceives and controls but can create and comprehend, was thus largely shaped by the process of cultural evolution.

Well, I’ve never been keen on memes, which in my view haven’t added anything to our understanding of anything, but never mind: Dan’s argument probably doesn’t rest on “memetics.” At any rate, I just got a prepublication copy of this book and will give a report when I finish it.

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A well known physicist espouses accommodationism in Smithsonian Magazine

November 18, 2016 • 1:45 pm
Think Big
As I’ve said repeatedly, for some reason that I don’t fathom, major “sciencey” magazines like National Geographic, Smithsonian, and even (ugh!) Nature are showing increasing osculation of religion’s rump, espousing a harmony between these two incompatible areas. I have no idea why they do this—perhaps in an era of click-bait journalism, they think it will draw readers.
The latest case, and an execrable one, is in Smithsonian Magazine. It’s an interview of physicist Sylvester James Gates by Summer Ash, and is called “Why theoretical physicist Sylvester James Gates sees no conflict between science and religion.”
Gates (photo below) is identified this way:

 [as] the John S. Toll Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland at College Park, where he studies the fundamental nature of our universe through the lens of supersymmetry—a theory that predicts twice as many fundamental particles as the Standard Model and could be the next step towards a grand unified theory. He’s also the first African-American to hold an endowed chair in physics at a major research university in the United States.

He also seems to be religious.

And I have to say that I envy this bit of his bio given in Wikipedia:

On February 1, 2013, Gates was a recipient of the National Medal of Science.[5] Gates was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013. As of 2015, Professor Gates has a base salary (9 months not including grants and other income) of $339,254.78 and taught 1 class in 2015 and none in 2016.

What is sad is how such an accomplished and well-paid professor has such a nebulous, almost incoherent, view of why science and religion aren’t in conflict. Though most of Smithsonian’s interview isn’t about that issue, the relevant part is at the end, with Ash’s question in bold and Gates’s answer below it:

In science, both mathematics and physics play large roles in describing and probing the earliest stages of our universe. But some people view the question of where our universe came from as the sole domain of faith or religion. What do you think about how science and faith are often pitted against each other?

I have never found a schism in my life between doing science and having religious beliefs. Evolutionary biologist Steven J. Gould explains why faith and science don’t conflict using the phrase “non-overlapping magisteria.” I find this idea fascinating, because if it’s correct, there ought to be mechanisms in each sphere of belief—whether it’s in faith or in science—that are responsible for this property of the non-overlapping attribute.

I spent some years thinking about it and it occurred to me that science seems to have one such mechanism. In science, not only do we tell people our best estimation about what’s going on in the universe, we also pay rigorous attention to what we don’t know. This is quantified in science as what are called “error bars” or “confidence bars.” We pay just as much attention to these uncertainties as we pay to that measured values of things around us. And there will always be uncertainty in any argument based on science.

That’s interesting in the context of faith because just as there will be uncertainty in any belief we may have, we will also have uncertainty in any disbelief we have. In my mind, this is the protection mechanism that science has built into it so that it does not intrude into faith-based belief systems.

In religion there’s a different protection mechanism. Saint Augustine, a Catholic saint mind you, said that people of faith must recognize that when people talk about the natural world and honestly record and observe phenomena that are in opposition to their belief, it is their belief it has to give way and not the other way around.

In my mind there’s this beautiful symmetry about why Gould got it exactly right. They don’t overlap, they’re just very different things. I believe that both faith and science are essential for the survival of our species.

I’ve explained in Faith Versus Fact (pp. 106-112) why Gould’s view of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) doesn’t work, and in fact has largely been rejected by theologians for its claim that the domian of religion doesn’t include statements about “the factual character of the natural world.” In fact most religions do at bottom depend on facts about God, about the afterlife, about heaven and hell, about Jesus, about Muhammad, what constitutes sin, and so on. Has Gates not thought about that? Apparently not.

As for the rest of Gates’s “accommodationism,” I find it hard to understand. It seems to be that both science and religion have “protection mechanisms” to assure the truth of what they find. In science that seems to be the use of statistics to affix a degree of uncertainty to our claims, and in religion it seems to be that one’s beliefs must be susceptible to the findings of science, so that one can retain and protect those beliefs not invalidated (or not addressed) by science.

But 64% of Americans have said that if a scientific fact invalidates a tenet of their religious beliefs, they’ll jettison the fact and keep their belief. In other words, religion’s “protection mechanism” doesn’t work very well, and not at all in the case of the 42% of Americans who are creationists.

I’m puzzled by how fuzzy Gates’s thinking is. If a student were to hand me an essay in which she gave Gates’s answer for why science and faith were compatible, I’ll mark it all up and say “think harder and try again.” But it all goes to show you that even a smart and well known scientist goes all wonky when he starts talking about religion and its compatibility with science. Gates says he’s religious, and he must therefore find a reason, however weird, for how he can have his science and his Jesus too.

As for religion (“faith”) being essential for the survival of our species, well, them’s just fancy words, for our species can survive just fine without religion. If it didn’t, Denmark and Sweden would be toast.

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Sylvester James Gates (photo from Smithsonian)
 h/t: Jente