When science gets politicized ...

I hate the tobacco industry, which does all it can do to tempt people to consume a product that is a slow killer.  I simply cannot understand how people volunteer to go work there.  Mercenaries!

But, there are plenty who do all kinds of jobs--and defend their businesses--for money.  It is not the market--it is the people.  After all, it is we the people who make up the market.

So, yes, any do I will do what I can do, to rant against big tobacco. Against the military-industrial complex. Against the prison-industrial-complex. Against unethical profiteers like the manufacturer of EpiPen.  It is a long list, typical of a person who is almost always on the left side of the political center.

But, there is one that plenty of people on the left side of the political spectrum rant against very loudly that has never made sense to me.  The virulent opposition to GMO.

I have blogged in plenty about this.  Even as recently when there was a nationwide march in support of science, I noted the lack of honest conversations about science.  While we are quick to laugh at the idiots who deny climate change ... there are plenty in the "save the earth" group who are adamantly anti-GMO.  I wrote in that post that I wished I could carry a sign like this:

Imagine the plight of the dedicated GMO research scientist.  Every scientific authority has ruled that GMO is safe, and yet the researchers cannot make headway!

One of those researchers has written a personal essay.  The guy, Devang Mehta, is from India and recently completed his PhD in Switzerland, "creating genetically modified organisms."  But, he is already exhausted:

Nevertheless, my time in GMO research creating virus-resistant plants has meant dealing with the overwhelming negative responses the topic evokes in so many people. These range from daily conversations halting into awkward silence when the subject of my work crops up, to hateful Twitter trolls, and even the occasional fear that public protesters might destroy our research. Little wonder then, that having finished my Ph.D., I’m part excited and part relieved to move to a new lab and work on more fundamental questions in plant biology: how plants are able to control the levels at which their genes are active.  

Like I said, it is virulent opposition :(

Mehta continues:

Beyond the issue of public acceptance and, frankly, a caving-in of many in the scientific community to pseudoscientific beliefs, I’m also glad to be moving away from transgenic research because anti-GMO activism over the last couple of decades has made a career in GMO research a risky proposition.

Research that never gets applied to helping people because of the opposition.  Like "golden rice" that is "still not available to the children who need it most" even two decades since it was successfully created.

My research has given me the opportunity to visit smallholder farms in two African countries, to teach a student from the “global south” the kind of modern biological techniques that remain a dream for many in her country, and to make discoveries that might help with an important problem in food security in the tropics. As a result, yes, I do feel a measure of guilt at leaving this field of research and quitting my lab’s quest to engineer better varieties of cassava for African and South Asian farmers halfway through the project.

What a loss!

Sex and the single guy. Well, married guy too.

Back in the early years of graduate school, when I was beginning to understand the libertarian political economy, an opportunity came up in class discussions for me to see how far that can be stretched.  I suggested to the class--this was before the days of NAFTA, the Berlin Wall was still there, and China was just about waking up--that in the global division of labor, perhaps we can also think of the spatial distribution of sex work.  And that as much as the US specialized in the silicon industry, well, Thailand specialized in the sex industry.

Of course, discussions at the graduate level are often to test the limits of a theoretical interpretation, but in this one maybe I went too far. Or, for all I know, thanks to my accent, nobody understood a word of what I had to say.  There were no discussions, and we moved on.

The sex industry has morphed in so many different ways now.  Like I mentioned in this post two years ago, I was thrown for quite a loop reading about the vibrator in the New Yorker and in the Atlantic.  If these two magazines that I have subscribed to for years could mainstream sex and the vibrator, then there must be a great deal happening and, as always, I am the last one to know!

Last night, I was flicking through the options on the telly--back home I get only the basic channels and the 49 channels here was mindblowing. One of those was HBO.  The channel surfing me was shocked when I reached HBO.  A completely nude woman was demonstrating various types of vibrators and other sex gadgets.  On regular HBO. Not even some special HBO.  And definitely not some adult pay channel.  When did the puritanical America become so open about sex and vibrators and sex toys?  Did I miss a memo update?

And then today, I scanned at one of my favorite websites ever--the nerd that I am, I have to check in there even when on the road--and there was a link to an article with this teaser:

Prostitution used to be a bad thing – degrading, retrograde and to be opposed. Now sex work is just another service job, like being a waitress...

What was even more interesting was that the link was not to a libertarian publication but to The Nation. So, of course, I had to read it.

On the left, prostitution used to be seen as a bad thing: part of the general degradation of the working class, and the subjugation of women, under capitalism. Women who sold sex were victims, forced by circumstances into a painful and humiliating way of life, and socialism would liberate them. Now, selling sex is sex work—just another service job, with good points and bad—and if you suggest that the women who perform it are anything less than free agents, perhaps even “empowered” if they make enough money, you’re just a prude. Today’s villain is not the pimp or the john—it’s second-wave feminists, with their primitive men-are-the-enemy worldview, and “rescuers” like Nicholas Kristof, who presume to know what’s best for women.

What the what?  There is a group on the left that argues that sex work is just work?  Really?  From the left?  When did I miss this memo?

The author, the ever fiery feminist Katha Pollitt goes for it:

It’s one thing to say sex workers shouldn’t be stigmatized, let alone put in jail. But when feminists argue that sex work should be normalized, they accept male privilege they would attack in any other area. They accept that sex is something women have and men get (do I hear “rape culture,” anyone?), that men are entitled to sex without attracting a partner, even to the limited extent of a pickup in a bar, much less pleasing or satisfying her.

I think I should get back to my ashram soon and stay away from these updates.  Nah, that won't happen--I will continue to investigate this strange world from the protective ashram that my home is.  Stupid is as stupid does, whether on the road or at home!

The radical left. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em!

So, there I was on the bike path, when I noticed graffiti on the path that was actually readable.  Graffiti, normally, is like some awful hieroglyphics, which leave me wondering what the point is if the intended audience cannot get the message.  But then maybe the graffiti artists are not talking to me, eh!

Anyway, this one was readable because it was in simple, no nonsense, English.  In big bold letters, which would have made any eager four year old try to read that out, with the accompanying parent having a tough time helping the kid read!

Thinking of the hapless parents dealing with their kids asking them "what does fuck mean?" reminds me of the "Mr. Robinson" parody skits that Eddie Murphy did in SNL.  Hey little boys and girls, can you use this word in a sentence?

Where was I?

Yes, that graffiti is so Eugene!

People in other places might have other things on their minds, but here in Eugene, we certainly have more than anybody else's share of the radical and the environmental left.  Old timers say that this is nothing, that it ain't the hippie town it once used to be.  Every old timer seems to have at least one favorite hippie story to tell, and as exaggerated as they might seem, well, they are not!

The folks on the left think I am one of 'em Republicans, while from the right they view me as a damn liberal.  I can't live with either, and can't live without either.  But, any day, I would rather live in a hippie town than at Stepford ;)

And there was another:

More vocabulary lessons for little boys and girls.  This one is a mix of politeness--"I am discouraged"--and the big verb there--"rapes."  You think it was a result of some serious thinking by the graffiti protester?  I don't think so ;)

Monsanto has made quite some enemies.  At this rate, pretty soon, perhaps the thesaurus will include Monsanto as a synonym for evil! As I have blogged before, in plenty, such extreme positions, however, prevent us from engaging in constructive discussions on genetic modification and the undeniable future demand for agricultural products. (Two, within the last two months alone: here and here)

I suppose it takes all kinds of people to make up this world.  If everybody were like me, it will be one hell of a boring planet of non-drinking, non-socializing, hermit bloggers!  But then that will be a neat way to keep the aliens from ever visiting us!

"it is a disaster for the left to abandon a commitment to reason"

A couple of days ago I remembered Alan Sokal's effort, when commenting about peer-review, and today the academic pops up again in The Philosophers' Magazine :) (ht)
I liked this part of that essay:

When thinking about why Sokal gets involved with these debates, it’s important to remember his political motivations. Sokal is a man of the left who once spent a few summers teaching maths at the National University of Nicaragua during the Sandinistas’ rule. Underlying his work outside of physics is a strong conviction that it is a disaster for the left to abandon a commitment to reason. In his book, he cites one such example of someone who wanted to claim that science is not universal, but varies according to how the individual is situated in the world: “A German can look at and understand Nature only according to his racial character.”
“This of course is a quotation from Ernst Krieck, a notorious Nazi ideologue, who was rector of the University of Heidelberg in 1937-38. I was flabbergasted – well maybe not flabbergasted – when I came across it. This doesn’t show that postmodernists are Nazis or anything. What it shows is a kind of uncanny overlap of ideas between, on the one hand, left-wing postmodernists, and the other hand, extreme right wing nationalists, whether they’re German or Hindu nationalists.”
Whether he’s right or wrong, this is why the debate that Sokal started matters, and is why, intellectual impostor or not, philosophers too should pay attention to him.

Obama, Chavez, and "the gift"

So, Hugo Chavez created quite a story by gifting Obama the "Latin Leftist's Bible" as the LA Times described the book.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa refers to this same book as the "Idiot's Bible" and recommends that Obama regift the book. Llosa, who is the son of the novelist/intellectal Mario Vargas Llosa, has always been highly critical of the Latin American left--here is an example of his commentaries.

The book shot up in Amazon's best seller lists. The Guardian notes that:

It is not the first time that Chávez has influenced the readers of the world. Three years ago he publicly praised a Noam Chomsky tome, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance, at the United Nations. The book surged to the top of Amazon's bestseller list.

It looks like Oprah has a competitor in Chavez :-)

The "Senategate" in the Land of Corruption, er, Lincoln

More to add on the coming confusion and disunity among Democrats .... Spiked's Sean Collins has this to throw in:

Only about four weeks after the election, and the liberal-left was now feeling a new range of emotions, from confusion to disillusion to who knows what, trying to work out how it could be that their hero could have selected such centrist and even right-wing figures to the leading advisory roles in his administration – with not a ‘progressive’ in sight. To make it even more galling, these picks were being widely referred to as ‘the best and brightest’ (what, were they implying that progressives are neither?).

Ahem, maybe a tad below the belt on progressives not being in the club of "the best and the brightest" .... but, good point. And then later he writes:

Sceptical liberals could at least console themselves that Obama would bring needed ‘change’ from the evil Bush administration – but wait, now they couldn’t even say that! The liberal-left not only has to deal with all the Clinton re-treads; they also have to face the fact that there will be holdovers from the Bush regime in critical roles. Robert Gates, the executor of the Iraq war, will stay on as defence secretary. And the top economic position of treasury secretary goes to Timothy Geithner, who was once registered as a Republican and now calls himself independent, and who has already been working closely with the Bush administration secretary, Henry Paulson, on the bailout package. Obama even reached back to the Reagan years and chose 81-year-old Paul Volcker to be an economic adviser (when Obama said he wanted experience, I guess that included finding someone who actually lived during the Great Depression).

Should something bizarre come out of the Illinois governor scandal--shall we call it "senategate?"--that taints even a third-stringer in the Obama camp, well, it will be quite a three-ring-circus! Bill Clinton had his real estate deals investigated ad nauseam--remember Whitewater? We now have the shadow of Tony Rezko ..... politics in any country is one hell of a spectator sport--if only it didn't have serious implications!