One of the most painful lessons I’ve learned over the past several months is that there are no heroes. There is always — always — some measure, small or large, of disappointment hiding behind all the awesome things that drew you to idolize one person or another.

Of course, while I always thought of Dawkins as a science popularizer and atheist first, and a humanist dead last, I figured this latest Great Sorting of the skeptical and atheist communities into those that are down with social justice causes and those that would rather entrench themselves in privilege would pretty much end exactly this way. The hyper-privileged folks nearest the top of our movement have pretty uniformly fallen on one side of this divide — the side that would rather not skeptically examine ideas like social conventions, consent, harassment policies and protecting the underprivileged.

So it’s absolutely no surprise to me that Dawkins has, again, sided against Skepchick — this time, instead of writing a “Dear Muslima” comment at Rebecca Watson (telling her that the sexism she encounters isn’t nearly as bad as female genital mutilation, so she should grow up or get a thicker skin), he’s stabbing at Skepchick the organization for a) being on board with the idea of harassment policies, and b) for having written a post last year offering free vaccinations with hugs as your reward.

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(How heartwarming is this Skepchick open invitation to “HUG ME at TAM”! http://tinyurl.com/6za5gxa . Spontaneous! Carefree! Rule-free! Delightful!)

He was asked to clarify by probably dozens of people — and dozens of people heaped derision at his “timely” reply to the issue in order to smear Skepchick’s credibility as hypocrites, even if it would damage the vaccination campaign in the process. He “clarified”:

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(I VERY strongly support the vaccine campaign. And I support spontaneous hugs governed by ordinary unwritten rules of politeness. Problem?)

The funny thing is, it doesn’t take a particularly sharp mind to be able to square that circle — first, put aside your predisposition that suddenly Skepchick is all about sex-negativity, or about requiring consent via consent forms written in triplicate, or any other antifeminist trope you’ve heard about them. Skepchick is very much a sex-positive organization. They are also very pro-consent. It is not difficult to be both — if you foster one, you pretty much must foster the other, because if you don’t, people will be almost invariably hurt.

He walked some of this back, because people got the wrong impression of what he was saying. Some people thought he does not support the efforts to increase herd immunity. So he said the following:

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(Please support http://hugmeimvaccinated.org . Epidemics are nonlinearly favoured if vax nos fall below a threshold. Spread the meme not the disease )

This was a good, strong message, and in isolation, absolutely correct. It’s just a shame that he decided to — now, suddenly, shortly before TAM 10, and using what he thinks is a gotcha moment from a blog post in 2011 — take this stab at Skepchick.

It is an emotive argument about the morality of expecting consent before actions are taken involving other people, and one predicated on paper-thin evidence. It is so far beneath Dawkins that it serves only to undercut his image as a rationalist in my eyes — not that I was any longer under any delusion that he is a pure rationalist. It is similar in scope and in vector to his last stab at a Skepchick, in suggesting that these unwritten rules are all it takes to prevent people from doing nasty things, and that anything that DOES happen must be dealt with via the panacea of a “thicker skin”.

Offering free, spontaneous hugs to people is perfectly fine. There was a very strong harassment policy at CONvergence, and a sur-policy for the FtB and Skepchick party rooms at the convention, and I got more hugs there than anywhere else at the entire convention. Every one of them was enthusiastically consented-to as far as I can tell, and if anyone was being significantly put-upon, they would have had every right and every recourse to ameliorate that situation.

Offering hugs as a reward for vaccination is a nice idea, but at the same time, it’s well within the rights of the person who gets a vaccine to forgo the hug. And in fact, some people are even bothered by the very offer of a hug, so those people must needs make that apparent before they partake in the free vaccination services offered, because the whole event is predicated on something that might be to them a trigger, if not a simple preference.

And setting the expectation that hugs are pre-consented (and in a limited fashion — the post he linked to says one hug per vaccination!) is absolutely not an undercutting of the idea that one needs to obtain consent before performing an action. The thing about consent is that it is often negotiated by the neurotypical without verbalizing or formalizing. One can offer a hug by opening one’s arms, and letting the other person approach if they choose. Neuro-atypical folks can explicitly request verbal consent if they are unskilled at those practices, as well. Even asking or motioning, though, crosses some people’s comfort barriers, so setting the expectation — verbally, via that blog post and via the title of the campaign — that hugs are on the table explicitly, and in advance, actually does people like that a huge service.

To be clear, and frank, I am seriously disheartened that Richard Dawkins feels the need to take swipes at Skepchick over concerns that completely buy into the least charitable framings of the issues at hand. I honestly thought that Dawkins would be more intellectually curious and rigorous than to conflate a demand for consent in the form of harassment policies, with sex-negativity in the form of deriding “spontaneity” and lionizing “unwritten rules”, the way he has in this instance. It’s terribly unskeptical, and it exposes a very large blind spot in an otherwise intelligent and rational actor.

I know there are no heroes. I just wish some of the people that I want to look up to, could stop proudly displaying the unheroic bits like so many peacock feathers.

The post Dawkins stabs at Skepchick over “Hug Me I’m Vaccinated” campaign appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

The Agora Cosmopolitan, a.k.a. The Canadian, has a piece up about the flu vaccine that gets pretty much everything about them wrong. It’s no surprise, mind you, considering the article is copied wholesale, verbatim, in its entirety, from a crank website that it links at the bottom of the page as the “internet site reference”. Lazy beggars. They begin:

Thimerosal is a widely used vaccine preservative that is present in the majority of flu shots and other vaccines. Thimerosal is 49% mercury by volume, an extremely toxic chemical element that wreaks havoc on the nervous system, neurological function, and overall biological function [1]. Each dose of flu vaccine contains around 25 micrograms of thimerosal, over 250 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s safety limit of exposure.

Wrong, straight out of the gate. Thimerosal is no longer used in pretty well any vaccine but the flu shots, having been removed from the other vaccines in 1997 after long and successful campaigns by the scaremongering tactics of the antivax crowd. The mercury in thimerosal is part of ethyl mercury (C₂H₅Hg), not methyl mercury (CH₃Hg). Ethyl mercury does not bioaccumulate like methyl mercury does, and is not an extremely “toxic” chemical element. Mercury is an element, methyl mercury and ethyl mercury are not. Ethyl mercury does not “wreak havoc on the nervous system”. The EPA cares primarily about methyl mercury and elemental mercury as environmental concerns, leaving ethyl mercury to the FDA due to its harmless nature. If thimerosal is 49% ethyl mercury, then this would be 125 times the EPA’s limit, not 250, if the EPA even considered ethyl mercury the same as methyl mercury, which it rightly does not.

There is no component of this paragraph that is even close to right, save the amount of thimerosal used to preserve the shots from bacterial or fungal infection, spoiling the batch and potentially harming its recipients should a spoiled vaccine be used. The false conflation lays the groundwork for the rest of the article though — all you have to do is imagine that thimerosal contains elemental mercury, a conflation they flog from the beginning to the end and you’re sure to come out every bit as mad as the frothing ignoramus who wrote the original article.

And the conflation of ethyl and methyl mercury is honestly like saying water (H₂O) is the same thing as hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂). Only there’s a hell of a lot of chemical difference between the two. I’d rather drink the former than the latter, thank you. The difference between ethyl mercury and methyl mercury is even more vast than this. I know precious little about chemistry but I know enough to understand that adding or replacing atoms in a molecule changes the way the molecule works.

Though thimerasol is not entirely mercury, the mercury content is still extremely high, making it very toxic to the human body. Despite highly exceeding the EPA safety standards for mercury content by over 250 times, flu shots are still recommended for children over 6 months and pregnant women.

It seems that the age groups that are urged to receive the flu shot are actually most affected by mercury exposure. Young children, pregnant women, and elderly are the ‘targeted’ demographic of flu shot manufacturers, and these individuals also happen to have the least defense against the elemental neurotoxin mercury.

Young children stand a very high risk of febrile seizures from the flu, and children between 6 and 23 months old might be hospitalized or die from it. This vaccine has been in use since 1930, and has been safe. It has saved countless lives of individuals who happen to have the least defense against the influenza virus.

Living in Canada, socialist bastion that it is, I lead a relatively sheltered existence. We don’t get a lot of the same nonsense you Americans get down there, with your Deepak Chopra and Jenny McCarthy. We feel the ripple effects, though. Since we get most of your TV channels, we get exposed to the aforementioned celebrity woo-peddlers rather more than I’d like, though the usually reasonable Canadian news media mostly makes up for it.

The marketplace of ideas is now awash with bad ideas (like vaccines being more harm than help) wrapped in good memes (caring for one’s young and elderly), and this antivax idiocy is one of the latest to make a bit of a splash. I am mortified to see it on an ostensibly progressive website, though not entirely surprised. We’re supposed to be the part of the political spectrum that values evidence and reality over ideology and magical thinking, right? Let’s not give quarter to the woo-peddlers.

The post Our newest Canadian import: flu vaccine scaremongering appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

Via Greg Laden elsewhere on FtB:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Michelle Bachmann has fired the footgun in a big way while attempting to take aim at Rick Perry in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, by claiming that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation. Knowing full well that the Human Papiloma Virus vaccine is a controversial issue amongst evangelical conservatives and others who feel that protecting people from STDs will encourage promiscuity, Bachmann was evidently hoping to score rhetorical points against Perry for having made this order by recounting an anecdote wherein a mother approached her after a rally telling her this story. The attempt has backfired spectacularly.

A bioethicist has offered Bachmann $10000 if she can show a single person having developed mental retardation after receiving the vaccine. Personally, I’d just like some proof that the mother Bachmann mentioned actually exists and actually told her this story, or if Bachmann’s misremembering some Jenny McCarthy nonsense about autism and framing it as though it happened first-hand.

Meanwhile cervical cancer, caused in almost every case by HPV, is the twelfth most common type of cancer, and fifth most deadly in women. It affects 16 per 100,000 women per year, and kills 9 per 100,000 per year. The HPV vaccine is effective against two of the most prevalent strains of the virus, making up 70% of all cases. This would reduce mortality and morbidity to this disease significantly, and it costs almost nothing compared to treating women who have suffered from the disease.

That is not to mention the stunning talent this world loses every day to the disease. Talent like Stephanie Zvan, a co-blogger here at Freethought Blogs and close friend, without whose presence my life would be significantly poorer. She takes Bachmann to task for her emotional manipulation, providing herself as an example of a real person whose life might not have been in such jeopardy, who might not have had to endure such “helpful violence” as she was forced to endure, with the HPV vaccine.

To be quite frank, I hope this scuttles Mayor Crazy of Crazytown’s presidential bid.

The post Which is a better political bludgeon: HPV vaccines, or cancer? appeared first on Lousy Canuck.