Blaming the victims

I would like, just once, to be able to read the news without being outraged.

Lately that wish has been a losing proposition.  Every other news story these days provides enough material to fuel thermonuclear-level fury in anyone who has a shred of sensibility and compassion.  It's reached the point where I'm thinking of avoiding the news altogether.  It seems preferable to remain ignorant than dying of a self-induced aneurysm.

Today's contribution from the Fountains of Rage Department hearkens back to the story of Brock Turner, the Stanford student who raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster and got a slap-on-the-wrist six month jail sentence.  To add to the injustice, Turner's father and friends rose to his defense, never once mentioning the victim; the father expressed grief over his son's having to pay such a price for "twenty minutes of action."

At least in this case the victim found her voice, writing a letter to her attacker that was so poignant and powerful that it brought me to tears.  The judge in the case, Aaron Persky, has been the target of a well-deserved backlash because of his caving to white male privilege and victim blaming, and in fact was removed from another sexual assault case by Santa Clara county district attorney Jeff Rosen. "After ... the recent turn of events, we lack confidence that Judge Persky can fairly participate in this upcoming hearing in which a male nurse sexually assaulted an anesthetized female patient," Rosen said.

Well, yeah.  And it'd be nice if this kind of retribution were served around more generally.  Instead, we have two news stories that illustrate that even this level of justice is far from the rule.

First, we have a case in England where a wealthy Eton student who was found in possession of 1,185 images of child pornography was allowed to be tried under a false name in order to "protect his family's reputation."  In addition, he received no jail time -- he was given an eighteen-month suspended sentence.

The student, who was tried under the name of Andrew Picard, would probably have remained comfortably anonymous if it hadn't been for an article in The Daily Mirror that slipped up and revealed his true identity as Andrew Boeckman, son of Phillip J. Boeckman, a wealthy lawyer whose clients have included Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan.  The article vanished from the internet -- "mysteriously," says Summer Winterbottom in Evolve Politics -- but is still available in a cached copy, the link to which is in the article cited above.

Andrew Boeckman ("Andrew Picard") [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The judge in the case, Peter Ross, seemed more sympathetic with Boeckman and his family than he did with the victims, some of whom were toddlers.  "Your family didn’t deserve that (suffering) but it is a consequence of this sort of offending," Ross said during the trial.  "Inevitably your privileged background and where you were going to school added a degree of frisson to the reporting."

Story #2 comes from my home state of New York, where a bill to help the survivors of child abuse was killed in the State Assembly by passing the deadline without coming to a vote.  The bill, sponsored by Assemblywoman Margaret Markey, would have increased the time a sexual abuse case could be pursued by five years, created a six-month window to revive old cases, and treated public and private entities identically in cases of sexual abuse.  The Assembly, however, saw fit to let the bill fail rather than allowing it to come to a vote.

Angry yet?  Just wait.  Because Catholic League President Bill Donohue crowed about the demise of the Child Victims Act, saying that Markey is a "principle enemy of the church" and that the act was a "sham."

Then he made the following statement, which I had to read three times before I could honestly believe my eyes: "This was a vindictive bill pushed by lawyers and activists out to rape the Catholic Church."

I beg your pardon?  Curious choice of words, given that what you're gloating about is protecting rapists.  But not content even with that outrageous statement, Donohue had the following to say in addition:

If the statute of limitations were lifted on offenses involving the sexual abuse of minors, the only winners would be greedy and bigoted lawyers out to line their pockets in a rash of settlements.  The big losers would be the poor, about whom the attorneys and activists care little: When money is funneled from parishioners to lawyers, services to the needy suffer.  The Catholic League is proud of its role in this victory.

How about the "big losers" now, who are the victims of predators who use their position of power and authority to inflict harm on children?   Donohue, and the members of the New York State Assembly who were complicit in this decision, have chosen to protect a powerful and wealthy institution rather than giving aid to the victims of sexual abuse.

Bill Donohue [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But that's what people like Donohue, and British Judge Peter Ross, and California Judge Aaron Persky excel at; swiveling the blame around so that the victims become somehow culpable in their own injury.

The bottom line is that no institution, family, or individual should be above the law, regardless of their wealth, power, or self-perception of holiness.  The first priority in these cases should be the welfare of the victims, and seeking justice for the damage that has been inflicted upon them.  And the fact that people like Ross, Persky, and Donohue are in a position to deflect our attention from that priority makes them guilty of perpetuating a culture in which rape victims, however young, are to blame for their own suffering.

Remembrance of things past

Sometimes science uncovers things that are profoundly unsettling.  The problem is, as Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe it."

Believing it, though, can run counter to our own intuition.  Consider, for example, the work of Julia Shaw, psychologist and lecturer at London South Bank University, which indicates that much of what we think we remember is simply wrong.

Shaw is a specialist in "false memory," our brain's ability to craft completely convincing memories of events that never happened.  And they're not minor and uncommon glitches, but pervasive and unavoidable.  "The question isn't whether our memories are false, it's how false are our memories," Shaw says, in an interview with Scientific American earlier this year.  "Complex and full false memories (of entire events) are probably less common than partial false memories (where we misremember parts of events that happened), but we already naturally fill in so many gaps between pieces of memories and make so many assumptions, that our personal past is essentially just a piece of fiction."

Nor are they always about small and insignificant pieces of our past.  In a study by Maryann Garry and Matthew P. Gerry, of the University of Wellington (New Zealand) Department of Psychology, the researchers found that complex and detailed false memories could be implanted by the simple expedient of a cleverly doctored photograph -- inducing one test subject to "remember" taking a hot-air balloon ride that never happened.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I find this deeply unnerving, mostly because of how rock-solid my memories seem to me.  "Of course it happened that way," my brain says to me.  "I remember it.  I can picture it.  It happened."

Shaw and others, however, have conclusively shown that this is a fallacious stance.  "I have always been self-conscious about my autobiographical memories, since I have always been really bad at remembering things that happen in my personal life," Shaw says.  "I am pretty good, on the other hand at remembering facts and information.  This is part of why I was confident my research on creating false memories could work, since if my memory was like this surely there must be others out there whose memories also don't work perfectly."

Which turns out to be an understatement.  "While I was always cautious about memory accuracy (as far as I remember, hah!)," Shaw continues, "now I am convinced that no memories are to be trusted. I am confident that we create our memories every day anew, if ever so slightly.  It's such a terrifying but beautiful notion that every day you wake up with a slightly different personal past."

For me, emphasis on the "terrifying" part, especially considering how much faith most of us have in our memories.  Eyewitness testimony is considered one of the strongest pieces of evidence in courts of law, and the work of Shaw and others has shown that it is in fact one of the weakest.  But on a more personal level, it's distressing to realize that so much of what we think of as our personal history might well be false.  It brings to mind the numerous instances when my wife and I have argued over the way a particular event happened.  Each of us was dead certain we remembered it right.  In fact -- it might be that neither of us was right.

The scariest thing to me is that there seems to be no way to tell the false memories from the accurate ones.  "[O]nce they take hold false memories are no different from true memories in the brain," Shaw says.  "This means that they have the same properties as any other memories, and are indistinguishable from memories of events that actually happened. The only way to check is to find corroborating evidence for any particular memory that you are interested in 'validating'."

Which, of course, isn't always possible.  So the unsettling truth is that what you remember of your past is a patchwork quilt of real events, partially misremembered events, and complete made-up bullshit your brain has invented.  The next time you're arguing with a friend over something in the past...

... remember that.

Tuna meltdown

So we're starting the week with another hoax.

I probably wouldn't even bother to address this one if I hadn't already seen it four times.  It's an article from the site News 4 with the scary title, "Massive Bumble Bee Recall After 2 Employees Admit Cooking a Man and Mixing Him With a Batch of Tuna."

[image courtesy of artist Duane Raver Jr. and the Wikimedia Commons]

If you click the link -- and I don't for a moment suggest you should, because I don't want to be responsible for giving News 4 any more hits on their hit tracker -- you will notice something rather strange; although the headline starts with the words "Massive Bumble Bee Recall," the article mentions nothing about a recall.  Nada.  It goes into a rather horrifying story of one José Melena, who was performing maintenance inside a 35-foot-long industrial oven when two coworkers dumped 12,000 pounds of tuna into it and turned it on.  It wasn't until the oven was opened two hours later that the accident was discovered and Melena's body found.

Awful.  Nauseating, even.  The problem is that despite what the headline says, Melena's death and the recall have absolutely nothing to do with one another, and in fact, happened four years apart.  Not only that, Melena was not deliberately cooked and then "mixed with a batch of tuna."

Melena's death happened in October of 2012, and resulted in the California plant's Operational Director and its Safety Manager being charged with violating Occupational Safety & Health Administration rules that caused a death.  Bumble Bee Foods was fined $1.5 million.  The tuna, needless to say, was all destroyed.

The recall, on the other hand, happened in March of 2016, and sounds like it was a pretty minor incident.  Here's the recall notice:

Bumble Bee Foods, LLC announced today that it is voluntarily recalling 3 specific UPC codes of canned Chunk Light tuna due to process deviations that occurred in a co-pack facility not owned or operated by Bumble Bee.  These deviations were part of the commercial sterilization process and could result in contamination by spoilage organisms or pathogens, which could lead to life-threatening illness if consumed.  It is important to note that there have been no reports of illness associated with these products to date.  No other production codes or products are affected by this recall.

So as you can see, the two are completely separate events.  If you're concerned about having bought one of the cans of recalled tuna, the link I posted above has a list of the can codes affected.

Which took me all of five minutes of research to verify.  Too much, apparently, for some people, because the article seems to be causing widespread meltdown.  Here are some of the comments I've seen posted :

• EWWWWWWW I'm never eating tuna again
• I wonder what else is in canned food that we never find out about?
• This kind of thing probably goes unreported all the time -- surprised this one got out
• I'm throwing out every can of tuna in my kitchen.
• Why were those two not charged with murder?  Our legal system fucking sucks.
• Corporate America will do anything to turn a buck, why did they have to be forced to do a recall, and why am I only now hearing about this?  Nothing in the MSM, of course.

Yes, well, the reason there's nothing in the MSM (mainstream media) is that the story is being completely misreported.  The original incident definitely made the news -- I remember seeing it when it happened -- but the blending of the story with the recall notice is a pure falsehood.

So once again we're back at "check your damn sources before you post something."  If you're a worry-wart, and still have uneaten Bumble Bee tuna from March, give a glance at the can codes if you like.  But don't worry that there's bits of human mixed into it.

That's soylent green, not tuna.

Legalizing hypocrisy

I cannot stomach pious hypocrisy.

Unfortunately, that's all we're being served by Congress at the moment with respect to providing protection to LGBT individuals.  Only days after one of the worst mass murders of gays and lesbians ever, the House of Representatives voted to block a bill protecting LGBT employees of federal contractors.  The sponsor of the bill, Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, thought it'd be a no-brainer.

"It’s hard to imagine that any act that is so horrific could lead to anything positive," Maloney said.  "But if we were going to do anything, it would be a very positive step to say that discrimination has no place in our law and to reaffirm the president’s actions in this area.  Seems to me a pretty basic thing to do."

Seems so to me, too.  The House disagreed.  So do the majority of state governments, apparently.  At the time of this writing, less than half of the states in the US (22, to be precise) have anti-discrimination laws that address sexual orientation.  Only 19 specifically address gender identity.

Instead, many states are now moving toward passing laws legalizing discrimination against LGBT individuals based on "deeply-held religious ideals."  Three -- Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee -- already have such laws.

You know what?  If your religion impels you to discriminate against a minority, you need to find a different fucking religion.

So the pious hypocrites keep pretending to care, while simultaneously sandbagging every piece of legislation that might actually make a difference.  And the toll keeps rising, not only because of well-publicized events like the Orlando massacre, but because of the ongoing pressure on LGBT individuals to hide and/or deny who they are.  No surprise, is it, that suicide rates are four times higher among LGBT youth than straight ones, and nearly a quarter of transgender individuals have attempted to take their own lives?

Oh, but never mind all that, because House Rules Committee chairman, Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, said his "thoughts and prayers" were with the people of Orlando after the attack.  That should be enough, right?  Then he turned around and joined the others in voting to block the anti-discrimination bill, and when interviewed about it all, even denied that Pulse was a gay nightclub. "It was a young person’s nightclub, I’m told," Sessions said.  "And there were some [LGBT people] there, but it was mostly Latinos."

Because "Latino" and "gay" are apparently mutually exclusive categories.

So to Sessions and his colleagues, I have the following to say: you can take your thoughts and prayers and stick them up your ass.  Sideways.  Your thoughts and prayers accomplish nothing.  Your actions, on the other hand, perpetuate prejudice and discrimination.  You and and the rest of Congress had the opportunity to make a difference.  Instead, you chose to side with the bigots, all the while uttering mealy-mouthed platitudes designed to feign a stance of compassion.

Well, you're not fooling anyone.

Nor are the powers-that-be in North Carolina, where there's been an ongoing battle over the law prohibiting transgender individuals from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender identification because of some bullshit argument about protecting women from attacks, and yet which authorized the destruction of 72 rape kits containing genetic evidence from open/unsolved cases of rape and molestation.

Right, North Carolina officials.  Explain to me again how much you care about attacks on innocent women and children, and how the bathroom bill was totally not about discrimination against LGBT individuals.

And the right-wing media continues to misrepresent the situation, and people continue to be suckered.  Just a couple of days ago, I saw a post on Facebook from a friend of a friend that might be the most vile thing I've ever seen on social media.  This woman went on for paragraphs about how sick she was of the liberals destroying the moral fiber of America, and how she was furious that "gays and lesbians now have more rights" than she does, and how there's an agenda to take away all of the rights from straight white working-class Americans.

I felt physically ill after reading this.  More rights?  Such as what?  Such as the right to walk down the street holding hands with the person you love without being afraid that you'll be harassed, attacked, perhaps killed?  The right to ask someone out in a bar without having the nagging fear that if you guess wrong, it might be the last mistake you'll ever make?  The right to marry, the right to expect service in a place of business, the right to hold down a job and not be the subject of discrimination over something you can't control?

At least if you're going to hold these sorts of beliefs, then be up front about the fact that you're espousing a doctrine of hatred against an entire sector of our society.  Don't try to hide behind a pious shield of false and twisted morality.  Maybe you're the ones that need to re-read a few passages in your favorite book, most especially Matthew, chapter 23:

[T]hey say, and do not.  For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers... Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.  Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

Cancer, coffee, and science reporting

Given the way science is presented in the media, it's no wonder a lot of average laypeople have the impression that scientists don't know what the hell they're doing.

The situation is worst, I think, with respect to health research.  I hear students say it all the time:  "Meh, everything causes cancer."  "Doesn't matter, if they say it causes heart disease today, tomorrow they'll say it won't."  Some of it, of course, is wishful thinking on the part of people would like to live on bacon double cheeseburgers with no impact on their fitness, but a lot of it comes from the way medical research is reported.

Take, for example, the article in The Independent a couple of days ago, "Very Hot Drinks 'Probably' Cause Cancer, UN Says."  Starting with the quotation marks around "probably," which I'm guessing were supposed to indicate that the word was a direct quote from the paper, but comes off sounding dubious.  But worse, take a look at how the research was reported:

The World Health Organisation is due to make a number of announcements today on health concerns and benefits of drinking hot beverages such as coffee.  In 1991, the IARC announced coffee "possibly caused cancer."  However, the health body is expected to revise that today to suggest other than concerns over temperature, there is insufficient evidence to say coffee itself causes cancer...  It is believed the temperature, rather than the substance of the drinks, causes cancer of the oesophagus and becomes a risk once beverages have a temperature above 65 C, AFP reports.  The announcement follows a review of more than 1,000 scientific studies on whether there is a link between coffee and cancer, conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

The impression you get is that the researchers were convinced that coffee was a carcinogen, and now they're saying no, it's not, but hot beverages in general are bad.  Only toward the end of the article do you find out that almost no one drinks beverages at temperatures above 65 C, because that's scald-the-mouth territory.  And the 65+ C liquid would have to still be at that temperature by the time it hits your esophagus (owie) in order to boost your risk of esophageal cancer.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So in fact, the research is indicating that almost no one is going to see an increase in cancer incidence from drinking hot beverages, which is exactly the opposite of what most of the article leads you to believe.  In fact, the article doesn't even mention the central issue -- that the problem isn't the temperature, it's the repeated tissue damage and resultant inflammation.  Research has shown that anything that causes chronic inflammation of the esophagus will increase the risk of cancer -- thus the connection between gastro-esophageal reflux disorder and cancer.

Of course, that's not the impression you get from a quick reading of the article, and especially not if all you did was read the headline (which I think is sadly common).  A less-than-careful perusal makes you come away with the idea that you're going to get cancer from sipping your nice cup of hot cocoa -- which is clearly not true.

No wonder people get the impression that the medical researchers, and scientists in general, don't know what they're doing.

I know everyone doesn't have a background in science, so I'm not expecting that the average person is going to read and thoroughly understand an academic paper on cancer research.  So it really is up to the media to make sure they're communicating correctly the gist of what's been found -- and this article in The Independent illustrates that the tendency is to do a pretty piss-poor job.

The price of free speech

It's been kind of a grim week here at Skeptophilia.  The news over the last few days has been seriously depressing, what with the current political situation, the attack in Orlando (and the chest-thumping by ideologues that followed), and the ongoing turmoil in so many parts of the world.  And much as I'd like to return to my happy world of making fun of people who believe in Bigfoot, aliens, and telepathy, I'm afraid we have (at least) one more rather dismal topic to cover.

This one comes up because of Newt Gingrich, who (according to informed sources) is currently hoping to be chosen as Donald Trump's running mate.  And in what looks like a bid to align himself with Trump's "'Murica!  Fuck Yeah!" platform, Gingrich has proposed recreating the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

[image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

You probably know that the original such committee was founded back in the 1930s, first to keep track of (and stop) any infiltration into the United States by the Nazis, and later to do the same thing with the communists.  The committee did nab a couple of Soviet spies -- notably Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers -- but in the process blacklisted hundreds of people whose only crime was attending communist party meetings (or even being friends with someone who had).  Eventually, criticizing the government was all it took (as folk singer Pete Seeger found out).  Careers and reputations were ruined, and the gains in terms of national security were debatable at best.

Now, of course, the target is different; Gingrich wants to go after people with Islamist leanings.  "We originally created the House Un-American Activities Committee to go after Nazis," Gingrich said during an appearance on Fox and Friends this week.  "We passed several laws in 1938 and 1939 to go after Nazis and we made it illegal to help the Nazis.  We're going to presently have to go take the similar steps here... We're going to ultimately declare a war on Islamic supremacists and we're going to say, if you pledge allegiance to ISIS, you are a traitor and you have lost your citizenship.  We're going to take much tougher positions."

Which sounds like a credible position at first.  I certainly have no reason to defend people who have dedicated themselves to ISIS, or whose political and religious beliefs impel them to come over here and harm American citizens.

But the problem is, how do you find out who those people are before they act?  The FBI already monitors people who are suspected Islamists, not that such efforts are foolproof.  But Gingrich seems to be proposing further measures, taking legal action against people who have committed no crime, who have only subscribed to the wrong ideology.

Me, I find this troubling.  It's a slide toward imprisoning people for thought crimes, and one step away from abrogating the right to free speech.

And lest you think I'm overreacting, here; just two days ago, Donald Trump revoked The Washington Post's press credentials because he objected to perceived criticism by the media.  "Based on the incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting of the record setting Trump campaign," he said in a statement, "we are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phony and dishonest Washington Post."

The Post's executive editor, Marty Baron, replied:

Donald Trump's decision to revoke The Washington Post's press credentials is nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press.  When coverage doesn't correspond to what the candidate wants it to be, then a news organization is banished. The Post will continue to cover Donald Trump as it has all along -- honorably, honestly, accurately, energetically, and unflinchingly.  We're proud of our coverage, and we're going to keep at it.

Which is it exactly.  If free speech means anything, it must involve allowing citizens to criticize the government.

So the whole thing is moving in a decidedly scary direction.  Look, it's not that I don't appreciate how hard it must be to craft policies that will protect American citizens, insofar as it is possible, from outside threats.  I can't imagine being tasked with monitoring anyone who is suspicious, and making the right call with respect to when to move in and make arrests -- especially given the backlash either way if you're wrong.

But I do know that restricting the right to free speech, muzzling the media, and harassing Americans for perceived "un-American activities," is not the way to go.  We tried it once before, and it didn't work out so well.  The price of free speech is risk -- but it's a cost that is well worth what you gain.

Complexity, uncertainty, and motives

Humans are complex beasts.

I know, it doesn't take a Ph.D. to figure that out.  (Fortunately for me, since I don't have one.)  But I was thinking about this today with regards to Omar Seddique Mateen, the perpetrator of Sunday's slaughter of 49 men and women in an Orlando nightclub.  Mateen himself was killed in the incident, leading to speculation about his motives for committing such a horrific act.

Immediately after he was identified, his obviously Middle Eastern name fueled talk that he was acting on anti-LGBT beliefs that came from Islam.  This idea was bolstered by the revelation that in a 911 call he made in which he pledged himself and his actions to ISIS.

Then his father came forward, and said that his son had committed the crime because he was "angered over seeing two men kissing."  So for a time, it seemed like the origin of his violent acts was clear enough.

But the father added a comment that made a lot of us frown in puzzlement: he said that his son's actions "had nothing to do with religion."  Really?  If so, why would he be angry over two guys kissing?  It's not like rational secularism would give you the impetus to be so furious over gay guys showing affection that you'd shoot up a nightclub.

Shortly after that, Mateen's ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy, came forward and said that Mateen had been physically and verbally abusive to her.  In her statement, Mateen comes across as not just angry, but mentally unstable.  "He was two totally different people," Yusufiy said.  "He would turn and abuse me, out of nowhere, when I was sleeping...  He was not a stable person.  He beat me.  He would come home and start beating me because the laundry wasn't finished, or something like that."  As far as his religious ideology, she said he was religious, but had never expressed sympathy with ISIS, terrorist organizations, or extremists.  "He wasn't very devout," Yusufiy said.  "He liked working out at the gym more."

Then things got even murkier when it was revealed that Mateen himself was a "regular" at Pulse himself, and "used gay dating apps."  This put yet another spin on things -- that Mateen was gay and leading a double life, pretending to be straight to keep the peace with his conservative father.  The image developed of Mateen as a tortured young man, steeped in self-loathing, who used the attack as a way of atoning for his own "sinfulness" through jihad against homosexuals.

Here's the problem, though.  It's always a losing proposition trying to parse the thoughts and motives of someone who died without leaving any hard evidence about what he was thinking at the time.  And even if he had -- left a note, called a friend, whatever -- there's still the problem that we'd only have his own words from which to draw a conclusion.

It's frustrating to say, "We don't know, and almost certainly will never know."  After a tragedy, we want to know the reason, to understand how such appalling things could happen.  Somehow, if we could just pin the cause on one thing -- Islam, availability of guns, mental instability, his anguish over being a closeted gay man, growing up in a narrow, judgmental household -- we could attain closure.

But in this case, it doesn't seem to be possible.  His motives could be any or all of the above, or something else we haven't even considered.  People seldom do anything based on one straightforward, clear reason, much as it'd make life simpler if that were so.  At this point, it's probably pointless to engage in further speculation; we need to be putting our thoughts and efforts into helping the survivors and the families of the victims, and -- most importantly -- taking steps to build a society in which such horrific acts never happen again.