Pointless poll on a medical absurdity

Unbelievable. The BMJ hosted a written debate on homeopathy. The side for homeopathy blathers on about various studies and meta-analyses and mostly just vaguely suggests positive results; when they get specific, the best they can say is that homeopaths use fewer antimicrobials. And their summary is truly ignorant.

Doctors should put aside bias based on the alleged implausibility of homeopathy. When integrated with standard care homeopathy is safe, popular with patients, improves clinical outcomes without increasing costs, and reduces the use of potentially hazardous drugs, including antimicrobials.

We should set aside the fact that there is no mechanism to allow water to magically retain the power of non-existent molecules? I cannot do that, sir. I also cannot set aside the ludicrous rationales provided for the medical utility of plain old water, which suggest that homeopathic practitioners are gullible fools.

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Even Jesus wouldn’t know where to get a pap smear

Jonathan Merritt, who has these amazing qualifications,

Senior Columnist, Religion News Service @RNS; Contributing Editor, @TheWeek; Author of Jesus is Better Than You Imagined (2014)

has announced that Planned Parenthood should be defunded. He was asked by a woman what she should do for her “medically necessary birth control, pap smears, and tests”, which was like an open invitation to mansplain to a lady where she can take her lady parts. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so painful. Would you believe he sent her a list of alternatives to Planned Parenthood that included a bunch of CPCs? Bless his little Christian heart.

Reddit gets kicked around some more

wretchedreddit

Yet another article about the ongoing Reddit failures portrays those who run the site as Libertarians who have no idea what they’re doing, and the attitude of dudebros running a place to pander to dudebros is inescapable.

Banning communities that actively encourage rape is unequivocally good (even though action hasn’t been taken yet), but it shouldn’t end the discussion. Reddit doesn’t deserve special credit for banning places that tell men to rape women. That ought to be one of the easiest decisions in the world, and the fact that it seems like a novel approach to governing a site with 160 million monthly visitors is abhorrent. Huffman’s plan for hate communities like r/coontown is to quarantine them from the rest of Reddit. But the mechanism of this isolation is a joke. Former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong’s approach to hateful content was telling everyone that “each man is responsible for his own soul.” Reddit’s new policies are basically a restatement of that, plus a button you have to click on. Users will eventually have to sign into Reddit to access its worst communities, but that means nothing will change for everyone who already uses Reddit — Reddit already requires you to log in to leave comments or vote on links, and those members represent the entire community.

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The ear of David Brooks

Tin-Ear-Trumpet

David Brooks read Ta-Nehisi Coates new book, Between the World and Me. His response to Coates is quite possibly the most Brooksian thing I’ve ever read.

I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.

In your anger at the tone of innocence some people adopt to describe the American dream, you reject the dream itself as flimflam. But a dream sullied is not a lie. The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow.

This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.

Maybe you will find my reactions irksome. Maybe the right white response is just silence for a change. In any case, you’ve filled my ears unforgettably.

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There are good reasons I’ve never been a fan of Reddit

wretchedreddit

It’s always only been second to YouTube in the abysmal quality of its comments, and it’s intentionally structured to promote the worst behavior in its community.

In practice, the ability of anyone to spawn their own subreddit plus the upvoting/downvoting mechanism leads to each subreddit being an angry little fiefdom fiercely dedicated to its own idea of consensus where dissenting opinions get downvoted into oblivion. A community that’s seen to have a particularly obnoxious bias, say, r/Android supposedly being in the tank for Google Nexus devices, will develop a community focused on attacking the first community for being a “circlejerk” (r/Androidcirclejerk) that has the exact opposite bias and exists to post memes mocking Google Nexus devices for how they’re overrated trash. Eventually one community will lose its patience and “brigade” another community, flooding it with hostile posts in order to show the other side how wrong they are, and mods are forced to stay up all night banning people until everything settles down again (and several users, usually female, have quit Reddit for good after being blasted with death threats).

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What all the really cool kids are doing right now

crisprcas

It’s CRISPR/Cas. I’m feeling a bit square because I’m not doing it yet. But maybe you’re so squaresville that you don’t even know what the heck it is. You’re saved like a hipster at a flea market: here’s a primer on CRISPR/Cas so you can pretend to be one of the with-it kids.

Simply put, this is a tool that combines targeting information that homes in on a precise location within the genome (that’s the CRISPR part), with the ability to generate DNA breaks at that site once it arrives there (that’s Cas’s job). Such tools are integral to the process of gene editing, because the ability to interrupt a continuous strand of DNA at a specific location is the first step to altering the information encoded there. There are other gene editing tools currently in use in research labs, but CRISPR/Cas has quickly gained popularity for the very practical reason that it’s a bit easier and less expensive to use than the other options.

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So true it hurts

Didn’t Martin Luther King make this same point many years ago?

White people do not think in terms of we. White people have the privilege to interact with the social and political structures of our society as individuals. You are “you,” I am “one of them.” Whites are often not directly affected by racial oppression even in their own community, so what does not affect them locally has little chance of affecting them regionally or nationally. They have no need, nor often any real desire, to think in terms of a group. They are supported by the system, and so are mostly unaffected by it.

What they are affected by are attacks on their own character. To my aunt, the suggestion that “people in The North are racist” is an attack on her as a racist. She is unable to differentiate her participation within a racist system (upwardly mobile, not racially profiled, able to move to White suburbs, etc.) from an accusation that she, individually, is a racist. Without being able to make that differentiation, White people in general decide to vigorously defend their own personal non-racism, or point out that it doesn’t exist because they don’t see it.

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