beyond persuasion

[Tannin]

This is worth quoting in full. It cuts straight to the heart of the matter.

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Climate and vaccine deniers are the same: beyond persuasion

Governments are worried. Vaccination rates are falling under the influence of a campaign of misinformation by a small minority of fanatics.

Scientifically there is no debate about immunisation, with every relevant health authority strongly endorsing vaccination. But anti-vaccination activists refuse to accept the evidence, claiming that “every issue has two sides”.

They believe vaccination is ineffective and unnecessary and that vaccines contain toxins and cause autism. They seize on the occasional dissenting study and exploit it for all it’s worth even after it has been discredited. They go hunting for instances of apparent adverse responses among children and advertise them as proof that jabs are dangerous and should be abandoned.

Anecdotes that seem to confirm their opinions trump mountains of carefully collected scientific evidence.

They spread theories about cover-ups, information-suppression and conspiracies among medical experts. They claim to be protecting our freedom and talk darkly about the government trying to take away our liberty. They portray themselves as David bravely fighting Goliath.

The anti-vaccinators attempt to hide their fanaticism behind a façade of respectability, adopting misleading names for their organisations and promoting the views of “experts” who look credible, but who cannot seem to convert their expertise into publications in peer-reviewed journals. While claiming to have better access to scientific truth, the anti-vaccinators show no respect for best scientific practice and dismiss the established experts as frauds.

These tactics are common knowledge. But every one of them is also used by climate science deniers. And yet the same kind of unhinged repudiation of an overwhelming body of scientific facts is treated not as the private obsession of a handful of nutcases, but as a legitimate part of the “debate” over global warming.

The media treat the anti-vaccinators with the disdain they deserve, but sections of the media see no contradiction in actively promoting the same type of anti-science fanaticism when it comes to climate.

The Australian recently supported attacks on “political correctness” in the school curriculum, giving voice to a teacher who argued that “there’s no Asian way of looking at physics”. Quite so; yet it routinely warns its readers about “left-wing" climate science.
Unhealthy advice

What would we think if Prime Minister Tony Abbott declared “immunization science is crap”? Or if he appointed Meryl Dorey, who runs the Australian Vaccination Network (which was recently ordered to change its misleading name), as chair of the National Preventive Health Agency’s Advisory Council?

Yet Mr Abbott has appointed climate denier Maurice Newman to be chair of his Business Advisory Council. In 2010, while chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Newman told journalists they should present both sides of the debate. Back then he felt the need to restrain himself. Now unleashed, Newman is in full flight mimicking the anti-vaccinators. Writing last month in The Australian (where else?) he declared that the evidence for human-induced climate change is a “scientific delusion”.

Newman professes to believe that the scientific establishment is engaged in “mass psychology” because it is “intent on exploiting the masses and extracting more money” (to what purpose he did not say). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the main global body that reports the scientific evidence on the issue – allegedly “resorts to dishonesty and deceit” and promotes “the religion behind the climate crusade”. Newman insists there are “credible” scientists who say the Earth is cooling rather than warming.

He says that governments that promote renewable energy are engaged in a “cover-up”, while state health departments are “hiding” evidence on the health dangers of wind farms. He declares that unless someone soon puts a stop to this “climate change madness” most of us will “descend to serfdom”.
Bizarre understanding

In a sane world this kind of fulmination would disqualify anyone from public office. But not today. The same ravings now issue from the mouths of many politicians who ought to know better.

One wonders how a man with Newman’s bizarre understanding of the state of the world can provide the government with sound advice about Australia’s business future, particularly when his claims about how climate policies have “decimated” our manufacturing industry have been rebuffed time and time again by systematic economic analysis.

If a private corporation appoints to its board someone with Newman’s views then that is of no public concern. But to have such a man in a senior public advisory role ought to worry every citizen.

I’m guessing that Newman supports immunisation and would not recognise in himself the kind of primitive thinking noted by The Lancet way back in 1927. In an article titled “The Psychology of Antivaccination” the prestigious medical journal commented on the passion of anti-vaccinators in terms that apply with eerie resonance to modern climate science denial.

It noted that the value and limitations of vaccination against smallpox had been thoroughly researched and understood by scientific medicine, and yet it went on to add:

“We still meet the belief … that vaccination is a gigantic fraud deliberately perpetuated for the sake of gain… The opposition to vaccination … still retains the ‘all or none’ quality of primitive behaviour and, like many emotional reactions, is supported by a wealth of argument which the person reacting honestly believes to be the logical foundation of his behaviour.”

The anti-immunisation brigade is still at it, yet giant strides have nevertheless been made in protecting public health. There is no such luxury in the case of climate change, and it is the anti-environmental paranoia of men like Abbott and Newman, and Andrew Bolt and George Pell, that endangers the health of our planet.

- Clive Hamilton, Charles Sturt University

http://theconversation.com/climate-and-vaccine-deniers-are-the-same-beyond-persuasion-22258

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So why is there such a massive difference in the way that these two different but amazingly similar sets of fruitcake deniers are treated? The key difference, it seems to me, is that the vaccination deniers have no resources, and no incentive for personal gain. They are just the ordinary kind of dangerous loonies who threaten our health and the health of our children with their delusions. Climate deniers are just as deluded and just as loopy and just as impervious to evidence or reason. They seem, on first sight to be identical. The difference is in their backing. The climate-denying type of fruitcake has a huge advantage because he is being fed a constant barrage of unscientific misinformation from the climate denial industry. This shadowy group of well-funded organisations has massive, effectively unlimited funding from a small number of very powerful, ruthless and greedy men, men like the Koch brothers (http://sourcewatch.org/index.php/Koch_Brothers ) who, through a vast network of interlocking "charity foundations" fund the manufacture of misinformation on a grand scale to support the ordinary climate-denial fruitloop in the street with exactly the same type of vicious and clever lies that the tobacco industry relied on in its multi-decade fight to deny the scientific mountain of evidence that smoking kills. Indeed, many of the operational leaders of these giant lie factories - organisations like the Heartland Institute - learned their evil trade in the tobacco denial industry. Several of the leading denial institutes still take money from the multi-national tobacco companies.

This is the key: it ain't the idiot in the street who can't tell sense from nonsense and denies the evidence in front of him no matter how much stronger it gets. There will always be idiots. It's the cynical, ultra-greedy bastards who feed him lies built upon lies and actively encourage him to hold the most stupid of opinions.

[Wokko]

Here's a great video about immunization (or anti immunization).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLcOz4EKrxg

[stui magpie]

People who deny their kids vaccination should have them removed and placed with mentally sound foster parents.

[think positive]

+1 the benefit to the whole community by far out weigh the risk

[Jezza]

I can't believe we have a small minority of parents refusing to allow their kids to have vaccinations. Not only is it beneficial for their children, it benefits society as a whole.

[Tannin]

Curious, isn't it. Four responses, and every single one of the four has chosen to respond to the (in relative terms) short-term and trivial form of ignorant denial of known facts - the form which only kills or injures a handful of people and has no great harmful long-term effect on humanity as a whole - as opposed to the far more serious and, in the long term, far, far more dangerous and harmful delusion.

Why is it so?

[HAL]

Is this a math question?

[think positive]

I've no $£$%^%%$ idea Hal, I'm trying to get my head around that slight amusing but no doubt derogatory post myself!

[think positive]

[HAL]

[David]

[1061]

Um it's simple if we came from Chimps then why are Chimps still here?

[Wokko]

[What'sinaname]

God created man and decides who dies and when. God created similarities between man and primates to give man a reason do doubt Him so that he knows who He takes to heaven and who rots in hell for eternity.

[David]

And yea, spake the Lord: in the latter days trolls shall make mockery of my words, whilst others believe in all sorts of abominations, such as anthropogenic climate change, and also theoretical physics. And in that day man will not know whether confusion over our evolutionary heritage shall be real or satire; and that great beast, Tannin, shall make a point and it shall be thoroughly neglected in favour of talk of vaccination. Amen.