"The AIDS crisis in Africa is utterly phoney," with a link to a Tech Central Station column? He can go fuck himself.
What's more funny about that link is that the column is by Michael Fumento, the author of such works as The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS.
Well, I guess that guy would think that.
And anything we do to help Africa makes no difference? What an incredible sanctimoniously useless idiot.
The next question is why Hack Central Station's corporate overlords want to spread that idea, but I guess the answer's obvious: No pressure to provide cheap AIDS drugs = more profits for big pharma.
5 to 3. 4: Yeah, it reminds me of Kim Du Toit. (Though I pretty much stopped reading at the bit I quoted.)
The other day I ran across Bellatrys's blog, which had a good post on this sort of nonsense.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to conclude about AIDS in Africa from his article or the ones he linked to. It seems to be either that:
a) It can't be AIDS, because African sex isn't homosexual.
b) It can't be transmitted via vaginal sex, so it must be homosexual sex, so we don't have to worry about it...
c) People are getting it from needles, not sex, so...
d) People are dying of bad water and other diseases, so they can't be dying of AIDS.
e) It's not my problem so I don't have to deal with it.
I think the "to" in "5 to 3" is a shortening of "responding to." It is, right? If so, it seems inapt to say you are responding to your own comment, rather than continuing from it. I realize that I have now opened myself to being nitipicked for a day or two re: Weiner's stated policy of only retaliatory nitpicking.
He says the living person he most despises Gearge W Bush, which I suppose earns him a few points, but how can someone be so big on the religion thing and miss so much of the gospels?
No no, w/d, you've opened yourself to being nitpicked. It's only got two 'i's.
(Punks jump up to get beat down.)
The TSS guy does cite this Boston Globe article which seems to agree with him somewhat:
Several AIDS specialists said they think the current estimate of 40 million people living with the AIDS virus worldwide is inflated by 25 percent to 50 percent, based on a wide spectrum of household surveys in nearly a dozen countries. That would go against the grain of years of assertions by UNAIDS that the disease is relentlessly on the rise.
But Even with lower estimates, health specialists agree that AIDS remains the most dangerous pandemic in the developing world. In particular, it threatens to ravage societies in southern Africa, and throughout the continent the disease has killed millions in the prime of their lives.
(I should also point out that the second-strike policy is not, technically retaliatory--it's more a Spiderman kinda thing, where I will swoop in on anyone who starts anything with anybody.)
So the policy is comment corrections as retaliation or humanitarian intervention?
right, but I don't think that the weird guy, Fumento, really disagrees with that:
Still, while AIDS may be grossly exaggerated and Richard Gere utterly obnoxious, it is a terrible disease affecting all countries. That's why we must know precisely where to spend our money. Unfortunately, neither the U.N. nor its staunch media allies are about to tell us.
I think he's guilty of stretching out the evidence for overexageration, but it is an interesting objection.
(he is correct, however, that Richard Gere is obnoxious. Though maybe not for the reason he cites. We'll call it Right Belief.)
17: But Grace called it 'phoney'. And, you know, it's the UN, scientists, and staunch media allies who are actually producing the lower estimates discussed in the Globe article. I trust them over loony Fumento.
Typical TCS strategy, from global warming; take the normal disagreement and revision that's the hallmark of good science and use it to create FUD around the overwhelming scientific consensus. Or CUD (complacency, uncertainty, and doubt).
There's also this:
Already, earlier this year, US officials told Rwandan AIDS administrators that if HIV prevalence estimates were to drop to 5 percent, the country's AIDS funding may be cut, according to both US and Rwandan officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.
5 percent is not really low.
18: Sure. I'm not necessarily a fan of Live 8 either. But that's no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
15: Doesn't 'retaliation' suggest doing to others what they did unto you, not what they did unto a third party? My dead-tree dictionary defines it as 'return of like for like'.
16 to 14, btw.
18, the title of the post below, and the fact that I read the first chapter this weekend lead me to ask: If we take Gladwell's theorizing in Blink seriously, what does this say about the validity of the question, "How do you know that?" and relatedly on models of knowledge of the justified true belief type (I am aware that is an old model in its pure form, and I find Gettier counter-examples fun to read, but not particularly on point here). Normally ones ability to answer "how do you know that?" with some justifiable chain of inferences is counted very heavily in deciding whether or not it is accurate to say that one knows something. This comment is a muddle, but I think where I'm going with it is comprehensible, even if wrong. I should repeat that I've only read the beginning of Blink, and make a joke about that, but many better such jokes were made right when it came out.
I agree, 5% is worrisomely high. But is this simply normal disagreement about the AIDS numbers? The range seems very wide.
I think most epistemologists, even those who conform to a JTB-esque theory of knowledge, will say that you need not be able to articulate your justification. If I believe something because I was told by a reliable informant, but I've forgotten who my informant was, I still count as knowing (so long as I have no reason to doubt).
There are some--Ram Neta in particular--who think that knowledge should be defined as the ideal goal of inquiry, and that ideal goal includes having a justification that you can articulate. So Blink cases wouldn't count as knowledge. But on this view knowledge isn't what we're necessarily getting at when we say 'I know' in ordinary circumstances.
These guys (haven't read the book, just seen them presenting some of the material) seem like they have an interesting critique of both Blink-type results and traditional epistemology, though I and everyone else weren't convinced by their attempts to expand their results into a methodological criticism of analytic epistemolgy.
It's not surprising, really, that estimates would be off given the difficulty of surveying or the problems with asking people to self-report.
But the problem with AIDS seems to be not just its prevalence or even its deadliness, but that a) it's pretty much killing a generation, leaving the old and the young and b) unlike a lot of other nasty illnesses, it's not easy to make go away by proper sanitation or nutrition.
I suspect that AIDS would remain a high concern even with significantly lower prevalence rates.
Cala, I have to disagree. I think it is surprising that estimates might be off by such large percentages. After all, this is a very important issue, and large amounts of time, money, and physical and mental labor are going into this. It is known as one of the biggest threats of our time. It's not new. And these numbers have been bandied about everywhere. Just about everyone is aware of them. I don't think even reduced numbers change the basic fact that AIDS is a terrible threat. But I can't say my reaction to the Boston Globe story is nonchalant.
Kevin rather likes Archbish Lefebvre too.So one assumes his denial of AIDS is driven by fundamentalist Catholicism. Mmmm, nice.