You need an "ology"
A shame becoming shameful
On 10 April, 2006 Media Lens issued an alert under this title and the subtitle:
"John Pilger And A Leading Epidemiologist Challenge IBC"
This is pot-pouri of their usual devices and themes including:
1. The Chomsky Quote
2. Pilgerism
3. The False Association
4. Self-referential Bollocks
5. The Zamparini Example
6. Professional Epidemiology --***NEW***---
1. The Chomsky Quote:
This alert's Chomsky Quote is good one:
"If you are not offending people who ought to be offended, you're doing something wrong."
And the ML conclusion is a "jaw-dropping display of propaganda" (to borrow their words) and a totalitarian *classic*:
"One indication that the Iraq Body Count (IBC) project is doing something wrong is that it is deemed, not merely inoffensive, but is eagerly embraced by people who really ought to be offended. "
For them, no task, no position, no words and no cause can be anything other righteous.
A bunch of corduroy-clad, intellectual lefties decide to devote every bit of their spare time to recording and giving a name to every civilian killed in a war-torn country.
An ordinary person would maybe view this as a generally good thing (if not a waste of time)? An activist and anarcho-syndicalist like Chomsky would no doubt congratulate them on their determination to work against all odds to record the names of individuals who lost their lives to further the ambitions of the US State and its willing partners.
But a totalitarian would only be interested in whether the exercise was of value to them. And if you aren't upsetting the BBC and privately owned media corporations then the exercise is deemed not just useless but threatening to the cause.
2. Pilgerism
The Editors are pulling out all the stops in this Alert with a Pilgerism following straight after The Chomsky Quote:
Consider Herald Sun journalist Adam Bolt, described by John Pilger as “the lowest of journalism's low, an extreme right wing and aggressively idiotic member of Murdoch's dominant press group in Australia“. (Email to Media Lens, April 4, 2006)
They then quote a paragraph from *journalism's low* and perform a miraculous sleight of hand...
3. False Association
Bolt’s recent article, ’Body of evidence,’ provides a jaw-dropping display of propaganda. Bolt asserts, for example, that Saddam Hussein “claimed on average between 90 and 120 victims each day. Every day. For 24 years. That's three or four times higher than the daily deaths in fighting in Iraq today”. (Bolt, ‘Body of evidence,’ Herald Sun, March 22, 2006)
While this is sheer fantasy, Bolt +does+ accurately cite IBC’s maximum tally for reported civilian deaths by mid-March - 37,800 - to make his point:
“It is a shocking loss of life, but see how many more Saddam killed or ordered to their death each day.”
This is so pathetic but serves to indicate the crude propaganda that his being pumped out by Media Lens. Propaganda that can be cut and pasted by their miserable band of followers and delivered to the target via a plague of email.
4. Self-referential Bollocks
The rest of the first half of the *Alert* is a shit storm of quotes in the usual Media Lens style of out-of-context quotations and running commentary so that their readers can all follow the *approved* interpretation.
This boils down to emailing Phil Space at the Hick County Enquirer and getting him to let slip that he wrote an article without giving the issues any thought.
Big fucking deal and, once again illustrating that The Editors just don't understand anything about Anarchism...
5. The Zamparini Example
Sometimes the ML acolytes get a little carried away and send emails to which they scrawl their own pay-off lines after the pasting some of the Alert. These are generally embarrassingly bad - along the lines of "you're in the pay of Bush and Blair and I hope you burn in hell you fucking liars" - so each Alert pays homage to the master of totalitarian arslikan, Gabriele Zamparini.
This one is particularly funny because it proves that the IBC are really bad people by revealing that the Liberal Democrat web site shows IBC figures that are 16 months out of date.
Now there's something I didn't know - that the IBC are webmasters for the LibDems! This is political activism at its best. Zamparini leaves no turn un-stoned.
As The Editors state:
"Sometimes the use of IBC’s figures borders on the surreal."
6. Professional Epidemiology - NEW
Media Lens' politics might be a bit old-fashioned in an *uncle Joe* kind of way but their techniques move with the times. Picture a beautiful girl tossing her long hair while smiling and saying "and now for the science".
And not just any old science, this is EPIDEMIOLOGY. And not just any old epidemiology, this is PROFESSIONAL EPIDEMIOLOGY. And not just any old professional epidemiology, this is ANONYMOUS PROFESSIONAL EPIDEMIOLOGY.
For those of you unfamiliar with the story of Broad Street Pump and the birth of epidemiology there are only two things worth knowing about this field:
a. If you prefer beer to water then you don't need epidemiology
b. Epidemiology is just like Economics - experts juggling figures to prove that white is black and day is night
The interesting thing about this section is the hypocrisy.
Media Lens' most often cited influence is Noam Chomsky. Chomsky is a professional in the area of linguistics but an amateur in just about every other area that he writes about. For anarchists this presents no problem because rational authority doesn't need to be labeled as "professional". But totalitarians like ML don't like their world complicated by lots of independent bits of rational authority.
Bakunin would blow their minds. For him, freedom: "results from th[e] great number of material, intellectual, and moral influences which every individual around him [or her] and which society . . . continually exercise . . . To abolish this mutual influence would be to die."
And a glance at the Media Lens message board proves the point. You are either right or wrong, with us or against us.
They should be choking on their Chomsky quotes as they worship the irrational authority of an anonymous professional.
An Amateur Writes
My mate George Bidder - an amateur Les Roberts watcher - has this to say about the remaining bit of the Media Lens Alert:
Martin
I had written this up right after that "Shame Becoming Shameful" shit came out, but I never got around to posting it. The "anonymous" bloke sounds just like Les Roberts - and it doesn't take much to shred his "arguments".
Feel free to post it on your blog.
[...]
Media Lens quotes Les Roberts as saying:
"Attached is a graph [not included here] of deaths in Guatemala from 1960 to
1995 put together by Patrick Ball at UC Berkeley. Murders are with the
black line, the % reported in the press with the dashed line. Note, when
violence goes up, reporting in the press goes down. I have calibrated
surveillance systems during times of war (always in Africa admittedly) and
would be astonished if [IBC's] system could capture 50% of deaths."
Roberts is presumably referring to one or more graphs featured at this site: http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ciidh/qr/english/chap7.html
However, it is pretty clear that Roberts knows perfectly well that these kind of findings do not necessarily follow neatly from conflict to conflict and so results that one finds by analyzing the Guatemalan press between 1960 and 1995 would not necessarily correspond with, or bear any resemblance to, the world's press currently in Iraq. That he knows this should be clear from some of his own findings and statements regarding his Lancet-published study from Iraq, such as these appearing in a radio documentary featuring Roberts and clearly produced in close communication with him:
http://www.thislife.org/ra/300.ram
Host: "The shocker was how people were dying. For the first time in any of
his surveys, the leading cause of death wasn't disease [note: disease only
accounted for about 15% of his Lancet estimate for Iraq]. It was bombs and
bullets. In the 32 of the 33 clusters sampled, 21 people died of violence,
as compared to just one violent death in the period before the war. There
was a second shocker. Of those 21 ... the biggest number, 9, were killed by
the American-led Coalition."
Roberts: "I just didn't expect violence from the Coalition to have dominated
the causes of death in Iraq. No way reading the New York Times and
listening to NPR would I have believed that the Coalition killed far, far
more people than did the insurgents setting off car bombs."
Obviously there's also "no way" he would have believed this if he were basing the speculation on a graph of the findings in his previous studies in war zones, which showed disease as the primary cause of excess death. Even the untested speculations of experts do not always pan out, as Roberts' own public statements show. I'm not sure why Les Roberts and/or the Media Lens Editors feel it proper to counter what they perceive as the flaws of "amateurs" by suggesting that other "amateurs" reading their words should themselves make untested speculations about the work of those "amateurs".
But whatever the reason, it appears to have little to do with scientific concerns.
It continues in the same vein with:
"In Saddam's time, morgues + hospital reports + death certificates reported
to the central Gov. only accounted for about 1/3 of the deaths that must
have been occurring in Iraq. There have now been 15,000 excess violent
deaths just in the Baghdad Morgues! If Baghdad is about 1/5th of the
country, and the morgues do not capture all deaths, what does this imply...
the UNDP number (more than twice IBC at the time it was done) is known by
the authors to be an underestimate and was based on a couple of questions
out of a long (88 min.?) interview." (Email to Media Lens, March 23, 2006)
Again we have a suggestion for his "amateur" readers to speculate about what the factoids he's providing would "imply", a very "scientific" method for determining the facts indeed. The irony of this suggestion is compounded by the fact that the factoids he provides, as quoted by Media Lens, are themselves unclear in their origin or reliability. How has Roberts determined what level of deaths "must have been occuring" in Iraq during "Saddam's time" to arrive at his "1/3" figure, the figure on which all the remaining speculations are to be built upon? Neither he nor the Media Lens Editors say. Is it based on science? Just more untested speculations? Does anybody know?
And, if official sources record so few deaths as we're being instructed to assume, why did the Lancet study find that over 80% of deaths had death certificates to match? If we're supposed to speculate about implications based on this "1/3" figure, who or what was issuing all those other death certificates?
Serious readers should of course pay no mind to such unexamined questions as these. They come from an amateur. Just construct free-floating speculations about what certain factoids "imply" while under conditions of hysteria created by a dire "Alert", as directed by an "anonymous" expert and a website "run by amateurs", who are clearly concerned with scientific rigour.
On 10 April, 2006 Media Lens issued an alert under this title and the subtitle:
"John Pilger And A Leading Epidemiologist Challenge IBC"
This is pot-pouri of their usual devices and themes including:
1. The Chomsky Quote
2. Pilgerism
3. The False Association
4. Self-referential Bollocks
5. The Zamparini Example
6. Professional Epidemiology --***NEW***---
1. The Chomsky Quote:
This alert's Chomsky Quote is good one:
"If you are not offending people who ought to be offended, you're doing something wrong."
And the ML conclusion is a "jaw-dropping display of propaganda" (to borrow their words) and a totalitarian *classic*:
"One indication that the Iraq Body Count (IBC) project is doing something wrong is that it is deemed, not merely inoffensive, but is eagerly embraced by people who really ought to be offended. "
For them, no task, no position, no words and no cause can be anything other righteous.
A bunch of corduroy-clad, intellectual lefties decide to devote every bit of their spare time to recording and giving a name to every civilian killed in a war-torn country.
An ordinary person would maybe view this as a generally good thing (if not a waste of time)? An activist and anarcho-syndicalist like Chomsky would no doubt congratulate them on their determination to work against all odds to record the names of individuals who lost their lives to further the ambitions of the US State and its willing partners.
But a totalitarian would only be interested in whether the exercise was of value to them. And if you aren't upsetting the BBC and privately owned media corporations then the exercise is deemed not just useless but threatening to the cause.
2. Pilgerism
The Editors are pulling out all the stops in this Alert with a Pilgerism following straight after The Chomsky Quote:
Consider Herald Sun journalist Adam Bolt, described by John Pilger as “the lowest of journalism's low, an extreme right wing and aggressively idiotic member of Murdoch's dominant press group in Australia“. (Email to Media Lens, April 4, 2006)
They then quote a paragraph from *journalism's low* and perform a miraculous sleight of hand...
3. False Association
Bolt’s recent article, ’Body of evidence,’ provides a jaw-dropping display of propaganda. Bolt asserts, for example, that Saddam Hussein “claimed on average between 90 and 120 victims each day. Every day. For 24 years. That's three or four times higher than the daily deaths in fighting in Iraq today”. (Bolt, ‘Body of evidence,’ Herald Sun, March 22, 2006)
While this is sheer fantasy, Bolt +does+ accurately cite IBC’s maximum tally for reported civilian deaths by mid-March - 37,800 - to make his point:
“It is a shocking loss of life, but see how many more Saddam killed or ordered to their death each day.”
This is so pathetic but serves to indicate the crude propaganda that his being pumped out by Media Lens. Propaganda that can be cut and pasted by their miserable band of followers and delivered to the target via a plague of email.
4. Self-referential Bollocks
The rest of the first half of the *Alert* is a shit storm of quotes in the usual Media Lens style of out-of-context quotations and running commentary so that their readers can all follow the *approved* interpretation.
This boils down to emailing Phil Space at the Hick County Enquirer and getting him to let slip that he wrote an article without giving the issues any thought.
Big fucking deal and, once again illustrating that The Editors just don't understand anything about Anarchism...
5. The Zamparini Example
Sometimes the ML acolytes get a little carried away and send emails to which they scrawl their own pay-off lines after the pasting some of the Alert. These are generally embarrassingly bad - along the lines of "you're in the pay of Bush and Blair and I hope you burn in hell you fucking liars" - so each Alert pays homage to the master of totalitarian arslikan, Gabriele Zamparini.
This one is particularly funny because it proves that the IBC are really bad people by revealing that the Liberal Democrat web site shows IBC figures that are 16 months out of date.
Now there's something I didn't know - that the IBC are webmasters for the LibDems! This is political activism at its best. Zamparini leaves no turn un-stoned.
As The Editors state:
"Sometimes the use of IBC’s figures borders on the surreal."
6. Professional Epidemiology - NEW
Media Lens' politics might be a bit old-fashioned in an *uncle Joe* kind of way but their techniques move with the times. Picture a beautiful girl tossing her long hair while smiling and saying "and now for the science".
And not just any old science, this is EPIDEMIOLOGY. And not just any old epidemiology, this is PROFESSIONAL EPIDEMIOLOGY. And not just any old professional epidemiology, this is ANONYMOUS PROFESSIONAL EPIDEMIOLOGY.
For those of you unfamiliar with the story of Broad Street Pump and the birth of epidemiology there are only two things worth knowing about this field:
a. If you prefer beer to water then you don't need epidemiology
b. Epidemiology is just like Economics - experts juggling figures to prove that white is black and day is night
The interesting thing about this section is the hypocrisy.
Media Lens' most often cited influence is Noam Chomsky. Chomsky is a professional in the area of linguistics but an amateur in just about every other area that he writes about. For anarchists this presents no problem because rational authority doesn't need to be labeled as "professional". But totalitarians like ML don't like their world complicated by lots of independent bits of rational authority.
Bakunin would blow their minds. For him, freedom: "results from th[e] great number of material, intellectual, and moral influences which every individual around him [or her] and which society . . . continually exercise . . . To abolish this mutual influence would be to die."
And a glance at the Media Lens message board proves the point. You are either right or wrong, with us or against us.
They should be choking on their Chomsky quotes as they worship the irrational authority of an anonymous professional.
An Amateur Writes
My mate George Bidder - an amateur Les Roberts watcher - has this to say about the remaining bit of the Media Lens Alert:
Martin
I had written this up right after that "Shame Becoming Shameful" shit came out, but I never got around to posting it. The "anonymous" bloke sounds just like Les Roberts - and it doesn't take much to shred his "arguments".
Feel free to post it on your blog.
[...]
Media Lens quotes Les Roberts as saying:
"Attached is a graph [not included here] of deaths in Guatemala from 1960 to
1995 put together by Patrick Ball at UC Berkeley. Murders are with the
black line, the % reported in the press with the dashed line. Note, when
violence goes up, reporting in the press goes down. I have calibrated
surveillance systems during times of war (always in Africa admittedly) and
would be astonished if [IBC's] system could capture 50% of deaths."
Roberts is presumably referring to one or more graphs featured at this site: http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ciidh/qr/english/chap7.html
However, it is pretty clear that Roberts knows perfectly well that these kind of findings do not necessarily follow neatly from conflict to conflict and so results that one finds by analyzing the Guatemalan press between 1960 and 1995 would not necessarily correspond with, or bear any resemblance to, the world's press currently in Iraq. That he knows this should be clear from some of his own findings and statements regarding his Lancet-published study from Iraq, such as these appearing in a radio documentary featuring Roberts and clearly produced in close communication with him:
http://www.thislife.org/ra/300.ram
Host: "The shocker was how people were dying. For the first time in any of
his surveys, the leading cause of death wasn't disease [note: disease only
accounted for about 15% of his Lancet estimate for Iraq]. It was bombs and
bullets. In the 32 of the 33 clusters sampled, 21 people died of violence,
as compared to just one violent death in the period before the war. There
was a second shocker. Of those 21 ... the biggest number, 9, were killed by
the American-led Coalition."
Roberts: "I just didn't expect violence from the Coalition to have dominated
the causes of death in Iraq. No way reading the New York Times and
listening to NPR would I have believed that the Coalition killed far, far
more people than did the insurgents setting off car bombs."
Obviously there's also "no way" he would have believed this if he were basing the speculation on a graph of the findings in his previous studies in war zones, which showed disease as the primary cause of excess death. Even the untested speculations of experts do not always pan out, as Roberts' own public statements show. I'm not sure why Les Roberts and/or the Media Lens Editors feel it proper to counter what they perceive as the flaws of "amateurs" by suggesting that other "amateurs" reading their words should themselves make untested speculations about the work of those "amateurs".
But whatever the reason, it appears to have little to do with scientific concerns.
It continues in the same vein with:
"In Saddam's time, morgues + hospital reports + death certificates reported
to the central Gov. only accounted for about 1/3 of the deaths that must
have been occurring in Iraq. There have now been 15,000 excess violent
deaths just in the Baghdad Morgues! If Baghdad is about 1/5th of the
country, and the morgues do not capture all deaths, what does this imply...
the UNDP number (more than twice IBC at the time it was done) is known by
the authors to be an underestimate and was based on a couple of questions
out of a long (88 min.?) interview." (Email to Media Lens, March 23, 2006)
Again we have a suggestion for his "amateur" readers to speculate about what the factoids he's providing would "imply", a very "scientific" method for determining the facts indeed. The irony of this suggestion is compounded by the fact that the factoids he provides, as quoted by Media Lens, are themselves unclear in their origin or reliability. How has Roberts determined what level of deaths "must have been occuring" in Iraq during "Saddam's time" to arrive at his "1/3" figure, the figure on which all the remaining speculations are to be built upon? Neither he nor the Media Lens Editors say. Is it based on science? Just more untested speculations? Does anybody know?
And, if official sources record so few deaths as we're being instructed to assume, why did the Lancet study find that over 80% of deaths had death certificates to match? If we're supposed to speculate about implications based on this "1/3" figure, who or what was issuing all those other death certificates?
Serious readers should of course pay no mind to such unexamined questions as these. They come from an amateur. Just construct free-floating speculations about what certain factoids "imply" while under conditions of hysteria created by a dire "Alert", as directed by an "anonymous" expert and a website "run by amateurs", who are clearly concerned with scientific rigour.
posted by g33kThug at 5:29 PM
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