Friday, 25 March 2011

The Left's Perennial Argument: "Shut Up"

Ann Coulter tries to explain to that cloth-head Bill 'O Reilly her point that the media will not report on scientific work claiming that a certain degree of exposure to radiation may in fact, help to ward off cancer. The numbers she mentions in the case of some apartment blocks built in Taiwan seem quite impressive, but their scientific merit is the secondary point here. The primary point of course is that the reason the media will not report such claims is because they don't fit with their anti-nuclear and more broadly left-wing environmentalist bias.* Ben Goren naturally can do little more than imply that Coulter should shut up because her remarks are in "bad taste". He's learning, but not from me.

*I vividly recall, for example, how the Taipei Times steadfastedly refused to report anything about the Climategate scandal at the University of East Anglia for as long as they could back in 2009.

2 comments:

  1. All my personal prejudices toward Ann Coulter aside, the "scientific" information she has apparently cited is grossly unscientific.

    WL Chen, the guy who wrote the laughably-entitled "Is Chronic Radiation an Effective Prophylaxis Against Cancer?" had an agenda to push: he was associated with the Atomic Energy Council and THEY certainly didn't want any findings that might end up with them having to compensate residents of radioactive apartments in northern Taiwan (NONE of those residents received an NT dollar of compensation btw).

    Furthermore, he compared the cancer rates of the relatively young demographic who'd purchased the radioactive homes with the statistically incompatible (much older) demographic of all of Taiwan. There's another paper out there somewhere in which the victims were compared to the appropriate cohorts, and the cancer rates were indeed MUCH higher among the victims, particularly in terms of the usual suspects leukaemia and (if I recall correctly) thyroid cancer.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I chased up those papers and yes, it seems Coulter was just out to draw attention and take a pop at the media.

    But it's good I can attract that sort of response from someone like you Steve, rather than someone who will just run some variant of the shut up "argument" (which I seem to be getting a lot recently).

    ReplyDelete

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