The Virgin-Creep Complex

Amanda and iocaste save me the trouble of pestering people to excerpt yet another WSJ article, as they discuss today’s cover story about hymen reconstruction, starting with an especially creepy account of obtaining one as an anniversary gift. One of these days I expect to read the paper and find accounts of women getting circumcisions to prove that they will remain faithful.

This reminds me of a depressing but at least funny teaching anecdote. I was putting together a comparative law syllabus, and a professor told be about a book about female genital mutilation that he had used. The book was good, but during one of the lectures a student raised his hand and asked, “what’s a clitoris?” I decided not to use the book–one reason I decided not to teach high school was to obviate any chance that I would have to teach sex ed…

Nominate Early, Nominate Often

Nominations for the 2005 Koufax Awards are up–make sure to send in your favorites. Pretty much every blog on the left (as well as, of course, many that aren’t) should be nominated in a category or 4, so it won’t be hard!

More please!

That’s more like it.

Tech Central Journal of Medicine

There was a terrific article by Anna Wilde Mathews in Monday’s Wall Street Journal about how an increasing number of medical journal articles are ghostwritten by drug company PR flacks. Of course, the article wasn’t online, and WSJ isn’t even on the academic L/N we get here, but thanks to an insanely overworked but generous lawyer, I can give you a taste of what the article found:

In 2001, the American Journal of Kidney Diseases published an article that touted the use of synthetic vitamin D. Its author was listed as Alex J. Brown, an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

But recently, that same article was featured as a work sample by a different person: Michael Anello, a free-lance medical writer, who posted a summary of it on his Web site. Mr. Anello says he was hired to write the article by a communications firm working for Abbott Laboratories, which makes a version of the vitamin D product. Dr. Brown agrees he got help in writing but says he redid part of the draft.
It’s an example of an open secret in medicine: Many of the articles that appear in scientific journals under the by-lines of prominent academics are actually written by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies. These seemingly objec-tive articles, which doctors around the world use to guide their care of patients, are often part of a marketing campaign by companies to promote a product or play up the condition it treats.

Now questions about the practice are mounting as medical journals face unprecedented scrutiny of their role as gatekeeper for scientific information. Last week, the New England Journal of Medicine admitted that a 2000 article it published highlighting the advantages of Merck & Co.’s Vioxx painkiller omitted information about heart attacks among patients taking the drug. The journal has said the deletions were made by someone working from a Merck computer. Merck says the heart attacks happened after the study’s cutoff date and it did nothing wrong.

[...]

When articles are ghostwritten by someone paid by a company, the big question is whether the article gets slanted. That’s what one former free-lance medical writer alleges she was told to do by a company hired by Johnson & Johnson.

Susanna Dodgson, who holds a doctorate in physiology, says she was hired in 2002 by Excerpta Medica, the El-sevier medical-communications firm, to write an article about J&J’s anemia drug Eprex. A J&J unit had sponsored a study measuring whether Eprex patients could do well taking the drug only once a week. The company was facing competition from a rival drug sold by Amgen Inc. that could be given once a week or less.

Dr. Dodgson says she was given an instruction sheet directing her to emphasize the “main message of the study” — that 79.3% of people with anemia had done well on a once-a-week Eprex dose. In fact, only 63.2% of patients re-sponded well as defined by the original study protocol, according to a report she was provided. That report said the study’s goal “could not be reached.” Both the instruction sheet and the report were viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The higher figure Dr. Dodgson was asked to highlight used a broader definition of success and excluded patients who dropped out of the trial or didn’t adhere to all its rules.

The instructions noted that some patients on large doses didn’t seem to do well with the once-weekly administration but warned that this point “has not been discussed with marketing and is not definitive!”

The Eprex study appeared last year in the journal Clinical Nephrology, highlighting the 79.3% figure without men-tioning the lower one. The article didn’t acknowledge Dr. Dodgson or Excerpta Medica. Dr. Dodgson, who now teaches medical writing at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, says she didn’t like the Eprex assignment “but I had to earn a living.”

Defenitely read the whole thing if you have access. Obviously, since scientists have to sign off, the articles may be titled toward drug companies but are less likely to contain actual errors (at least of commission.) On the other hand, the fact that scientists maintain their bylines (often, if I understand correctly, without crediting the ghostwriters) makes it harder to trust any of a journal’s articles; at least you know when you see that James Glassman has written something and know how much stock to put in it. I hope the article will help bring some serious scrutiny to the practice…

…UPDATE: more shilling at the Cato Institute (although, to their credit, they at least fired the party involved, while John Lott is still an AEI fellow the last time I checked.) And, surprisingly enough, at Tech Central Station.

Certainty About the Uncertain

Speaking of torture, Jim Henley has a quite brilliant post noting that the most common justifications for the Iraq war collapse for the same reason that the”ticking time bomb” argument justifying torture is abjectly useless:

The features of the dorm bull session ethics symposium are perfect knowledge of the present and the default future and perfect certainty of the results of your actions. If you know A, and B will cause C, then musn’t you B?

This is the “ticking bomb” case for torture (as opposed to the esoteric case: payback). It is also, on a moment’s reflection, the case for launching the Iraq War – cases, really:

* If you know Iraq plans to use banned weapons against the United States and that toppling Saddam Hussein will prevent that, musn’t the United States topple Saddam Hussein?

* If you know that Muslims commit terrorism against the United States because they live in unfree societies and democratizing Iraq by force will lead to Ummah-wide freedom and end terrorism, musn’t the United States democratize Iraq by force?

* If you know that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and that overthrowing his regime will lead to freedom and internal peace, musn’t you overthrow his regime?

Spot the assumed certainties in the trains of logic and you can see the bad institutional furniture and soiled carpets on which they were conceived.

The problem both arguments is that if you use the right assumptions about not only the underlying stakes but about the lengths to which one is willing goal to achieve the cited ends, you can justify anything. (And this was the second iteration of the salami-slicing in the pro-war argument: the threat wasn’t imminent, but we had to stop Saddam before it became imminent. Once you go there, there’s no war that can’t be justified.) But the second part is just as problematic as the first, because once the alleged ends are compelling enough, the careful restraints on the means are going to fade, particularly since in practice you don’t have control over the people acting:

As Kinsley hints, the real problem is just who gets to do the slicing. If you’re Charles Krauthammer presuming to posit official guidelines on torture or Andrew Sullivan hedging on the means to be employed in speculative war, you are gravely misunderstanding the central problem: you won’t be deciding. The ones with actual power to put your general principles into practice will be people who have gotten where they are by achieving a certain level of success in a ruthless business: politics. The fine grain of your own conscience is less likely to show in them – it’s not impossible, but circumstance tells against it.

The same hubris that says we can know the outcome of a large application of speculative force (prophylactic, humanitarian war) says we can know the outcome of a much smaller application (torture). Comfort with one will tend toward comfort with the other. If you are pro-war and anti-torture, it has not in your case, and that speaks well of you.

That’s right. There’s no necessary connection between the pro-war and pro-torture arguments, but it’s not surprising that they go together so often. Anyway, terrific, provocative stuff; make sure to click through.

Bad and Worse

Last week, my new NL team traded for Tony Womack. They didn’t give up anything of consequence, and the Yankees picked up part of Womack’s salary. The downside is that they now have Tony Womack.

This week, my AL team signed Carl Everett. There is no upside.

It’s going to be a long year.

UPDATE: Giving it some more thought, I think that the Everett signing is actually worse than the Womack trade. The Mariners have managed to acquire a DH who, next year, is likely to hit like a league average shortstop. Worse, they’ve pushed their previous DH back into left field, where he’s likely to be the worst defensive outfielder in the league. One year, three million would be a bad deal if Everett were paying to play. Add to that the fact that Carl Everett is a thug, and you’ve got a genuine disaster on your hands. Great work, Bill. At least it looks as if the Reds are only going to use Womack as a utility player.

Last Kaus this Week

I apologize in advance…

Mickey is trying to correct the impression that he just doesn’t like homosexuals:

If a gay man, say, goes to see “Wuthering Heights,” there is at least one romantic lead of the sex he’s interested in! In “Brokeback Mountain,” neither of the two romantic leads is of a sex I’m interested in. … My wild hypothesis is that more people will go see a movie if it features an actor or actress they find attractive! If heterosexual men in heartland America don’t flock to see Brokeback Mountain it’s not because they’re bigoted. It’s because they’re heterosexual. “Heterosexuals Attracted to Members of the Opposite Sex”–for those cultural critics wondering what a commerical disappointment for this much-heralded movie will Tell Us About America Today, there’s your headline. …

Fascinating.

If I’m reading this right, Mickey thinks that the box office of a film depends on the attractiveness of its stars to the opposite sex. The reason Mickey (and his hypothetical American movie going audience) doesn’t want to see Brokeback Mountain isn’t because gay sex makes him uncomfortable, but rather because there are no women involved. Mickey, you see, watches movies because he likes to think about having sex with attractive actresses. This explains why he was just as skeptical about the box office chances of, say, Master and Commander (no female characters) as he is about those of Brokeback Mountain. No women, and guys won’t want to see it. Or so I assume; I haven’t actually checked back into his archives to find out. Also, I invite you to examine the 2005 box office list, and tell me how much the success of these films depended on the attractiveness of their stars to the opposite sex, as opposed to story, setting, acting, writing, directing, and so forth.

I can see why Mickey feels resentful about all this. Damn dirty liberals like Frank Rich are trying to make him feel bad about not wanting to see Brokeback Mountain. Well, they’re not actually trying, but Mickey suspects that they might. Sexual preference, you see, is genetic, and Mickey is a confirmed, genetically determined heterosexual, meaning that he can’t enjoy a movie in which men have sex with one another. Worse, if Mickey did find the sex scenes…interesting… then he would be forced to ask awkward, uncomfortable questions about himself. Since we are all genetically determined to like either men or women, Mickey might be forced to wonder about which way his genes actually pointed. I can see how that would be difficult for him.

Have no sympathy for Mickey. If he had written that he was reluctant to see Brokeback Mountain because Ang Lee is a hit or miss director, I wouldn’t be harassing him. If he were reluctant to see it because films on such topics often take on an Afterschool Special quality, I wouldn’t harass him. If he were reluctant to see it because he doesn’t care for cowboy romance films, I wouldn’t harass him. Mickey has been quite specific, though; he doesn’t want to see it because it’s a gay film, and thinks it will fail commercially for the same reason. That he may be right about the second doesn’t excuse the first.

UPDATE (from Scott): Roger Ailes finds the only film of the last half-century that Kaus could like.

The Johnson Impeachment

There’s an interesting discussion taking place about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson on the lawcourts listerv. Sanford Levinson brings up an interesting argument, which is that the general sense that the impeachment was unjustified was heavily influenced by “JFK”‘s Profiles in Courage, which basically put forward the standard anti-Reconstruction account of apartheid’s apologists. (Another reason why LBJ should be far higher in the progressive pantheon than JFK.)

The close relationship of defenses of Johnson with anti-Reconstruction revisionism further convinces me that Congress was right to impeach him. It was certainly justifiable (if not required) by the Constitution, and the pragmatic considerations could hardly be more compelling, given that he was going beyond the understood role of the Presidency and nullifying the will of Congress in order to gut Reconstruction and protect the interests of the old Confederacy. Some people have argued that the non-conviction was defensible in that Johnson had begun to change after his impeachment, but I’m inclined to say that he should have been convicted. (And there can certainly be no question that this would have been far, far better for the country.) I’m by no means an expert on the subject, though, so I open the floor.

On the Futility of Arguing With Hacks

The Plank has an amusing account of Andrew Sullivan embarrassing Men in Black clown Mark Levin as the latter demands evidence and then goes on to describe the proffered evidence as “looney,” which seems to mean “contradicts the unsubstantiated claims of Mark Levin.” Having been thoroughly humiliated, Levin calls in the blogosphere’s most prominent Bush lickspittle, who repeats an old smear:

In the interest of some clarity, Andrew Sullivan invokes a legal definition of torture, which is progress. But does he think it includes things like fake menstrual blood, and being wrapped in the Israeli flag?

Because he’s made much of those things. If he thinks they fall within the legal definition, then he’s not very serious. If he doesn’t think they fall within the legal definition, then — given his repeated treatment of those subjects as “torture” — he’s not very serious.

Reynolds backs up his claim that Sullivan has “repeatedly” described being wrapped in the Israeli flag as torture by linking to a particularly odious past piece of Instahackery, which lied about Sullivan’s position while engaging in some vicious gay-baiting on the side. To get a reminder about Reynolds’ intellectual honesty, let’s consider what Sullivan actually wrote:

…after U.S. interrogators have tortured over two dozen detainees to death, after they have wrapped one in an Israeli flag, after they have smeared naked detainees with fake menstrual blood, after they have told one detainee to “Fuck Allah,” after they have ordered detainees to pray to Allah in order to kick them from behind in the head, is it completely beyond credibility that they would also have desecrated the Koran?

You’ll note that he discussed the menstrual blood and Israeli flag incidents separately from torture, and nowhere describes these incidents as torture. (As for the argument that this is a “repeated” claim, Reynolds provides his usual amount of evidence: none.) The lengths of dishonesty that people like Reynolds and Levin will go to in order to uncritically defend the Bush administration while pretending not to support torture are pathetic, and instructive.

…more on Reynolds’ torture apologia at Sadly, No!

Action

As a follow-up to my post about Maye and the blogosphere, Angelica suggests some courses of action. And according to Radley Balko the blog divisions of CBS and the National Journal have picked up the story, which is encouraging.

Counterinsurgency is Hard

Fine post on counter-insurgency from Kingdaddy.

Via AG.