Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/14/ectopic-utopian.html
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Maybe try working with actual doctors and scientists rather than reading an article and saying, “yes, that’s it!”
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“It’s the fault of the medical journals that I put any faith in the words of a person who pays me to be their mouthpiece over the interests of my constituents. If the doctors would just pay me more for my mercenary ideals, we wouldn’t be in this mess!”
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Man, these people are stupid.
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The side effects are life, not death, Barry: life for the woman who is carrying the ectopic pregnancy. But she doesn’t really count, does she? Jesus if these fucks would put half the effort they put into legislating clumps of cells into solving actual problems that affect most people, we’d live in a completely different world.
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Since the politicians don’t seem to know anything about anything, how do they plan to enforce this should it become law?
Doctor: “I’ve successfully treated that ectopic pregnancy.”
Authorities: "Wait, you reimplanted that fetus, right?
Doctor: “Oh yeah, totally.” [slaps woman’s belly] “This baby’s good to go.”
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Only two articles? That there is the first warning sign.
One of them is from 1917? That’s a huge warning sign.
This is pretty basic stuff. I didn’t even go to university, but I think I know more about doing research than this person. Enough to know I’d never attempt to do medical research for legislation.
Coincidentally I’ve recently been reading some medical evidence from 1907, in which they discuss whether it’s the ethanol of the “impurities” - fusel oils - that provide medical benefit.
Despite my medical training extending no further than a first aid certificate from over a decade ago, I can figure out that the “medical benefits” being spoken of are slim. They amount to making the patient feel better. Which is important. But the actual evidence being given is, medically speaking, ridiculous.
For example, from the 1907 Royal Commission on Whiskey and Other Potable Spirits - evidence from the respected medical professor Dr. William Murrell:
There’s a lot more - for example, alcohol was being used as both a stimulant and a sedative in 1907. We’ve learned a lot since then. Certainly what I’ve learned from reading this kind of evidence is just how far our medical understanding has come in 112 years.
If the evidence you have is slim, and 50% of it is from 1917 (and almost certainly outdated), then there’s a damned good chance that your actual problem is you’re a moron who doesn’t know how to do good research.
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And the Physics journals should tear out Newton’s papers.
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!!! DO NOT ENGAGE WITH BULLSHIT !!!
The correct way to use the scientific literature is to ask (or be) a scientist in good standing in the relevant field, period. Scientific papers are not intended to be cherry-picked and interpreted at will by lay readers; this jerk has yanked that idea out of his anus.
The entire reason for academia to exist is that at the specialised frontiers of knowledge, you can’t understand anything without having an up-to-date overview of everything. Citing a single article about obstetrics _ in no way_ makes you as good as a real obstetrician on that topic. It just turns your general ignorance into specific fraud.
(A real obstetrician, being familiar with the whole landscape of research on ectopic pregnancy, would know these two outlying accounts are not meaningful. That is why the idea that “the journals” are obliged to “retract” such papers is so cretinous)
Every journalist should be trained to shoot down such claims on sight. The implication that any savage can just overrule experts, by pretending to read a cherry-picked article in an alien specialty, insults the foundations of our civilisation. He’s free to say God wants him to be a rapist; he shouldn’t be free to slander the whole of science.
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“The thing is, Becker doesn’t even care that he’s ignorant. He told Local 2 news, “I’m not smart enough to know what causes abortions and what doesn’t. The bill’s just written ‘if it causes an abortion’ and people smarter than me can figure out what that means.”
Here’s the thing: PEOPLE SMARTER THAN HIM ALREADY KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS AND THEY ARE CALLED DOCTORS. He is not a doctor. And yet, here he is deciding what goes on between women and actual medical professionals.”
from: https://pridesource.com/article/creep-of-the-week-rep-john-becker/
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The US needs to stop being so constantly stupid.
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That Becker appears to be a real dimwit.
If we retract everything that is obviously wrong, we would not have any books by Republican pundits in print. The bible would probably have to go, too.
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I don’t see the issue here. Sound science if you ask me. /s
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Yeah, but that requires one to understand things. Which requires one to not have a lot invested in deliberately failing to understand things. People like this lawmaker have an agenda and they’ve made it abundantly clear they’re not going to let the facts stand in the way of it.
But they don’t want the facts. They only want a veneer of legitimacy for their beliefs. Which is why, now that it’s been explained to him how journals work, and how cherry picking two reports is particularly meaningless, I’m sure he’ll turn around and do it again.
I’m reminded of the young Earth creationists (he may actually be one for all I know, given the overlap with forced birthers). A big thing with the YECs is that the amount of dust on the Moon “proves” it’s only a few thousand years old. How? They found an article, written pre-space flight, guessing as to how much dust comes from space. It was based on measurements of dust that turned out to be almost entirely terrestrial in origin, so it was wildly inflated compared to the real numbers, which were figured out at the beginning of the space program. Someone pointed all this out, and that the last two digits of the publishing year of the article had been reversed, which made it seem more recent. So what did the YECs do, with their bit of evidence having been disproved? They found another early 20th century article along the same lines, and again reversed the last two digits of the publishing year to make it seem modern. It may have been an accident, but it was an accident that was only possible because they were being disingenuous in their argument to begin with.
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I don’t even know what to say about this, other than I’m glad as hell that I don’t live in fucking Ohio anymore.
That the people making the laws cant see that this is a veritable BOMB of winnable law suits just waiting to happen speaks volumes about how dumb this timeline really is.
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I’ve been conducting my own studies into the subject. Not blind studies, naturally - I need to remain sober enough to note the results.
Now all I need to do is figure out how to read my drunk handwriting when I’m sober… 
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Given trump’s judicial nominees, this isn’t a foregone conclusion.
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As it applies here just as well:
Also, for a sense of scale, there are currently about 2.5 million science and engineering publications a year (according to the NSF). If there are only 2 in a 100 years that support an idea, that means either no one gives a shit about the idea or its bullshit.
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Now, this paper along with several others, was retracted, and Pearce was struck off for serious scientific misconduct, but people who read the fraudulent piece, or articles based off of it may not have read the retraction, or the many articles based on this retraction–
e.g.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1457763/
Additionally, ectopic pregnancy is treated as a illustrative case when discussing the “Principle of Double Effect”, a conundrum of Catholic moral theology.
Scientific reality doesn’t sustain their world view. Bullshit sustains it.
Or if you want to be charitable, it’s akin to asking Philippa Foot to design a mass transport system,
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