Science Guardian

John Moore teaches us leadership

We are in receipt of an email from the distinguished Cornell researcher, John P. Moore, who may be one of the most combative and unthinking of paradigm proponents in the endlessly compromised field of HIV∫AIDS, but is thoughtful and has his heart in the right place on one topic, that’s for sure. He is a strong opponent of verbal homophobia, even in private email, and has written to us to deplore our apparent tolerance of this style of bullying in two of the most distinguished of his opponents in the HIV∫AIDS dispute, as recorded here in our previous post.

We capitalized on the brou-ha-ha, he told us, without taking a stand against the sin. He was right. We were trying to keep out of that complicated social issue – in this case whether the written homophobic insults were inherently disgraceful, or merely the excesses of a private spat where insults are used to lash the recipient into paying careful attention, somewhat illogically – since it was not directly involved in the scientific debate about whether HIV caused AIDS or not, and it was up to the reader to decide where he/she stood on the particular example, and it was none of our business, and we preferred not to get in the middle of a catfight between two tigers.

John Moore wrote to tell us we were wrong, and it was important to take a stand, and we belatedly realized he was right. The only thing necessary to ensure the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, a saying someone has well applied to the Nazi genocide. We apologize. As Don Imus has belatedly realized too the use of hatefilled terms in argument is such a breach of decency and the use of bullying verbal violence of that kind is so hurtful to those who fear and have experienced worse along the same lines that nothing can excuse it.

To overlook it is to condone it, and the state of society is always improved by anyone’s objection to such things, and not objecting to it is to waste an opportunity to raise the level of discourse back to where it should be, after so many thousands of years of evolution, that is, free of bullying and violence.

But Moore needs to rethink, too

Our only excuse is that we were preoccupied with psychologist Mark Biernbaum’s telling email reminder to Moore that his bullying support of HIV∫AIDS conventional wisdom was more damaging by far to gays than any verbal abuse.

As long as the can of worms that is HIV∫AIDS remains sealed and efforts to open it are kept from the public eye by the strenuous efforts of John Moore and his cohorts on AIDSTruth and elsewhere, it is lives which will continue to be damaged and lost, not merely the peace of mind of a gay man in an email exchange where mutual understanding and a positive outcome are destroyed by such hostile language.

So we ask John P. Moore in his turn, if he feels so sensitive and solicitous about the welfare of a gay man attacked in private email with gayhating barbs, how can he reconcile himself to his denial of a public voice to those who bring to his attention the uncountable flaws in his favorite paradigm?

We are not even saying he knows he is wrong to think that HIV causes AIDS, although we know of at least one paper from 2004 where he pretty much admits that the difficulties of accepting that it does are insoluble. We’ll post that soon.

But how can he truly love gays as much as any other human beings and yet deny a voice to critics of HIV∫AIDS, some of them far higher in the pantheon of great scientists than he is as yet, when this leaves the fate of gays and other people hinging on his assumption that he is right without review, without a free public debate, and without free coverage from investigative reporters of the issue (he said in Montreal he wanted to ban coverage by journalists of the topic), which is the only way to ensure his judgement is sound, when so much of the scientific literature speaks against it?

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So we ask John P. Moore in his turn, if he feels so sensitive and solicitous about the welfare of a gay man attacked in private email with gayhating barbs, how can he reconcile himself to his denial of a public voice to those who bring to his attention the uncountable flaws in his favorite paradigm?
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And incidentally, we have an email in hand from Harvey Bialy, whose life has been devoted to truthful science in his roles as editor and scholar, saying quite forthrightly that he is not homophobic, but homophiliac, as anyone who knows him knows. If you want to read the whole exchange, pop over to the group blog You Bet Your Life and check out the new Bad manners and Good Gossip side box down on the left, a parking spot for “Potential contributions, of either original “good gossip”, or comments on pre-existing items, (which) may be sent to the managing editor.”

The renowned independent scholar and fierce guard dog of science who spends much of his time with his sharp teeth clamped on the trousers of a terrified HIV∫AIDS paradigm promoter attempts to explain in his introduction why he habitually sends out scathingly sulphuric email that leaves its recipients with third degree burns:

Contrary to perhaps widely spread opinion (an expression with three ambiguous words), I am extremely thoughtful about everything I write whether it is intended for publication, private with the understanding that it is confidential, or private with the expectation that its recipient might wish to use its coarse language (or apparent betrayals of trust) against me at some future time on the wild and wooly way outset west ever, called The Internet.

And being a mischievous sort by nature and nombre (although as all who know me know, never malicious, no matter how “wicked” the mischief might appear), often these private emails of the third category wind up being extremely provocative, and often cause me considerably more “wasted time” (an ambiguous two word, common expression) than I bargained for in the initial, often improperly spell-checked, electronic missives, which are impulsive only in that restricted, technical sense.

Nonetheless, one cannot grumble about the fruits of the seeds of one’s own planting to any profit (although many try often to do so, at least to my experience), and so I bear the ignominies that come my way with the best good humor I am able to muster at the moment they come, life being quite a complex progression of connected temporal stimuli of all varieties from inside as well as out, and although each reducible to
“chemistry”, the temporal wholeness is a great deal more than the sum of its chemical parts. (I know, none of the above is either bad manners or good gossip…patience…we
will get there soon enough.)

We urge any readers who can extract from this extended riff exactly what the justification is supposed to be to please explain in Comments below.

Delusional Delaney

Back to the topic of homophobia, which experts on CNN’s Anderson Cooper broadcast are already detecting in the Virginia Tech shooter, as one who feared he wasn’t as attracted to women as he wanted to be (see shirt at left). Whether this is true or not, self-hatred appears to be a common theme in discussions of this kind, whether heterosexual or homosexual. Could it be that certain well known promoters of the HIV∫AIDS paradigm suffer from this mental imbalance?

Certainly it is true that as many have pointed out gays have been their own worst enemy in HIV∫AIDS, many of them being led by activists often financed by the drug companies into deploring the critics of HIV∫AIDS who might have rescued them from an ideology not justified by the scientific literature.

One of the best examples of that is the post just put up at AIDSTruth by Martin Delaney, which begins by attacking Peter Duesberg as having no background in AIDS and thus no authority in reviewing the paradigm and rejecting it. Here it is with spelling corrected:

Peter Duesberg and homophobia
by Martin Delaney
April 15, 2007

More than a decade and a half ago we on the frontlines in the fight against HIV/AIDS concluded that Peter Duesberg was bitterly homophobic. Long before there were many anti-viral drugs for him to blame, he clearly blamed AIDS on the gay men who contracted it, arguing that it was the product of a life of promiscuity and drug abuse. In the earliest days, a lot of people suspected that, but studies were soon done by Ascher and others that disproved the theory. Only Duesberg continued to promote the belief, despite studies of thousands of drug using men, controlled for the presence or absence of HIV. Only the presence of HIV correlated with death and major immune deficiency. Drug use and promiscuity were indeed a risk factor for contracting HIV, but by themselves were never shown capable of producing AIDS-like symptoms. Despite this evidence, Duesberg continued to blame AIDS on the behavior of the men, not the viral infection they acquired. This was the same nonsense mouthed by right wing fundamentalists, minus the religious overtones. It still came down to blaming the victim for the disease. In my opinion Duesberg always was, and continues to be, a major homophobe. For a while, he tried to counter this view by hanging around with leather-clad gay men, trying to show some affiliation, but these men were simply a first wave of denialists among the gay community. They were notorious themselves for denigrating others in the gay community, accusing people with AIDS of promiscuity and drug abuse. Their presence in no way cleansed Duesberg of his homophobia.

In all his efforts to blame the victim for the disease, Duesberg has always overlooked the fact that there were plenty of gay men who died of AIDS who never had a history of either promiscuity or drug use. Whenever confronted with this information, Duesberg simply accused people of lying or being in denial.

While I am not aware of explicit homophobic words on record by Duesberg (unlike his friend and business colleague Harvey Bialy, though both are known to use racial slurs), his explanations about AIDS makes it clear what he thinks of gay people in general – contrary to clear, controlled studies, Duesberg insists that AIDS is the fault of the immorality of its victims.

As anyone informed knows, Duesberg has in fact a record of

a) having written a series of the most extensive and comprehensive reviews of HIV’s role in AIDS,on which he became the best informed man in the world,

b) he mapped the sequences of not one but about ten retroviruses

c) he has written about 15 grant proposals for the NIH on researching HIV and AIDS , all rejected for so little reason that even the past editor of Science complained (Dan Koshland) after supporting one in vain and

d) he demonstrated the toxicity of AZT before it was acknowledged as indeed the cause of many needless deaths before the mid nineties, when the dose was reduced by two thirds.

If he is right in his judgement, tempered and tested in the white heat of hostile reaction and penalties, from his peers and scientific ignoramuses both, and produced by more careful study of the literature than anybody else in the world, he has thus saved many gay men’s lives, and continues to try and save more, even as they continue to insist, under the leadership of Martin Delaney and other activists funded by the drug manufacturers (computers still working well, Martin?), in taking a little AZT and ARV’s in a cocktail which has no party spirit in it at all, in fact, causes the drug symptoms which half the deaths of AIDS patients in the US are now attributed to.

As one informed observer has recently pointed out here, the predicament of gays who take high doses of recreational drugs and/or are overly strenuous in cleaning themselves and thus stripping their digestive systems of protective flora and fauna, are by every logic and paper in the relevant literature endangering themselves, and if Duesberg is responsible for pointing that out he is hardly homophobic.

As so many distinguished contributors have pointed out here in Comments, gay men have largely ignored this advice, instead developing a reflex hostility towards it for political and emotional reasons, Figures like Martin Delaney are among those who have to take prime responsibility for fostering those political and emotional motivations, which have persuaded so many to ignore reason and the message of the scientific literature, which tells us that HIV is the last thing that might cause immune system dysfunction, and the partying habits of many gays the first thing that should be considered instead.

The “plenty of gay men who died of AIDS who never had a history of either promiscuity or drug use” are without much doubt those who took AZT or the later cocktails, since the only improvement that has resulted from spoonfeeding them standard medications over two decades to date not surprisingly coincides with the reduction in AZT dose in the early nineties. There has been no improvement since, as we learned last summer.

The question Martin Delaney and John Moore have to answer is, do they really think there is no question to answer?

Or are they overcome with some kind of bias in favor of the status quo which prevents them from even considering the alternative, a bias so strong that they wish to prevent others from considering it also?

Whether that bias stems from other factors or from homophobia, there is no doubt that is has a seriously homophobic effect, the illness and death of those that trust their leadership.

That. at least, is what the scientific literature tells the few people who read it without preconceptions.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Science Guardian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.