Dr. Strangelove And Bipartisan Opposition To Vaccination

Dear Fred,

Interesting you should ask...

Back in 1970, Paul Schulte arranged scholarships for Michael Morgan and me to do grad work at University of Cincinnati (where Paul eventually got his Doctorate in Epidemiology).

One night, for amusement, we attended a John Birch Society meeting. While there, I experienced one of the most startling epiphanies I've ever had.

The speakers at the meeting were obsessed with the fluoridation of public water supplies - a right wing obsession calling to mind the Left's growing fixation on organically produced foods.

Suddenly I recalled Einstein's observation that the nature of Space is curved and immediately saw that the far right wing and the far left wing meet if see them extended in space the same way we see people extending themselves on Earth until they have circumnavigate the globe by "going in a straight line," thus ending up where they began.

Opposition to vaccination -- a political position touted on "both sides of the aisle" -- is, feeds on the same dynamic I discovered in Cincinnati that cold night in the winter of '70-'71. 

Pax on both houses,

Alan

PS Recently, my boy Danny and I watched "Dr. Strangelove," featuring Sterling Hayden as the fluoridation-crazed Base Commander who, seized by paranoid delusion, unleashes "The Doomsday Machine." Since Danny had never seen "Strangelove," I decided to watch with him, mostly to see how much "chispa" it had lost since my first viewing 40 years ago. To my amazement, the movie not only "held up" over time, but improved. 

"One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the [Adolf] Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing. . .  The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous. It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake." 

"A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann" in Raids on the Unspeakable." Trappist monk, Thomas Merton

On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 2:23 PM, Fred Owens <froghospital911@gmail.com> wrote:

to vax or not vax against measles

My question: Is the anti-vax campaign a right-wing or a left-wing lunacy?

It is anti-science, but what is it's source?

On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 11:01 AM, Alan Archibald <alanarchibaldo@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Fred,
Thanks for your email.
Basically I agree with you: Facts are essential to humankind's "objective" approximation of truth.
But I do not think the academy has turned its back on facts. (The denial of science is a right-wing endeavor. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/03/ted-talk-danger-of-science-denial.html  ///  http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/07/great-science-and-science-denial.html  ///  http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/04/conservative-christians-and-global.html 
As I see it, the academy wants to expand the contextualization-and-interpretation of facts (along with expanding "the database" itself) so that we have a truer perspective on a world, which -- like or not (and often I DO NOT LIKE IT) -- has a significant admixture of probabilism and contingency.
As I've probably mentioned before, I accommodate "the contingency of Truth" in the same way that I accommodate the overwhelmingly probable location of (essentially un-locatable) electrons in an electron cloud. 
Metaphorically, I see virtual identity with the cloudy shekinah of Yahweh's earthly visitations. "He's" right there, clearly present (even hyper-clearly present) and yet He's still "cloudy." 
If this cloud ever clarified, "who could see God and live?"
Pax tecum,
Alan

On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 1:43 PM, Fred Owens <froghospital911@gmail.com> wrote:

Ronald Reagan: "Facts are stupid things."

But I've heard this more often on the left...... I kind of like facts myself, but the university is the principle source for the attacks against facts and what they condemn as "objectivity."

The signal moment for me in graduate school was when I heard a fellow student say, with feigned academic weariness, "We know, of course, there's no such thing as objectivity."

Hence, the demise of journalism and the triumph of Facebook. Facebook is the dominant mode and it's all about who you like and how you feel -- no facts allowed. No objectivity, which is the human approximation of truth.

--
Fred Owens
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