Category: The Dish

Maybe the April 1 date gave them an out, but the Los Angeles Times is actually reporting a decline in HIV rates in San Francisco. The data is hard to refute:

New cases of HIV in San Francisco dipped nearly 10% in the last five years, marking the first drop in infections since the late 1980s, according to preliminary estimates from the city’s Department of Public Health.

During that period the gay male population increased 25 percent. And five years ago, San Francisco’s health department was predicting a huge increase in HIV infection rates among gay men to "sub-Saharan" rates – predictions given front page billing on the New York Times. The reason for the actual decline? A large amount of it is not "safer sex" but "sero-sorting": only dating and having sex with men who have the same HIV status as you do. You’ll also notice two passages in the article that tell you a lot:

"This is great news; we’re making progress," said Mark Cloutier, executive director of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. "But I think it is both bad planning and bad public policy to look toward the future based on a [short-term] trend. We don’t know how long this will last." … One possible downside to the apparent drop in HIV cases: If cases dip below certain thresholds, San Francisco could lose federal dollars for prevention and treatment, and city funds could be shifted elsewhere.

Draw your own conclusions about the relationship between city health departments and HIV infection data. Let’s just say a healthy dose of skepticism is always in order.

She had three guns pointed at her back as she gave her pre-release statement. Now she is free, she can tell the truth. I hope those who jumped to swift condemnatory conclusions will now apologize.

A reader makes a good point:

"One interesting case study for elitism is medicine. Your familiarity is through experience with HIV; mine, cancer. The point though is the same. There was at first an unresponsive God-like community that made unassailable pronouncements about the science and medicine. Correctly this was rebelled against. But now we have charlatans and healers who have no basis, except anecdotes if that, for their claims. And substantial members of the public believe them over the science. Part of this is because for cases like AIDS and cancer, sometimes science hasn’t an answer yet. Nonetheless, the "everyone’s opinion is equal" attitude is now as destructive as the God-like elitism. Somehow we need a happy medium – acknowledging expertise while demanding that it explain itself. The anti-knowledge forces are not just religious fundamentalists; read some of the anti-medicine nonsense out there."

I have to agree. One of the most persistent sub-currents out there among people with HIV and AIDS is superstition, or the notion that all drugs are somehow poisonous, or that homoepathic quackery can replace actual science, or that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, and so on. This is particularly widespread among some gays and African-Americans, some of the populations most at risk. You have magazines like Harper’s giving credence to "theories" that HIV is unrelated to AIDS – in 2006! In the early days, you had people like Larry Kramer telling everyone that AZT was poison, despite the fact that it was then and remains today a critical component of many effective anti-HIV cocktails (it was disastrous only as over-dosed mono-therapy). Every day, I get emails telling me to try aspirin or St John’s Wort for HIV. The right response, I think, is not to take what the science establishment says on faith – let alone the public health establishment. The answer is to try and understand the science as best you can, to ask the right questions, to keep asking, to get second opinions. There is an alternative between fundamentalism and relativism, between authority and nihilism. That alternative is curious and empirical skepticism, which must, of course, respect those whose knowledge of any particular subject is inevitably far deeper than our own. That kind of skepticism is important not only for a patient with a life-threatening disease, but also for liberal democracy and liberal learning. We need to recover it.

"1) Republicans are preparing to bring the Federal Marriage Amendment to a vote. So I guess the plan from now on is to do this in all even-numbered years, and then throw the idea aside in odd-numbered ones? I know a lot of people support the FMA for principled reasons, but a decisive number of Republicans are clearly just picking on gays for political profit.

2) Republicans are leading a charge to subject "527 groups" to onerous regulations. A minority of them, again, have sincere and above-board reasons for doing this. Most of them just want to shut down groups that are trying to beat them in elections. For a majority to restrict the freedom of others to try to boot them out is pretty much a textbook definition of the abuse of power, isn’t it?" – Ramesh Ponnuru, rocking da house, in a post called "Repulsive Republicans." I promise I didn’t slip something in his Long Island Iced Tea.

Or "evil hippies"? More rambling, but rewarding, ruminations on the current state of relativist conservatism.

"I’m sorry, but what a pitiful excuse for a Democrat. Yes, let’s cry racism and sexism and Democratism, I guess you’d call it, because a cop didn’t recognize you and you decided to not even wear your member of Congress pin, or turn around when the cop called out to you while we’re at war. Next time, it’ll be better if the cop lets strangers without their pins just barge into the halls of Congress, bypass security, and oh blow the hell out of the entire building because they’re afraid the person they stop might be – what? – a Democrat?
Like I said, the only thing more pathetic than McKinney is that NOW and the NAACP would lower themselves to attend this ridiculous farce of a press conference. Have they nothing better to do than pander to someone who belittles legitimate concerns about race and gender and political bias?
Pathetic liberal groups, and pathetic Democratic members of Congress. Their funders should cut them all off until they prove the worth of their continued existence," – John Aravosis, liberal-left blogger, telling it like it is.

This creepy transcript from ABC News of a pre-release interview with Jill Carroll helps explain some things. The release was obviously designed as a propaganda weapon to get Carroll to publicly back the Mujahideen – and get their message across. She does so in the tape; and she was very careful not to say anything else in her first debriefing after her captivity. Her release may also have been a way to bolster Sunni negotiations with Shiites in the formation of a national unity government. I don’t know any more about Carroll, except the glowing references from those people who knew her well before the kidnapping. We will find out more in due course. But it’s wise not to jump to conclusions about what someone says when they have a gun even metaphorically pointed in their back. Give her freedom and time. And be glad she is alive.

(Photo: Baghdad TV/APTN)

A reader writes about my defense of elitist conservatism. He argues – provocatively – that the prerequisite for the right’s new populist tone is the left’s deconstruction of authority and reason in the 1960s and 1970s:

"Yes, it was those deconstructionists who attacked not only elites, but the ontological conception of a ‚Äòprivileged position,‚Äô which is the idea that some people may have access to better, more complete information (and better culture) and thus their point of view ought to have more weight. Their zeal to dismantle the notion of ‘great books’ and ‘great thought’ as reflecting a stultifying, ‘white-male’ and oppressive ideology was completely successful. Not only did it open up the way for African studies and gay identity (a few of the benefits, I concede), it also destroyed such ‘cultured’ institutions as objective TV news journalism, ‘high’ culture entertainment, and contemporary literature. Now instead we have Hannity and Colms, American Idol, and the personal blog.

The effect of this philosophical shift to dismantle any ‘elite’ position has been so successful, that throughout the ’90s and the naughts, the fundamentalist crowd have been adopting it as well, and quite successfully too. They attack these earlier liberals back as now being the ‘elites.’ This why they talk about the ‘east-coast MSM elite’ and the ‘liberal elites’ in Hollywood and elsewhere. The strategy is to cast these former iconoclasts and now being the new Republican Guard. You see this strategy to adopt deconstructionist tactics being specifically adopted in the religious quarters, for example in the debate on Creationism (i.e., ‘Intelligent Design’). Their argument to ‘teach the controversy’ is lifted verbatim from Gerald Graff, the deconstructionist English professor who used controversy as another method for ‘deconstructing’ a privileged position. (Thankfully, the field of science remains pretty firmly reliant on the privileged position of objective research and empiricism.)

As a liberal who grew up immersed in this deconstructionist thinking of the ‚Äò80s (and who now finds myself adopting classicist and formalist values that would seem in opposition to that), I have to admit that there is value in the deconstructionist enterprise but I believe these deconstructionists were totally blindsided by not thinking through their position ‚Äì by not realizing that anything can become the new Republican Guard ripe for deconstruction, even Deconstruction. Their failure to find a philosophical justification for creating some kind of legitimate ontological ‘grounding’ ‚Äì some way to justify a privileged position ‚Äì is their biggest failure and quite possibly the reason that both Liberalism and Republicanism is in the mess we see today.

Yes, Andrew ‚Äì your Christianists have become the new deconstructionist Relativists, willing to deconstruct empirical evidence (Darwinism, WMDs, the data in global climate change) and elite knowledge (budget analysis from the OMB) and in fact any shared, political middle-ground in order to promote the cherished value-system of their minority. Just as liberal deconstructionists destroyed the philosophical underpinnings of true Liberalism in the ’80s, which also once was great philosophy based on positive values, these new deconstructionists are doing the same to Conservativism. It is ‘American Idol’ Conservativism, and Bush is the leader of their pack."

I think the reader has a point here, except that some on the right, specifically those trying to resurrect natural law, share the reader’s analysis, if not his prescription. My own view is that there can be only one real grounding for a politics: and that is reason exercized within the constraints of an inherited historical tradition. By "reason," I simply mean that deployed in Socrates’ dialogues, where mere opinion evolves gradually into reason by conversation and argument. That reason is sturdy enough to provide a coherent defense of elite institutions in a mass society. And you only have to read the Federalist Papers to see it in action. By "tradition," I mean the inherited Anglo-American idea of individual liberty, protected by constitutional forms and institutions. I see no reason why this cannot be defended today, using the reason deployed by Socrates and Plato. And that’s what my book is trying to do.

Victor Davis Hanson channels the rage of the Republican base after last week’s pro-immigration demonstrations. I do favor secure borders, and see no reason why we shouldn’t make a much bigger effort to control them – in America and Iraq. But I don’t favor criminalizing eleven million often hard-working people in this country and those who help and employ them. A better fence and a guestworker program seem to me to be the obvious rational solution – phased in simultaneously. But if the emotions are anywhere near as high-pitched as VDH claims, such a solution will be impossible. Especially in an election year.