So it’s now 6 years later and nothing has hapenned like he expected. Shocker!

See; CYP2D6, CYP2C9, CYP2C19, NAT2, UGT1A1, DPD, 5HTT, and CYP1A2 screen tests.

These tests are admittedly limited – especially considering how little is known about the human brain- not to mention that the drugs given are addressing a lie called ‘mental illness’ that arguably doesn’t even exist. Logically, pretending to fix ‘a wound’ with a drug proven to actually wound the human brain; could never create anything but another wound. Some people are far too wounded to grasp that or… that they are being lied to. If and when they come to understand this as a well-documented scientific fact, they tend to feel like a bunch of liars just risked their lives and health in order to make a living lording their judgements and the law over them to get them to comply to criminal acts against their person.

The Chemical Imbalance Theory has been exposed, proven and admitted even by the APA to be nothing more than a convenient allegory to trick people into taking toxic brain damaging chemicals- it is a hoax. The minute we deviate from that fact, any and all conversation becomes yet another lie. Until the lie is banished as fiction in the highest court of law, the abuse will continue as the ‘mental health’ industry feeds itself off of the bodies, minds and souls of those in crisis.

There simply are NO cures in Allopathic medicine which is a deadly, downstream, band-aid with no hope or INTENTION of addressing the root causes of ‘mental illness’. There are over a 100 documented diseases and imbalances that create SYMPTOMS of mental illness to present in the body/brain- most of which are never tested for. When root causes are overlooked and allowed to progress because a label, falsely called a ‘diagnosis’ is permanently written in stone, that crime is called misdiagnosis.

The ‘mental health’ industry is the single largest medical malpractice scam ever perpetrated on the citizens of the world. No jail could be large enough to house all the manipulating, self-righteous criminals perpetuating the lie that they help to maintain to the detriment to an ever increasing array of victims.

It’s an even more political argument to make at a time when most cutting edge science has become so profoundly complex and incredibly expensive to conduct, right? For example, how could you argue that anything at all happening with the CERN Large Hadron Collider is not fundamentally political from start to finish? Where, if anywhere, does this utterly independent, uninfluenced, uncorrupted agent you’re describing enter into it?

Einstein, in fact, was one of the most prominently, openly political scientists of this century. He also deeply embraced the importance of understanding the philosophy of science, which is what I am also calling the inherent politics of science, as one of the precursors or essential foundations for practising science. Is science, even in its purest forms, free of the influence of conventional thinking, cultural frames of reference, ethnocentrically controlled prejudice, and political assumptions? You can see, for example, a little discussion of Einstein’s own questioning of some of the inherent biases or prejudices embedded in the Newtonian mechanics and worldview here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/ and it is more thoroughly elaborated upon here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_time_and_space

So as long as we disagree on the nature of the problem, we’ll of course disagree on what the appropriate solution is. For me, I don’t think we should be pretending in the first place that science is ‘better’ or ‘purer’ than politics. Both can be bad; both can be good, both intertwine with each other.

Not really. Science just is what it is when it is real science.

Newton described very well the mentality of the creative scientist when explaining how he resolved scientific problems:

“By always thinking unto them. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait till the first dawnings open little by little into the full light.”

Nothing political about that. It is science driven by personal obsession (most great scientists are obsessive, or Aspergerish).

Sure, scientists like to be rewarded and applauded, which is why going with the power is such a temptation to scientists in an age of massive government and corporate investment in research. But going with the power means being guided in one’s research by economic or political interests, not what Mencken described as near pathological curiosity, which drove a Newton or an Einstein. For this reason, the results of applied science tend to be narrow, the best that can be achieved by dull and narrow minds.

But you should hear Terence Kealey (video link above). He cites good evidence of an inverse relationship between scientific productivity and external (i.e., political or economic) direction of research. My own observation based on 50 years involvement with science is consistent with Kealey’s view.

Canadian Nobel Laureate John Polanyi has also made the same point:

“It is folly to use as one’s guide in the selection of fundamental science the criterion of utility. Not because (scientists)… despise utility. But because. .. useful outcomes are best identified after the making of discoveries, rather than before.”

and

“Faced with the admitted difficulty of managing the creative process, we are doubling our efforts to do so. Is this because science has failed to deliver, having given us nothing more than nuclear power, penicillin, space travel, genetic engineering, transistors, and superconductors? Or is it because governments everywhere regard as a reproach activities they cannot advantageously control? They felt that way about the marketplace for goods, but trillions of wasted dollars later, they have come to recognize the efficiency of this self-regulating system. Not so, however, with the marketplace for ideas.”

I like to use religion as a comparison. In many religions, there is this ideal espoused that the purpose of the religion is to understand and abide in truth and love. In reality, of course, we see that most religions are not actually practised that way by most people. Similarly, I don’t see that science is any more “pure” and “righteous” in its intent than a nice religion, despite scientists’ frequent claims to holier-than-thou status. So science, much like religion, needs to be tempered by greater wisdom, one rooted in true self-questioning.

I’m glad you liked the Mencken quote.

Our views of what politics is appear irreconcilable.

I don’t think I can add anything to that, although if I may, I will include a link to my blogpost “When science and politics mix.”

PS, I like your coverage of the use and abuse of anti-psychotics in the care of the elderly. Keep up the good work.

Cheers.

I think you’re idealizing science, and reifying it right out of its real world context. You’re imagining that it has and is done by people who have absolutely no motive, no influences, and exist within no culture at all. These Scientists you imagine want nothing but Truth and Understanding, and are guided by nothing but a curiosity which springs forth from absolute vacuum.

Yet again, you’re providing better examples to prove my point than I am providing: “a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes”. If there’s a better example of how “insatiable curiosity” itself is fundamentally politicized in its very act and direction of movement than this, a dog caught in its unrelenting pursuit of its sensory-based hunger for satisfactory stimulation, I don’t know one.

Have a look into the philosophy of science, it will really open up the framework of discussion for us here.

p.s. e.g. I’ll just add one example: Some would argue that Newtonian mechanics was built on, and helped build, a fundamentally narrow-minded and limited view of reality which extricated too much the observer away from the observed. Since Einstein, we’ve seen growing concern within physics with relative position of the observer as an increasingly important component of how we understand reality. Newton’s views, in that sense, some would argue, were political in their nature.

“Your complaint…. His science is fine.”

I was not aware that there was any science in Weaver’s article, which I have read twice. He simply asserts: “Coal is 1500 Times Worse for the Environment than Oil Sands,” and elaborates thereon, without a single scientific argument.

“you seem to not understand …”

I understand, as I illustrated with examples, that science has frequently been politicized, much the worse for science. But you are mistaken if you believe that science is “inherently political.” It would be more accurate to say that when science is politicized it becomes unproductive and often socially destructive.

You ask for examples of science that is not “inherently political,” which I am happy to provide, though I wonder why you need to ask. Newton’s law of gravity, his laws of motion, basically the whole framework of modern science, had no political basis whatever. Einstein’s reflections on what it would be like to travel with a ray of light, which led quite directly to the atom bomb, were equally devoid of political interest. Darwin was so unworldly that he failed to publish his work until Wallace forced his hand. Gregor Mendel’s work, conducted within the walls of a monastery, which provided the explanation of the hereditary mechanism upon which Darwin’s “natural selection” worked, was not likely much affected by politics either.

However, the application of the work of Newton, Einstein, Darwin and Mendel has all been powerfully affected by political pressures that have constrained and limited the advancement of science. Terence Kealey, Vice-Chancellor (i.e., President) of the University of Buckingham has studied this effect and assembled compelling statistical evidence that economic and political pressures on scientists diminish not only their scientific productivity but the economic value of the work their work.

Your notion that “as a society” we should be positioning science in terms of anything, let alone politics, would be anathema to virtually all of the great scientists and severely toxic to the scientific enterprise. The last thing any creative scientist wants is some egomaniacal politician like Al Gore telling them what to do or how to go about doing it.

A scientist of any ability is obsessed by the desire to find out more about whatever deep questions have excited their curiosity. As H.L. Mencken explained:

“The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.”

CS