To Kill a Living Language
The other day, owing to a technical problem related to reception, we watched the 19:00 news on SABC3. Usually, we restrict ourselves to the news on e.tv because it isn’t a mouthpiece for the ruling mob, unlike the three SABC channels which wear their bias and cant like so many tin badges of honour. A further difference we’ve found is that e.tv is also aware that the world doesn’t end at SA’s borders, and for this reason, too, we don’t normally dine at the trough of the SABC’s pre-digested fodder.
Now we may well be stodgy old stick-in-the-mud grouches who are a few decades behind the times, but it occurs to us that a certain minimal ability to speak the language of the newscast would be an essential job requirement for newsreaders and TV reporters. In this case, that language would be English. Surely the news is intended readily to be understood without its target audience having to scratch its head and ponder at length the barrage of garbled pidgin and gibberish that has issued from the newsreaders’ or reporters’ lips.
It is true that e.tv isn’t entirely innocent of such language abuses. In particular, some of its reporters are obviously speaking a third or fourth language when they speak English, but on the whole the e.tv newscasts are intelligible. Not so in the case of those that the SABC injudiciously broadcasts, which require the skills of an accomplished linguist/phoneticist to extricate meaning from the garble of errant grammar, mispronunciation, malapropism and misnomer (collectively known as “ErrMMM”). Such a failing will be a sad reflection on this country’s ability to produce from its many millions even just a few well-spoken and educated people when the World Cup hordes arrive, many of whom are English speakers who will struggle to make head or tail of the spoutings on TV. Equally importantly, this defective diction and anarchic enunciation by newsreaders and reporters perpetuates among the country’s youth the idea that it’s okay to torture spoken language into a broken heap: after all, they do it every day on TV.
Several local entertainment productions for TV feature actors and personalities who can speak clearly and intelligibly in English. Thus, there really are such people who have the requisite ability. While there are many more who, based on their English impairments, should never have been selected for whichever role they were awarded, the presence in locally-produced dramas of those who have a decent speaking mastery of the language immediately raises a telling question. If there are some actors who can speak properly, why are the unknown and struggling ones who share that talent but who are without fixed work not snatched up to be newsreaders? Instead, we are treated to a compote of minced gobbledegook by people with club-tongues and an assortment of adverse glosso-laryngeal conditions.
It makes no sense at all to us that the SABC would pursue – if that indeed is the driving force behind it – racial quotas (or possibly afrocentrism) ahead of intelligibility on something as important as a news service. Not everything brought by the colonists is automatically bad. Whether one likes it or not, English is the de facto communications standard in all spheres of interest around the globe, be it business, science, the arts, or just about anything else one would care to mention. India and China have realised it and are emphatically engaged in enlightening their populations to that fact. To ignore it is political and ultimately economic suicide by way of parochialism.
And merely to pay lip service to it by employing newsreaders and reporters barely capable of speaking a nominal version of it is stupid, ridiculous and vaguely insulting.
Homoeopathy’s Third Law: Hypocrisy
It’s been pumped in many quarters that we are presently in the middle of World Homeopathy Awareness Week. At this time, a great deal has been written, much of it on blogs such as this one, and much of it critical of homoeopathy’s persistence despite its counterfactual and anti-scientific nature (Part deux here). It is not our purpose to rehash the very many fact-based reasons why homoeopathy is, to a high degree of certainty, a load of undiluted bunk. It should be sufficient to consider just how convoluted and contrived are the “reasons,” “facts” and “arguments” of its proponents in order to set off a strident clamour of alarm bells.
Rather, the aim of this entry is to examine a few of the ethical issues attending the application of homoeopathy and how these often play out in practice.
If one were to Google the phrase “good intentions are not enough,” a plethora of hits would be returned. This signifies, above all, that it is a familiar phrase, something that is no doubt also true of many other phrases, be they English or of a different language. However, the phrase’s popularity cannot be taken to mean that it’s well understood what the phrase (or dictum if you like) intends to convey.
There are numerous stories and anecdotes about preventable harm and death at the hands of homoeopaths. Admittedly, these are just that – anecdotes, even if, in many cases, they are well-documented ones, and homoeopaths will claim the obverse, i.e. that homoeopathy could have prevented harms inflicted through conventional medical endeavours. But conventional practices are continually reassessed and improved whenever possible. It is astonishing, then, that homoeopaths do not seek, with appropriate and comparable vigour, to advance their “science” past the clearly outdated and counterfactual notions of Samuel Hahnemann. The fundamental “science” of homoeopathy retains exactly the same basic nonsensical principles articulated by Hahnemann more than 200 years ago, and is today concerned only with manufacturing ever more elaborate excuses why these must be taken to be not only valid, but also – inconsequently, please note – supportive of homoeopathy’s effectiveness. As an exercise in ethics, it should be self-evident that the “good intentions” of defending – at whatever cost – Hahnemann’s outmoded thinking “are not enough” to justify either the potential or the actual harm resulting from “knowledge” derived from dubious or even bogus premisses.
As medical practitioners (if only so in name), homoeopaths have a clear ethical obligation to inform their patients of unknown aspects or uncertainties or potential failures of their methods. Homoeopaths are partial to citing Hippocrates at opportune moments, specifically his moral directives concerning patient care – more so than practitioners of conventional evidence-based medicine. In this light, it is, to say the least, surprising that homoeopaths, almost without fail, seem always to know exactly what ails a given patient, and how to go about curing the condition. This last observation is based on discussions with and personal experiences of several different homoeopaths, so it cannot by any means be taken to be authoritative. Still, it is interesting to note that not one of these homoeopaths ever recommended a visit to a specialist, or admitted to being baffled, or hesitated to commit to a diagnosis, prognosis and/or course of treatment. Indeed, their findings were pronounced with firm confidence, as were the prescriptions of “remedies.” Never once was a caution issued along the lines of, “This may not work. Come and see me in a week or two if you don’t improve and we’ll try something different.” Such self-assurance is not warranted when assessed against the facts of homoeopathy’s performance, but perhaps that is exactly how they dupe themselves and the majority of their patients. Who needs ambiguity when buoyant conviction can be had at the same price?
Many homoeopaths also include several other CAM modalities, such as aromatherapy, applied kinesiology, iridology, crystal therapy, naturopathy, etc., in their repertoire. Here, one should immediately feel pressed to ask a very urgent and insistent, “But why!?” After all, if homoeopathy is, as very often claimed, an essentially complete system with only a few minor details left to be sorted out, it is just a little seditious of any homoeopath to augment his or her range of offerings with “skills” or methods that do not fit the homoeopathic mould. It would be akin to a hydrogeologist who professes to use pendulum-on-a-map divination in addition to willow-twig dowsing and remote viewing techniques for the siting of wells. It should, rightly, arouse the thinking individual’s suspicions: If X promises a whole solution, why bother with Y and Z? Could it be that, despite its philanthropic pretensions, homoeopathy and its evidence-free inbred cousins are – O, mon cœur noir! Quelle squalid sordidness, quelle grimy grubbery! – a business!?
When examining the trading of homoeopathic remedies, two further moral aspects rear their hydrocephalic heads. There are many off-the-shelf preparations that sport labels prominently emblazoned with “Homeopathic” (preferring, oddly, the miscreant US spelling – it has little to do with “O homeo, homeo, wherefore art thou homeo” and lots to do with “homoeo—,” Greek homoios). Of these remedies, several turn out, on closer inspection, to be about as homoeopathic as a flamethrower, usually by reason of significant concentrations of active ingredients. That is, the label of “Homeopathic” has been abducted purely for marketing purposes because there is a major subculture out there that buys into the sham and is therefore easy to bilk and milk in perpetuity. However, what is truly telling is that not a single homoeopath, either individually or through coordinated effort, has ever made a fuss about such blatant misuse of their craft. In contrast, it would not take very long before a shaman who sold, say, powdered baboon brains as a “proven” antidepressant, will find him- or herself in heaps of trouble with an assortment of professional bodies over misrepresentation. Thus, one must ask how it is that homoeopaths are apparently quite content to permit the hijacking of their terminology and principles for someone else’s promotional purposes.
Of at least equal significance is the fact itself of the ready availability of off-the-shelf bona fide homoeopathic preparations. To understand this properly, it is necessary to remember that a central principle of homoeopathy, second in status only to Hahnemann’s two founding tenets, is that of the individualised remedy. That is, homoeopaths design a “treatment” after assessing “holistically” the afflicted individual, and this “treatment” is allegedly specific to the individual for whose purposes it was formulated. It should be obvious that there’s a fundamental disconnect between the idea of an “individualised treatment” and that of off-the-shelf preparations (often selling, almost needless to say, at prices a Croesus would find challenging, given what they are). Again, no homoeopaths appear overly concerned about this sort of manipulative misuse.
It is the deception inherent in an “individualised treatment” – a “deception” because as humans we are to the best of medical science’s knowledge biochemically too similar to one another to merit such fine-grained distinctions as homoeopaths would make – that facilitates a further homoeopathic subterfuge. “Randomised double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials,” proclaims the committed homoeopath in a voice of solemn gravity, “are not a suitable tool for gauging the effectiveness of homoeopathy because treatments must be tailored to the individual.” Well, fuck. And now what? There is an easy way around this, one that no homoeopath has ever proposed. By all means, do the individualised assessments and prescriptions for a significant sample of patients, and only after this has been completed is it time to randomise and placebo-ise (to coin a term) via another independent party whose involvement, except for revealing the group assignments (placebo or prescription) at the conclusion of the study, ends at that point. It’s not by any stretch of the imagination rocket science, proverbial or otherwise, and it’s eminently feasible. But instead of working towards such earnest endeavours to assess the validity of their spiel, homoeopathic apologists offer only superficial pretext and feeble rationale – with homoeopathic dilutions of verifiable fact.
And by these various factors the innate hypocrisy of homoeopathy in its modern practice becomes explicit.
A Plurality of Inconsequent Carps on Irksome Slapdashery
“Data” is the plural of “datum.” It is one “phenomenon” and one “criterion.”
These data comprise some of the criteria by which to avoid an unfortunate series of incorrect grammatical phenomena.
That’s all.
P.S. This is not an April Fool’s gag.
Julius, the ANC and Skate Speech
If, by now, the South African reader is unfamiliar with the context and ensuing furore surrounding Julius Malema’s unrepentant singing of “Kill the Boer,” the hate-speech ruling and the ANC’s reaction thereto, then s/he has been in the grip of an inexplicably imperturbable slumber.
This being an emotionally charged issue, it is inevitable that everyone should have an opinion on this matter.
Everyone.
That includes us, and ours is very simple: Malema and the ANC’s position is untenable for being both self-contradictory and ostentatiously self-righteous ― just like religious dogma, in fact.
The self-contradiction should be obvious. On the one hand, the ANC professes reconciliation, progress, tolerance and harmony, while on the other it seeks to cling to bygones and sweep such an overtly inflammatory incitement-to-violence song under the “It’s only meant symbolically” and the “historical legacy lest we forget” mats. It is arguable whether the song with its rabble-rousing flavour even should have had a place in the past at all given late-20th century values, but that question is largely academic anyway; what is clear is that its sentiments do not accord with the values the ANC is paying lip service to. Malema’s quite blatant and deliberate cultivation of fear in a minority is inimical to the ANC’s professed aims of harmony and upliftment. The ANC’s defence is therefore evidently a hollow sham, born, one supposes, of a fear of appearing divided over this issue ― or any other for that matter.
Simultaneously, and shoe-on-the-other-foot notwithstanding, the ostentatious self-righteousness of the ANC’s position becomes obvious when one imagines a reversal of the situation. With all the clarity afforded by 20/20 hindsight, the various minority organisations – yes, that would be you, AfriForum – that objected so vehemently, should have approached the issue very differently to the whingeing and whining we’ve been cringing witness to. Imagine that AfriForum had instead commissioned a poet or songwriter to compose on their behalf a simple anthemic tune with lyrics exhorting the boer to “Kill the Munt” because “he’s a thief and a rapist and a savage, uncivilised killer” or somesuch. Imagine this song gaining ground over the next few months in response to Malema’s stupid intransigence. Imagine the uproar and protest and finger-pointing. Imagine, finally, that when such confrontation reached a fevered frenzy, AfriForum (or whoever) offered to cease and desist provided Malema did the same.
While the merits are debatable, being perhaps too confrontational, we think that the above scenario would be considerably more sobering to the ANC because they could hardly fail to notice that condoning either or both songs serves only to polarise people, not unite them, making their latest position on the question incompatible with their espoused values. Moreover, condemning one but not the other would be just too obviously hypocritical.
But, as said, that’s our opinion.
Be Not Perturbed…
The authors are taking a four-week hiatus. AntiBlog activity will resume next year, an event that will be marked by the unleashing upon the world of commentary inadvertently caught in the spam filter.
A safe and enjoyable festive season to all our readers.
