AIDS activist accused of genocide by crank science advocate Anthony Brink

[james_davis_nicoll]

Zackie Achmat's crime? Believing that HIV causes AIDS and that it should be treated with antivirals and not vitamins.

Seen via Supergee

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Why don't these people ever inject themselves with HIV-contaminated blood and forego antiviral treatment, just to show the world that they are correct and convinced?

-- Wakboth

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

One of them did do something along those lines, although it was only a needlestick rather than actually injecting a syringeful of HIV+ blood. He seems to have died a couple of years later from something unrelated, although I can't find details (and no word on whether he was HIV+ at the time).

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Ah, according to this article, "died the following year from a heart attack".

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Lunacy.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Doesn't James Hogan also believe this?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Yep. I also have got the impression that L. Neil Smith does as well:

http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle1997/le970615-01.html

"Meantime, we were among the first (not the first, I've been reminded recently) to expose AIDS as the cruel hoax that more and more have come to realize it is."

Of course, he's a libertarian.

[(Anonymous)]

"When we remove the government, the business will automagically turn into benevolent and egalitarian system instead of grasping monopolies, like every time in history when regulation has been weak!"

-- Wakboth

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

No surprise there.

Calling yourself a libertarian should be shorthand for "I'm an extremely gullible fool who will believe any stupidity that comes along the pike as long as it can be sold as a controversy and/or confirms my prejudices".

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I can confirm that he does. He was holding forth about it at a Bubonicon I was at some years ago. I yelled at him. Unfortunately I did not dump my coke on him.

[eukarya.livejournal.com]

You have no idea how fucking enraged these AIDs deniers make me. It was one of the reasons I eventually left one of the LJ science communities, the fact that some people on there actually think that this is a "controversy" and that it also somehow has to do with issues of honesty and dogma in the scientific world. It really wasn't worth the time for me to argue, I'd end up being online 24/7, and I'm not an epidemiologist.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

See also: Evolution, global warming, heliocentricity, geology, archaeology, gravity.

[eukarya.livejournal.com]

At least some of the asshats left those topics alone-at least before I left (and there was some worse stuff in the biology community-for some reason a poster didn't believe insects could be alive because they lacked lungs. Or it was just a troll, hard to tell anymore)-but christ, it really helped solidify my opinion that there is about as much anti-science bullshit in some sects of the left as there is in the extreme right wing. I've noticed at least three anarchist print magazines pissing and moaning about the evils of science (it depends too much on resources and group activities, apparently). And this itself is aside from the postmodernists and deconstructionists out there...

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say "as much", but I won't argue that it's there.

The reason I think you see more anti-education, anti-science, and anti-thought coming out of right-wingers is that science keeps conclusively, absolutely, incontrovertibly disproving their religion. You don't get the same thing out of left-wingers because they're much less likely to take the stories in the King James Bible and the Book Of Moron as absolute literal unmetaphorical fact. That being the case, they don't freak out over the geological column, because they're perfectly willing to believe that Noah's flood was regional or metaphorical, or that Genesis' "days" were a billion years long, or that the story of Laman and Lemuel doesn't *really* mean that black people have dark skin because they're unrepentant, unclean sinners, and that if they were truly virtuous they'd turn white.

True

[eukarya.livejournal.com]

I tend to read left/progressive-leaning stuff, so I tend to notice it a bit more there in certain sects of the left (mostly anarchist)-albiet certainly not all-these days. But certainly not without the knowledge of the right-wing led anti-evolution and global-warming deniers, work, and so forth. But I've come to the point of not bothering to read sites like InfoShop anymore unless I must. WSWS.org just seem a bit more more reasonable to me, at least in regards to certain issues.

Re: True

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

The difference between leftist anti-science and rightist anti-science is that the former are not so much concerned about science proper (few evolution deniers on the left) but more about the applications of science (genetic engineering, nuclear power, space travel et all) which IMO is inherently more respectable, even if misplaced. People can still be pretty clueless of course.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A major difference is that, at least in the US, the left-wing attacks on science were never associated with big money or great political power, even at the height of the 1990s Science Wars episode. They mostly held sway in university humanities departments, which the scientists at the very same institutions largely ignored apart from the occasional viewing-with-alarm.

The right, on the other hand, has had the muscle; we get enormous, well-funded corporate propaganda campaigns and direct administration interference with government research; and instead of some people making perhaps overstated arguments about social construction in university humanities departments, there are continuing, intermittently successful attempts to do damage to public primary and secondary school science curricula. To my mind this is a big difference.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

I'd mostly agree, but will note that the far left comes up with a lot of kookiness where medical science is concerned. It shows up in issues like vaccination and a lot of other medications, thanks to a distrust of Big Business combined with a naive belief that Big Pharma are the only people who might have an interest in distorting research - I hope the Wakefield affair will at least dispel THAT myth.

Concern for animal welfare often spills over into attempts to distort related science in order to strengthen the arguments against animal research and/or eating meat. I've seen people on LJ's science communities claiming in all seriousness that animal research has never provided the slightest benefit to medical science, for instance.

And New Age-ism seems to spawn just as much quackery in the way of cancer treatments etc as Christian literalism, from what I can see.

Forgot to add

[eukarya.livejournal.com]

I had a well-meaning bio-anthro teacher (perhaps I'm being too charitable...) who apparently did not believe that using chimps for AIDS research was essentially worthless. At the end I think a fair amount of students shared his conclusions over the matter.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The leftish/New Age/humanities-academic anti-science stuff got a lot more attention in the 1990s, during the so-called "Science Wars". I remember seeing the proceedings for one conference of pissed-off scientists concerning that, and one speaker, I think it was Gerald Holton, argued that they were all concentrating on the wrong enemy, and that the right and various fundamentalist/traditionalist movements would ultimately reemerge as a much bigger threat.

Achmat encourages the use of AZT

[(Anonymous)]

Surely to encourage people to take a drug like AZT, which the original inventor describes as a dangerous cell poison and on which package a skull appears with the words poison, is extremely irresponsible especially if the drug could cause death. This is basically what Achmat is doing. I agree with Anthony Brink. Remember the drug prescribed during the late 50's for pregnant women which had the result that thousands of children were borned deformed? Everyone then showed the same exitement as Achmat now does, to prescribe and encourage the drug until it was too late. Anthony Brink and his group have my 100% support in the noble cause of their action.