Help Ben Goldacre!

[wingco]

I've already circulated something about this on Facebook, but here's a link from the Bad Science website explaining in full. Essentially, Goldacre uploaded an excerpt of an astoundingly asinine broadcast by one Jeni Barnett explaining why, using her gut instincts as a mother, she was anti the MMR vaccine. Now, LBC, the station on which it was broadcast, are threatening legal action for copyright infringement.

http://www.badscience.net

Now, it can be safely said that all of my attempts to divine the world of science have been bad. But there is one simple stat alone that settles the matter of the MMR vaccine for me and it's represented in a graph on the link here. Anyway, it's suggested that people complain either to OFCOM or LBC themselves.

[Wyatt Earp]

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I've already written to Of-whateveritis, and like wingco would urge others to do the same.

[Guest]

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I'll ask Mrs Horse but she's libel, not copyright. My instinct, though, is that nothing too bad can happen to him if he just posted it up and then took it straight down again when they asked him to desist.

[wingco]

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I'd hope that was the case too, Horse.

[hobbes]

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Her response on her blog is hilarous.
"All you nasty science types, bullying me with facts. How dare you."
A cursory read of the first 20 or 30 of the responses from these nasty bullies are unfailingly polite and the rudest responses come from people slating (and I'm almost embarrassed to type this) "allopaths."
"What's wrong with 3 separate injections?" says one.
Apart from of course, it requiring 3 visits to the doctors, costs 3 times as much AND MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER.

Part of me would like to see LBC try it on. It'd put the subject of fraudulent broadcasting about medicine in the press and you've got to think that the Guardian's lawyers have a lot more practice at this kind of thing than LBC's.

[Bill Poster]

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Why would the Guardian be involved? he put this on his own website.

I've signed up - he's a hero as far as I'm concerned.

[ian.64]

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Same here, especially when he skewers the spurious claims that the more wanky papers (eg, the Mail) are keen to promote.

[Wyatt Earp]

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I've now also written to LBC.

[The Purple Cow]

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As she apologized for referring to that poor nurse as 'vicious' yet?

[Brandenburger Toro]

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Goldacre support added.

Being wrong is one thing. Being aggressively and litigiously so is quite another.

[wingco]

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I got a bit of a testy response from the chap at LBC to which I've replied, courteously. He seems to be taking it all very personally and feeling somewhat under siege.

[The Purple Cow]

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Here's the MP3 of the original show.

http://thatsfuckingstupid.com/jeni-barnett-mmr-and-vaccination-slot-on-lbc.mp3

Does anyone know what a "logical child" is?

[Femme Folle]

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I'm guessing 'logical child' is the new PC way of saying 'adopted' - as if there is something wrong with being adopted.

I listened to about seven minutes of that before I had to shut it off. She admits in the broadcast that she is not an expert, so why is it such a problem for her when someone else says it?

[wingco]

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It's desperately hard to endure. Just a series of rambling, irrelevant, emotional non-sequiturs and massacring of straw targets. Awful.

[Brandenburger Toro]

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Staggering. This woman is almost failing-the-Turing-test stupid.

[Brandenburger Toro]

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Mind you, in the spirit of evenhandedness, Edward Jenner, discoverer/inventor of vaccination, was a true cunt's cunt.

[Caliban]

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I made a complaint to Ofcom a few days ago. Rarely do I get so cross. That stupid woman.

[Brandenburger Toro]

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Relatedly; there are no swearwords adequate...

[Reed John]

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Logical Child?

[Wyatt Earp]

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Googling seems to throw up only (a) random pairings of "logical" with "child", and (b) the technical meaning from the theory of relational data structures. Someone may be having a laugh.

[Wolf2]

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Ofcom complaint issued. Good luck to the brilliant Dr. Goldacre.

[garcia]

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i don't understand their case at all. surely uploading an excerpt from a broadcast is the same thing as quoting from a newspaper article.

[Guest]

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I'm adopted, and I'm in my early 30s, and as a (mild) knock-on effect I take a reasonable bit of interest in adoption-related developments in society at large -- and I've never encountered the phrase "logical child" once, either anecdotally or in the press.

[Wyatt Earp]

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You realise we're all on the same side as David Aaronovitch here? Stopped clocks and that.

[wingco]

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Jesus, I was about to post precisely that, right down to the stopped clocks analogy! Apart from all the science and maths stuff, My brain and Wyatt's are clearly exactly like.