March 2009 Archives

It has been a bit over a week since Martin Delaney's memorial service. It was beautiful, and quite overwhelming for me on a personal level. It was truly a testament to Marty as a person and an activist.

I want to share a story from Marty's passing, to illustrate a powerful human tendency- one which we are all subject to and would do well to pay attention to.

At the memorial Marty's sister talked about Marty finding god in his deathbed. I was witness to this myself. When I went to the hospital to sit with Marty a few days before he died, at one point he said, quite clearly and unambiguously, ' I never believed in god, but now I do and know I am going to heaven.'

Marty's sister replied, 'He never stopped believing in you.' 

I remained quiet.Hearing Marty say he had found god made me uncomfortable. But that is not my point here. Both Marty's sister and I heard him say the same thing, and came to vastly different conclusions about it. She heard him say that he found god, and believed that he had found god. I heard him say he found god, and thought it was the cancer and the drugs.

Neither of us really knows what was going on for Marty. He might have had a genuine spiritual experience. He might have had a  opiate induced hallucination. Or something else.

The point is that his sister believes in god, so she heard his words as a reflecting a real experience of Marty connecting with god. I do not believe in god, so I saw it as the simple seqelae of the cancer and all the drugs he was being given to keep him comfortable.

We do this all the time. We filter the vast amount of data the world hurls at us each minute of each day, looking for patterns and meaning in the deluge. We have a natural bias toward fitting this information into our worldview. We tend to notice, retain and ascribe meaning and truth to those things that confirm what we already believe. We tend to discount and dismiss that which doesn't.

AIDS activist need to check this tendency on a regular basis. We all hold our own biases- we think that drug X is better than drug Y, or that 'natural' medicine is better or worse than 'western' medicine. When we read journal articles or posters, the more aware we are of these biases, the better job we can do at scrutinizing the data.

Last week I went to the desert with two of my dearest friends. On the way back we listened to a recording of a talk by a critic of genetically modified foods. We then had a spirited and at times contentious discussion about the relative merits of the talk, and more broadly the science of GM foods.

In the course of this conversation, I argued that we should be extra critical of things that confirm what we already believe- that is we should challenge our own confirmational biases.

This does not mean that you automatically disbelieve anything that supports your views. I still do not believe in god. I still think that there is much stronger evidence of the existence of opiate induced hallucination that there is for the existence of god. The point is to notice our biases, and put them to the test. If they stand up to this scrutiny, the ideas grow stronger.

Marty taught me a lot about challenging our own biases. Quite often he was the one activist in the room willing to take a contrary position to the rest of us. Often times he did this simply to challenge us, to make us make our case better, to force us to see the issue at hand through other lenses.

He is still teaching me. 

 With apologies to Keith Olberman, today's worst person in the world: Robin Scovill

Scovill is the child abusing father of Eliza Jane Scovill who died from AIDS related complications at age 3. He was married to uber denialist Christina Maggiore, who succumbed to her own denial, dying of AIDS late last year.

Maggiore was diagnosed with HIV in 1991. She latched on to a group of anti-science knuckleheads who think that anything and everything other than HIV causes AIDS. She wrote the screed, "What If Everything You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?" which tragically convinced far too many people to reject anti-retroviral treatment and embrace hucksterism and denial.

People have the right to kill themselves due to neglect and stupidity. These two however killed their daughter, just as surly as had they slowly starved her to death. As reported on www.poz.com yesterday, a settlement was reached in a suit filed by Scovill against the LA county coroner who ruled Eliza's death to be from AIDS.

If Scovill got a penny from the settlement, it is nothing less than blackmail by legal brief, and a true insult to the lost life of Eliza Jane. Details of the settlement have not been made public, so for now at least we just don't know.

Robin you are a monster.

You sat by and watched you child die due to your neglect. Rather than learning from this needless death, you just deepened your embrace of your nonsensical flat earthism. In fact you sought to gain financially from your daughter's death.

Monster.

Then you sat by as you watched your wife die. Two dead in your family caused in large part by your denialism.

Monster.