Simon Singh libel case dropped
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British Chiropractic Association ends legal action against science writer for comments in Guardian article
Simon Singh smiles outside the high court in London after winning his appeal earlier this month. Photograph: Fiona Hanson/PA
The British Chiropractic Association dropped its libel action against the science writer Simon Singh today, filing a notice of discontinuation in the high court.
The case had become a cause celebre, with scientists, celebrities and freedom of speech campaigners lining up to condemn the British libel laws and argue that Singh had a right to express his opinion in print.
The sudden end to the case will strengthen the campaign for reform of the libel laws, which Jack Straw, the justice secretary, is considering. It is also a specific pledge in the Liberal Democrat manifesto.
Singh was sued by the BCA for a piece he wrote in the Guardian‘s comment pages, criticising the association for defending chiropractors who use treatments for which there is little evidence on children with conditions such as colic and asthma.
Singh and his supporters were dismayed by an early verdict by Mr Justice Eady on the meaning of the words used in the article. The judge ruled that Singh was stating facts, which he would have to prove in his defence, rather than voicing opinion and that he had implied the members of the BCA knowingly promoted what Singh called “bogus treatments”.
Singh argued that was not what he meant and went to the court of appeal. Two weeks ago, he won the point.
Let’s all point and laugh at the BCA
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Is there no end to the bullying by the British Chiropractic Association? Not content with putting the man through two years of hell with their ridiculous libel action against him, this morning brought the news that they have now decided to deprive Dr Simon Singh of his day in court, where it was confidently expected that he would wipe the floor with them.
The very reason why Simon didn’t meekly cave in, withdraw his comments and apologise as they expected him to when they first brought the case, is because when he said,
The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.
he knew it was the truth and that he could defend the claim in court. And now they aren’t going to let him. Bastards!
Those of us who were eagerly awaiting the libel trial of the decade will just have to console ourselves with the thought that, as a result of this action, the absurd claims made for this particular brand of quackery have been exposed and chiropractors the length and breadth of the land are being forced to get their houses in order and stop spouting crap on their websites and promotional leaflets. Alas, this won’t necessarily stop them lying through their teeth to people’s faces, as I discovered from personal experience.
Better yet, it has put libel reform firmly on the agenda but that’s no help to the countless victims who’ve already been forced to withdraw comments that they — like Simon — knew to be the truth but who — unlike Simon — simply didn’t have the resources to fight the bullies. And it’s no help to heroes like Dr Peter Wilmshurst who don’t have the resources but who’ve decided to fight anyway at risk of financial ruin.
For crying out loud, sign the petition for libel reform and badger the politicians. It’s high time we put an end to this nonsense.
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Update:
What an absolutely pathetic statement that has just been released by the BCA. Mr Justice Eady, who cocked up and made the astonishingly illiberal ruling on the meaning of the words used in the article at the preliminary hearing a year ago, is described in the statement as “the UK’s most experienced defamation judge”. So who were the Court of Appeal — chopped liver? The fact that they included England’s two most senior judges, the Lord Chief Justice of England and the Master of the Rolls doesn’t get mentioned. Nor does the fact that, having been refused leave to appeal against Eady’s ruling twice, Simon was finally given leave by Lord Justice Laws — said to be one of the “savviest” High Court judges on human rights issues, who was much more emphatic about it than he needed to be.
The Pope, the Church, and skepticism
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Introduction
This is a bit of a long post. As such, I’ve broken it up into sections, to help me corral my thoughts, and make it more likely people will actually read what I’ve written before leaving comments.
Yes, that’s a hint. I’ve spent quite some time wrestling with these issues the past two days, and I’m interested in rebuttals as well as supporting arguments. I urge people to comment, but please read what I’ve written first, and please keep it civil.
So.
By now you’ve probably heard that the Pope is in trouble. A letter written and signed by him seems to indicate that he was complicit in, at the very least, holding up discussion on what to do with an Oakland priest who was a pedophile. That’s pretty awful, even more so when considering that it took him four years to get around to even writing this letter after he was informed of the trouble, and during that time the priest was still working with children. At worst, it looks very much like Ratzinger, at the time a Cardinal, may have actively stalled the Church’s actions against the priest.
Let me be as clear as I can here: if Pope Ratzinger in any way stalled or prevented an investigation, Church-based or otherwise, into any aspect of child molestation by priests, then he needs to be indicted and brought to trial; an international tribunal into all this is also necessary and should be demanded by every living human on the planet. Obviously, a very thorough and major investigation of the Catholic Church’s practices about this needs to be held. It is a rock solid fact that there are a lot of priests who have molested children, and it’s clear that the Church has engaged in diversionary tactics ever since this became public (like the abhorrent Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone who says homosexuality lies at the heart of this scandal).
The skeptic community has been up in arms about this, as one would expect, since organized religion is a major target of skeptical thinkers. There have been rumors and misinformation about all this, including a dumb article (one of Rupert Murdoch’s papers, natch) that said that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins — both noted skeptics and atheists — were going to try to arrest the Pope if he visited England. This has been debunked by Dawkins himself.
But the idea of Dawkins swooping in to arrest the Pope got a lot of people fired up, notably in the skeptic community. A lot of folks have sounded off about what the skeptic community should do about this as individuals, as organized groups, and as a whole.
But the ideas being tossed around, to me, are a bit confused. The bottom line is, what role does the skeptic movement, such as it is, have in all this?
It depends on which part of this issue you mean. First there’s the Pope’s behavior. Then there’s the Church’s behavior, and then why the Church did the things it did. Finally, there’s the issue of the skeptics’ behavior.
Here are my thoughts.
1) The Pope
This is actually pretty cut and dried.
I agree in part with Rebecca Watson’s premise that the Pope needs to be called before justice. However, I do in fact care who does it and why; more on that below. But the important thing is that there is a fair trial and justice is served.
Basically, it seems that the Pope was putting the Church before the children, children who were being sexually molested. That is so abhorrent that words fail.
However, I don’t know if this is specifically a skeptical issue. It’s more a human issue, and a criminal issue. If the Pope had said that the Bible says it’s OK to molest children, then yeah, critical thinking and skepticism come into play. But if he was trying to protect the Church and was breaking laws (moral or civil) to do it, then see my comment above re: resignation and indictment. That’s something anyone should understand, whether or not they are a skeptic.
Skepticism deals with issues of the paranormal, issues with faith, issues where scientific evidence can be used to test a claim. In this case, I don’t see skeptics needing to be involved more than any other interest group.
2) The Church
What Skeptical Movement?
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We’re at it again. Skeptics fighting each other over whether or not a particular issue falls within the jurisdiction of skeptical inquiry, and precisely what it means to be a Skeptic, and whether others’ definitions of skepticism and actions based on those definitions “hurt the movement”.
Rather than go into all of the various factions in this battle, and continue to rehash the argument, I’d like to challenge the fundamental assumption behind all this bickering: The idea that a single Skeptical Movement actually exists.
It seems to me that what we have here, currently, is a worldwide community of self-identified skeptics, out of which movements of different sorts can crystalize and spread. Certain factions within the community seem to think that the next logical step is to create a single, unified Skepticism, encapsulating everyone who identifies as a skeptic, and expecting to be able to limit the scope of skeptical inquiry to what they deem appropriate.
This is inherently problematic, for several reasons; the most daunting of which is the fact that, by definition, skeptics tend to eschew authority. We like to figure things out for ourselves. Because of this, we are never going to come to the same conclusions about everything, especially matters like religion that can be fraught with personal experience and cultural baggage. Also, because of those different personal experiences, we all come to the table with different priorities and ideas on how to create the change we’d like to see in the world.
Another problem lies in controlling how the word “skeptic” itself is used. I posit that such control is impossible, given the fact that it is currently used by science advocates and woo peddlers alike. Even if one assumes there is such a thing as a monolithic Skeptical Movement, we still don’t own the trademark on the word, and the general public isn’t ever going to necessarily identify the word “skeptic” with our particular brand of scientific advocacy and anti woo activism.
These problems solve themselves when we stop trying to be something we’re not. Skepticism means something different to all of us. I think we need to stop being so hung up on labels and definitions and focus on what we’d like to accomplish. Multiple tactics are capable of accomplishing each goal. We may not always agree on how to achieve these things, but I think it’s unhelpful to bandy about the “so and so is hurting the movement” card.
Child abuse, the Pope and organized skepticism…now what?
There is a literal fire storm going on on Twitter , and the catalyst I would say is Rebecca Watson’s entry about the pope, to which I linked here earlier today. Venerable names in skepticism are wondering out loud what the “movement’s” involvement with this issue should be? Should we actively seek the pope’s indictment? Should we just endorse it, without getting involved too much? Should we shrug our shoulders and say “that’s not my job“? Twitter may not be the best medium to discuss this issue; 140 charachters are too little for us to be able to have any meaningful discussion, so I decided to elaborate my position here.
So let us get the technicalities out of the way: this is a purely legal issue. The pope stands accused of covering up for child rapists. Some facts have made their way into the public sphere. As is the case with most things like this, many more very likely have not. Should the pope be held responsible? Probably. Is he guilty? I do not know! That is why we have a legal system, to sort these sort of things out. The question “Is the pope responsible and if yes to what extent?” is not a skeptical issue; nor is it an atheist issue. It is simply, purely a legal matter.
So from this point of view, skepticism, as a movement, has not much constructive to add to the discussion. The question then becomes, what, if any, should our involvement be? This is where it becomes a bit more of a personnal choice, and it is open to speculation. One can easily maintain that the religious beliefs is what induced the behavior, but one can just as easily maintain that greed and concern for the institution and it’s well being is what induced the behavior. Or one may come up with a host of other reasonable explanations. I do not think that enough evidence has come to light for us to pretend to know for sure what motivated the alleged misbehavior. So far, it seems that a concern about the church and the church’s reputation might be the front runner. If that were the case, what should organized skepticm’s involvement be?
I think the correct answer here is: whatever the individual skeptic feels is the right thing! This is not a skeptical issue, technically speaking, so it would be hard to argue what the movement’s response should be! On the other hand, we are all human beings, and we all have emotional responses, as we should, especially to cases so morally clear cut as child rape is. So from the human point of view, we should all feel that outrage and that desire to see whoever is responsible brought to justice. Except that we’re seeing what appears to be a lack of response in the eyes of daming evidence, and one can only wonder how much the fact that this is the pope we’re talking about has to do with anything. Is there a ridiculous double standard playing in front of our eyes? Possibly, which should make our skeptical minds get back in gear, because something that goes counter to critical thinking is, at least partially, within our area of expertise.
However, I do not agree with those that maintain that skepticism, including the skeptical organizations out there, ought to keep quiet about this issue. There is nothing wrong with a skeptical organization showing support for something they think is right, even something not within their area of expertise. For example, what would be wrong if the JREF endorsed the idea of legal action towards the pope? Sure they are not a moral authority, nor a legal one, but they have their own morals nevertheless. If these morals are offended by what has happened, what is the problem with them expressing that? Does that mean that CFI is bound by JREF’s actions? Of course not, JREF does not speak for all skeptics or for skepticism as a movement; JREF is allowed to maintain positions that may leave a sour note on some skeptic’s collective mouths.
In fact, I think that showing emotion, speaking up when issues such as these are involved are very important public relations tools. We want to break the public misconception that sketpics are cynical, cold, emotionless robots, right? Well then let us show some emotion; let us show that we have a highly evolved moral code; let us break the stereotype that we’re only against stuff by showing that we are for something that many other people can relate with. And let us, those of us to whom this issue is important enough to speak out, do so without being told “it’s not your job“.
Yes, The Pope Should Be Arrested, and I Don’t Care Who Does It
As usual, the original Skepchic is right!
Yesterday morning the big news was an interesting article with a ridiculous headline: “Richard Dawkins: I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI“.
I thought my Tweet summed up my feeling on the matter:
Richard Dawkins is going to personally arrest the pope. I hope it’s like the video for Sabotage but with old dudes http://is.gd/bo707
I was wrong to assume that people would read that and think, “Yes, that is a completely ridiculous headline.” I’m kicking myself for not being clearer, because when Dawkins posted a clarification to say that no, he did not say he’d be personally arresting the pope, a lot of my Twitter and Facebook followers happily declared that it was all a big hoax. A few others declared that it was all a big publicity stunt on Dawkins’ part, and that it therefore hurt “the skeptical movement.”
Bullshit.
Dawkins’ clarification explained that while he was not going to swing into action Beastie Boys-style, he does support the actual effort currently underway to hold the Pope accountable for the systematic protection of child abusers. And that, to me, was the entire point: not that Dawkins is involved (though that is a funny image), but that the Pope may in fact answer for his crimes. So no, it’s not all a big, overblown hoax. It is a real and important story.
On to the second point, that this effort will apparently hurt the “skeptical movement”: it won’t, and it’s completely absurd to suggest otherwise.
I like and admire Massimo Pigliucci, but he is 100% wrong when he posted this (among other things) on my Facebook profile:
naturally, always a good thing to keep one’s baloney detector set to orange alert. though the basic problem remains: two of the “horsemen” are behind a sensationalistic stunt that has no chance in hell (pun intended) of actually succeeding in the real world
Bullshit, Massimo, on several points. Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins lent their support to an effort that was already well underway, and if it weren’t for that support, most people wouldn’t know that this is happening. To describe their support as a “sensationalistic stunt” is pointless cat-fighting. And to describe it as an effort that “has no chance in hell” of succeeding is simply ignorant.
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