Maybe it's just me, but I'm a little bothered by the fact that most of the comments have a flavor somewhere between 'meh' and castigating the author for various missteps.
Can we all at least agree that pseudoscience is bad and litigious pseudoscience is very bad?
Yes. Sell fraud products and sue people saying it's fraud backed by evidence is bad. almost as bad as patenting prior art, not doing anything with it, and suing people who actually make something useful with it. same type of people we should export to a remote island to sue each other.
I think this is where the phrase "It goes without saying" comes from. Of course most people agree that litigious pseudoscience is bad. People don't make comments to that effect because it is like reading a newspaper article about a mugging and going to the comments to point out that the mugger sounds like a very mean person.
Basically, outrage is a boring thing to read about. If we have productive ideas about what to do about this, that's good, and if we have insights about the matter (e.g. the Romanian legal system), that's good, but it's fairly pointless just to comment, "Grr, this is wrong and I am very angry, rabble rabble rabble."
Great article but somebody should change the title to remove the sensationalist "...to try and deny reality" - the story is interesting enough on its own merits without the personal touch IMHO..
Also this chapter coincided with our then president Thabo Mbeki making typically over-academic assertions that HIV does not cuase aids and our then health minister fuckface Tshablala Msimang (she of the stolen liver) telling AIDS sufferers to eat bearoot and garlic.
Evil compounded.
Please forgive my rant. I am a proud South African sickened by the suffering our people have been subjected to.
No worries at all. It is one thing for someone to be a true believer however misled, but I am convinced from looking into this that Rath knows damn well what he is doing and is playing the piper for something far worse than mere greed. The trouble is, he is also damn good at it and manages to feed many folk exactly what they want to hear.
Everyone loves to be in on 'how the world really works' TM.
And as far as I can tell, the military-entertainment-pharma-tourism-complex, or whatever it is this week, is hardly doing itself many favours in not making people in the poorer bits of the world utterly paranoid and suspect everything of being some massive trick. I mean, people there have to put up with repeated nestle marketing campaigns to discourage breastfeeding when there's fuck-all clean water[1]. At least here in the UK they just try to addict us to sugar and drugs instead.
And that's not in some old colonial past, that kind of shit happens today. I mean, when you have stuff like the CIA faking an immunisation program in Pakistan to sample for DNA[2] while looking for Ernst Stavro Blofeld or whatever, then no wonder some people believe in Mattias Rath. And their fear makes him a lot of money.
And if not for trolling, riding around in rusty Toyotas with ak47s demanding "tributes" from villiagers. It's encouraging that we've managed to confine them to the courtroom, but discouraging that we haven't been able to outgrow them altogether.
They are in Romania, why would you even care about their silly threats? Repost the article all over the internet, inter-link, and your links will show up first in the search engines.
I'm in Romania too.
The original blogpost criticizing their product is third in Google search results when looking for "colon help" (at least if you are in RO)
Anyway, no big deal yet as I'm remaining anonymous and I'm sure Automatic Inc will be fine, however the principle of the thing is bothering me.
They already stoped proper criticism because the person had a domain and a whois search gave his name and address away.
I don't plan on stopping and will continue to critique products which are bulshit naming them on purpose.
I already did this with Power Balance (5-th in results) and they did not sue or react much.
This is a big company though, they sold over 200.000 products at 35$ a piece (this is a lot in Romania)
Checked Google.ca. For Colon Help your blog from July of Last year is 5th. The first couple are theirs. And the 4th one is irrelevant; it's about semicolon's.
It's quite shitty that after all this time Romania is still such a piece of work. Every month or so I read up on more stuff regarding it, and thank my folks for coming to Canada 6 years ago.
I know it's in the original title, but calling them a "colon cleaning company" makes it should like they clean your colon as a service, rather than providing a good purporting to do that.
Or is it just me?
Would be similar to calling Procter & Gamble a cleaning company because they sell cleaning agents.
And yeah "Deny reality" is simply link bait. Everyone claims they have reality on their side. That's why lawyers exist, and so on. Not much news here, IMO, just one more lawsuit where both sides allege they have been harmed by the other.
You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
Despite the fact that everyone thinks they are right, there are in fact people in this world who are right, and those who are wrong. The system that we have developed to ascertain where the truth lies is not the law, but rather science.
"Everyone claims they have reality on their side. That's why lawyers exist"
The law is not there to decide on the science of whether particular medicines work. This was put astonishingly well by the UK high court, in the case of the BCA vs Simon Singh - http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2010/350.html
"To see where this approach leads, one can look at the pleadings. By his defence Dr Singh sets out the undisputed fact that the BCA promotes chiropractic as a treatment for infants and young children suffering from colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, and then says:
"The comment which the Defendant contends that the article bears is that the Claimant's behaviour in so doing is reckless and irresponsible in the light of the lack of any reliable scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of such treatments and in the light of the risks of the treatment proposed."
He then sets out, ailment by ailment and study by study, his reasons for considering that none of the available epidemiological evidence reliably supports the BCA's claims. This is met by a reply of comparable length in which the BCA, again ailment by ailment and study by study, contests his view and asserts that there is some dependable evidence for its claims. Ms Rogers has told us that, given the judge's ruling that these are verifiable facts, the trial can be expected to involve expert evidence on both sides and a judicial conclusion as to whether there is any evidence for the BCA's claims.
One has only to contemplate this prospect to conclude that something is amiss. It is one thing to defame somebody in terms which can only be defended by proving their truth, even if this ineluctably casts the court in the role of historian or investigative journalist. It is another thing to evaluate published material as giving no evidential support to a claim and, on the basis of this evaluation, to denounce as irresponsible those who make the claim. Recent years have seen a small number of high-profile libel cases in which the courts, however reluctantly, have had to discharge the first of these functions. But these have been precisely cases in which the defendant has made a clear assertion of highly damaging fact, and must prove its truth or lose.
The present case is not in this class: the material words, however one represents or paraphrases their meaning, are in our judgment expressions of opinion. The opinion may be mistaken, but to allow the party which has been denounced on the basis of it to compel its author to prove in court what he has asserted by way of argument is to invite the court to become an Orwellian ministry of truth. Milton, recalling in the Areopagitica his visit to Italy in 1638-9, wrote:
"I have sat among their learned men, for that honour I had, and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom, as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning among them was brought; …. that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old a prisoner of the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought."
That is a pass to which we ought not to come again."
I think this whole article (and the other stories I've read like it) is best summed up by the last sentence: "In other news, pencil company gets sued because someone writes angry letters using pencils"
Serious question: Let's say for a moment that this is akin to defamation. Why would it be Wordpress' legal responsibility to take down the posts or the blog and not the person who posted them? It seems that holding Wordpress responsible for what their users say is a burdensome and dangerous notion.
The blogger put the post up on Wordpress.com. It now resides on a server wholly owned by Wordpress, which is serving up the blog to the entire world.
I'm trying to avoid making a third analogy, because analogy usually takes you further from the specifics, but apparently I can't help it: It's analogous to suing YouTube when a user uploads copyrighted content. What is YouTube's responsibility to stop serving up the "illegal" content? Or a mail host's responsibility to stop customers from sending spam?
Hosts can not wash their hands of the content that they're sending out just because it was user-generated.
I think you may have been better off not making the third analogy... Because now I want to ask: So republishing copyrighted material and posting a scathing review are in the same 'illegal' class?
That's the problem with analogy - it moves the conversation off the topic and onto the fit and fitness of the analogy. I should have thought of something with cars.
My point was not that both crimes were equivalent. My point was that "a user did it!" is not a defense against lawsuits.
Yeah I agree, that is definitely no defense. I just don't know if I would even consider a lawsuit like this valid. But I'm not a lawyer nor am I in Romania so I'm speaking completely from opinion.
Can we all at least agree that pseudoscience is bad and litigious pseudoscience is very bad?