The Infectious Myth

The Infectious Myth - Fighting against Shaken Baby Syndrome with Keith Findley

Keith Findley is a law professor from the University of Wisconsin who has spent many years fighting injustices in the US justice system. One of them is convictions based on the Shaken Baby Syndrome hypothesis, sometimes treated as a dogma, now often called Abusive Head Trauma. Responding to an article in a pediatric journal, Findley and colleagues made a couple of major points in their responding paper. First, that the controversy over SBS/AHT is alive and well. In fact, a recent Swedish government panel reviewed the evidence and found that there’s no good evidence that the so called triad of internal symptoms in a baby are convincing evidence of abuse. Secondly, they assert that doctors are really going beyond a diagnosis of brain injury, and claiming that they can determine the cause of the damage, which is a legal finding (and often simply poor differential diagnosis, as many possible causes of the symptoms are ignored). David and Keith discuss these points, and also the biomechanical evidence which does not support the SBS theory, how those who testify as experts against SBS are treated (such as former guest Waney Squier), and some of the situations where convictions have been overturned after some people have spent years in jail. Even the godfather of Shaken Baby Syndrome, Dr. Norman Guthkelch, has spoken against the misuse of his tentative theory, that he proposed in 1971, so the times, they are a changing.

 

The article by Findley and colleagues is freely available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3328996

The Infectious Myth - Stop the JNF with David Mivasair

David Mivasair is a Canadian rabbi who is part of a petition to remove charitable status from the Jewish National Fund, a major landowner in Israel that has a mission to provide land to Jews, but not to people of our groups, such as Palestinians, a bias that even the Israeli state is not allowed to enforce. Reasons for the complaint is that the JNF has never identified purpose, supports the Israeli military (clearly illegal for a Canadian charity), is discriminatory and has assisted the Israeli state in annexing occupied terrority. This discussion of the JNF is within the context of the historical Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so the two David’s also take a historical journey back before the first major conflict of 1948. 

 

You can learn about the petition to end charitable status for the JNF in Canada, and sign it if you wish here: http://www.stopthejnf.ca

The Infectious Myth - Silencing Libby Emmons

Libby Emmons is an award-winning playwright who was member of a theater group called the Puss Collective, but got ejected because of her views on transgender issues. This was not the first time she had addressed these issues, they were also part of her rather provocatively named play, “How to sell your gang rape baby for parts”. In that play, there was controversy, but not over transgender issues. Now, however it was different. Her response was to write about her experiences in Quillette, the Federalist and the Post Millenial. David and Libby talk about the schism between feminists and transgender activists in a world where progressives have perhaps too quickly sided with those who say that a man can become a woman (or vice-versa) simply by saying so. They talk about what Libby calls the ‘erasure’ of women, the invasion of women-only spaces by biological men calling themselves women, and the effects of chemical and surgical interventions on young children.

The Infectious Myth - George Maschke on Polygraphs

David discusses polygraphs, also known as lie detectors, with George Maschke. He makes the case that they are merely pseudoscience in fancy packaging designed to make gullible people confess to their sins based on the belief that the devices are infallible. Not only are they fallible, but George believes that they can be reliably fooled by your response to the control question, if you are applying for a job that needs one, or are in some other situation where it is hard to refuse one.

If you want to learn more, see Maschke’s site, which contains a lot of useful information, including the free e-book, “The Lie Behind the Lie Detector”: https://antipolygraph.org