Posts by Lucy Stewart
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What's your basis for this? Your belief that everyone else is racist?
My belief that at a distance (which the sighting presumably was) it can be quite hard to distinguish between, say, many East Asians and dark-haired Europeans. It seemed weird that the witnesses could be sure the woman was Asian but not even be able to rule out any of the *very different* ethnicities that come under that banner. And what if it wasn't Aisling they saw? Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable and easily shaped by other information. When a description is that vague, and a case has that much publicity, you have to wonder how reliable it is.
But thanks for the classy assumption of prejudice, that contributed so much to the discussion.
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Just checking, is this disbelief about "the Asian lady 'story'" about her entire existence, or about the abduction angle?
Her existence as reported, let's say. That Aisling could have been abducted remained a real possibility until her body was found. That the only solid report of who might have done the abduction indicted, as I said, a vaguely-described member of a particularly disliked ethnic group...that rang bells.
It's not even that I don't think the reports were genuine; I just wonder whether they actually saw what they thought they saw. Of course the police had to follow it up and it would have been remiss of them not to, given that it was the only lead. But, at best, the way it was framed and reported - and the vagueness of the original reports - fitted a very old pattern.
I'm also perturbed that the reports about the Asian woman were very cagey about who saw her, and how the child was identified;
Exactly. It's like - why were they sure she was Asian? Why were they sure it was Aisling? How reliable were the witnesses? It was all so vague.
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Perhaps I’m being naïve Lucy, but the way so many fell for that (yes, I did listen to some talkback last week) really surprised and annoyed me..
It's a traditional missing-kid story for a reason; it ties up prejudice, irrational fear, and genuine tragedy into one neat bundle.
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It all sounds like yet another cynical attempt by the usual suspects to find a scapegoat.
I always found the "Asian lady" story a bit suss in this regard - I mean, mysterious member of disliked ethnic group, described only in the vaguest of terms, kidnaps sweet white toddler? Yeah, sure, *that* story has no precedent.
While it's entirely possible they may yet find the woman, and I believe that was alluded to in this morning's press conference, it always felt very urban-mythic.
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What are you guys so fearful about? That there may be things beyond our current comprehension?
How these people continue to make a living off a mix of cold reading and outright guessing is certainly beyond my comprehension.
I just thought some of the comments here and on other threads reveal a fundamentalism of another kind.
The equivalency between asking for extraordinary (helll, ordinary) proof for extraordinary claims and burning people at the stake also eludes me somewhat.
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The area had been thoroughly searched already and according to the Dompost today they re-searched on a 'hunch'.
The lead investigator was pretty clear in the press conference right now on the reasons they dug up the drain, and 'a psychic told us to' wasn't one of them.
Does it really not bother you that this woman has been revealed as a fraud?
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You didn't have to be a medium to guess that -- I suggested the same to my partner days ago. Does that make me psychic?
Given the most common cause of death for wandering toddlers, it's pretty damn hard *not* to guess that a drain or stream would be involved.
I believe one of the most common psychic "insights" in this sort of case is that the body will be found near water - because, one has to assume, it's pretty difficult for bodies not to be found near water unless they're in a desert.
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In New Zealand, you more than likely know the friends or family of an actor in question (that is if you don't know them directly). Does that make fancying them even more wrong?
It certainly makes it *feel* wrong.
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Much of what has been found by ethnobotanists does indeed have valuable pharmaceutical properties.
I think I remember expressing my hearty support for this earlier in the thread. My problem is basically arguments from authority and/or age for these things, rather than actually testing them out or - and this is the crucial bit - accepting negative results from those tests.
Lucy, you will have to be specific as to which field you mean by "alternative". I grew up in a country where therapies such acupuncture and marijuana are used in mainstream allopathic medicine.
Marijuana has fairly well-known biochemical effects...the "mainstream" issue is due to recreational use, not questions of efficacy or effect.
"Alternative" is, as you say, a tricky beast to define. I would say, broadly, it's anything that is promoted on the basis of, as mentioned above, "tradition" or "naturalness" (and especially anything involving "energy fields") rather than proven efficacy, and, specifically, anything that is promoted on these bases in spite of a broad lack of evidence that any asserted efficacy is not just the placebo effect. And, of course, anything that promotes itself as, specifically, alternative - in the sense of "in opposition to".
But it's fuzzy, and given the usefulness of the placebo effect in dealing with humans, there are good arguments for some integration. I just ask that it be *honest* integration. Because anything else opens the door to the quacks and the frauds and the real tragedies. Alternative medicine, however you choose to define it, is an extremely lucrative industry. Of course, so is mainstream medicine (however you define that.) But there's often a great deal of portrayal of Evil Money-making Big Pharma vs. the Nice Natural Good-doers, and the reality is...much more complex.
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a) No he/she needs a more sleep.
(gets seen as insensitive arrogant and incompetent)
or.
b) Okay.
(is blamed for the ineffectiveness antiobiotics worldwide - merely seen as incompetent)
Is *responsible* for the growing ineffectiveness of many antibiotics. It's a very well-established pathway.
See, this is one of the times where I'd totally understand a GP either a) dishing out sugar pills or b) directing people to a homeopath (as Giovanni reports) Better overall than needless antibiotic use. But then you will inevitably get people using homeopathy to try and cure very serious conditions, and ending up much sicker than they otherwise would have - or dying. DILEMMA.
(E.g. if you do 1000 studies, it is likely 10 of them will look like positive results at the "3-sigma" level, even if no-one has made mistakes, or simply failed to control for hidden parameters that biased their results.)
And that's sort of the crux of the argument. It doesn't matter how old something is or what the Tibetans thought about it or whether it's from the Amazon or baked up in a lab. That's mostly a sidetrack. The question is: if alternative treatments are so great, why is it that despite fairly massive amounts of money being poured into testing by places like the NIH, there has never been clear-cut evidence of a direct, better-than-placebo effect? Why are they only effective sometimes, under some conditions, generally in small studies, for chronic conditions or those with very subjective measurements of benefit?
Because to believe that they're there, obvious and clear, for all the things alternative therapies claim to treat, and we just need to look harder...you need to believe that all doctors and medical researchers, everywhere, are either monumentally incompetent in experimental design or really truly want people to be blocked from access to a beneficial treatment. Which is...pretty harsh, really.