Life in a parallel universe

Life on Planet Pollyanna

It must be wonderful to live in such a curious world, where the belief system that underpins your actions is more important than the consequences of your actions. So, for example, today we discover that withholding your research so that people can validate your claims is a bad thing:

Roche, the manufacturer of Tamiflu, has made it impossible for scientists to assess how well the anti-flu drug stockpiled around the globe works by withholding the evidence the company has gained from trials, doctors alleged today .

A major review of what data there is in the public domain has found no evidence Tamiflu can prevent healthy people with flu from suffering complications such as pneumonia.

Tamiflu may shorten the bout of illness by a day or so, the investigators say, but it is impossible to know whether it prevents severe disease because the published data is insufficient. Roche has failed to make some of the studies carried out on the drug publicly available, the scientists say.

The swine! How very dare those self-serving, profiteering thugs withhold such vital evidence from the world in the name of making millions more out of our fears, fears which, I might add, have been greatly encouraged by a media that is desperate to sell more copies of their newspapers.

However, it seems that it’s also OK to withhold research so that people can’t validate your claims, provided you’re doing it for the right reasons. It seems that if your anthropogenic climate change research is leaked, then the people doing the leaking are not “supporting a Freedom of Information request”, but are, instead, “hacking“:

The University of East Anglia is to launch a review into the theft and online publication of hundreds of emails sent by scientists in its climate research unit.

Selected and unverified extracts from the emails have been used by climate change deniers to claim that the scientists colluded to manipulate climate data, causing a storm on deniers’ blogs. The charge is rejected as “despicable” by those involved and as groundless by leading scientific bodies.

Those malicious hacking nasty men, breaching the privacy of noble scientists, who are only concerned with truth and justice for poor brown people and not at all concerned about massive research funding or getting their names in the papers, oh no!

And of course, it’s not just this recent outbreak of elastic morality that I find curious. Consider, this newspaper that claims that Tesco is behaving unethically by resorting to off-shore tax havens:

The Guardian’s exposé of Tesco’s large-scale tax avoidance methods gives substance to the widespread perception that Britain’s large companies and rich individuals treat taxation as a largely voluntary activity.

It has long been common practice among companies with cross-border operations to pursue “tax-efficient” solutions. This activity is – mostly – legal but is understandably of growing concern to governments in countries where the taxable transactions, profits or capital gains are generated but tax is avoided. The UK government has been moving towards “general anti-avoidance” legislation which outlaws attempts by companies and tax advisers to systematically seek out tax avoidance dodges. An urgent investigation by the Inland Revenue is required to establish whether Tesco’s activities in exploiting the lax tax laws of the Cayman Islands to hide property profit fall on the right side of the law.

Those cheeky retailers, eh? Imagine them using every legally approved mechanism to retain profit and not just give it to the poor and the downtrodden. I wonder, though, how this newspaper might feel about another business that “set up a Cayman Islands company to minimise its own tax liability”? It seems that:

at least the newspaper had not “allowed its reporting to be influenced by Guardian Media Group’s handling of its own tax affairs”

Well, that’s all OK then!

So by the curious logic of Alan Rusbridger: it’s OK to withhold research from proper public scrutiny, bully other researchers, subvert a respected academic process and even illegally fail to comply with Freedom of Information requests, as long as you are doing it for Guardian-approved objectives; it’s also OK to “cheat” the taxman, as long as you’re wearing a hair shirt when you do it.

I could go on and even peer into the mind of Polly Toynbee, but I fear I might not escape from that Parody Singularity.

Comment may well be free, but the facts? Ah, the facts …

TJW is an itinerant blogger who lives in East Angular. He grew up as a fascist, mellowed into a Tory and was converted to anarchism in his middle age by the Devil's Kitchen.