Transmuting bullshit into fact with the power of money

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > Transmuting bullshit into fact with the power of money

The Oldest Man: Jul 28, 2003

Got into an argument with someone about why Cuba is constantly exporting doctors (they have good healthcare vs they are a propagandist slave state, perhaps the truth is somewhere in the middle???) and went to trusty ol' wikipedia and found this:

quote:

The Cuban government operates a national health system and assumes fiscal and administrative responsibility for the health care of all its citizens.[1] There are no private hospitals or clinics as all health services are government-run. The present Minister for Public Health is Roberto Morales Ojeda.[2]

Like the rest of the Cuban economy, Cuban medical care suffered following the end of Soviet subsidies in 1991 and the stepping up of the United States embargo against Cuba at this time also had an effect.[3]

Cuba has historically � both before and during Communist rule � performed better than other countries in the region on infant mortality and life expectancy.[4] Some experts say that official statistics provided by the Castro regime should be treated skeptically.[4][5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Cuba

There's also a bunch of the usual CIA Factbook-sourced horseshit in the article as well, but that last sentence in the intro stood out. That's a weird sentence for a wikipedia article intro since it's non-specific; it's literally "some people say not to trust Cuba's government." Really? Why does that non-specific blanket statement warrant inclusion in this article at all? It doesn't cast doubt on any specific claim in the article about Cuba's health system or outcomes, it just casts doubt on the entire premise that Cuban healthcare might be good from the first principle that Cuba bad.

Digging into the page history even the word "some" on that statement was added by wikipedia editors trying to follow NPOV rules; the original statement was "experts say" and was originally added in 2017 by this editor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Snooganssnoogans), whose talk page is filled with accusations of pov pushing in a variety of articles about American politics. The same editor has been reverting every single attempt to remove this statement for the last three years or so while pushing controversial edits on a selection of high powered American law and consulting firms and Republican politicians' pages to sanitize them of critical statements: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Snooganssnoogans

Interesting. Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Let's see what those experts are actually saying to prop up that statement about Cuba's government being untrustworthy on the subject of healthcare.

Citation the first:

quote:

Fact Checker
Justin Trudeau�s claim that Castro made �significant improvements� to Cuban health care and education

�A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.�
� Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, statement on the death of Fidel Castro, Nov. 26, 2016

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-and-education/

What a weird loving article to cite as an expert opinion in an article about Cuban healthcare. It's a fact check in WaPo written about a statement made by the Canadian Prime Minister in a statement on the death of Fidel Castro. They're fact-checking a single sentence from a eulogy for a recently dead world leader and then someone is using that fact check as standing to say experts think Cuba lies about its healthcare. So what exactly are they disputing about that statement being factual?

quote:

The Facts
Obviously, it is impossible to go in a time machine and explore what would have happened if Castro had not overthrown the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959. But any measurement of Cuba now must take into account where Cuba stood at the time of the revolution � and whether it has maintained its place among Latin American nations during Castro�s rule.

This is now a counterfactual hypothetical scenario starting from 1959 rather than a fact check that Cuba's healthcare got better after the revolution. Stunning.

quote:

We also have to acknowledge that any data from the Cuban government is naturally suspect. Experts say that official statistics must be treated gingerly and skeptically, as police states generally are not known to provide accurate numbers. In particular, Cuba�s relatively high ranking � 67 out of 188 countries � in the United Nations� Human Development Index appears to be affected by questionable data.

The fact check now rests the claim that the entirety of all data from the Cuban government is "naturally suspect" and once again references unnamed experts to throw doubt on literally any statistic that shows Cuba might actually be pretty well off compared to peer nations. Who are the unnamed experts in this case? That'd be an economist from the University of Pittsburgh named Carmelo Mesa-Lago. What's his deal?

BA Law University of Havana (1956),
Doctor Law University Madrid and Diploma Social Security OISS (1958),
MA Economics University of Miami (1965)

Went to undergrad in Cuba in the mid-fifties, then found a reason to be overseas in Europe in 1956-1958, and finally ended up getting his economics degree in Miami in the mid '60s. Weird coincidence. Anyway, this particular uh ex-pat is not a hardliner but his economics work is absolutely freshwater school anti-Cuban government. It's also an interesting choice in this "fact check" to cite an omnibus review of Cuba's inclusion or exclusion from international organizations as a citation for the statement that Cuba's ranking in the HDI is questionable.

Moving on (highlights)

quote:

Prior to the revolution, Cuba was closely tied to the United States (which had once occupied it), and so roads, railroads and hotels had been built with U.S. investments. Ward-Peradoza and Devereux calculated that Cuba�s income per capita in 1955 was 50 to 60 percent of the top Western European levels � and about the same as Italy�s income per capita at the time. Cuba�s consumption was relatively high as a share of gross domestic product.

Nothing else was going on in Cuba in the early 50s that would cause people to be unhappy with this idyllic situation at all of course.

quote:

In particular, gaps between the rich and poor were narrowed after the revolution. Free national public education was expanded, as was the free public health system. The number of rural hospitals increased from one to 62, for instance. The Cuban health-care system in particular places strong emphasis on preventive medicine, making it easy for Cubans to get checkups.

But in terms of GDP, capital formation, industrial production and key measures such as cars per person, Cuba plummeted from the top ranks to as low as 20th place. That came at a cost, even though Cubans are well educated.

Healthcare: it's actually about car ownership. This will become a recurring theme in a moment.

quote:

Andrew Wolfe, who traveled to Cuba three times in the mid-2000s when he was senior manager of the Western Hemisphere department at the International Monetary Fund, said that primary health care has probably improved under Castro but that doctors and teachers in Cuba earn less than hotel workers. He said it was noteworthy that when Castro became ill in 2006, a specialist arrived from Spain to treat him, suggesting that Cuban doctors lag in treating more complex cases.

I also asked the head of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation what he thought, and he was like, "Fidel Castro sucks!" True. True.

quote:

Moreover, the focus on health care and education should not detract from the fact that overall living standards, as measured by gross domestic product, calorie consumption and other measures, have declined significantly under communist rule. Without big handouts from first the Soviet Union and then Venezuela, the economic picture would be even worse.

So basically "Fact Check: Fidel Castro actually hosed up Cuba's healthcare bigly" boils down to "ok I admit Cuban healthcare improved on all measures of healthcare and outcomes themselves such as access, chronic conditions, and life expectancies, but they don't own as many cars or eat big macs: three loving pinocchios."

This fact check provided by Glenn Kessler. Why do I find the name Glenn Kessler familiar? He's bylined as The Fact Checker in WaPo, but you may remember him as a) a TV talking head on foreign policy and b) from his last job:

quote:

Glenn Kessler has been editor and chief writer of The Fact Checker since 2011. In a journalism career spanning more than three decades, Kessler has covered foreign policy, economic policy, the White House, Congress, politics, airline safety and Wall Street. He was The Washington Post�s chief State Department reporter for nine years, traveling around the world with three secretaries of state. Before that, he covered tax and budget policy for The Washington Post and also served as the newspaper�s national business editor. Kessler appears frequently on television and has lectured widely on U.S. foreign policy.

Wow, weird that we're getting a horseshit counter-factual 'fact check' on a single sentence in a Justin Trudeau canned statement on Fidel Castro's death from a guy who used to be WaPo's State Department Bureau Chief who spent twenty loving years riding around on Air Force One with the American foreign policy establishment. But I'm sure he's remained impartial and-

quote:

Professional Affiliations: member, Council on Foreign Relations; advisory board

NEXT

Citation 2: I Guarantee You Won't Actually Believe This poo poo
This one's actually an academic paper so I was expecting the bulk of the "Cuba's healthcare is bullshit" factual support to come from this, but I was delighted by what I found instead.

quote:

Cuban infant mortality and longevity: health care or repression?
Ongoing political changes in Cuba following Fidel Castro�s death offer an opportunity to evaluate his regime�s legacy with regards to health outcomes. The common assessment is that Cuba�s achievements in lowering infant mortality and increasing longevity are among the praiseworthy outcomes of the regime�a viewpoint reinforced by studies published in US medical journals (Campion and Morrissey 1993; Cooper and Kennelly, 2006)1 We argue that some of the praise is unjustified. Although Cuban health statistics appear strong, they overstate the achievements because of data manipulation. Moreover, their strength is not derived from the successful delivery of health care but rather from the particular repressive nature of the regime which comes at the expense of other populations.
https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article/33/6/755/5035051

I do like a good smashing of the health stats idols. Let's see what they've got in the chamber.

quote:

Centralized planning has disadvantages. Physicians are given health outcome targets to meet or face penalties. This provides incentives to manipulate data. Take Cuba�s much praised infant mortality rate for example. In most countries, the ratio of the numbers of neonatal deaths and late fetal deaths stay within a certain range of each other as they have many common causes and determinants. One study found that that while the ratio of late fetal deaths to early neonatal deaths in countries with available data stood between 1.04 and 3.03 (Gonzalez, 2015)�a ratio which is representative of Latin American countries as well (Gonzalez and Gilleskie, 2017).2 Cuba, with a ratio of 6, was a clear outlier. This skewed ratio is evidence that physicians likely reclassified early neonatal deaths as late fetal deaths, thus deflating the infant mortality statistics and propping up life expectancy.3 Cuban doctors were re-categorizing neonatal deaths as late fetal deaths in order for doctors to meet government targets for infant mortality.

Oh. The data disagreed with my ideology so I'm going to assume a priori that they're lying. I mean, maybe. Hopefully there is some support for this statement based on actual research or other data instead of just "Cuba, an outlier country in many respects, had an outlier health statistic so I will assume that the outlier is indicative of fraud."

quote:

Using the ratios found for other countries, corrections were proposed to the statistics published by the Cuban government: instead of 5.79 per 1000 births, the rate stands between 7.45 and 11.16 per 1000 births. Recalculating life expectancy at birth to account for these corrections (using WHO life tables and assuming that they are accurate depictions of reality), the life expectancy at birth of men by between 0.22 and 0.55 years (Gonzalez, 2015).

Nope, just going to take it as an assumption that they're lying, make up new numbers based on other countries with worse healthcare systems, and call those the facts, Jack.

quote:

Coercing or pressuring patients into having abortions artificially improve infant mortality by preventing marginally riskier births from occurring help doctors meet their centrally fixed targets. At 72.8 abortions per 100 births, Cuba has one of the highest abortion rates in the world.6 If only 5% of the abortions are actually pressured abortions meant to keep health statistics up, life expectancy at birth must be lowered by a sizeable amount. If we combine the misreporting of late fetal deaths and pressured abortions, life expectancy would drop by between 1.46 and 1.79 years for men. In Figure 1 below, we show that that with this adjustment alone, instead of being first in the ranking of life expectancy at birth for men in Latin America and the Caribbean, Cuba falls either to the third or fourth place depending on the range.7

In which I make a completely unfounded assertion that the Cuban government actively coerces women into aborting 3.6 pregnancies for every 100 live births. Wow, that would practically be democide! Why haven't I heard about this????

quote:

Other repressive policies, unrelated to health care, contribute to Cuba�s health outcomes. For example, car ownership is heavily restricted in Cuba and as a result the country�s car ownership rate is far below the Latin American average (55.8 per 1000 persons as opposed to 267 per 1000) (Road Safety, 2016). A low rate of automobile ownership results in little traffic congestion and few auto fatalities. In Brazil, where the car ownership rate is 7.3 times above that of Cuba, road fatalities reduce male and female life expectancy at birth by 0.8 and 0.2 years (Chandran et al. 2013). All else being equal, government restrictions of automobile ownership improves Cuban life expectancy by reducing accidents but also by forcing the population to increase their reliance on more physically demanding forms of transportation (e.g. cycling and walking) (Borowy, 2013). In fact, local physicians attribute a strong role to the massive introduction of bicycles in order to explain the decrease in traffic accidents mortality (Garcell and Quesada, 2011).

Combined with the increase in the levels of energy expenditures due to the reliance on physically demanding forms of transportation, this led to a reduction in net nutrition. Accidently, this crisis led to the halving of obesity rates and, although one has to be careful in causal terms, this likely contributed to important reductions of deaths attributed to diabetes, coronary heart diseases and strokes (there were also increases in the number of cases of neuropathy).8

Wow people are really loving mad that not everyone in Cuba has a car. Those goddamned dirty reds are forcing people to live long and healthy lives that don't end in horrifying mangled car wrecks. Those absolute loving monsters. Who the gently caress even writes poo poo like this? This paper has three authors, all at Texas Tech. The first is a pulmonologist, presumably included to give cover to the other two.

quote:

Vincent Geloso is a research associate at the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University and obtained his Ph.D. in economic history from the London School of Economics.

Ah, the Free Market Institute. But this guy is just a grunt. Let's see that third author.

quote:

Benjamin W. "Ben" Powell (born 1978) is the director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University and Professor of Economics at Texas Tech University's Rawls College of Business. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and the North American Editor of the Review of Austrian Economics.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Powell

Ah yes, the Review of Austrian Economics, a fine publication. The Austrian connection also explains why "I don't like that this communist country has good health outcomes so I will assume they are lying and/or committing democide" was the original premise for this paper. He's also the secretary treasurer of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, which in its own words has the following mission.

quote:

The mission of The Association of Private Enterprise Education is to put into action accurate and objective understandings of private enterprise. The APEE leadership is committed to:

Helping people understand and apply private enterprise principles;
Revealing to people the invisible hand at work;
A future of innovation, productivity, fairness, and ever improving standards of living for all people; and
Maintaining the kind of dynamic environment which permits change and growth.

APEE members seek and employ creative ways of illustrating the value and importance of the invisible hand through their writings and teachings.

I love academic research groups that talk about efficient markets and rational actors the way Seventh-day Adventists talk about our lord and savior Jesus Christ. Dr. Powell here has also written many other fine publications including a couple books and boy howdy would you believe the subject of one of them is exploitative labor practices in the developing world? And by that, I mean how loving awesome they are?

quote:

Mises Institute: So you take an empirical look at the improvements that sweatshops produce?

Powell: My new book does exactly that. I find that sweatshops in the third world today benefit the workers who toil in them and aid in the process of capital accumulation that leads to higher living standards in much the same way that factories in Great Britain and the United States did during the Industrial Revolution.

Ludwig von Mises wrote that during the Industrial Revolution, �The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them.�1 This is precisely what I find in third-world sweatshops today.

I found 83 cases of supposedly exploitative sweatshop wages reported in popular press sources and compared those earnings to the living standards in the countries where they were found. In every country where the sweatshops were located, more than 10 percent of the population lived on less than $2 per day. In more than half of the countries, more than 40 percent did. Yet, in 77 of the 83 cases, the sweatshop wages exceeded the $2 a day threshold. Five of the six exceptions occurred in Bangladesh, where the workers earned more than $1.25 per day � something that more than half the population of that country failed to achieve at the time.

MI: But how do these jobs compare to other jobs in that same country?

Powell: In fact, sweatshop earnings even compared favorably to the average incomes in the countries where they were located. In six of the 17 countries, the average reported sweatshop wage exceeded the average income in the country � in Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua it was more than twice the national average. In another six countries, the average reported sweatshop wages were around the national average. In four of the five countries where sweatshop wages were 50 percent below the national average, the workers were immigrants (sometimes illegal) from other countries and their sweatshop wages exceeded the average wage in their native country.

In short, sweatshops provide the least-bad option for the workers who work in them. But sweatshops are better than just the least-bad option. Sweatshops bring with them the proximate causes of economic development � capital, technology, and the opportunity to build human capital. If countries respect private property rights and economic freedoms, these proximate causes of development lead to higher productivity, which eventually leads to higher pay and better working conditions.

https://mises.org/library/sweatshops-way-out-poverty

So there you have it. One member of the council on foreign relations masquerading as a fact checker with a national paper platforming him and a pro-sweatshop Austrian economist with a tenured faculty position and a few appointments to grant-laundering interdisciplinary academic groups later, you've got a free-standing criticism that the Cuban government's healthcare system is bunk to keep a permanent cloud of doubt on their wikipedia page. Should have prescribed more car ownership.

Anyway post your favorite base bullshit lies transformed into facts through the magical power of millions of dollars.

The Oldest Man has issued a correction as of 02:14 on Feb 10, 2021

# ? Feb 10, 2021 01:16

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# ? May 2, 2024 20:26

Persiflagist: Mar 7, 2013

The Oldest Man posted:

Got into an argument with someone about why Cuba is constantly exporting doctors (they have good healthcare vs they are a propagandist slave state, perhaps the truth is somewhere in the middle???) and went to trusty ol' wikipedia and found this:

There's also a bunch of the usual CIA Factbook-sourced horseshit in the article as well, but that last sentence in the intro stood out. That's a weird sentence for a wikipedia article intro since it's non-specific; it's literally "some people say not to trust Cuba's government." Really? Why does that non-specific blanket statement warrant inclusion in this article at all? It doesn't cast doubt on any specific claim in the article about Cuba's health system or outcomes, it just casts doubt on the entire premise that Cuban healthcare might be good from the first principle that Cuba bad.

Digging into the page history even the word "some" on that statement was added by wikipedia editors trying to follow NPOV rules; the original statement was "experts say" and was originally added in 2017 by this editor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Snooganssnoogans), whose talk page is filled with accusations of pov pushing in a variety of articles about American politics. The same editor has been reverting every single attempt to remove this statement for the last three years or so while pushing controversial edits on a selection of high powered American law and consulting firms and Republican politicians' pages to sanitize them of critical statements: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Snooganssnoogans

Interesting. Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Let's see what those experts are actually saying to prop up that statement about Cuba's government being untrustworthy on the subject of healthcare.

Citation the first:

What a weird loving article to cite as an expert opinion in an article about Cuban healthcare. It's a fact check in WaPo written about a statement made by the Canadian Prime Minister in a statement on the death of Fidel Castro. They're fact-checking a single sentence from a eulogy for a recently dead world leader and then someone is using that fact check as standing to say experts think Cuba lies about its healthcare. So what exactly are they disputing about that statement being factual?

This is now a counterfactual hypothetical scenario starting from 1959 rather than a fact check that Cuba's healthcare got better after the revolution. Stunning.

The fact check now rests the claim that the entirety of all data from the Cuban government is "naturally suspect" and once again references unnamed experts to throw doubt on literally any statistic that shows Cuba might actually be pretty well off compared to peer nations. Who are the unnamed experts in this case? That'd be an economist from the University of Pittsburgh named Carmelo Mesa-Lago. What's his deal?

BA Law University of Havana (1956),
Doctor Law University Madrid and Diploma Social Security OISS (1958),
MA Economics University of Miami (1965)

Went to undergrad in Cuba in the mid-fifties, then found a reason to be overseas in Europe in 1956-1958, and finally ended up getting his economics degree in Miami in the mid '60s. Weird coincidence. Anyway, this particular uh ex-pat is not a hardliner but his economics work is absolutely freshwater school anti-Cuban government. It's also an interesting choice in this "fact check" to cite an omnibus review of Cuba's inclusion or exclusion from international organizations as a citation for the statement that Cuba's ranking in the HDI is questionable.

Moving on (highlights)

Nothing else was going on in Cuba in the early 50s that would cause people to be unhappy with this idyllic situation at all of course.

Healthcare: it's actually about car ownership. This will become a recurring theme in a moment.

I also asked the head of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation what he thought, and he was like, "Fidel Castro sucks!" True. True.

So basically "Fact Check: Fidel Castro actually hosed up Cuba's healthcare bigly" boils down to "ok I admit Cuban healthcare improved on all measures of healthcare and outcomes themselves such as access, chronic conditions, and life expectancies, but they don't own as many cars or eat big macs: three loving pinocchios."

This fact check provided by Glenn Kessler. Why do I find the name Glenn Kessler familiar? He's bylined as The Fact Checker in WaPo, but you may remember him as a) a TV talking head on foreign policy and b) from his last job:

Wow, weird that we're getting a horseshit counter-factual 'fact check' on a single sentence in a Justin Trudeau canned statement on Fidel Castro's death from a guy who used to be WaPo's State Department Bureau Chief who spent twenty loving years riding around on Air Force One with the American foreign policy establishment. But I'm sure he's remained impartial and-

NEXT

Citation 2: I Guarantee You Won't Actually Believe This poo poo
This one's actually an academic paper so I was expecting the bulk of the "Cuba's healthcare is bullshit" factual support to come from this, but I was delighted by what I found instead.

I do like a good smashing of the health stats idols. Let's see what they've got in the chamber.

Oh. The data disagreed with my ideology so I'm going to assume a priori that they're lying. I mean, maybe. Hopefully there is some support for this statement based on actual research or other data instead of just "Cuba, an outlier country in many respects, had an outlier health statistic so I will assume that the outlier is indicative of fraud."

Nope, just going to take it as an assumption that they're lying, make up new numbers based on other countries with worse healthcare systems, and call those the facts, Jack.

In which I make a completely unfounded assertion that the Cuban government actively coerces women into aborting 3.6 pregnancies for every 100 live births. Wow, that would practically be democide! Why haven't I heard about this????

Wow people are really loving mad that not everyone in Cuba has a car. Those goddamned dirty reds are forcing people to live long and healthy lives that don't end in horrifying mangled car wrecks. Those absolute loving monsters. Who the gently caress even writes poo poo like this? This paper has three authors, all at Texas Tech. The first is a pulmonologist, presumably included to give cover to the other two.

Ah, the Free Market Institute. But this guy is just a grunt. Let's see that third author.

Ah yes, the Review of Austrian Economics, a fine publication. The Austrian connection also explains why "I don't like that this communist country has good health outcomes so I will assume they are lying and/or committing democide" was the original premise for this paper. He's also the secretary treasurer of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, which in its own words has the following mission.

I love academic research groups that talk about efficient markets and rational actors the way Seventh-day Adventists talk about our lord and savior Jesus Christ. Dr. Powell here has also written many other fine publications including a couple books and boy howdy would you believe the subject of one of them is exploitative labor practices in the developing world? And by that, I mean how loving awesome they are?

So there you have it. One member of the council on foreign relations masquerading as a fact checker with a national paper platforming him and a pro-sweatshop Austrian economist with a tenured faculty position and a few appointments to grant-laundering interdisciplinary academic groups later, you've got a free-standing criticism that the Cuban government's healthcare system is bunk to keep a permanent cloud of doubt on their wikipedia page. Should have prescribed more car ownership.

Anyway post your favorite base bullshit lies transformed into facts through the magical power of millions of dollars.

What a great post. I read it

# ? May 6, 2022 00:54

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > Transmuting bullshit into fact with the power of money