scot hacker's foobar blog

The Lone Cheerio post, which started as pure whimsy, is now nursing a discussion on the relative merits of the ongoing boycott against Nestle for their (alleged) practices of pushing formula over breast milk in the third world. The pro-boycott position says that Nestle’s corporate greed hurts — and possibly kills — mothers and babies, and that we should vote with our wallets until it stops. The anti-boycott position says that formula is probably healthier than breast milk if the mother has low immunity, that the World Health Organization is probably warped by uneven political pressures, and that the boycott is an example of political correctness run amok.

Personally, I think that Nestle, like all corporate giants, will get away with whatever it can if unchecked. If the allegations are true, its practices are foul, and definitely boycott-worthy (well-organized boycotts do work). On the other hand, I know that we can’t lift a finger in this world without some of our actions supporting bad karma on one front or another. That organic onion in your stir fry tonight? Maybe picked by an underpaid, exploited immigrant farm worker. Breast feeding is too important to play games with. Even if formula has some advantages (Amy and I use it as an occasional substitute), it’s not worth the risk to the child’s health or later intelligence (breastfeeding.com references seven separate studies showing a correlation between IQ and breastfeeding — in the range of 3-8 IQ points difference between breast- and formula-fed children).

If you have strong feelings about this, do the research — find out whether the allegations are true or whether Nestle’s practices have changed in the 20 years the boycott has been running, and think carefully about the counter-arguments — will not buying Cheerios really make a difference to the parent company? Are there health benefits to formula (in the 3rd world) that in part offset its downsides? Is Nestle’s behavior pure greed, or something else?

Amy and I are still trying to figure out what to do.

A piece in The Chronicle this morning says that U.S. Marines dropped napalm on Iraqis during the war. The Pentagon has claimed that they destroyed all their napalm stockpiles two years ago, and that this wasn’t napalm. Turns out all they’ve done is tweak the benzene concentration. The director of Physicians for Social Responsibility says that trying to distinguish between these incendiaries and traditional napalm is “pretty outrageous.” Said one Marine, “The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect.”

Bonus surprise: The U.S. has not agreed to an international ban against using incendiaries against civilian targets.

I’m sick of the term “politically correct” being used in the negative. The implication is that the person with the politically correct viewpoint doesn’t actually believe in their own position, but is just concerned with being sensitive, hip, diverse, inclusive, anti-establishment, or whatever. While there are people who take positions on things for the wrong reasons (e.g. to be on some bandwagon), the fact that a proposition is currently considered politically correct has nothing whatsoever to do with the truth value of that proposition .

It may be politically correct to suggest, for example, that the spotted owl is entitled to its habitat, and we all may be sick to death of politically correct bandwagoneering, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with deciding whether the spotted owl is in fact entitled to its habitat. Casting the issue as “politically correct” is a way of steering the discussion away from the issue itself and onto the character of the person holding the viewpoint. Political correctness has nothing to do with the price of tea in China (or spotted owls, or Nestle boycotts…)

Same with the way many right-wing commentators use the word “liberal” not as a description of political leanings, but as though it were an epithet to be hurled, an insult, an adjective just shy of “turd,” to be prefaced with adjectives like “bleeding heart,” “fuzzy,” etc. By casting “liberal” and “politically correct” as insults, discussion is tipped into the realm of name calling rather than issue analysis, and people are put on the defensive. It’s a technique for logjamming the dialog.

Sometimes “politically correct” is simply “correct” (and sometimes not).