Month: May 2007
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Denialists’ Deck of Cards: The 3 of Spades, “Dolittle and DeLay”
At this point, the denalist engages in delay. The problem that doesn’t exist, and the harms that do not occur will continue not occur in the future, if we just wait. A great “wait and see” tactic is to “shift the goal posts.” The denialist does by stating, “we don’t know that there is a…
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Logical Fallacies
Almost everybody knows about the fallacies of logic, formal and informal, that are routinely used in arguments with denialists. While these fallacies aren’t perfect examples of logic that show when an argument is always wrong, they are good rules of thumb to tell when you’re listening to bunk, and if you listen to denialists you’ll…
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Where’s the Hitler Zombie when you need it?
Well, I won’t watch CNN anymore, after Glenn Beck decided to call climate scientists who actually believe climate science Nazis. You read his profile at Media Matters and it’s clear pretty much anyone he disagrees with is a Nazi.
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Denialists’ Deck of Cards: The 3 of Hearts, “No Harm”
Okay, my industry lobbyists in training. You’ve said “no problem” over and over. You’ve dismissed problems as attributable to bad apples, or diminished the problem as a “mere inconvenience.” But people still seem to think that the problem that doesn’t exist still exists. You’re getting more and more press calls on the non-existent problem. What…
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Impossible expectations (and moving goalposts)
I’m sorry for mixing terminologies. But moving goalposts isn’t adequate to describe the full hilarity of the kinds of arguments denialists make. For instance, the goalposts never have to be moved when they require evidence that places them somewhere in the land before time. What I mean is the use, by denialists, of the absence…
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Ed Brayton Exposes Sal Cordova’s Cherry Picking
It was pointed out in a comment in our FRC post how much cherry picking resembles rank dishonesty. That’s because it is. Deception is inherent in denialist arguments, and there are few better examples than Sal Cordova’s selective quotation as demonstrated by Ed Brayton in Dispatches from the Culture Wars.
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Denialists’ Deck of Cards: The 2 of Spades, “Mere Inconvenience”
Are you practicing the “no problem” hand? You know how it goes–“there’s no problem” (damn persnickety do gooders)! And even if people sometimes think that there is a problem, the problem that isn’t a problem is caused by bad apples. But it really isn’t even a problem. It’s just a mere inconvenience! Therefore, there’s no…
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Epstein: FDA Deprives “Informed Patients” Choice in Care, But So Does the Market
Okay, I’m going to open a can of worms, and I’ll need the commentors to help me with this one. Last week, Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago School of Law published an oped in the Wall Street Journal. Epstein’s a charming fellow, and I like him, but I wouldn’t want to live…
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Fake Experts
You know who they are – those organizations that have words like “freedom” and “rights” “choice” and “consumer” in their names but always shill for corporate interests…those occasional MDs or engineers creationists find that will say evolution has nothing to do with science. They are the fake experts. But how do we tell which experts…
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Never forget 4-29
How will we ever know the truth about 4-29. I say, it was a conspiracy to undermine 9-11 truth to show that fuel from a tanker truck could actually melt steel and cause a freeway to collapse. Initial photos from the site raise lots of questions.