Month: June 2007
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Denialists’ Deck of Cards: The Ace of Clubs, “Our Rights”
The denialist can almost always argue that a proposal is unconstitutional. After all, businesses were afforded many civil rights before women achieved suffrage.
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Left wing woo from HuffPo
The last day or so of posts on HuffPo is a perfect example of why I’ll never take that site seriously, and why in the end, lefties are just as susceptible to anti-science nonsense as the right. We start with Donna Karen promoting her new health-care initiative, the Well-Being Forum with much credit to hucksters…
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Funniest Blogs for Brownback post yet
We’ve had fun reading blogs 4 Brownback with their recent rejection of heliocentrism based on biblical literalism. Their science tag is a real joy to read including the aerospace conspiracy, their love of the science fair stalactite experiment that PZ trashed so thoroughly, and of course their hilarious rejection of “helioleftism. I’ve subscribed to their…
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Denialists’ Deck of Cards: The King of Spades, “Danger!”
This is a very powerful argument in the post-9/11 environment. And if you’re a denialist worth your salt, you can figure out a way to claim that your industry is a potential target for terrorism. Danger! can be used to get things done quickly, as Verisign realized when it wanted to move a “root server”…
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Blogging for Sex Education
Renegade Evolution encourages us to spend some time today blogging for sex education (she has a great feminist blog by the way). I thought to further this aim I’d talk about this recent Nation article about the scam that is the abstinence education industry. Basically, it’s just pork for the already-wealthy right-wing friends of the…
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Denialists’ Deck of Cards: Two Kings, the Proposal “Can’t Be Enforced,” or “Lawsuits (It Can Be Enforced)”
“Can’t be enforced” is a different argument than “it won’t work” (the Jack of Diamonds). Here, the denialist is usually threatening to operate an offending practice overseas, or oddly enough, arguing that because a proposal doesn’t give someone a right to sue, it isn’t worth passing. Of course, if the proposal gives one a right…
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This guy is a brain surgeon?
The latest gem from Egnor: Clearly the brain, as a material substance, causes movement of the body, which is also a material substance. The links are nerves and muscles. But there is no material link between our ideas and our brains, because ideas aren’t material. I’m not a neuroscientist, but that’s strikes me as the…
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Folie a news
I’ve decided to describe a largely unacknowledged process of disease pathogenesis that I will call folie a news. To explain though, I’ll have to first discuss a disease called delusional parasitosis. Delusional parasitosis (DP – sometimes called Ekbom’s disease) is a lot like what it sounds like. Normal or abnormal sensations of itching are interpreted…
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Lambert catches Cockburn in a big fat cherry-pick
I should have known better than to trust a single quote cited by a denialist or crank. In our Case Study of Alexander Cockburn we pointed out his selective use of data but we missed a big fat cherry-pick. It’s based on this quote from Cockburns article: As Richard Kerr, Science magazine’s man on global…
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Denialists’ Deck of Cards: The Red Joker, “Give Money to the Leadership”
Giving money to the leadership of the Senate and House is a great strategy, because no proposals will be considered at all if the leadership blocks them. The leadership is rarefied; one only taps them in desperate situations