Denialism

Category: Cranks

  • More madness from PETA

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    MarkH
    in

    My earlier post on People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was perhaps not clear enough. PETA is not for “the ethical treatment of animals”. They are for treating animals as if they were furry humans. In fact, they are for treating animals better than we treat humans. This is a dangerous philosophy. To…

  • Bill Maher is a crank

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    MarkH
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    I must admit I have a love-hate relationship with Bill Maher. He is a funny guy, he is good at mocking some of the more ludicrous aspects of politics, and he has been an effective critic of this administration and some of its more egregious policies. However, I’ve also long held the position that both…

  • More JPANDS lies—Godwin, here we come

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    MarkH
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    Once again, JPANDS, the mouthpiece of the AAPS, has it all wrong. The contradictory missions of the AAPS often lead to humorous juxtapositions of policy. For example, the AAPS wants the physician-patient relationship unsullied by any outside forces—unless that relationship pisses them off. They intervened in the Terry Schiavo case, they wish to make abortion…

  • Autism cranks going after bloggers

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    MarkH
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    It’s time to open up a can of Streisand. The author of the autism blog Neurodiversity, along with many other blogs and other online entities, has been subpoenaed to produce what amounts to her entire life to aid in some frivolous autism suit. The only thing they didn’t ask her to do was submit to…

  • Is that really a disease? Epistemology and crank-ism

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    MarkH
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    And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto the man to see what he would call them; and whatsoever the man would call every living creature, that was to be the name thereof. (Genesis 2:19) Human beings are great…

  • Wifi Woo Strikes in Sebastopol

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    Chris
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    By way of AP and BoingBoing, one can find this post by Dale Daugherty on O’Reilly Radar about the newest attack of the tinfoil-hat-wifi-radiation brigade: Our town, Sebastopol, had passed a resolution in November to permit a local Internet provider to provide public wireless access. This week, fourteen people showed up at a City Council…

  • Chris Mooney on ignoring the cranks

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    MarkH
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    Now that PZ, Brian, and ERV have all weighed in on whether Chris Mooney’s piece on crank enablers is right or not, let me lay out my operational strategy as an anti-denialist writer. It is true that repetition of denialist arguments is a strategic error, and that the repeition itself can reinforce their arguments. One…

  • Values Voters and Neo Nazis

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    MarkH
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    I see that I’m in good company in my curiosity about why Ron Paul enjoys so much crank magnetism. And his crank magnetism and appeal to racist groups can’t be denied. Here for instance, is Ron Paul posing with Don Black, culled from the neo-nazi Stormfront website: Now, I think its unlikely Ron Paul knew…

  • Obesity Crankery Part II

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    MarkH
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    Orac alerted me, based on my recent obesity writings, of a new crank obesity attack on science. This latest is in the form of a rebuttal to Morgan Spurlock’s excellent film Supersize me. Comedian Tom Naughton, who has all the charisma of a wet sponge, is making his own documentary Fathead: You’ve been fed a…

  • Obesity Crankery – A growing problem

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    MarkH
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    Recently, it seems there has been a backlash against medicine and the current knowledge of the relationship between diet, weight and overall health. I don’t actually believe this is directly the fault of scientists or doctors, who react to the trashy mainstream reporting of science with little more than the occasional raised eyebrow. However, many…