Category: Selectivity
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Denialism From Forbes Courtesy of Heartland Hack James Taylor
It’s fascinating when you catch the start of a new bogus claim enter the denialsphere, bounce from site to site, and echo about without any evidence of critical analysis or intelligence on the part of the denialists. A good example of this was an article by Heartland Institute’s contributor to Forbes, James Taylor, falsely claiming…
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Disinformation about Disinformation: L. Gordon Crovitz's Information Age
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When one spouts disinformation about disinformation, does it make it information? No, it’s L. Gordon Crovitz’s “Information Age,” the weekly poorly informed and poorly reasoned blather about information policy in the Wall Street Journal. Recall that Crovitz recently wrote about the invention of the Internet and online privacy. I wrote about these last two columns,…
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Don’t Screw with T.J.
DaveScot, crank extraordinaire at Uncommon Descent, has made the mistake of talking about Thomas Jefferson now that there is UVa representation on the Scienceblogs. He makes the argument that because the constitution only dealt with federal separation of church and state (before the reconstruction amendments of course) that established religion was perfectly ok in the…
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Beware the bashers of peer review
I’d like to hear from some other sciencebloggers and science readers what they think reform of peer-review should look like. I’m not of the opinion that it has any critical flaws, but most people would like to see more accountability for sand-bagging and other bad reviewer habits. Something like a grading system that allows submitters…
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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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Selectivity from the Family Research Council
Some might wonder why I include some right-wing “family” organizations on the list of denialists. It’s simple. In their efforts to oppose all forms of contraception, they routinely lie about the science behind the efficacy of condoms for STD-prevention (just like HIV/AIDS denialists), the efficacy of contraception, as well as social effects of contraception like…
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Selectivity (Cherry Picking)
For our next installment of the big five tactics in denialism we’ll discuss the tactic of selectivity, or cherry-picking of data.