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Respectful Insolence

"A statement of fact cannot be insolent." The miscellaneous ramblings of a surgeon/scientist on medicine, quackery, science, pseudoscience, history, and pseudohistory (and anything else that interests him)

Who (or what) is Orac?

orac.jpg Orac is the nom de blog of a (not so) humble pseudonymous surgeon/scientist with an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his miscellaneous verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few will. (Continued here, along with a DISCLAIMER that you should read before reading any medical discussions here.)

Orac's old Blog is archived at Archived Insolence.



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August 31, 2006

The Abraham Cherrix case: Bad medicine makes bad law

Category: Medicine

Boy, oh, boy, I had to control myself on this one. Yes, dear reader, while I was away this last week and a half, many were the times that I wanted to let loose about this. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending...

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The 42nd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Recovering from an attack of the undead down under

Category: Skeptics' Circle

Rapidly dwindling vacation or no vacation, I have to plug the Skeptic's Circle. Some of you may have wondered where the host of this week's Skeptic's Circle has been. After all, a few of you commented that his blog hadn't...

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Short scientific talks for dummies

Category: Science

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old...

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August 30, 2006

How I discovered Holocaust denial

Category: Holocaust denial

I stared at words on the computer screen, dumbfounded:

They do not want to do it because it would show that at Auschwitz Nazis were conducting ETHICAL medicine and they want to keep the myths of the Holocaust alive!
What the--?? I blinked. Did I read this right? I read it again, gently flickering on the computer screen:

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Eugenics and involuntary euthanasia

Category: Holocaust

As longtime readers know, I've had a longstanding interest in the Holocaust. A precursor of the Holocaust was known as the T4 euthanasia program. This was a program in which as many as 200,000 people deemed "useless eaters" or "life unworthy of life" were "euthanized" (a euphemism for "murdered," actually) by a variety of means, including starvation, overdoses of narcotics, poisoning, and early prototypes of gas chambers later used to to such lethal effect. The T4 program, which ran from 1939 to 1941, when Hitler ordered a temporary halt to the program due to protests from churches and the victims' families, provided the development and proving grounds for methods of mass murder that would later be expanded to the industrialized killings of millions from 1941 until the end of the war. Indeed, Josef Mengele himself learned his trade in this program. Of course, even this "temporary halt" was nothing of the sort. The program continued in secret.

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August 29, 2006

The Wedgie Document and the creationist challenge

Category: Intelligent design/creationism

Creationists have the Wedge Document. Now, thanks to The Commissar, one of my favorite conservative bloggers, a man after my own heart who leans right (albeit a bit farther right than I do) but doesn't buy into the fundamentalism of the Christian right that has infested the Republican Party, we now have the Wedgie Document, a guide to arguing with creationists on the Internet.

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Pseudohistory and pseudoscience

Category: Intelligent design/creationism

I've alluded to this similarity before, but DarkSyde posted an interesting piece about the similarities between the fallacies used by Holocaust deniers and those used by creationists. He begins:
Most people can get by fine without ever being taught evolutionary biology just as most folks can get by fine without being taught cosmology. So if there's no harm, why should we teach evolution but not creationism or the evidence against evolution?

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Reply to a 14 year old creationist

Category: Intelligent design/creationism

Yet, every so often, a post will provoke a reaction long after I've forgotten I had even written it. So it was last week, when in my e-mail I found a comment about a post I had made over a month earlier. The post in question was a bit of ridicule directed at Frank Peretti, a writer of Christian-themed novels, who had recently written a horror novel whose theme was that "evolution makes us monsters." My beef with Mr. Peretti was the utterly incorrect statements he made while promoting his book, among which was his claim that there are no "beneficial" mutations. Here is what the comment said:

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Shortsighted, not curious, and proud of it!

Category: Skepticism/critical thinking

When I first encountered this post over at Pharyngula a couple of days ago, I wasn't planning on commenting on article to which PZ referred, even though I found it as disturbing as he did, and even though I don't have quite the same compunctions about "beating up on" a student that he does. (Humiliating students and residents for stupid answers is, alas, a longstanding tradition in medical education.) After all, PZ had already taken it on, as had Super Doomed Planet, Jason at Evolutionblog, and The Uncredible Hallq. Whatever I might say today, a couple of days later seemed superfluous. But then I thought about my college days a bit and decided that my take on this, although equally scathing to the attitudes expressed in the article, was nonetheless a bit different. But first, I feel obligated to give you a flavor of why this article was so disturbing. I sincerely hope that this is some sort of satire that misfired, but I fear that it is not.

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August 28, 2006

From the depths of the Midwest, I call all skeptics!

Category: Skeptics' Circle

Even though I'm on vacation, I would be remiss if I didn't post a reminder to all skeptics and skeptical bloggers out there that the latest edition of the Skeptics' Circle is due to be posted this Thursday. It's being...

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