cranks
sb admin | May 26, 2008I am giving out a previously non-existent award today to a truly great denialist. Andrew Schlafly, spawn of anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly and some long-forgotten sperm-donor (ironic, eh?), was not content just being the legal counsel to the uber-crank Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. No, he had to take it one step further, and clog our precious intertubes with Conservaepedia, a repository of all things stupid. In fact, there is so much stupid there, an entire wiki is devoted to documenting it. I was newly enraged when a commenter over at the "blogging on peer-reviewed…
denialism | May 12, 2008So on the blog birthday we asked our dear readers what they've learned over the last year, and as a test we gave them this crank who attacks the bisphosphonate anti-osteoporosis drugs in his article "the delusion of bone drugs".
I think the reader with the best grade is LanceR or Martin, but SurgPA would have done better if he had shown his work.
But let's talk about some signs that something you're reading is unscientific crankery. In this case, we don't have a particularly sophisticated crank, and he let's the cat out of the bag in his very profile:
Because of Bill's increasing concerns…
denialism | April 24, 2008Dude. If you thought Vox Day (the guy with the minge haircut) was crazy, check out what his crazy dad has been up too since he fast captured last year:
The trial of millionaire tax protester Robert Beale turned bizarre even before jury selection began Monday as the prosecutor announced the arrest of four of Beale's supporters for conspiring with Beale to disrupt the proceedings and intimidate the judge.
"God ... wants me to take the judge out, that's what he wants me to do," Beale allegedly told his common-law wife, according to a new criminal complaint filed against him and the four…
denialism | April 17, 2008Slate has a series of three articles on what editor Daniel Engber refers to as "the paranoid style". Starting with A crank's progress, sliding into a review of Doubt is their product, and finishing with a spot-on review of Expelled he runs the guantlet of modern denialism. He also happens to hit upon the major commonalities between all pseudoscientists, which of course I find gratifying. For instance, read his description of Berlinski and how he nails the truisms in detecting the false skeptic:
Forgive me if I don't pause here to defend the conventional wisdom on evolution and cosmology. (…
denialism | April 17, 2008One of the most salient features of cranks is their inconsistency. A major difference between someone who is trying to reason scientifically and someone who has a fixed belief they are trying to defend against rational inquiry is the scientific thinker is looking for synthesis. They want things to fit together nicely, to make sense, and incorporate as much of the data as possible into a cohesive picture or theory that is convincing to ones peers so they adopt your view.
A crank, on the other hand, doesn't care about internal consistency, presenting a cohesive picture of any kind, or…
sb admin | April 7, 2008My 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 equate human rights with animal rights is to diminish the value of human beings. First, which animals do we apply these rights to? The cute ones? Bunnies? Drosophilia?
And in their battle for equal rights for all animals, humans included, do they work for the rights of…
denialism | April 6, 2008I 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 liberals and conservatives alike must own up to their own extremists. Liberals must own up to the fact that they don't have a universally-solid grasp on scientific truth, and just like the right wingers, we have people and movements within the left wing that are cranky and denialist. I would…
sb admin | April 4, 2008Once 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 illegal---in other words, they're libertarians, unless AAPS disapproves of your decisions.
Their big beef in the current article is that there has been a conspiracy to hide the dangers of oral contraceptives and abortion. You see…
sb admin | April 3, 2008It'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 a speculum exam (don't get any ideas, bastards!).
This is truly outrageous. It is a clear attempt by a group of (forgive me, please PP) demented fucking wackaloons to intimidate a humble New Englander who enjoys writing.
Time to get the word out!
(Hat tip LizDitz)
Addendum:
Orac and others…
sb admin | April 3, 2008And 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 organizers. As far back as written history goes, people have named and classified what they observe. In fact, it forms the basis for modern science. Linnaean classification, based on observation of traits, predates modern cladistic and genomic classification of organisms, based on arguably more fundamental…
choofnagle | March 24, 2008By 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 meeting to make the claim that wireless caused health problems in general and to them specifically. These emotional pleas made the Council rescind its previous resolution.
Ah, California! There's good stuff out there explaining this breed of woo, but these…
denialism | March 20, 2008Now 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 has to consider this when dealing with nonsense and debunking it not to fall in the trap of just fisking it, which can defeat the purpose of your writing - to decrease the amount of BS in the world.
However, a knowledge of the history of denialism is of utility in this…
denialism | December 31, 2007I 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 who this was when he posed for this shot, but between this and their endorsement of Paul on Stormfront radio, I think it's pretty well confirmed who their candidate is. Also note, this picture was taken at the "Values Voters Presidential Debate" just as a reminder of who "Values Voters"…
denialism | December 21, 2007Orac 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 load of bologna. Here's the trailer:
Aside from the shoddy production, noncharismatic host, and general crankery, I guess it's not so bad. But I am growing concerned about the continual assault on what little good nutritional data is out there, and the misleading tactics of those…
denialism | December 20, 2007Recently, 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 people in response to all these silly health pronouncements, which seemingly come from on high but really are from press coverage of often minor reports in the medical literature, have lost their trust in what science has to offer as a solution to…
denialism | November 27, 2007It's funny, but the crank use of the recent reevaluation of global AIDS statistics by the UN reminds me of a sign you see driving towards Charlottesville from DC. It's faded wooden thingy that says, "Get the US out of the UN". About 5 miles up the road is a derelict-looking building with what looks like Santa Claus dressed as a confederate soldier carrying the battle flag, so you get a feel for the general sentiment of the area. For those outside the US, it might be helpful to understand this problem to know that a big part of the hatred is based on the belief of some fundamentalists that…
denialism | November 21, 2007Keeping quiet for the last few days has given me the advantage of seeing patterns in my firefox tabs. I see news stories in my feed that I'm interested in, open them in tabs and figure maybe I can blog about them later.
Well, the result of doing this for the last week has led to a couple of nice crank convergences.
The first is this crank attack on scientific consensus from John West at ID the future. It follows a pretty standard crank script. First a misstatement of what scientific consensus means
Should the consensus view of science always prevail? Darwinists often claim science…
denialism | November 14, 2007 Richard Black investigates the common crank claim that science is just an old boys network designed to throw sweet, sweet grant money at their friends. Guess what? The evidence of this conspiracy is lacking.
I anticipated having to spend days, weeks, months even, sifting the wheat from the chaff, going backwards and forwards between journal editors, heads of department, conference organisers, funding bodies and the original plaintiffs.
I envisaged major headaches materialising as I tried to sort out the chains of events, attempting to decipher whether claims had any validity, or were…
denialism | November 9, 2007Just watching CNN, and saw them mindlessly parrot the latest rant from a crank. In this instance it's the founder of the weather channel John Coleman, now a San Diego meteorologist, who peels off a doozy.
It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motivesmanipulated long term scientific data to create an allusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the "research" to further…
denialism | October 29, 2007How do doctors decide what is healthy and unhealthy? Do they arbitrarily decide on risk factors to line their pockets - creating false epidemics as Sandy Szwarc at Junkfood Science suggests? Or, is there actually a science, called epidemiology, that is the basis for health recommendations?
As I've said repeatedly, one of the sure signs you're about to hear total BS is if someone suggests there is some conspiracy by scientists or doctors to hide the truth. In an article challenging the use of serum troponin levels to determine whether myocardial infarction (MI) has occurred (a more…