Dara Berger
oracknows | December 3, 2015I originally wasn't going to write about this particular post, but the mass shooting in San Bernardino yesterday led me to change my mind. For those of you who either aren't in the US or were somehow cut off from media for the last 18 hours or so, yesterday a heavily armed man and woman dressed in body armor, who turned out to be a married couple, entered a conference center at Inland Regional Center, a sprawling facility that provides services for thousands of people with disabilities. There, at an annual holiday party for the San Bernardino County Public Health Department, Syed Rizwan…
oracknows | November 27, 2015Bullying. You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Yes, I do so love to co-opt that famous line from The Princess Bride for my own nefarious purposes, but it's so perfect for this particular topic, which comes up every so often when I'm writing about the pseudoscience behind the antivaccine movement. It usually takes the form of an emotional screed by some antivaccine parent or other complaining about how she's being "bullied" by us nasty, evil, insensitive pro-vaccine, well, bullies. (They frequently repeat the word many times throughout the course of their…