They are certainly familiar to anyone who has ever had a Creationist troll, a global-warming denialist troll, AIDS-HIV connection denialist troll, AR troll, DDT-is-banned troll, etc....
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One of the more promising trends I've seen is that the various forms of denialism that scientists regularly decry (including those of us here at ScienceBlogs) are starting to be recognized by non-scientists. I don't know if there's a direct cause-and-effect here, or if like-minded people are…
Who are the global Warming Denialists?
A tougher question is, in a discipline as complex as climate science, how do you tell who the legitimate skeptics (those that ignore the reporting at the Independent for instance) are versus who are the denialists?
Again, it's simple, because denialism is…
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…
So, I after looking at who was on Inhofe's list of scientists that he claims dispute global warming and on the Discovery Institute's list of Darwin dissentors, I thought I should see who was Inhofe's list and this list of HIV/AIDS "rethinkers". The HIV/AIDS list seems to be even dodgier than Inhofe…
Man, you and I are on the same wavelength on this one. I've just been commenting on Orac's and MarkCC's sites about just this problem.
It's seems like so much effort to go through all the work of debunking a denialist argument every single time. It seems like you guys should develop a shorthand, like ad hominem or Godwin's law to deal with these problems. That link is dead on, you encounter the same poor arguments every single time, it takes an incredible amount of work to refute arguments they pull out of the freaking ether, and ultimately there is no convincing the denialists to change their minds.
We can argue about the utility of having a venue to challenge their bad arguments for the sake of the unconvinced, but it seems as though you guys shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel every time these terrible arguments come up. We should have a law, we can just cite it and say, "hey, you're just a denialist, you've violated 'X' law and don't have a real argument, come back when you have real data or a peer-reviewed paper."
We can call it "quitter's law." Ha! Ok, that's arrogant, and I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this. But really, you guys should develop a shorthand to rapidly dismiss this sloppy thinking without all this hard work.
Alternatively you can do what talk origins does and just have a central repository of denialist debunking on every conceivable topic. A lot of work, but ultimately a time-saver.