After Fumento had been worked over by yours truly, Chris Mooney and PZ Myers, you'd think there would be nothing left, but Steve Reuland has taken just one paragraph from Fumento's column and found as many mistakes as I found in the whole thing. Fumento's columns aren't just wrong, they're fractals of wrongness!
P.S. Fumento.
What I find telling is Reuland's observation that it takes much more space (and, of course, time and effort) to explain Typhoon Fumento's ineptitude than to read Fumento's drivel itself. Perhaps it's his strategy.
Thanks for the plug, Tim! I just started that blog about a week ago, so I'm still tweaking it.
"fractals of wrongness!"
Phrase of the year nominee.
You may have skipped another whole fractal dimension: political framing. I identified 7 different debatable frames in one 24-word passage. See:
http://critiquesoflibertarianism.blogspot.com/2004/11/libertarian-frami…
Tim
For the record. I didn't think of this when I read this post many months ago, but in Summer '05 I took on two paragraphs of a creationist's malarkey about the San Andreas fault on wiki and found, in a text of a bit over 200 words [and a map], 93 lies.
And these two paragraphs were part of an inundation of many scores of pages he linked to from of Wiki, all containing roughly this concentration of dishonesty. Most grating was his handle...."Truthteller."
The analysis is on my wiki user page, User:Skookumplanet.