I wrote about this classic crank gambit a bit about a week and a half ago, emphasizing that no amount of studies will convince a crank.
Now, MarkH at denialism.com takes on the same issue in more detail so that I don't have to bother with David Kirby's latest spew. Thanks, MarkH! The point is that, for people who've already made up their mind to take a position that already contradicts what large amounts of available evidence says, no amount of other studies is ever enough. The "just another study" gambit should be recognized for what it is: a delaying tactic designed to buy time and distract people from the already existing scientific evidence against the crank position. It's a shifting of the goalposts.
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If you leave aside the problem with the Autism Omnibus trial, which has just entered its second week, that annoys me the most, namely a hypothesis so poorly supported by science and so badly argued by a panoply of nonexperts could make it so far in our legal system and possibly even endanger the…
Four days later, I still can't figure it out. I really can't.
Remember the other day when I said I was debating whether or not to respond to the latest excretion from one of the first hangers-on of the anti-vaccine movement I ever encountered after I started blogging. I'm referring, of course, to…
Has it really been two years?
Amazingly, it has indeed. On June 16, 2005, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. deposited the biggest, steamingest, drippiest (not to mention stinkiest) turd I had as yet seen in my then young blogging career, specifically an article published simultaneously by both Salon.com and…
Those who still desperately cling to the concept that mercury in thimerosal in vaccines causes autism have been known to write some really stupid stuff trying to justify their position or attack someone else's rebuttal of the whole "hypothesis." This week has produced a bumper crop of such fallacy-…
Your welcome. it's already attracted a troll I thought I had dispensed with. His wit and wisdom seems to be to call the expert witnesses for the government in the autism omnibus "whores" with the usual failure to address any criticism.