Fake News
oracknows | May 3, 2017[Editor's note: Sorry this is a few hours late. I forgot to change the status from DRAFT to SCHEDULE in WordPress last night. D'oh!]
The single most persuasive strategies by which quacks sell their wares and believers in quackery persuade others to try the quackery they believe in is the personal anecdote. Indeed, I established very early on in the history of this blog a type of post that has become a staple that shows up several times a year. In these posts, I deconstruct "alternative cancer cure" testimonials, showing how the story as related doesn't provide convincing evidence that the…
oracknows | February 22, 2017Regular readers here are probably familiar with Mike Adams and his website NaturalNews.com. Forget the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, when it comes to wretched hives of scum and quackery on the Internet, NaturalNews is the wretchedest, scummiest, and quackiest. Not surprisingly, Adams got his start in wingnuttery selling Y2K scams nearly 18 years ago. Now, besides presiding over a scammy online publishing empire that racks in considerable green by publishing articles laced with quackery, antivaccine pseudoscience, character assassination, and thuggery, both legal and getting a bit too…
oracknows | February 9, 2017Last night was a bit weird. I think too many days of only getting a few hours of sleep finally caught up to me, and I crashed by around 9:30 PM. So, contrary to usually happens, when I say this post will be briefer than usual, I actually mean it; I have even less time this morning than usual to pump out a quickie post. However, this is the perfect time to look at one thing that probably doesn't rate a full heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence but that I'd like to take note of anyway. It's a bit of fake news that's been making the rounds similar to the fake news a couple of weeks ago…
oracknows | January 26, 2017Longtime readers of this blog are familiar with one major kind of blog post that I've done periodically ever since the very beginning of this blog, and that's the alternative medicine cancer cure testimonial, particularly breast cancer cure testimonials, but also testimonials for a wide variety of cancers allegedly "cured" by a wide variety of quacks. It started with Suzanne Somers and Lorraine Day, whose stories I deconstructed and showed not to be indicative of a cancer cure due to the quackery they were pursuing and continues to this day. Another, related category of post are early…
oracknows | January 23, 2017[Note: The proprietor of the website has responded by e-mail. See Comment #37.]
Now that the unreal has become real, I was just thinking how weird it is that I've never actually blogged about a phenomenon that directly contributed to the election of Donald Trump. I'm referring to the phenomenon known now as "fake news." Now, by "fake news," I do not mean sloppy reporting. I do not mean biased reporting. I do not even mean a type of article that many crank websites publish in which a real news story (often with other news stories) is used as jumping-off point for pseudoscience and conspiracy…
milhayser | November 30, 2016The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the U.S. caught nearly everyone by surprise, and fingers were immediately pointed in all directions as the election's losers looked to lay blame. Chad Orzel offers one relevant narrative: "There are a lot of people who feel like they’re being screwed by a system run for the benefit of people in big cities on the coasts who sneer at them as ignorant, racist hicks." Ethan Siegel extends an olive branch on Starts With a Bang, saying "we all have our biases, even if we ourselves are scientists," and encourages EVERYONE to accept the responsibility…