Holocaust denial
oracknows | January 30, 2017Most of my regular readers probably haven't been following this blog long enough to know it, but early in its history this blog was more of a general skeptical blog. True, it always had a heavy emphasis on medical science and pseudoscience, but I also used to write about evolution and other topics from a skeptic perspective. Back then, dating back to the very earliest days after I discovered blogging, Holocaust denial was a frequent topic on this blog because it was a big interest of mine. It still is, even though I haven't had much opportunity to write about it over the last few years. It…
oracknows | December 30, 2016This will almost certainly be my last post of 2016. Unless something so amazing, terrible, or just plain interesting to me happens between now and tomorrow night, I probably won't be posting again until January 2 or 3. Many bloggers like to do "end of year roundup"-type posts that list their best or most popular post, trends noted in 2016 relevant to their area of blogging interest, or predictions for the coming year as their last post of the year, but that's never really been my style. I don't remember the last time I did a post like that, and I'm too lazy today to bother to go and look it…
oracknows | November 11, 2016If you’re a skeptic dedicated to promoting science and reason, these are scary times. My country, the United States of America, just unexpectedly elected a racist, misogynistic, conspiracy-mongering, scientific ignoramus (who, by the way, is rabidly antivaccine) as its next President thanks to the political relic known as the Electoral College. In actuality, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by close to 350,000 votes at the last tally I checked this morning, but now, as in 2000, thanks to the Electoral College, the candidate with the most popular votes is not President-Elect. Hillary…
oracknows | March 31, 2016I wish this post were an April Fools Day joke, but it is not.
Three weeks ago, Skeptical Raptor and I wrote posts describing how a particularly vicious, nasty antivaccine troll named Heather Murray had successfully gamed Facebook reporting algorithms intended to report abuse in order to silence pro-science bloggers. It is, unfortunately, a tactic that I first heard about over two years ago, when antivaccine activists affiliated with what was then called the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) used the same sort of tactics to target pro-science bloggers and activists associated with a group…
oracknows | June 17, 2015Antivaccinationists like Holocaust analogies. I've described this particularly loathsome phenomenon more times than I can remember, most recently when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. compared the "vaccine-induced autism epidemic" (vaccine-induced only in RFK, Jr.'s imagination and that of antivaccinationists) to the Holocaust. True, even he was forced to apologize, although it was a classic "notpology":
"I want to apologize to all whom I offended by my use of the word holocaust to describe the autism epidemic," Kennedy said in a statement. "I employed the term during an impromptu speech as I struggled…
oracknows | January 6, 2015
Readers who've been following this blog a while would probably not be surprised to learn that one of my all time favorite movies is Ghostbusters. In fact, it's hard to believe that the movie is now 30 years old. It makes me feel so old, given that I saw the movie in the theater when it came out. Be that as it may, there's a scene near the end of the movie, where an ancient god Gozer the Gozarian, takes the form of a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, tromping through New York City destroying things, all thanks to a stray thought by Ghostbuster Ray Stantz (played by Dan Ackroyd) that inspired…
oracknows | May 4, 2014A week ago or so, I was perusing my Google Alerts, along with various blogs and news websites, looking for something to blog about, when I noticed a disturbance in the pseudoscience Force. It's a phenomenon I've noticed many times before from a wide variety of cranks and quacks, but it all boils down to how we as supporters of science-based medicine are viewed by those who are, in essence, victims of the quackery that we are trying to combat. I think it's a topic worth revisiting periodically; so here's the 2014 update.
A week ago, Sharon Hill published a post over at Doubtful News entitled…
oracknows | April 6, 2013It's very clear that many antivaccinationists hate autistic children. The language they use to describe them makes that very clear. Such children are "damaged" (by vaccines, of course); the parents' real children were "stolen" from them (by vaccines); they are "toxic" (from vaccines); the "light left their eyes" (due to vaccines). Autism is an "epidemic," a "tsunami," even a "holocaust," with "denial" of that "holocaust" being equivalent to Holocaust denial. All of this likens autism to a horror on par with these calamities, and paints vaccines as the instrument of annihilation of…
oracknows | June 12, 2012If there's one thing shared in common among nearly all advocates of pseudoscience, it is the belief that they know The Truth. More importantly, they know The Truth, and The Powers That Be don't want you to know The Truth and will do almost anything to makes sure that The Truth stays secret. Think about it. This sort of thinking is common, be it among advocates of alternative medicine, cold fusion advocates, HIV/AIDS denialists, 9/11 "Truthers," birthers, creationists, moon hoax believers, or Holocaust deniers. For instance, Mike Adams and Joe Mercola will tell you that the government in the…
oracknows | July 19, 2011Since I was still recovering from TAM9 last night and crashed on the couch at around 9 PM, I didn't have time for one of my usual logorrheic posts. I did, however, have time to take note of an update on a story I started covering six years ago. One of the greatest things about having a long running blog (six and a half years) is that sometimes, after not having heard anything for a long time, I'll be surprised by new information on a story I commented on years ago and can update my readers. So it is with this rather bizarre story about two teenaged girls who formed the group Prussian Blue…
oracknows | June 29, 2011It's grant crunch time, as the submission deadline for revised R01s is July 5. However, in a classic example of how electronic filing has actually made things more difficult, the grant has to be done and at the university grant office a week before the deadline if it is to be uploaded in time. So, my beloved Orac-philes, I'm afraid it's reruns one last time today, but, benevolent blogger that I am, I'll again post two on the same topic. As regular readers know, I've had a long history of combatting Holocaust denial online, but I also have a real problem when the price of combatting Holocaust…
oracknows | June 28, 2011It's grant crunch time, as the submission deadline for revised R01s is July 5. However, in a classic example of how electronic filing has actually made things more difficult, the grant has to be done and at the university grant office a week before the deadline if it is to be uploaded in time. So, my beloved Orac-philes, I'm afraid it's reruns one last time today, but, benevolent blogger that I am, I'll again post two on the same topic. As regular readers know, I've had a long history of combatting Holocaust denial online, but I also have a real problem when the price of combatting Holocaust…
oracknows | December 11, 2010Has it really been six years?
Six years ago today, on a dim and dreary Saturday in December, almost on a whim I sat down, went to Blogspot, and started up the first version of Respectful Insolence with an introductory post with the cliched title, Please allow me to introduce myself. Here it is, six years later. On this cold December Saturday, I still find it difficult to his blog is considered one of the "top" medical blogs by one measure, and some actually--shockingly--consider me somewhat of a "famous" skeptic. I know, I know, I still can't wrap my head around the concept myself. At least,…
oracknows | June 3, 2010It occurs to me that I haven't written about this topic in quite a while, but a recent event makes me think that maybe now's the time to revisit this topic. I'm referring to Holocaust denial. Newer readers may not know that part of what got me involved in online discussions back in the late 1990s was Holocaust denial. Indeed, a lengthy post about how I discovered Holocaust denial was one of the earliest substantive posts on this blog, popping up a mere month after I started blogging, which just so happened to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz. That post…
oracknows | February 17, 2010I happened to be listening to the Holocaust Denial On Trial podcast yesterday, specifically this episode which is a recording of a speech given by Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt about Holocaust denial and her experiences being sued for libel in Britain by arch Holocaust denier David Irving, who, much like the British Chiropractic Association taking advantage of the U.K.'s highly plaintiff-friendly libel laws to sue Simon Singh for libel now, took advantage of those same libel laws back in the late 1990s to sue Deborah Lipstadt. In the speech, she takes a position that I have argued on…
oracknows | November 30, 2009A couple of years ago, fellow ScienceBlogger Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism Blog coined a most excellent term to describe all manners of pseuodscience, quackery, and crankery. The term, "crank magnetism," describes the tendency of cranks not to mind it when they see crankery in others. More specifically, it describes how cranks of one variety (for instance, HIV/AIDS denialists, will be attracted to another form of crankery (for instance, anti-vaccinationism or the 9/11 Truth movement) because, as Mark put it, cranks and pseudoscientists see themselves as iconoclasts, brave mavericks opposed…
oracknows | November 15, 2009Since I seem to have attracted several truly idiotic Holocaust deniers in the comments after this post, including, believe it or not, Eric Hunt, the anti-Semite who attacked Elie Wiesel at a San Francisco hotel in 2007 and who now runs a blog full of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism where he recently bragged about attending an appearance by arch-Holocaust denier David Irving and bleating about a vacuous legal suit he's bringing against Steven Spielberg and Irene Weisberg Zisblatt over what he considers to be a "defamatory" documentary.
How do I deserve such "honors"?
In any case, while I'm…
oracknows | November 12, 2009I detest Holocaust denial.
Relative newbies who haven't been reading this blog that long may be wondering why I, a physician, booster of science-based medicine, and scourge of the anti-vaccine movement (well, at least in my mind, anyway) would blog about Holocaust denial, but in actuality my interest in combatting Holocaust denial predates my interest in combatting quackery by at least two years. Indeed, one of my earliest long-form posts for this blog, written more than a year before I joined ScienceBlogs and reposted after I joined relates how I discovered Holocaust denial, my confusion and…
oracknows | November 4, 2009As regular readers know, one of my interests outside of medicine is the phenomenon of Holocaust denial. Granted, I haven't written as much about it lately as I used to, but that doesn't mean I've lost interest. Actually, I think it may be because I seem to be encountering fewer and fewer major issues of Holocaust denial, although the Bishop Williamson case did draw my ire earlier this year, and I have been perturbed by Holocaust denier David Irving's traveling anti-Semitism show that's now slithering its way through the U.S. and is now in the eastern part of the country.
One thing that I have…
oracknows | September 3, 2009As I mentioned the other day, September 1 marked the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland and the "official" start of World War II. I say "official' because the invasion of Poland marked the beginning of a true shooting war in Europe after a long period of escalating tensions and increasingly brazen provocations by the Nazi regime, culminating in March 1939 with its invasion of what parts of Czechoslovakia Britain and France hadn't already given it in the Munich Agreement from the prior year. Because of mutual defense pacts signed earlier, which declared that an attack on any of…