Denialism Blog

Month: May 2007

  • Denialists' Deck of Cards: State and Federal Issues

    Okay industry lobbyists in training, you’ve started just making up arguments to confuse everyone. That’s a method of confusing issues. Now you should start confusing individuals’ roles in the policy process. It’s time to start playing government officials off each other.

    i-c0142cd2d1230b072c7f2544c00a6b67-8h.jpg If you don’t like what the federal government is doing, say that it is a state issue.

    Of course, if the states are active on the issue, you should argue that it is a federal issue, and that state action will create a “patchwork” of conflicting requirements. The “patchwork” argument is also an effective tool to broaden opposition to a measure.

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  • The 4th Largest Religion: No Religion

    Next week’s New Yorker makes a point that I hadn’t considered, perhaps because there is so much religiosity in America. In a review of recently-published books on atheism, Anthony Gottlieb writes:

    …one can venture conservative estimates of the number of unbelievers in the world today. Reviewing a large number of studies among some fifty countries, Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College, in Claremont, California, puts the figure at between five hundred million and seven hundred and fifty million. This excludes such highly populated places as Brazil, Iran, Indonesia, and Nigeria, for which information is lacking or patchy. Even the low estimate of five hundred million would make unbelief the fourth-largest persuasion in the world, after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. It is also by far the youngest, with no significant presence in the West before the eighteenth century. Who can say what the landscape will look like once unbelief has enjoyed a past as long as Islam’s–let alone as long as Christianity’s? God is assuredly not on the side of the unbelievers, but history may yet be.

    It’s quite nice to broaden one’s view, and realize that one isn’t so lonely being an atheist/agnostic in this world.

  • A question for Luskin

    Evolution news and views on me

    That’s fascinating logic: apparently the widespread feeling that it is “sensible” to remove individuals of a particular viewpoint does not necessarily mean there’s a “conspiracy” to remove individuals with a particular viewpoint.

    Mr. Luskin, is it the considered opinion of the DI, UD etc., that it is never acceptable to discriminate against a professor in a tenure decision based on their ideas?

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  • Denialists' Deck of Cards: The Fourth Hand, Spread Confusion!

    Now, the debate starts to get fun. This group of Denialists’ cards are all about spreading confusion. The more that one muddies the waters, the harder it is for anyone to do anything.

    And so, the place to start is with the Red Herring.

    i-26ed759fce51bf8557d3101e51532b9a-8c.jpg The “red herring” argument is a frequently-employed and efficacious tool to confuse everyone. A red herring is a specious argument–one that sounds cogent, but isn’t really responsive to the issue at hand. Just make something up that sounds good.

    My favorite example of this is in the financial privacy sector. A few years ago, when California was trying to establish opt-in (affirmative consent) requirements before a bank could share personal information, banking industry officials claimed that it would cause the ATM network to break. Why? Because the complex process of dispensing cash would be interrupted by having to ask the consumer for her consent! This was a bogus argument because the legislation in question clearly allowed information to be shared in any circumstance where a consumer requested a specific service.

  • Suck it DI

    PLoS has an intriguing article providing additional reasons why the thermodynamic arguments against evolution are more than silly. It’s called the maximum entropy production (MEP) hypothesis, and John Whitfield describes why life is actually may be favored by the second law of thermodynamics.

    At first glance, life and the laws of thermodynamics seem to be at loggerheads. Most glaringly, the second law states that over time, any system will tend to the maximum level of entropy, meaning the minimum level of order and useful energy. Open a bottle of perfume in a closed room, and eventually the pool of scent will become a smelly cloud. Organisms do their damnedest to avoid the smelly cloud of equilibrium, otherwise known as death, and a common argument of anti-evolutionists is that the universe’s tendency toward disorder means that natural selection cannot make living things more complex.

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  • Who are the denialists? (Part II)

    What kind of family value is lying? That’s the foremost question in my mind when I consider the family values organizations that use false research, lies and denialism to justify their agenda of disparaging contraception, sex education, homosexuality, and exaggerating the dangers of abortion.

    In light of Falwell’s death, I thought it would be appropriate to advance the discussion of the use of denialist techniques to reinforce bigotry and an anti-feminist agenda in the name of family values.
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  • Old Timey Conspiracy Theories

    WaPo shows us how a good conspiracy theory can never die. It’s depressing. We’re probably going to be hearing from 9/11 troofers for the rest of our lives.

    The new evidence that Kennedy was killed by someone on a grassy-knoll or the Cubans or whatever is that the metallurgical analysis that was used to prove that the bullets could only have come from the batch that Oswald used was flawed.

    So is it time to re-open the Kennedy assassination?
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  • John Gravois on Oprah and the Secret

    A must read from Slate on Oprah, the Secret, and the American excess of wishful thinking – starting with a lovely story about a woman who stopped taking her cancer meds because of the secret.

    I find the Secret to be pretty typical idiotic woo, that taken to its logical conclusions becomes dangerous, nasty and ugly woo. Beyond the stupid quantum mechanics fallacy, and the outrageous woo claims which have no credibility whatsoever, If you think about it, they’re really just blaming the victims and offering false hope.

  • Flies disprove evolution!

    Or at least “Darwinism” whatever the hell that means these days. I guess they couldn’t keep quiet all day. UD’s new argument is an easily dismissed straw man. It goes like this.

    Scientists discover fruit flies put in a sensory-deprivation chamber,instead of flying around randomly, or in a rigid pattern, fly in a pattern with both random and non-random properties. (PLoS one article)
    Uncommon Descent which should have its RSS feeds revoked, says it’s proof of design! Darwinism requires there is no free will! This is apparently based on a stunning misunderstanding of Dawkin’s ideas by dacook.

    Of course standard Darwinian orthodoxy denies the reality of free will. Though many Darwinists shy away from the implications of their beliefs as they apply to ascribing responsibility for human behavior, their position demands that all behavior is determined by the genetic heritage of selfish genes.

    Then we hang our heads and sigh.

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  • Speaking of 9/11

    You know the most obnoxious thing about 9/11 conspiracy theorists? They make idiots like Jonah Goldberg look right about something.

    Goldberg, who as far as I can tell has never made an accurate prediction, finally has figured out a great way to make Democrats look bad rather than just embarrass himself and the Republicans. He writes for the LA Times “Just How Crazy are the Dems?”, and sadly, he’s got a point. The Democrats, their candidates, and sites like Daily Kos have failed miserably to quash support for conspiratorial thinking about 9/11. And it makes them look, really, really bad.
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