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The denialist can almost always argue that a proposal is unconstitutional. After all, businesses were afforded many civil rights before women achieved suffrage. |
Month: June 2007
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Denialists' Deck of Cards: The Ace of Clubs, "Our Rights"
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Left wing woo from HuffPo
The last day or so of posts on HuffPo is a perfect example of why I’ll never take that site seriously, and why in the end, lefties are just as susceptible to anti-science nonsense as the right. We start with Donna Karen promoting her new health-care initiative, the Well-Being Forum with much credit to hucksters Tony Robbins (he’ll hypnotize you with his teeth) and Deepak Chopra, king of woo. You know where it’s going with the first post “Healing Is Individual, Not One-Size-Fits-All” and early statements such as this:
But Tony knew that the bottom line is that healing is individual, it’s not one size fits all. You have to find the key to yourself. At the Well-Being Forum, Karen Duffy, a TV host and patient advocate who has experienced serious illness told us that, “The doctors gave me metaphors like, “you’re going to fight this illness.” But I’m a lover, not a fighter, and I didn’t want a big battle. I wanted the happy cells to take the unhappy cells out for a pint and talk it over.”
“Doctors don’t realize the hypnotic power of their messages, whether it’s telling you illness is a battle or saying that you have six months to live,” Tony told us at the forum. ” But it’s vital to bring hope to the table and give people the images and metaphors that will heal them.”
That’s what was missing from medicine and healthcare, metaphors! Precious healing metaphors from Tony Robbins! I can see my work will be cut out for me (the second post also pushes Tony Robbins’ carny-trick rubbish). And when you start getting into the Chopra-woo they promote it becomes perfectly clear that the left loves brain-dead unscientific garbage just as much as the religious fundamentalists on the right. The parallels are creepy.
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Funniest Blogs for Brownback post yet
We’ve had fun reading blogs 4 Brownback with their recent rejection of heliocentrism based on biblical literalism. Their science tag is a real joy to read including the aerospace conspiracy, their love of the science fair stalactite experiment that PZ trashed so thoroughly, and of course their hilarious rejection of “helioleftism.
I’ve subscribed to their feed and really, I love it better than fafblog. This is just the best satire I’ve ever seen.
Today really took the cake though. Here’s their latest justification for rejection of Mitt Romney:
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Denialists' Deck of Cards: The King of Spades, "Danger!"
This is a very powerful argument in the post-9/11 environment. And if you’re a denialist worth your salt, you can figure out a way to claim that your industry is a potential target for terrorism. Danger! can be used to get things done quickly, as Verisign realized when it wanted to move a “root server” without following normal process. In Department of Commerce officials’ emails, Verisign made pleas to declare an emergency to get their way: The company wants “to push us to declare some kind of national security threat and blow past the process,” one e-mail said. The subject line of another message described the company’s “request for immediate authority to effect address change.”
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Blogging for Sex Education
Renegade Evolution encourages us to spend some time today blogging for sex education (she has a great feminist blog by the way).I thought to further this aim I’d talk about this recent Nation article about the scam that is the abstinence education industry. Basically, it’s just pork for the already-wealthy right-wing friends of the administration who use their money to attack abortion and fund denialist groups like the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America.
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Denialists' Deck of Cards: Two Kings, the Proposal "Can't Be Enforced," or "Lawsuits (It Can Be Enforced)"
“Can’t be enforced” is a different argument than “it won’t work” (the Jack of Diamonds). Here, the denialist is usually threatening to operate an offending practice overseas, or oddly enough, arguing that because a proposal doesn’t give someone a right to sue, it isn’t worth passing. Of course, if the proposal gives one a right to sue, the denialist uses the opposite argument: the proposal is enforceable, and the denialist will complain of frivolous lawsuits.
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This guy is a brain surgeon?
Clearly the brain, as a material substance, causes movement of the body, which is also a material substance. The links are nerves and muscles. But there is no material link between our ideas and our brains, because ideas aren’t material.
I’m not a neuroscientist, but that’s strikes me as the dumbest thing I’ve heard yet. No material link between our ideas and our brains? So I guess when we take a hallucinogen like LSD it works by magic? How could it be that thinking
is separate from “material” as he puts it, when we can ingest material substances that alter our thinking? How is it that damage to specific areas of the brain can inhibit different kinds of thought? Immaterial things like remorse, impulsivity, memory, language can all be affected by “material” brain-damage and “material” drugs. How does the non-materialist explain this? Is it magic?This goes beyond Egnor’s usual ignorance of science, this is more like Deepak Chopra kind of woo – this idea that our brains are in contact with the divine and that’s where our thoughts and ideas come from. But it’s just magical thinking, there is no evidence of some divine hand in our thoughts, quite the opposite. The evidence is that ideas do have an organic origin, or how else does one explain how damage to the system or specific drugs that interact with it, affects our thinking in predictable and repeatable ways?
And let’s think about what this “non-materialist” view does for the study of neuroscience. Oh wait, nothing. Because if the brain is an incomprehensible magic black box, why study neuroscience? Why try to decode, dissect and discover how neural processes and diseases work if you believe it’s just magic?
** It’s also ironic that this paper – Probabilistic reasoning by neurons – just popped up on Nature AOP and I couldn’t help thinking that maybe Egnor didn’t do a thorough literature review before posting this nonsense.
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Folie a news
I’ve decided to describe a largely unacknowledged process of disease pathogenesis that I will call folie a news. To explain though, I’ll have to first discuss a disease called delusional parasitosis.
Delusional parasitosis (DP – sometimes called Ekbom’s disease) is a lot like what it sounds like. Normal or abnormal sensations of itching are interpreted by the patient as being bug bites, or bugs traveling under the skin despite the absence of histological evidence of a parasitic infection. This is what is known as a “fixed delusion” and it becomes an obsession for the patient. The disease has a few known organic causes such as amphetamine or cocaine-use and many common co-morbities including diabetes, schizophrenia, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, lyme disease and depression.(1) Patients usually present to a dermatologists office complaining of sensations of itching and biting from insects, and frequently carry in samples of skin or lesions they’ve scratched off – this is referred to as “matchbook sign” in that the patients would often present with their skin scrapings in a small box like a matchbook. These days it’s probably more likely to be “zip lock sign”.
12% of DP patients present with what is known as folie a deux(literally madness of two) in which the patient is not the primary sufferer of the delusion, but has adopted the delusion of another patient – usually a spouse or other family member.(2) It’s also important to remember that these people may be perfectly rational in every other way, but have just this single fixated delusion. Also, the feelings they’re having are real – one must not tell them it’s just “in their head” – it’s just what they’re ascribing them to is off . Further treatment with atypical anti-psychotics – which is effective a majority of the time – should be broached carefully as people feel stigmatized by diagnoses of mental illness.
Now keep these things in mind while watching the following video that grrlscientist blogged this weekend about people who think bugs are crawling out of their skin.
(video and more below the fold)
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Lambert catches Cockburn in a big fat cherry-pick
I should have known better than to trust a single quote cited by a denialist or crank. In our Case Study of Alexander Cockburn we pointed out his selective use of data but we missed a big fat cherry-pick.
It’s based on this quote from Cockburns article:
As Richard Kerr, Science magazine’s man on global warming remarked, “Climate modelers have been ‘cheating’ for so long it’s become almost respectable.”
Tim Lambert catches Cockburn in this dishonesty and it’s a pretty bad behavior. It reminds me of the HOWTO again, in that people that become cranks really see only what they want to see in a source of information. It’s clear to any honest, reasonable person reading Kerr’s article that the conclusion was the opposite of what Cockburn suggested.
This is why it’s denialism, and not “dissent” or “skepticism”. They can’t seem to do it without dishonesty.
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Denialists' Deck of Cards: The Red Joker, "Give Money to the Leadership"
Giving money to the leadership of the Senate and House is a great strategy, because no proposals will be considered at all if the leadership blocks them. The leadership is rarefied; one only taps them in desperate situations