Denialism Blog

Category: Cranks

  • This day in Crankery, November 16th

    So who here has actually read the health care bill?. I’ve been devoting a bit of time each week to peruse more and more of it, and while there are endless obstacles to a complete understanding of it (including legalese and the annoying tendency of legislation to contain edits to other bills without including the text of the other bills being edited) it is telling that opponents of the bill are having some difficulty coming up with real criticisms of it. For example, the now infamous death panel fiasco was a willful misunderstanding of a completely wholesome concept, the idea that physicians should be compensated for having end-of-life discussions with patients. It makes sense on multiple levels to reward such discussions. For one, they are hard conversations to have, and without a motivating factor, they are avoided by many physicians. The result is a situation in which many patients fail to communicate their desires for the end of their lives, they fall in the default pathway of over-utilization of resources at the end-of-life, with invasive and often pointless interventions that have no benefit and burden and overwhelm the health-care system. The ideologues who sank that language in the bill should truly rot in hell, because they destroyed a good thing just to create a bogus political argument.

    And speaking of the death panel conspiracy theory, has anyone been checking out Arthur Goldwag’s coverage of Sarah Palin’s conspiratorial beliefs? How sad is it that we still have candidates for national office that believe things that fail the snopes.com test? Palin gives me the creeps, she represents my worst nightmare, a crank candidate with inroads towards a national campaign. Goldwag’s writing on the birther movement is also excellent and I’m glad to see these crackpots are being laughed out of court for the fools they are. In particular I liked the text of Judge Carter’s decision describing what it’s like to deal with cranks in court:

    The hearings have been interesting to say the least. Plaintiffs’ arguments through Taitz have generally failed to aid the Court. Instead, Plaintiffs’ counsel has favored rhetoric seeking to arouse the emotions and prejudices of her followers rather than the language of a lawyer seeking to present arguments through cogent legal reasoning. While the Court has no desire to chill Plaintiffs’ enthusiastic presentation, Taitz’s argument often hampered the efforts of her co-counsel Gary Kreep (“Kreep”), counsel for Plaintiffs Drake and Robinson, to bring serious issues before the Court. The Court has attempted to give Plaintiffs a voice and a chance to be heard by respecting their choice of counsel and by making every effort to discern the legal arguments of Plaintiffs’ counsel amongst the rhetoric.
    This Court exercised extreme patience when Taitz endangered this case being heard at all by failing to properly file and serve the complaint upon Defendants and held multiple hearings to ensure that the case would not be dismissed on the technicality of failure to effect service. While the original complaint in this matter was filed on January 20, 2009, Defendants were not properly served until August 25, 2009. Taitz successfully served Defendants only after the Court intervened on several occasions and requested that defense counsel make significant accommodations for her to effect service. Taitz also continually refused to comply with court rules and procedure. Taitz even asked this Court to recuse Magistrate Judge Arthur Nakazato on the basis that he required her to comply with the Local Rules. See Order Denying Pls.’ Mot. For Modification of Mag. J. Nakazato’s Aug. 6, 2009, Order; Denying Pls.’ Mot. to Recuse Mag. J. Nakazato; and Granting Ex Parte App. for Order Vacating Voluntary Dismissal (Sep. 8, 2009). Taitz also attempted to dismiss two of her clients against their wishes because she did not want to work with their new counsel. See id. Taitz encouraged her supporters to contact this Court, both via letters and phone calls. It was improper and unethical for her as an attorney to encourage her supporters to attempt to influence this Court’s decision. Despite these attempts to manipulate this Court, the Court has not considered any outside pleas to influence the Court’s decision.
    Additionally, the Court has received several sworn affidavits that Taitz asked potential witnesses that she planned to call before this Court to perjure themselves. This Court is deeply concerned that Taitz may have suborned perjury through witnesses she intended to bring before this Court. While the Court seeks to ensure that all interested parties have had the opportunity to be heard, the Court cannot condone the conduct of Plaintiffs’ counsel in her efforts to influence this Court.
    …
    Plaintiffs have encouraged the Court to ignore these mandates of the Constitution; to
    disregard the limits on its power put in place by the Constitution; and to effectively overthrow a sitting president who was popularly elected by “We the People”-over sixty-nine million of the people. Plaintiffs have attacked the judiciary, including every prior court that has dismissed their claim, as unpatriotic and even treasonous for refusing to grant their requests and for adhering to the terms of the Constitution which set forth its jurisdiction. Respecting the constitutional role and jurisdiction of this Court is not unpatriotic. Quite the contrary, this Courtconsiders commitment to that constitutional role to be the ultimate reflection of patriotism.
    Therefore, for the reasons stated above, Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss is GRANTED.

    You can just taste the crankery. The complete looseness with the truth as long as it conforms to the warped worldview of these crackpots is part and parcel of cranks the world over. Reading the follow-up of this case from right wing sites like Free Republic, and Storm Front, it’s impossible to tell the difference between the conservative ideologues and the unrepentant racists. All the appeals to patriotism and the constitution are such weak cover for the fact these cranks are angry we have a black president.

    I continue to work the long hours of a surgical intern and must say, it’s a lot of drudgery. Internship is much more about paying your dues than about learning a whole lot, although my daily routine is occasionally punctuated by moments of extreme excitement. For instance, I will not forget the first time I placed a chest tube in a patient in the bedside, the blood that poured out of the guys chest that was keeping him from breathing, or the time I walked into a room to discover a patient in the midst of having a heart attack. Luckily, the training sets in, and we have a lot of supervision, so even when things get crazy I’ve always got someone with me who has seen it all before.

    I also am increasingly motivated to write more as I feel less plugged-in than ever to the outside world since writing at least forced me to read tons of diverse information on lots of different topics. Cranks and crankery are all around us and I’m constantly reminded of the problems they create. It seems every time I see some topical show, and the commentators pause to reflect for a moment on the problem they’re all facing, it seems like they all know what the problem is but just don’t have a good name for it. The problem is that lies can be equally effective as the truth, and denialism creates very real problems for us and our democracy every single day. Denialism works, and cranks run amok throughout our country and the world. We have to keep writing about it until rather being on the tip of everyone’s tongue, people are willing to come out and call out denialism for what it is, and shout it down when it rears its ugly head.

  • Reclaiming "Freedom"

    Thomas Frank’s weekly column in the Journal is one of the few tolerable pieces in the paper’s opinion section. This week, Frank writes, sensibly, in my opinion, that the left needs to recapture “freedom.”

    There are few things in politics more annoying than the right’s utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word “freedom” that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed, that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty, the noblest cause of them all.

    He concludes:

    Even such pits of statism as Britain and Canada remain free societies, generally speaking, despite having gone skipping blithely down the universal-health-care road to serfdom decades ago.

    For the sort of people who gathered on the Mall last weekend, however, I doubt that such observations would matter in the least. Their conception of freedom soars on by a force all its own, carried aloft on the wings of pure abstract reasoning: Government intervention equals tyranny. Liberalism is forever a form of despotism-in-waiting.

    The reality of misgovernment, meanwhile, is not something you can grasp simply by donning a tricorn hat and musing on the majesty of Lady Liberty. It requires, among other things, close attention to the following irony: That many of the most destructive and even corrupt policies of the past few decades were engineered by exactly the sort of people who claim to be motivated by freedom and liberty. Our friends on the Mall no doubt imagine themselves as guiltless accusers, but if they really want to understand how our country got to this sorry state, they need to take a long hard look in the mirror.

  • Holocaust Museum Shooter – Anti-semite and conspiracy theorist

    Orac has already pointed out the disgusting hate behind the Holocaust museum shooter and his holocaust denial. Others around the internet, in particular Pat at Screw Loose Change have pointed out he was an example of crank magnetism. Not surprisingly, he was also a 9/11 truther (which as Pat says, “scratch a 9/11 truther and you get a holocaust denier”), loved Mel Gibson, and promoted conspiracies about how Obama isn’t a US citizen.

    I am particularly interested in his anti-Federal Reserve craziness, which these days, especially among the Ron Paul crowd, I’ve noticed seems to be a stand-in or euphemism for “Jewish bankers”. I think it’s no surprise that Ron Paul is the Stormfront candidate, as his theories about the gold standard and federal reserve being the source of all evil are congruent with the classic jewish/banker/protocols conspiracies usually espoused by the extreme right wing and neo-nazis. Is this the mainstreaming of an anti-Jewish conspiracy theory? Or is it just another example of crank magnetism?

    Finally, this is another example of the importance of understanding and working to correct the problem of the suspicious personality. This type of thinking isn’t just unscientific, historically bankrupt, irrational, and just plain crazy, it also leads to extremism as it feeds into persecutory delusions, and as people become more disenfranchised due to their insane beliefs, it eventually will cause violence. This violence, evidenced by shootings loosely directed at liberals and gays like at the Knoxville Unitarian Church, is likely being ratcheted up by the increasingly unhinged conspiracy-mongering coming from the right. Liberals are being described as destroying America, major right-wing media moguls like Andrew Breitbart are spreading conspiracies about the liberal intent to destroy the country, Glenn Beck is spouting off total gibberish about how his country is being destroyed by liberals, etc. This is only going to get worse and the paranoid conspiracy-mongering from the right is stoking the flames.

  • The psychology of crankery

    ResearchBlogging.orgOur recent discussions of HIV/AIDS denial and in particular Seth Kalichman’s book “Denying AIDS” has got me thinking more about the psychology of those who are susceptible to pseudoscientific belief. It’s an interesting topic, and Kalichman studies it briefly in his book mentioning the “suspicious minds”:

    At its very core, denialism is deeply embedded in a sense of mistrust. Most obviously, we see suspicion in denialist conspiracy theories. Most conspiracy theories grow out of suspicions about corruptions in government, industry, science, and medicine, all working together in some grand sinister plot. Psychologically, suspicion is the central feature of paranoid personality, and it is not overreaching to say that some denialists demonstrate this extreme. Suspicious thinking can be understood as a filter through which the world is interpreted, where attention is driven towards those ideas and isolated anecdotes that confirm one’s preconceived notions of wrong doing. Suspicious thinkers are predisposed to see themselves as special or to hold some special knowledge.
    Psychotherapist David Shpairo in his classic book Neurotic Styles describes the suspicious thinker. Just as wee see in denialism, suspiciousness is not easily penetrated by facts or evidence that counter individuals’ preconceived worldview. Just as Shapiro describes in the suspicious personality, the denialist selectively attends to information that bolsters his or her own beliefs. Denialists exhibit suspicious thinking when they manipulate objective reality to fit within their beliefs. It is true that all people are prone to fit the world into their sense of reality, but the suspicious person distorts reality and does so with an uncommon rigidity. The parallel between the suspicious personality style and denialism is really quite compelling. As described by Shapiro:

    A suspicious person is a person who has something on his mind. He looks at the world with fixed and preoccupying expectation, and he searches repetitively, and only, for confirmation of it. He will not be persuaded to abandon his suspicion of some plan of action based on it. On the contrary, he will pay no attention to rational arguments except to find in them some aspect or feature that actually confirms his original view. Anyone who tries to influence or persuade a suspicious person will not only fail, but also, unless he is sensible enough to abandon his efforts early will, himself, become an object of the original suspicious idea.

    The rhetoric of denialism clearly reveals a deeply suspicious character. In denialism, the science of AIDS is deconstructed to examine evidence taken out of context by non-scientists. The evidence is assimilated into one’s beliefs that HIV does not cause AIDS, that HIV tests are invalid, that the science is corrupt, and aimed to profit Big Pharma.
    …
    The insights offered by Shapiro are that denialists are not “lying” in the way that most anti-denialists portray them. The cognitive style of the denialist represents a warped sense of reality for sure, explaining why arguing or debating with a denialist gets you nowhere. But the denialist is not the evil plotter they are often portrayed as. Rather denialists are trapped in their denialism.
    …
    Psychologically, certain people seem predisposed to suspicious thinking and it seems this may be true of denialism as well. I submit that dienialism stems from a conspiracy-theory-prone personality style. We see this in people who appear predisposed to suspiciousness, and these people are vulnerable to anti-establishment propaganda. We know that suspicious people view themselves as the target of wrongdoing and hold persecutory ideas.

    I agree that this certainly represents a portion of denialists, but not all. I think others, for example creationists and global warming denialists, tend to have a different motivation and style, due to ideological extremism that warps their worldview. Ideological and paranoid denialism can co-exist within denialist camps, or even within an individual, but there are areas where the overlap is incomplete. Still, the issue of the suspicious personality style is important.

    We all know this person. If you don’t, maybe you know Dale Gribble (AKA Rusty Shackleford).

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    I just know Mike Judge has met the suspicious personality style and encapsulated the extreme of this personality in this character. Dale inevitably sees every event as tied to some bizarre government/alien conspiracy, and inevitably the other men in the alley ignore his interjections or Hank simply says, “that’s asinine”. Hank is a wise man. To argue with a Dale would only make you look like the fool.

    Some anti-denialists sites have recently brought to my attention a growing body of work trying to understand how people become conspiracy theorists. Two papers in particular are of interest, the first Unanswered Questions: A Preliminary Investigation of
    Personality and Individual Difference Predictors of 9/11 Conspiracist Beliefs     [1] is an interesting study because it provides some explanation for crank magnetism.

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  • Oprah is a crank

    PZ brings to my attention this article in Newsweek which sums up Oprah’s views on health, and one sadly must come to the conclusion that Oprah is a crank. Based on our definition of crankery, one of the critical aspects is the incompetence of an individual in judging sources of information. How else can you describe her dismissal of legitimate medical opinion for the pseudoscience of celebrities like Suzanne Somers or Jenny McCarthy?

    That was apparently good enough for Oprah. “Many people write Suzanne off as a quackadoo,” she said. “But she just might be a pioneer.” Oprah acknowledged that Somers’s claims “have been met with relentless criticism” from doctors. Several times during the show she gave physicians an opportunity to dispute what Somers was saying. But it wasn’t quite a fair fight. The doctors who raised these concerns were seated down in the audience and had to wait to be called on. Somers sat onstage next to Oprah, who defended her from attack. “Suzanne swears by bioidenticals and refuses to keep quiet. She’ll take on anyone, including any doctor who questions her.”

    That would be a lot of doctors. Outside Oprah’s world, there isn’t a raging debate about replacing hormones. Somers “is simply repackaging the old, discredited idea that menopause is some kind of hormone-deficiency disease, and that restoring them will bring back youth,” says Dr. Nanette Santoro, director of reproductive endocrinology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Older women aren’t missing hormones. They just don’t need as much once they get past their childbearing years. Unless a woman has significant discomfort from hot flashes–and most women don’t–there is little reason to prescribe them. Most women never use them. Hormone therapy can increase a woman’s risk of heart attacks, strokes, blood clots and cancer. And despite Somers’s claim that her specially made, non-FDA-approved bioidenticals are “natural” and safer, they are actually synthetic, just like conventional hormones and FDA-approved bioidenticals from pharmacies–and there are no conclusive clinical studies showing they are less risky. That’s why endocrinologists advise that women take the smallest dose that alleviates symptoms, and use them only as long as they’re needed.
    …
    This is where things get tricky. Because the truth is, some of what Oprah promotes isn’t good, and a lot of the advice her guests dispense on the show is just bad. The Suzanne Somers episode wasn’t an oddball occurrence. This kind of thing happens again and again on Oprah. Some of the many experts who cross her stage offer interesting and useful information (props to you, Dr. Oz). Others gush nonsense. Oprah, who holds up her guests as prophets, can’t seem to tell the difference. She has the power to summon the most learned authorities on any subject; who would refuse her? Instead, all too often Oprah winds up putting herself and her trusting audience in the hands of celebrity authors and pop-science artists pitching wonder cures and miracle treatments that are questionable or flat-out wrong, and sometimes dangerous.
    …
    But back on the Oprah show, McCarthy’s charges went virtually unchallenged. Oprah praised McCarthy’s bravery and plugged her book, but did not invite a physician or scientist to explain to her audience the many studies that contradict the vaccines-autism link. Instead, Oprah read a brief statement from the Centers for Disease Control saying there was no science to prove a connection and that the government was continuing to study the problem. But McCarthy got the last word. “My science is named Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.” Oprah might say that McCarthy was just sharing her first-person story and that Oprah wasn’t endorsing her point of view. But by the end of the show, the take-away message for any mother with young kids was pretty clear: be afraid.

    Dangerous is right. One wonders why the CDC doesn’t have a public health authority devoted to studying the spread of quackery at the hands of celebrities and promoters of woo such as Oprah. It’s disappointing though, she’s clearly an intelligent person and has the potential to do so much good, but instead chooses to follow the advice of any celebrity at hand who will tell her and her audience what they want to hear.

    What’s worse is that while seeking advice from quacks who promote this wishful thinking, at the same time she reinforces that most fundamental aspect of medical woo. When you are sick it isn’t because human bodies are fragile, or they wear out, or are attacked by bacteria and viruses, instead it’s your fault. Sickness isn’t an accident. It’s your failure. You failed to take supplements, or you failed to protect yourself, or you are weak-minded, or you failed spiritually. Of course there are things that we can do to protect ourselves and stay healthy, I wouldn’t suggest some form of health fatalism. But medical quackery takes a healthy attitude of self-protection to an extreme of self-flagellation. It promotes the idea that there is always a way of staying healthy, (take this vitamin!) when in reality sickness and death comes to us all no matter how hard we wish it were otherwise. This wishful thinking and self-doubt is, of course, what is exploited to sell quack remedies.

    Oprah fails her audience, not only in her incompetence in judging medical expertise, but also for complicity in this most insidious aspect of quackery, that of blaming the victim.
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  • What's sad is that this actually works

    The onion, as always, nails it:

    Oh, No! It’s Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!

    I…I think it’s finally over. Our reactionary emotional response seems to have stopped it dead in its tracks. If I’m right, all we have to do now is smugly reiterate our half-formed thesis and–oh, no! For the love of God, no! It’s thoughtfully mulling things over!

    Run! Run! It’s making reasonable, fact-based arguments!

    Quickly! Hide behind self-righteousness! The ad hominem rejoinders–ready the ad hominem rejoinders! Watch out! Dodge the issue at hand! Question its character and keep moving haphazardly from one flawed point to the next!

    All together now! Put every bit of secondhand conjecture into it you’ve got!

    …

    All is lost. We don’t stand a chance against its relentless onslaught of exhaustive research and immaculate rhetoric. We may as well lie down and–Christ, how it pains me to say it–admit that it’s right. My friends, I would like to take these last few moments of stubborn close-mindedness to say that it’s been an honor to dig myself into this hole with you.

    Unless…wait, of course! Why didn’t we think of it before? Volume! Sheer volume! It’s so simple. Quickly now, we don’t have much time! Don’t let it get a word in edgewise! Derisively cut it off mid-sentence! Now, launch the sophomoric personal attacks! Louder, yes, that’s it, louder! Be repetitive, juvenile, and obstinate! It’s working! It’s working!

    We’ve done it! It’s walking away and shaking its head in disgust! Huzzah! Finally–defeated with a single three-minute volley of irrelevant, off-topic shouting!

    Ironic, really, isn’t it?

    Thanks lbcapps

  • Denialism in the Literature

    ResearchBlogging.orgIt’s good news though! A description of the tactics and appropriate response to denialism was published in the European Journal of Public Health by authors Pascal Diethelm and Martin McKee. It’s entitled “Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?” and I think it does an excellent job explaining the harms of deniailsm, critical elements of denialism, as well as providing interesting historical examples of corporate denialism on the part of tobacco companies.

    HIV does not cause AIDS. The world was created in 4004 BCE. Smoking does not cause cancer. And if climate change is happening, it is nothing to do with man-made CO2 emissions. Few, if any, of the readers of this journal will believe any of these statements. Yet each can be found easily in the mass media.

    The consequences of policies based on views such as these can be fatal. Thabo Mbeki’s denial that that HIV caused AIDS prevented thousands of HIV positive mothers in South Africa receiving anti-retrovirals so that they, unnecessarily, transmitted the disease to their children.1 His health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, famously rejected evidence of the efficacy of these drugs, instead advocating treatment with garlic, beetroot and African potato. It was ironic that their departure from office coincided with the award of the Nobel Prize to Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi for their discovery that HIV is indeed the case of AIDS. The rejection of scientific evidence is also apparent in the popularity of creationism, with an estimated 45% of Americans in 2004 believing that God created man in his present form within the past 10 000 years.2 While successive judgements of the US Supreme Court have rejected the teaching of creationism as science, many American schools are cautious about discussing evolution. In the United Kingdom, some faith-based schools teach evolution and creationism as equally valid ‘faith positions’. It remains unclear how they explain the emergence of antibiotic resistance.

    In particular I found their inclusion of a tactic of inversionism interesting:
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  • Happy Blogiversary To Us!

    It’s been two years now since we said hello to scienceblogs, and had our introductory posts on Conspiracy, Unified theory of the Crank, and the denialist deck of cards.

    Lately reading a recent profile of a crank, Marc Morano in the NYT, which was sent to me by the crank himself. I can’t help but be amazed how our initial description has held up.

    For one, throughout the article, it’s wonderful how wihtout realizing it, Morano exposes the the fact he’s living in a bizarre fantasy world. Starting with the questionable reality of his confrontation with Al Gore:

    For example, Mr. Morano said he once spotted former Vice President Al Gore on an airplane returning from a climate conference in Bali. Mr. Gore was posing for photos with well-wishers, and Mr. Morano said he had asked if he, too, could have his picture taken with Mr. Gore.

    He refused, Mr. Morano said.

    “You attack me all the time,” Mr. Gore said, according to Mr. Morano.

    “Yes, we do,” Mr. Morano said he had replied.

    Mr. Gore’s office said Mr. Gore had no memory of the encounter. Mr. Morano does not care. He tells the story anyway.

    Then his pride over being a swift-boater:

    He then jumped to Cybercast News Service, where he was the first to publish accusations from Vietnam Swift-boat veterans that Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, then the Democratic presidential nominee, had glorified his war record. Many of the accusations later proved unfounded.

    Mr. Morano is proud of his work, which he says is not advocacy but truth seeking.

    Or the bizarre way he justifies including scientists who completely disagree with his position on his BS AGW dissenter list:

    Kevin Grandia, who manages Desmogblog.com, which describes itself as dedicated to combating misinformation on climate change, says the report is filled with so-called experts who are really weather broadcasters and others without advanced degrees.

    Chris Allen, for example, the weather director for WBKO-TV in Kentucky, is listed as a meteorologist on the report, even though he has no degree in meteorology. On his Web site, Mr. Allen has written that his major objection to the idea of human-influenced climate change is that “it completely takes God out of the picture.” Mr. Allen did not respond to phone calls.

    Mr. Grandia also said Mr. Morano’s report misrepresented the work of legitimate scientists. Mr. Grandia pointed to Steve Rayner, a professor at Oxford, who was mentioned for articles criticizing the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 international treaty on curbing carbon dioxide emissions.

    Dr. Rayner, however, in no way disputes the existence of global warming or that human activity contributes to it, as the report implies. In e-mail messages, he said that he had asked to be removed from the Morano report and that a staff member in Mr. Inhofe’s office had promised that he would be. He called his inclusion on the list “quite outrageous.”

    Asked about Dr. Rayner, Mr. Morano was unmoved. He said that he had no record of Dr. Rayner’s asking to be removed from the list and that the doctor must be “not to be remembering this clearly.”

    Yes, clearly, Dr. Rayner must not be remembering how he never said anything in support of the denialist position on warming. Only Marc Morano is ever correct.

    It’s amazing to me how people who are so clearly cranks can remain so influential, especially on a topic as important as global warming. We clearly have more work to do.

  • The Global Warming Cranks – George Will officially in their ranks

    One would think given recent findings that antarctic warming is robust for instance, that the canard of antarctic cooling would go away. Or, that based on the round dismissal of the myth of 1970s global cooling warnings we’d stop hearing about that in the media too. But instead I’m watching TV last night and there’s all these unbelievable crank ads sponsored by the anti-regulation ideologues the Americans for Prosperity featuring fake expert John Coleman. His senseless rant against the stimulus and the evils of regulation is accompanied by text on the bottom of the screen declaring “global warming it is the hoax” and “it is the greatest scam in history”. It is amazing in this day and age that this shameless conspiracy theory is being broadcast on national television. There is no way that one can on the one hand describe anti-AGW denialism as skepticism, and at the same time be a proponent of such an absurd conspiracy that thousands of scientists around the world, and journals, and editors, and politicians are all in cahoots to falsify data about climate.

    But if there is a truism about crankery that I can come up with to explain the persistence of debunked arguments, it is that good ideas may come and go, but we’re stuck with the bad ones forever. For instance, we saw this weekend that George will still thinks there were predictions of global cooling in the 1970s. Scibling James decries George Will’s inability to read what he cites, but this is nothing new. George’s Willful Ignorance on this topic has persisted for years this isn’t the first time he’s misquoted that exact same article, or the second time either despite being corrected by others. His incompetence at judging sources, and his inability to stop citing false information shows he’s simply unwilling or unable to differentiate between legitimate and false information, or even read for comprehension for that matter.

    What can be our response to this consistent dishonesty from Will? A repeat of a cherry-pick not once, or twice, but three times despite this being clearly false? I think the only thing you can say about someone like this, a man who can’t be turned, is that they’re a crank.
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  • The Ayn Rand Deprogrammer: Submissions Solicited

    Sciblings, I request your assistance in an important venture.

    I recently learned that Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead was a top read among UC Berkeley undergrads in 1987 and 1997. This dismaying fact drove me to start assembling a reader, The Ayn Rand Deprogrammer. I’ve spent the last several weeks reviewing possible texts for this important new work. Here is the first candidate for inclusion, and going forward, I would appreciate any suggestions that you have for the Deprogrammer.

    Mary Gaitskill: Two Girls, Fat and Thin

    I spent much of my vacation reading Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin, where Ayn Rand is presented as Anna Granite, an amphetamine-popping, average looking, salon-holding kook who writes The Bulwark. Gaitskill depicts the salons held in Rand’s apartment in the development of her second book, Atlas Shrugged (which apparently included Alan Greenspan!).

    Gaitskill does a bizarro sex scene even better than Rand (from Two Girls):

    She crouched in the darkened room, her face almost contorted with fear. He stood still in the doorway, arms loose at his sides, an amused sneer on his mouth. She felt her lip curl. She darted forward and then she felt her body, helpless and frail, crushed against chest. She felt her fists and elbows beating against his form. She thought she felt a deep, silent laugh well up in his chest. Effortlessly, he lifted her body and carried her to the stone sculpture. It was not an act of love, or an act of hate. It was an act of contempt, an act of detachment and brutality. Asia knew that she was being utterly debased by him. Yet the debasement was bound to an exaltation that made her moan. Their mouths locked; there was pain that tore her body and ecstasy that wrenched her soul. He crucified her on his stone.

    Gaitskill attacks Rand in many ways, most directly through an article written by one of the two protagonists:

    This cultural utopia of greed, expressed in gentrification and the slashing of social programs, has had its spokesperson and prophet for the last fifty years, a novelist whose books are American fantasies that mirror, in all its neurotic excess, the frantic twist to the right we are not experiencing. Anna Granite, who coined the term “the Truth of Selfishness,” has been advocating the yuppie raison d’etre since the early forties; it is only now that her ideas are being lived out, in mass culture and in government.

    This book requires a lot of investment for the Ayn Rand critiques, but it is probably worth it. I love the depiction of Ayn Rand’s public lecture; it reminded me of visits to the Cato Institute.

    Call for Submissions

    If you think this is an important venture, please suggest texts in the comments for inclusion.