Denialism Blog

Denialism Blog

  • The Joys of the Skymall Catalog

    I just returned from a wonderful trip to Turkey and London, and the flight gave me the opportunity to spend hours with one of my favorite diversions, the Skymall Catalog. Admit it! You look at this thing full of wonders, and wonder who in the world buys them!

    i-49c0612e28d87b7ed4ef2006815eece3-bogus.jpgCheck out this whopper: the “Aculife Therapist Deluxe.” For a mere $179.95 you can “Help strengthen your health with the latest ancient technology.” Yes, the latest ancient technology!

    It continues: “Otzi, a 5,000 year old mummy found in the Alps during 1991, has spurred a whole new vigor into modern research of the Ancient Chinese medical practice of acupuncture. Recent examinations of the mummy found that Otzi has a number of tattoos that coincide with acupuncture points that would be used to treat various ailments from which he was suffering.” And Otzi was really sick! Looks like he needed help with “livers,” coffee-ground vomitus, and gynecological problems.

    So, what does this thing do? It, “send[s] a signal to the operator when a qi point that needed stimulation was touched and (2) could be switched to another setting that would pass a light electrical pulse into the point that required stimulation.”

    Brilliant! Sign me up.

  • Karadzic captured

    Radovan Karadzic, one of the worst mass-murders of the post-WWII era, has been captured, or, perhaps more properly, has been allowed to be captured. Karadzic was responsible for orchestrating the murders of tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims during the Balkan Wars.
    i-9d0e3366dd520cbfbae38bea2aa3b1b9-rt_karadzic_080722_mn.jpg
    A close friend of my family grew up in a small Bosnian city during the war. She lived in basements, and came up dodging sniper fire and grenades only when they couldn’t wait any longer to find food and water. Her mother suffers osteoporosis from years of malnutrition. He brother-in-law died of complications of war wounds. Her father, now dead of other causes, was in his home village at the beginning of the war. The Serbian army came to the village and separated the women from the men and boys. He took off running behind the women and escaped into the woods, while all the remaining males were shot to death.

    The Balkan Wars and the genocides they produced are still an open wound in Europe, but Serbia is apparently ready to join the European community and finally allowed Karadzic to be arrested.

    Oh, and guess what he’s been up to…

    That’s right, he grew a beard and has been practicing alternative medicine. Draw your own conclusions.

  • NY meetup

    Any native New Yorkers out there that read denialism blog? If so, I’ll be in town for the Sb meetup in NYC on August 9th. If anyone would like to meet me or the other sciencebloggers, let us know. And if you have a good idea where a bunch of people could find an air-conditioned space to do it, feel free to suggest away.

  • Propaganda

    Here and in other venues, we’ve written quite a bit about the tactics used in the anti-vaccination movement (or as I like to call it, the “infectious disease promotion movement (IDPM)”). Let’s examine some less subtle tactics.
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  • Vaccination and morality

    Who has the moral high ground in the vaccination wars?

    My initial response is that I do, “I” meaning the medical and public health fields—those of us who prevent disease, disability, and death.

    But it’s much more complicated. Many anti-vaccine activists are “true believers”. They really believe that vaccines do more harm than good. But, without getting all Godwin, being a true believer doesn’t insulate one from moral responsibility.
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  • The APS should have known better

    Those reading Deltoid’s coverage of the APS fiasco are probably up to date on this issue, but I feel like we need to discuss the APS failure in more detail. For those unaware of the latest in global warming denialist nonsense, the American Physical Society made the foolish mistake of entertaining global warming denialists by giving Christopher Monckton space in their newsletter to “challenge” global warming. As Lambert demonstrates in his post, the factual and calculation errors are a joke, but the strategy error is demonstrated by the fact that every global warming crank from tobacco apologist Steven Milloy to creationist William Dembski at UD is now celebrating the supposed end of a consensus on climate.

    Milloy leads with a story that “APS ENDS CONSENSUS MYTH!” and all the other cranks with no regard for disreputable sources have happily followed suit. Creationists like Dembski, happy to promote any conspiracy theory about “mainstream” science that they think oppresses cranks like him cheerfully joins in. This is despite the fact that the APS has not changed it’s position on global warming, the article itself is a joke, and it is not even in the peer-reviewed literature. Monckton is crying foul because he thinks that a piece in a newsletter represents peer review. How embarrassing is it for them that because the piece was subjected by a review by an editor that he thinks this is peer review? Do we really have to explain what peer-review actually is to these people? Are they so ignorant? Clearly the answer is yes.

    Peer review means that your paper is shared with experts in the field and they are allowed to challenge statements made in the paper and the author has to rebut or provide more data to address their concerns. Peer review is not having a single editor look over the paper for egregious errors; if this were actually a peer-reviewed publication, such a review would represent a massive failure of the review system to have a publication with only an editor reading over the paper. For those that haven’t been through the process, peer-review is usually grueling, must involve more than just an editor looking over the paper – often several leading researchers in a field – and usually requires an author to address substantive challenges to their argument. Monckton’s stunning ignorance of the process is telling.

    That being said the bigger failure here is that of the APS not realizing they were dealing with a den of snakes when they opened up any publication to the likes of Monckton. Never mind that Monckton’s paper is about as big a challenge to the theory of anthropomorphic climate change as a poodle wearing boxing gloves is to Mike Tyson; as has been said before, denialists aren’t interested in debate, they are only interested in the appearance of debate. This non-peer-reviewed publication in a newsletter is being touted by cranks all over the internet as proof that global warming is being debated in the halls of academia because it is under the auspices of the APS. When the APS clarifies, correctly, that this is not an example of peer-reviewed publication, they get attacked by Milloy and others as stifling debate and caving to the global warming conspiracy.

    To sum up. Monckton has published tripe that is clearly nonsense, is not peer-reviewed, and in no way has APS changed it’s position on global warming. The lesson is that when dealing with crooks, the truth doesn’t matter, and they will twist the truth to serve their purposes if you give them an opening. The APS has failed to realize that these people are not honest brokers in a debate. There are few clearer examples of this phenomenon than this blatant prevarication by the likes of Monckton, Milloy and others promoting this “end to consensus” or cover-up by the APS. This is not debate, this is denialism, and APS has learned the difference the hard way.

  • Where did we go wrong? Framing vaccination

    I’ve had a bit of writer’s block lately, but I’ve learned to take my own advice and just wait it out. And so I did. Then, today, I read Orac’s piece on framing the vaccine problem. It set my mind a-whirring, so I’ve put the coffee on, and I’m setting fingers to keyboard.

    I don’t care about the whole “framing science” thing. The systematic evaluation of science communication is too far outside my field. I am stuck being a “empiric framer.”

    (Jargon alert! Outside of the blogosphere, my communications are basically one-on-one, doctor and patient. My framing is the equivalent of a RCT n=1 trial—I get a chance to intervene with a single subject and evaluate the response, but I don’t get the chance to study larger sample sizes and do statistical analyses of my work. End jargon)

    The vaccine problem is currently an n=1 problem. Individual medical professionals work hard every day to educate individual patients. Decades ago, we didn’t need to convince anyone to get vaccinated—the need was so blindingly obvious that people lined up for their shots and prayed there would be enough to go around. Everyone saw polio, saw measles, saw people becoming disabled or dying from infectious diseases. Everyone watched as our public health improved with the wide-spread administration of vaccines. And now we are the victims of our own success—people don’t fear vaccine-preventable diseases because they no longer know them.
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  • The stupid continues at Channel 7

    Right now, I’m looking out my window to see the spreading pall of burning stupid rising over Channel 7’s tower in Southfield. And the stupid isn’t just for Steve Wilson anymore. What reporter Carolyn Clifford lacks in adiposity, she easily makes up for in credulity. Her “investigative report” tonight on the HPV vaccine Gardasil is another example of embarrassingly bad health reporting.

    A few preliminaries:

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  • Skeptics' Circle #91

    …is up at Sorting Out Science. Go and read it. Now.

  • Uh oh…not again

    Tonight on WXYZ Channel 7 in Detroit, the station that brought us the irresponsible health reporting of Steve Wilson, there will be a report on the HPV vaccine Gardasil. Given this station’s recent history, I’m not very optimistic.

    The Gardasil issue has been a unique crank-magnet. It has attracted a an interesting mix of religious zealots, antivax cultists, consumer advocates, and conspiracy theorists. It’s even got Oprah! It’s also damned interesting science.

    Stay tuned.