Jesus Christ. For a brief moment there, P.Z. Myers had won us over with his robust defense of free speech for skeptics; but then, after Jared Lee Loughner went bonkers and that abortion doctor got busted - wow. According to James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal, P.Z. promptly climbed back aboard his turnip truck, just so he could fall off of it again:
Myers seems to think symbolic speech from his political foes is a worse offense than the actual killing of babies. His lack of perspective is so gross that it has led him to outright depravity.
Ouch. Ouch. And Ouch. As they say, read the whole thing for yourself.
Oh well. We wish we could say we're surprised, but we were calling Myers a "clown" long before Taranto (apparently) even knew he existed. Still, it's a crying shame:
While the Vodkapundit has no clue what to do about the media, skeptic P.Z. Myers actually has some good advice for our most gullible TV types out there:
If you're disappointed in CNN, you can always turn to MSNBC…ooops, never mind, they're solemnly reporting on the end-of-the-world nonsense from the Harold Camping Cult. They're predicting the Rapture will come on 21 May.
I would like to propose a novel version of Pascal's Wager for the news media. When apocalyptic cults come along and announce disaster and doom, ridicule them. Just rip into them, send your most sarcastic, cynical reporters to cover the story, and just shred all the followers as loons and gullible freaks. There will be two possible outcomes.
One, they're right, and the world ends. Your business has nothing to gain or lose by taking them seriously before the big event — it's going kaput no matter what. So have a grand time before the catastrophe and make money with laughter. It's not as if listening to crazy ol' Harold Camping will make a bit of difference in your fate.
Two, they're wrong, and the world keeps rolling on beyond 21 May. We all win! It means your coverage was spot on perfect, and got all the right answers, while the cultists are going to have to go glumly back to living their miserable little failed lives. Follow up with a feature on all the broken-hearted crazies. Start looking for the next mob of nuts to mock.
Excellent advice - excellent! (And he even called this cult a "cult"!) Seriously, it's not like we're going to run out of end-of-the-world nutjobs anytime soon, even with 2012 right around the corner,...
The news media could have a field day - forever!
And getting them back to doing their jobs is the point, isn't it? Isn't it?
There's another silly argument taking place amongst skeptics, started by Jeff Wagg of the JREF, which we have no interest in (we stopped paying attention to the JREF once Randi handed over the day-to-day operations) but we did want to say two things related to it:
1) Though we never thought we'd be saying this, the more PZ Myers gets attacked from within the science and skeptic world, the more we're inclined to side with him and his brand of skepticism. We've already criticized online scientists for being too closely aligned with "spirituality", and agree with Meyers that any attempt to hang on to those within the fold who share that strain is unhealthy, unproductive, and unwelcome. The fact that, when we pointed it out, we were either ignored or attacked told us everything we needed to know about the mindset of their cultish "community", and we knew then we couldn't be part of it, except peripherally.
Still, these days PZ Myers is doing himself proud, and we wish him well in his battles.
2) We thought this quote from JT (of Atheism Resource) bears repeating for any non-skeptics out there:
Skepticism leads to certain conclusions like homeopathy doesn’t work or that psychics are frauds. Just as certain as it leads to those conclusions, it also leads to the conclusion that god doesn’t exist (or that anybody claiming to have good reason to believe that god exists has done so in error). And just like the previous conclusions, people who fail to grasp the godlessness of the universe often hamstring society,...
Well said. Well done. Well well.
That's all you're going to get from us on this - we told you:
See, the science bloggers are all upset because their parent company, SEED, went and,...oh, who gives a shit? It's nothing - truly NOTHING - compared to what I felt after my ex-wife killed three people and the, oh, so compassionate science crowd dissed me for coming to them while emotional, so fuck 'em. They're a bunch of stupid assholes, with their priorities all fucked up, their politics fucking everything else up, and their heads stuck so far up their asses they don't know their experiments from their excrement.
If their little "community" of fallen NewAge liberal attack dogs is coming apart, then that's what they deserve, for being a bunch of dickheads when they thought nobody else was looking.
Now, excuse me while I go and have a Pepsi in their honor,...
While I'm no fan of P.Z. Myers, or many other scientists these days (mind you: I still love science, but my respect for scientists has definitely waned since I started engaging with them) I have to come down on the side of the clown when it comes to the behavior of skeptics vs. (the beloved) Phil Plait's "Don't Be A Dick" speech at James Randi's TAM conference.
As Myers has said, trying to be nice "narrows the range of tactics unnecessarily" and - delusional thinking alert - it bears no resemblance to the reality scientists, themselves, have put the rest of us in.
As a true atheist and skeptic (someone who never believed) I found the results of Phil's simple poll of TAM attendees interesting - especially because they were so willing to admit the following amongst each other:
"Let me ask you a question: how many of you here today used to believe in something — used to, past tense — whether it was flying saucers, psychic powers, religion, anything like that? You can raise your hand if you want to. [lots of hands go up] Not everyone is born a skeptic. A lot of you raised your hand. I’d even say most of you, from what I can tell."
And let me tell you, none of them were pleased that I pointed that out. As a matter of fact, they were downright hostile, when all I said was what they all supposedly were into - the truth.
"Well, so what?" you might say, "They're atheists and skeptics now!" To which I would answer, no they're not. From what I can see, the science community hasn't shown they're inoculated, in the least, to the siren call of unreason, except with the cheapest form of evidence available: their words.
I bet, if Phil did that same hand-raising exercise - except the question was "How many of you here today voted for Obama?" - he would still find "Not everyone is born a skeptic. A lot of you raised your hand. I’d even say most of you, from what I can tell."
I'd even put money on Phil Plait, himself, having voted for Oprah Winfrey's candidate - cultishly referred to by the charlatan herself as "The One" - and known to be the NewAge choice. A politician who, like most cult leaders, had no previous accomplishments but was repeatedly said to be (and laughed about being) the leader of a cult. The same man who, speaking of his adversaries, told his followers to "get in their faces" and "punch back twice as hard".
This also puts scientists on the side of those who accused John McCain - and are still accusing this black Tea Partier - of being a "racist" on a daily basis.
And all the while, let's-be-civil Phil, and his fellow believing scientists said, and say, nothing.
And now look at us, stuck with a fool who advocates quackery, wants to financially bury us under "global warming" taxation, thinks NASA should be for the self-esteem training of Muslims, and didn't even call scientists to consult on logistics during the Gulf oil spill.
Here's another part of Phil Plait's question-and-answer period:
"Now let me ask you a second question: how many of you no longer believe in those things, and you became a skeptic, because somebody got in your face, screaming, and called you an idiot, brain-damaged, and a retard? [Very few hands go up]"
Now - again - I see scientists as just as in need of acceptance, able to be gullible, delusional, and just as untrustworthy, as the rest of the population (if they weren't, why would scientists - people who test hypotheses - need Randi, a magician, to help them figure out the wrong-headed things they'd come to believe?) so I have a hard time imagining they'd want to say anything against the great Phil Plait's thesis. But even a casual look at the endorsements to the right of this blog - and my e-mail account - will show that a healthy dose of anger and name-calling has it's usefulness.
True, that's all anecdotal - my word against Phil's - but, as I read Phil's let's disarm speech, I find (just this once) his words aren't worth much.
Does somebody getting "in your face" work? Well, according to the latest research (as Phil said during the "it's hard" portion of his speech) the calm, cool, recitation of facts actually backfire. What he left out is the part that refutes his thesis:
"There are also some cases where directness works. Kuklinski’s welfare study suggested that people will actually update their beliefs if you hit them 'between the eyes' with bluntly presented, objective facts that contradict their preconceived ideas. He asked one group of participants what percentage of its budget they believed the federal government spent on welfare, and what percentage they believed the government should spend. Another group was given the same questions, but the second group was immediately told the correct percentage the government spends on welfare (1 percent). They were then asked, with that in mind, what the government should spend. Regardless of how wrong they had been before receiving the information, the second group indeed adjusted their answer to reflect the correct fact."
Biff! Bam! Pow! How you like me now? Probably not much (nothing new there) but there's no one who has met me, online or off, who can claim that I don't want to "win the game" - probably more than the rest of you because, with my background (and results) and heritage, it's personal. (I'd even wager that it's the personal nature of my interest - that none of this is just theory to me and so I won't calm down about it - that makes most scientists steer clear.) I'm sure Phil's advice to be cool works on scientists, because it's my experience that if you approach them as a normal non-scientist would (which is what I did) they'll erupt in the very hubristic, double-barrelled we-know-everything assault Phil abhors. His friend and colleague, Orac, amongst others, has definitely made it known, in very non-PC terms, that he thinks I'm a fruitcake. Which doesn't hurt me in the least, coming from a guy who voted for Obama and "didn't consider acupuncture to be a form of woo."
Still, rather than suggesting scientists give up anger as a weapon, I'd rather give them my own tips on how to combat the influence of NewAge in society today:
1. Get truly active - and unrelenting. Allow NewAgers no safe haven, give no quarter. Shit, if enough of you guys can make the time (and can afford) to meet at TAM, then you ought to be able to organize at the paranormal-loving Lady GaGa's concerts. That would shut her down, spread the anti-woo message amongst her followers (a group you don't reach at all) and it would bring the cause of skepticism a remarkable amount of media attention. The same goes for appearances by Oprah, Dr. Oz, Shirley MacLaine, Louise Hay, Sylvia Browne, and anyone else we know of, spreading misinformation and, basically, doing what we know is wrong.
2. Call a spade a spade. Stop saying "Homeopathic preparations don't include one molecule of their original substance" (or whatever multi-syllabled dreck you guys say to each other) and stick with "It's fucking water!" Or - as they said in England about the "energy medicine" - it's witchcraft. Rieki? "You can't shoot magic fire out of your fingers!" Etc. That's what works on normal folks.
3. Attack the enemy within. How can doctors, and other medical professionals, who are skeptics tolerate having the likes of Dr. Oz in their ranks? I don't see one sign - not one - that doctors are putting heat on these charlatans for the misinformation they spread. Where are the attacks, in America, on chiropractors and the like? Whole Foods sells Homeopathy - why aren't you engaging them as skeptics did Boots in England? They should be drummed out of business, just as was done with Andrew Wakefield. (Here's a question: why can England be doing such a bang-up job against woo, making Simon Singh a hero, when here in America most skeptics are hardly known at all - even amongst fellow skeptics? I'll tell you: because he fought - and won.)
4. Stop attacking anyone on your side who says you're wrong. You're scientists: you're supposed to be used to this. When I came along, Orac was confused by NewAge - and attacked me for saying it was cultism - only to eventually come around. But he's never admitted he was wrong, never given me credit for correcting him, and never acted like I was anything but what I was when we met: someone trying to fight the same scourge he was. Instead, like Phil Plait, he focused on my tactics (which have remained unchanged) and decided to attempt to use them against me. (His readers even, occasionally, attacked me for being divorced.) This was not only cruel, under the circumstances in which we met, but unethical. He was wrong, I was right, and he ought to be big enough to admit it.
The same goes for the rest of you: The embarrassment scientists suffered over ClimateGate - an embarrassment which has seeped into science itself - was completely avoidable, if only scientists were willing to entertain that, as they do when James Randi points out a hoax, the nonsense that was being peddled (and still being peddled) didn't add up. I can't tell you how many times I got into an online argument with so-called scientists about it, who sent me to a website that would clear the whole thing up, only to discover the shit didn't make any sense. Not because I'm stupid, or the material was above my head, but because - being a student of NewAge - I know a scam when I see one.
Those scientists were so sold on their own - on the unquestioned work of other scientists - all they could do is alienate normal people who, they claim, they want to bring into the fold. That's a lie. What they wanted was to keep screaming "Ad Hominem Attack" until I conceded they knew a phrase I didn't (I know name-calling) and, thus, to claim they were smarter than I was. It wasn't true. As ClimateGate proved, smart ain't the same thing as intelligent.
5. This is the one that's going to sting: Look in the mirror. The one point I agree with Phil Plait on, whole-heartedly, is the misdirected anger with which you ply your trade. You're scientists - not science itself - so you're fallible, and I for one forgive you, but the truth is you do believe in weird things and will attack anyone who tells you so, who isn't a part of your culture already. What you should be attacking is what you've done to yourselves and science.
Phil's suggestion to give up our anger when attacking the enemies of reason doesn't speak of a people from "The Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave" but of NewAge, wimpiness, and Western Buddhism. As Phil found at TAM, the majority of you were once into "flying saucers, psychic powers, religion, anything like that" and it shows. Like all NewAgers, you're joiners - you wanted to be liked rather than right - and science is in trouble because of it. Science is not a method for being "non-judgmental" or nice - it's for being hard, on yourself most of all, to see if your ideas are true.
I love and appreciate the work of all scientists - Phil Plait especially: I read him often, and (unlike a lot of scientists) with very few reservations. I really don't want to criticize him. But, this time, he's wrong - clearly wrong - and I hope he'll appreciate that only his friends (and a friend to science) will tell him.
Now that we're in another of those periods when everybody starts doing a end of the year/decade round-up - and the verdict is in that this was (as I've always said) a "Decade From Hell" - I finally want to take a few posts to defend my (rightly) "negative" and mostly-unread-or-referenced little blog by saying, "I told you so". This is Part I:
The Scientific Mind: Clearly Defined
I think people first started calling me a "genius" when I was about 6 years old, but it never really became a big problem until around the year 2000. After that (like a child star discovering he ain't cute no more) it became quite obvious the designation of "genius" is a double-edged sword, because while, on the one hand, the word "genius" means I can be really smart, on the other hand it means A) I can get on people's nerves, and B) I have to spend the rest of my life with people I find to be over-the-top stupid. And unfortunately, for a genuis, "over-the-top stupid" describes almost anyone who accepts conventional wisdom - and, folks, there's a lot of really gullible, non-thinking and absolutely vicious idiots out there.
Oh - and I forgot to mention the worst, which is C) no matter how they try my patience, I'm expected to be "nice" to all of them.
Along with all that, what best defines "over-the-top-stupid" to me now'a'days is pretty much anyone who doesn't possess the ability to merely admit when they're wrong. Rush Limbaugh talks about this phenomena from time-to-time: how stupid people will seriously hate on anyone who knows something - not believes, but actually knows something - like I know NewAge. And those people will bring out the knives, especially, if the person that knows something doesn't have a college degree to back him up. (I think it was James Randi - hero to scientists, and critical thinkers, alike - who first said a PhD was merely a piece of paper that allowed idiots to pop-off at the mouth,...) One thing I've learned over the last 10 years: Groupthink, in the hands of the college educated - who, like gang members, are the most likely to engage in it - is a truly dangerous thing.
Of course, the ultimate symbol for this has to be the AGW "scientists", furiously doing anything - anything - not to be found out as being the fools and liars that they actually are. Oh, the conventional wisdom was so sure of global warming - based not on science but a belief. We saw millions of Americans, recently, willing to attempt wrecking the entire U.S. economy over it. (Think about that: they were willing to destroy the financial system of not only the greatest country on earth but the one they live in - without any real proof it was necessary. Now that's over-the-top-stupid.) Almost anyone who had a bumpersticker that read, "There's a village missing an idiot" during the Bush years (and there were a lot of them) is probably guilty of being a fool for the AGW scam. I talked to a lot of online scientists after I started this blog and almost all of them - Orac of Respectful Insolence, P.Z. Meyers of Pharyngula, and Mark Hoofnagle of the (just all together wrong) Denialism blog - all of them acted like idiots when confronted with my black ass, an actual skeptic. Every one of them - in defense of science, logic, and reason - was revealed by me to be an embarrassment to science, logic, and reason. But their supporters were even worse:
Not one of them questioned what these online "science" jokers were telling them. But rather, as a group, they were determined to bury anyone who questioned them - and they had a field day on me - or they'd refer me to one of those pre-approved climate websites, in the same manner that Michael Mann and Phil Jones did the "idiots" who questioned them. Very creepy - and cultish. They did the same thing regarding Barack Obama:
I'd ask them to explain his political platform, since they were so gun-ho behind it, and they'd either say what they hope he meant or refer me to his website.
They just couldn't admit (and probably still can't) that there is no "there" there.
That's, partially, what made this a "Decade From Hell" - there was no reasoning with supposedly-smart people. They were just like cult members: They'd cuss, and scream, and do anything else they had to, to sideline their critics - anything but to try and actually listen and understand. To discover it was happening offline, as well as on, was really disillusioning. (I've noticed Orac and Co. haven't said much, if anything, about the AGW scam since the East Anglia files were released - the true sign of dishonest cowards,....people should be on their asses for it.) It's just like when I told Orac (and Mark Hoofnagle) homeopathy was a cult, and Orac and his readers repeatedly gave me grief for it, only to see him adopt my language, later, without giving me a word of credit for his turn-around. No, the "scientific" way, now, is to ignore people who are willing to correct your findings, and there's no way Orac could appear to be fallible to his "followers". Better to pretend it never happened, or make it appear as though he came to the Homeopathy=cult conclusion on his own. (Yea, that's the ticket!)
What a Loser.
Why (now that I'm thinking about Orac and, that idiot, Hoofnagle) the online science community's behavior over the last few years, regarding me and science and what true skepticism means, has been a lot like what George W. Bush faced with a certain Islamic cult leader and his group,....at least the emotions were the same.
Jesus Christ. For a brief moment there, P.Z. Myers had won us over with his robust defense of free speech for skeptics; but then, after Jared Lee Loughner went bonkers and that abortion doctor got busted - wow. According to James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal, P.Z. promptly climbed back aboard his turnip truck, just so he could fall off of it again:
Oh well. We wish we could say we're surprised, but we were calling Myers a "clown" long before Taranto (apparently) even knew he existed. Still, it's a crying shame:
If P.Z. Myers wasn't a crazy Liberal, he'd be brilliant. 
