Interesting Skeptical Links and Articles

davros

Originally posted by williamgrogan
It just dawned on me...........

Davros is on the Atkins diet

More unsubstantiated allegations :rolleyes:

Fact: davros doesn't even know what the Atkins diet is.

williamgrogan

A pity someone had to die though!

Faith healer receives 9-year prison sentence; radio host sued.

Reina Chavarria, of Van Nuys, California, has been sentenced to nine
years in prison for practicing medicine without a license and
injecting drugs into a man who later died. In November 2002, she was
arrested administering vitamins and an anti-inflammatory drug to a
54-year-old handyman who consulted her for a persistent rash. The
injections caused the man to have convulsions and die shortly
afterward. The man had consulted her for a persistent skin disorder.
Police investigators later found candles, voodoo dolls, and religious
figurines in the room where she treated her clients. In November
2003, Chavarria pleaded guilty to four counts of unlawful medical
practice and three counts of tax evasion. Reina's husband Jose
pleaded no contest to signing a false tax return and was sentenced to
two years' probation. Chavarria's assistant, Margarita Montes, who
pleaded no contest to one count of unlawful medical practice, was
sentenced to nine months in Los Angeles County Jail and three years'
probation. The victim's family has filed suit against Chavarria,
Montes, the Hispanic Broadcasting Corp (parent company of Los Angeles
radio station KSCA-FM), and Alexandro Coello (a/k/a "El Cucuy") who
hosted a radio program through which Chavarria attracted clients for
her services. [Fausset R. Van Nuys faith healer is sentenced to 9
years in prison. Los Angeles Times Feb 10, 2004] In November 2003,
the California Franchise Tax Board reported that the Chavarrias
failed to report income of more than $319,000 for the years 1999
through 2001 and owed the state more than $45,000 in delinquent
income taxes and penalties.

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williamgrogan

The Union of Concerned Scientists has issued an interesting report on Mr Bush's administration

Scientific Integrity in Policymaking
An Investigation into the Bush Administration's Misuse of Science

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/rsi/page.cfm?pageID=1322

click on "full report" under Related Links, its a PDF doc

PaulP

Regarding the UCS, an alternative view is that they are a bunch of scare-mongering cranks. See http://www.activistcash.com/

williamgrogan

Isn't the web great!

Very good web site. Too early to judge how accurate but definitely interesting.

I took the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist for a couple of years and that is very alarmist as well.

While we are at it what do you people think of Naom Chomsky? I can't stand him. Terribly un PC of me. Ditto Robert Fisk. He almost congratulated the Muslims that nearly beat him to death recently. I don’t like Greenpeace either.

I was aware the UCS was a bit OTT but I have to admit that my attitude to Bush and his fundamentalism, anti-Science, “what Greenhouse effect?” attitude got the better of me.

A point made somewhere recently was that activist organisations can not only discredit themselves but the very movement they are trying to promote by getting carried away with their own propaganda.

Anyone read Michael Houellebecq? Dynamite. He was unsuccessfully sued by the Muslims in France for calling Islam, "easily the most stupid religion of them all".

I've just realised to be a Skeptic you virtually have to be politically incorrect.

Typedef

Originally posted by williamgrogan
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/rsi/page.cfm?pageID=1322

http://www.sierraclub.org/globalwarming/epareport2003.asp

Speaking of distortions that have arisen during the tenure of the Bush administration, based on questionably subjective 'scientific' data, the above link alleges that the Bush administration emasculated the EPA's report in deference to global warming.

williamgrogan

Penn & Teller's BS program was on tonight on Sky's FX Channel. A Fox Channel incidentally.

They took the piss out of Feng Shui and Bottle Water. It’s very funny, don’t miss it.

Three FS people (consultants) charged about €3,000 each to shift a woman’s furniture into three totally separate arrangements. They even examined a FS hair salon. Two identical twins went to a) FS hair salon for $150 haircut and b) Joe’s Barbers, $16. They then paraded the two around the place and asked people which brother had the FS haircut and 50/50 was the guess as to which was which.

The bottle water section was a total piss take. They convinced diners that they had a special water menu with; Everest Water, Mount Fuji Water, Amazon Rain Forest Water etc. from about 4$ to $8. To hear those being conned waffling on about the qualities of the different water was funny. All the bottles were filled from a garden hose!

75% of people they had blind test tap water v bottled said that the tap water tasted better than the bought water and the tap water was from New York’s city normal supply. 33% of all bottled water in a test done by the FDA over 4 years failed quality controls. There is 1 government official that tests all the bottled water and hundreds that test the tap water.

davros

Originally posted by williamgrogan
While we are at it what do you people think of Naom Chomsky? I can't stand him.

His ability to marshal an argument is extremely impressive. In the written word or verbally. His books are meticulously researched and every source is carefully noted. Often, the sources of quotes are the objects of his attack. I'm surprised you don't like him - he is a model skeptic, IMHO.

I went to a lecture he gave, in linguistics, a long time ago (over a dozen years ago now) in Dublin. I can still remember the contents of that lecture, so clear was the presentation.

williamgrogan

I don't deny any of that but he gets bogged down in detail and misses the bigger picture - reality.

ecksor

Originally posted by davros
I'm surprised you don't like him - he is a model skeptic, IMHO.

Yes ... Odd that ...

I went to a lecture he gave, in linguistics, a long time ago (over a dozen years ago now) in Dublin. I can still remember the contents of that lecture, so clear was the presentation.

His contributions to linguistics are well known, but a lot of that work is hugely important in computer science too! His work is helping us have these discussions.

Gibs

Originally posted by williamgrogan
While we are at it what do you people think of Naom Chomsky? I can't stand him. Terribly un PC of me. Ditto Robert Fisk. He almost congratulated the Muslims that nearly beat him to death recently........................I've just realised to be a Skeptic you virtually have to be politically incorrect.

An interesting assortment of opinions, but I'm not sure I follow your logic.

I think its fair enough to criticise Chomsky and Fisk - they are not everyone's cup of tea, whether in terms of their style, content or political orientation. However, once you look past some of the soundbite versions of their views as reported in the media, I think the impressive thing is just how committed they are to challenging the orthodoxies within their own areas of interest.

Both men have continuously striven, throughout long careers, to challenge assumptions about prevailing, unsustainable versions of the 'truth'. They have done this by meticulously drawing attention to information that is either being wilfully ignored by vested interests or hidden away from public scrutiny.

I am not suggesting that Chomsky and Fisk don't have an agenda and a definite political persuasion; clearly they do. Also, I don't always agree with the conclusions they draw, or the leaps they make from correlation to causation. But at least they are prepared to debate issues with factual (typically, and ironically, governmentally sourced ) information rather than relying on empty platitudes, spin and anecdotal reassurances. Above all else, this suggests to me that they are the epitome of what it means to be a 'skeptic'. Evidence-based argument surely has to be better than rhetoric? .

I accept that the two men have become intellectual touchstones for the left-wing, but any force that their arguments has, derives from logic and evidence. I don't think it's fair to blame them for the 'PC' associations that have attached to them. Particularly in the case of Chomsky, his career (and, apparently, even his life) has been threatened as a result of things he has said and opinions he has held.

Regarding the issue of Chomsky not getting the 'big picture' because he focuses too much on detail, I think that's a ridiculous and contradictory argument. Certainly his writing style leaves a lot to be desired and he tends to go off on tangents. The value of his books and lectures, however, is that he addresses the bigger picture, not by relying on sophistry, but by demonstrating in a methodical, systematic way how the usual cliches and assumptions that underlie widely accepted political (not to mention, linguistic!!) ideas are based on incorrect information.

Once again, this seems to me to be the essence of what it is to be a skeptic - challenging the establishment with reliable data and offering hypotheses that are testable and open to refutation.

I'm curious as to how you can defend making blithe criticisms of Chomsky and Fisk when they both seem easily to qualify as excellent examples of 'skeptics', an identity for which many of your previous posts would suggest you hold some affinity.

williamgrogan

Gibs has summed fairly well what I think of Chomsky.

I didn’t say he was wrong, I said “I can’t stand him”. I agree with a lot of what he says, I still can’t stand him. I do think he ignores reality and human nature.

What Fisk reports is undoubtedly accurate but I his continuous tirades against America, which he blames for everything, has turned me off him.

Left wing politics, socialism and communism are the intellectual bedfellows of Chomsky and Fisk, so how come the whole philosophy has collapsed? Socialism is great in theory; it’s the practice that doesn’t work. America was wrong to invade Iraq, but Sadam is gone.

PaulP

I'm still not sure what to make of Chomsky. He has many opponents who are not swivel-eyed ideologues. The argument against him is that he is simply always against whatever the US government is for, and since US policy changes this leads him to make a case against something only later to make the opposite case. Another point made is that when challenged on the specifics of his arguments he changes the point, the intellectual equivalent of kicking sand in the eyes.

However while his books go into great details about the perfidy, as he sees it, of US policies in respect of the outside world, he has acknowledged that the US is not the only source of badness in the world, and that his abhorrence of the evils of even anti-US regimes (e.g those in the Warsaw Pact when it still existed) should be taken as read. He is writing not to provide a complete picture of the world but to fill in the gaps in the knowledge of someone living in the US, pointing out a lot of US hypocrisies along the way.