“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”
/ Thomas Paine
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Yet some Crazies are not so easy to spot as Teabaggers and GOP haters. They call their cringe Reason and hide behind brave terms such as Skeptic and Debunker. Those who ridicule, mock, or seek to stop questioning, thought, and investigation are not rationalists protecting the poor helpless idiots of the general public, of whom they hold a low opinion, from the terrifying lamentable sanders of irrationality.
Far from it.
Those are protectors of ideology. They enforce the status quo. They scare away legitimate scientists with the threat that interest shown in the wrong things will cause them to be swarmed by sneering condescending patronizing scoffers who will question their judgment, pour scathing acidic sarcasm on their work, and soon call them crazy.
These intellectual thugs intimidate and claim right of approval when it comes to which topics and what approaches are permitted. Thought police is what they are, if we let them be. If we take seriously their specious claims (swamp gas) and ludicrous standards (extraordinary claims — defined by them of course — require extraordinary evidence — what ever that is) we let them rig the discussion against rationality.
They fear anything they don’t understand and they insist they have all the answers. Know-it-all blow-hard toddlers are often more valid.
Be specific. State facts and name names. Stick to empirical fact and do not let the guardians of the status quo buffalo you, scare you, or bully you. If you think independently they will try first to fool you, seduce and co-opt you, then to bully and ostracize you. They will come disguised as Reason, Rationality, and Skepticism but they are not those things any more than the Dominionist Capitalist Christians are actually Christian. They are zealots with a missionary zeal to define and contain inquiry and thought.
CSICOP, Kurtz’s Krazy Krusaders, SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Michael Shermer, Ray Nickell, The Semi-Tumescent Randi, and others carry this mark proudly and loudly. Know them for the arrogant, empty bullies they are. When they say, “Most such claims are hoaxes and mistakes and if we had enough evidence we could explain them all,” retort with fact, such as, “Actually, the better the evidence, the less likely an explanation becomes for anomalous events.” When they try to charge you with a logical fallacy, point out theirs, it is sure to be there. When they begin getting nasty, and they will, calmly ask for substantive points, evidence, and demonstrations of their claims. When they try to put words and thoughts into your statements, and when they try to inject absurdities to then mock, point it out and refuse to let them set the debate’s agenda or terminology.
Explain that showing how something could be faked does not mean the initial event was faked. Explain that anecdotal solutions are no more reliable than anecdotal accounts, often far less so. Point out the flaws in their math; they love flawed math. In trying to keep them honest you will find they are not. This will eventually free you from any impression that they represent logic, rationality, or skepticism. Far from it. All they represent is an adamant, fearful world view, closed-minded and infantile, a world view in which they question nothing and have answers for everything because that keeps them feeling safe and smug and superior.
Admitting there are things we do not know and must investigate terrifies them; it is chaos to them. They have so demonized the term Conspiracy Theory that it is now used as a synomym for Crazy Bullshit, when in fact a theory is merely a testable hypotesis used tentatively to explain an event that is otherwise inexplicable. As we test, fact arises and we trim our theory to conform to facts, leading to a preponderance of evidence allowing for conclusions. Please note, conclusions are always tentative, pending further fact arising or better refinement of the analysis of what fact we have.
Ask poor Pluto, once a planet, now a planetesimal.
Ad verus, per ardua.
/ geste
