What a prick!

People wonder why I try to suck the joy out of life by destroying their deeply held beliefs when they are otherwise harmless. Then I point to stories like this one and those people generally shut up.

Three men, imprisoned in Vietnam since 2002 for gang-raping an 18-year-old girl, were released after an acupuncturist examined them and made some wholly unscientific claims that apparently nobody was around to debunk.

Pham Thi Hong, an acupuncturist at the national traditional medicine hospital, said prison officials had sent one of the men to her for treatment in 2006.

She said examination of a pressure point beneath the convict’s ear showed a small capillary was unbroken, which Vietnamese traditional medicine holds to mean that he was a virgin. Hong then examined the other two men.

“I recognised these three men had never had sex with women,” Hong said.

How a capillary in your ear could be broken via sexual intercourse, but not rubbing one out or even just having a wet dream, I’ll never know. No idea whether this is because of his training as an acupuncturist (which has no scientific validity outside of the endorphin rush that comes of small amounts of pain), or his training as a “traditional medicine” (read: witch) doctor. Either way, the capillary idea is fucking nonsense and three probable gang rapists are free because nobody said so. Whether there were legitimate issues in the original investigation or not, the presence of an unburst blood vessel that nobody has ever even linked properly with virginity is no grounds for reopening it. Present some real goddamn evidence before you question the investigation, is that so hard?

But “what’s the harm” from believing silly pseudoscience?

I gotta go punch something now.

What a prick!
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Curiosity Aroused

I’m in the process of an overnight for work and can’t put together any new content at the moment. Instead, go check out Curiosity Aroused, a brand-new podcast hosted and edited by Rebecca Watson, with the Skepchicks doing stories/interviews. I’m going to listen to it while I’m doing my reformat tonight.

Topics seem interesting as well — this week, the ladies are apparently going to take on the myth that you can greatly extend your life (we’re talking almost doubling it, to 168yrs!) by reducing your caloric intake. Never mind that we’ve already tripled our lifetimes through science, now we’re going to double it again through pseudoscience! Yay!

Curiosity Aroused

Science Victorious

The past thirty days have been rife with excellent science news, which for various reasons I’ve been unable to blog on. Rest assured, I’m very grateful to those of you that submitted links to these pieces of good news! I’d love to encourage you all to continue submitting such victorious tidbits, as every submission proves you’re thinking of me, and, as I’m a blogger, I’m also therefore a huge egotist. Also, every one of these links made me cheer, and the more cheery, the better, I say.

The first and obviously biggest victory we skeptics can celebrate, is the retraction by The Lancet of Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s spurious study linking autism and vaccination, a campaign he evidently started out of reprehensible self-interest, having previously patented a “safer” MMR vaccine. That’s right, he sought to destroy the existing vaccination schedule not because it was actually unsafe, but because he had the alternative and would have stood to make a shit-ton of money.

Continue reading “Science Victorious”

Science Victorious

Science vs Psychosomatic Illness (Science vs Garlic Redux)

I am consistently amazed by how entrenched some people can get in their positions. I’ve had a “cell phones cause cancer” proponent posting on an older post about a local garlic farmer that impeded the erection of a radio tower because he had a gut feeling it would cause mutations. This troll points out they’ve actually studied garlic mutations in 1959 in the presence of a high-radiation field — I can’t find this study specifically, nor has the troll any intention of ever posting it.

The point is, every study that’s been posted claiming there’s no statistical link or even correlation between cell phone usage and cancer rates, every study that claims such radiation can’t even harm DNA to begin with, is dismissed out of hand as invalid by this guy, without citations. Why I’m countenancing putting him in his place is wholly beyond me. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s relatively local to me, or the fact that he’s spent hours posting his pseudoscientific claptrap to try to “convert” me. News flash, pal: you can’t just cite studies with science whose conclusions agree with you, without also explaining away the science that doesn’t. Especially not when the balance of that science weighs against you. I am convinced by evidence, not by people really, truly, and dogmatically espousing viewpoints then building “evidence” to corroborate.

Continue reading “Science vs Psychosomatic Illness (Science vs Garlic Redux)”

Science vs Psychosomatic Illness (Science vs Garlic Redux)

Every Bill Nye episode ever

… is apparently on Youtube at the moment (part 2). Watch ’em while they’re still up. If you can stand Bill Nye that is. Aside from the gratuitous repeating of terms and silly puns / stupid cover songs, I love the show, and I love that he honestly makes science approachable to kids. I never missed it on Saturday mornings.

If you have to watch any single episode, make it #69 (snicker) – Pseudoscience. James Randi makes an appearance!

The Part-1 playlist, episodes 1 to 50, is embedded below.

https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=986BAE2FE1655FF8

Every Bill Nye episode ever

A response to Real Scotsman — err, Real Theist

Over at Vizhnet’s brand-new blog, someone commenting under the name of “realtheist” (whom DanJ believes is Daniel Maldonado, owner of the Real Theist blog and an occasional commenter here), left a very VERY long comment in reply to me and in defense of our favorite apologist Zdenny. I reproduce it herein, as Vizhnet has stated he debates only on Twitter and I want to save it for posterity in case he decides to clean up again. I’ll break it down paragraph by paragraph.

Continue reading “A response to Real Scotsman — err, Real Theist”

A response to Real Scotsman — err, Real Theist

RCimT: Friday catch-up day

There’s a ton of stuff on the interwebs worth reading right now, and I have to play catch-up a bit. Bear with me, blurbs will be short. I expect a link back to this post sometime later today from Mike Haubrich, who likes to syndicate my Friday Random Crap in my Tabs, so go over there and read his stuff when you get the chance, as it’s all uniformly excellent and I can’t pimp him enough.

Check out Where’s Poppa?, part 2 of a great series on the lack of evidence for any deities (much less the Abrahamic god Yahweh). The master linking post is here.

TV Guide has to be very sneaky about political commentary. I love Probably Bad News… great site, always full of LOLs.

This is probably my favorite Greg Laden post ever. It’s the next part of his Falsehoods series, in case you haven’t been following, in which case go read them all. The post is about how the rich are actually out-reproducing the poor in the States, putting the lie to yet another racist polemic.

Neurologica explains how facts are NOT anti-religious, it’s just that religions based on falsehoods have to assume that the facts that contradict them are intended to affront them because otherwise their foundations will crumble. The example used is of the Krishna denying the moon landing ever happened, because according to their scriptures, the moon is further away than the sun and space travel is impossible without first dying. This is used to illustrate why Christians have their heads up their asses about evolution. Fun times!

Three interesting articles on Daily Galaxy: Stephen Hawking musing on non-carbon-based alien life, Harvard figuring out that plate tectonics is probably a prerequisite for finding habitable Earthlike planets, and DNA evidence suggests we were almost wiped out as a species about 70000 years ago.

Heaving Dead Cats takes a study about confirmation bias and applies it to religious asshattery, as though nobody’s ever thought to do that before. Great read, though!

How do you teach your kids not to masturbate in public without stunting their natural sexual development? If anyone knows the answer, it’d be Greta Christina, but there’s further musings on the topic at Life Without a Net, linked above.

Our Lady of Perpetual Win has posted a very bitter pill to swallow, in the form of a short story that you may want to sit down and have a glass of whiskey before reading. Because you’re going to think twice afterward.

A mutant gene is apparently responsible for Fragile X syndrome. That isn’t news in and of itself, but tracking down the gene responsible is.

An anthropologist with a mind for meta has undertaken a study to explore the evolution of Darwin’s theory of evolution. This is specifically for those people that think Darwin is some kind of prophet and his materials are taken as dogmatically true.

PZ Myers’ I Get Email series pretty well covers all the fundie tropes, but there’s nothing funnier than a letter that consists of “blah blah unrelated qualifications blah blah anti-intellectualism yadda yadda Pascal’s wager dobby dobby God Bless.” Like that’s going to shake PZ’s lack of faith.

Over at Balloon Juice, DougJ discusses the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, probably falsely executed based on some egregiously spurious pseudoscience about fire.

And last, but by no stretch of the imagination least, Dan J kicks the shit out of the health care lies that are floating around the wingnut world. Oh, and also out of the idea that one can convert an atheist to religion, when said atheist reasoned their way into their non-belief to begin with, by explaining exactly how one “deconverts”.

Happy Friday!

RCimT: Friday catch-up day

Wherein I explain how Oprah is quantifiably damaging humankind

If only he had joined a mainstream religion, like Oprahism or Voodoo.
Professor Farnsworth, Futurama

In a previous blog post, I made the assertion that Oprah Winfrey and her current fame is a net negative for society, and that’s not a charge I’m willing to make lightly. I’m going to start this post by describing a number of good deeds that Oprah has performed, because I am anything but an unfair critic. Bear in mind that I reserve the right to temper any praise for any individual point after the fact, because there’s at least one “charitable act” that I can think of, that was poorly thought out and ultimately a waste of money.

Get some popcorn, this is a long one.
Continue reading “Wherein I explain how Oprah is quantifiably damaging humankind”

Wherein I explain how Oprah is quantifiably damaging humankind

‘Religious apologetics’ infects Vancouver Sun

My rage meter just pegged on reading an article on the Vancouver Sun’s online version, entitled ‘Scientism’ infects Darwinian debates.   I don’t even know where to start. Perhaps once I’m off work and have more time, I will fully debunk this, but it boils down to, “people who think that the act of studying nature to discover its secrets is the only true way to find out more about nature, are just as wrapped up in their faith as people who use really old books and make wild guesses about nature”.

Pro tip for you creationist apologizers — science is a self-correcting meritocracy based on the evidential study of reality, where the bad theories get knocked out and replaced with better ones all the time, and if you find that this reality conflicts with your personal world view, then your personal world view is the one that’s wrong. You put the two ideas on a scale, one with heaps of evidence and the other with nothing but faith, and guess which one weighs more?

Update: Phil Plait is much more eloquent than I am. As usual. He also directly attacks the angle that the Sun article brings up, that science isn’t as good as imagination, by pointing out that without imagination, science is nothing more than a bunch of useless facts.

In the meantime, I’m starting to feel like I’m repeating myself ad nauseum into the ether. Though I know I have a handful regular readers, the site metrics tell me so, I’m not getting a lot of regular commenters, and I’m starting to think it’s my subject matter. Either you folks all agree with me (and I know at least a few of you who are regular readers do not), or you don’t want to take the bait and get into an actual debate on this subject matter. Why? I’m not that scary, am I? I really do just want to spark debate with you, which I absolutely relish not only as a means of getting to know you better, but also to force us both to suss out our personal belief systems as much as possible.

The funny thing is, when the political race in the States was nearing its crescendo, and I was posting stuff that wasn’t exactly controversial (e.g. annoyance at the media’s soft-gloving John McBombeverything), people were more willing to comment. I guess people really do believe that you’re allowed to discuss one another’s political viewpoints but not one another’s religious beliefs. I really just want to encourage you all to view religious belief as something that can be discussed along the same lines as politics.

Frankly, I’m starting to suspect that the fact that your religious beliefs make up the core of your personhood, inclines you all to turn away from any challenges to those beliefs just in case they shake the foundation of those beliefs. It’s why I’m willing to not simply close the browser window and ignore articles like the one I mentioned in this post, even though that would do my blood pressure many favours — my core belief system is that the universe is comprehensible, and the only way to gain understanding of the rules by which it plays is by applying the scientific method, so when someone suggests that people like myself are guilty of “scientism”, I have to post something about it. I can’t let the challenge go unanswered. So why are you?

Hell. If I was just looking for attention, I’d post more random Youtube videos. Those seem to get comments regularly. Or, another sure-fire way to get more comments is, I’d just mention the LHC and have one of the most prolific internet trolls in recent memory return. Then maybe I could debate him properly this time (if such is possible with that type of debater, who hits you with fifty references to poorly thought out pseudoscience in hopes that you can’t adequately answer every last one of them — the “shit and wall” debating method), instead of simply calling him on his games and shutting him out with an “all other planets are yours but this one”.

‘Religious apologetics’ infects Vancouver Sun