skeptics
“What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we’d like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence, rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” ~Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Episode IV
There really is a tumblr for everything
OMSFSM totally NSFW. Link in clear text because I don’t want anybody to say that they weren’t warned.
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Katha Pollitt: Hitchens and his writing on Women
for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest in women’s writing or women’s lives or perspectives
Burzynski Clinic, meet Streisand Effect – you’re going to be spending some time together
When skeptics start questioning the scientific basis for the Burzynski Clinic’s highly expensive “antineoplaston” cancer therapy, that’s the time that you are supposed to offer proof of therapeutic benefit. Issuing threats instead tends to make it look like the Burzynski Clinic just doesn’t have any proofs to offer.
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Links of the day: gendered slurs as social signals
Full Story »On the subject of gendered insults (in this case, the use of specific terms to signal acceptable behavior):
Guys, Don’t Do That
Months later, the woman who spoke these four words is still dealing with cyber-harassment including rape and death threats
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When one’s right to dissent is so terribly, terribly suppressed…
…that one can only manage to get one’s views published in the opinion pages of a national broadsheet, one knows that the nation is in a parlous state of enforced conformity indeed.
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I wish to make a deeply heartfelt apology to all motorists
In the wake of Elevatorgate, I realise that in habitually engaging in threat/risk-assessment vigilance every single time I cross the road, I have actually been doing you all a most grave injustice.
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More Elevatorgate: cornering, uncongeniality and warning flags
Full Story »Ironically, no one hates high pressure sales tactics more than skeptics. We can’t stand it when a sales associate gets in our face and uses cheap psychological tricks to try to make us buy stuff we don’t want. We take it as an insult to our intelligence. We resent it.
Bye bye Dawkins: a voice from the past
How very disappointing, but sadly not surprising, that he turned out be such a smug, patronising git about more than just religious beliefs.
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SIWOTI: Sagan’s ECREE maxim is NOT nonsense
Please pardon the acronyms in the title (expansions forthcoming in the post), I’m attempting to keep my post titles reasonably concise. Which is exactly what the final sentence in the quote below does in relation to the rest of the paragraph preceding it: it restates the whole argument of the paragraph pithily in just five words: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
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Working Mum it’s all your fault too.
Just when you thought it was Ladies of Leisure being at fault now it’s working mothers making their children fat.
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* Quicklink to recent open threads
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