Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Introductions Are in Order, and An Asinine Post on an Anti-Science Blog

by Gambolputty

Hello, everyone. Our dear friend MySocratesNote has stepped away from this lovely little blog and has passed the reins to moi. Some of you may have noticed my posting recently under this name, but I assure you that I have been posting online, countering the misinformation of those like Orac, Steve Novella, Stephen Barrett and others for quite some time (though under a different moniker). Now, I believe a little introduction is in order.

I have chosen to remain anonymous, and this is for a number of reasons. Firstly, I love my job, and I don’t feel comfortable revealing too much about where I work or what I do. Seeing what has happened to my friend here, I feel that it is best for me to maintain my anonymity. I will tell you that I am a teacher (among other things), and I will just leave it at that. For some time, I have been a silent contributor to this blog. So when MySocratesNote left it to me, he did so in the hopes that I would continue with his legacy and take the time to point out the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the false skeptic community.

So that is it, in a nutshell. Unlike some, I do not have the time or energy to post here daily (or in some cases hourly *cough* Kim Wombles *cough*). I will post infrequently, or when the mood suits me. But you can be assured that I will continue to try to post with the same amount snark as Craig did, but mixed in with my own humour and British witticisms.

Now, on to what I wanted to discuss.

Today, I glanced over at Mr Gorski’s (I refuse to give him the honorific) misinformation site and noticed that he is disturbed by an article written on Age of Autism. Then again, when is he not?

His latest excrement, “A Disturbing Post on an Anti-Vaccine Blog” is yet another tour-de-farce of logical fallacies and delusions of grandeur masquerading as a martyr complex.

The gist of this not so remarkable piece of fiction is that he his afraid; he’s concerned that Kent Heckenlively is promoting violence against some unnamed entity. He thinks that Kent has dropped off the deep end, and should be carefully monitored:

“Notice how Heckenlively refers to "Dark Forces." Not "dark forces," but "Dark Forces," capitalized, as though it's name or these Forces are so malevolent that they need to be capitalized, much as the Force in Star Wars was so important and powerful that it needed to be capitalized as a formal name. Worse, the imagery is downright paranoid. These Dark Forces, according to Heckenlively, are out to destroy the activists and "scientists" who have bought into the idea that vaccines cause autism, rather than the real situation, which is that they are trying to guard public health against the return of vaccine-preventable diseases that will occur if vaccination rates fall due to the sort of propaganda that AoA promotes.”

Notice how Gorski refuses to acknowledge that there have indeed been cases of corporate interests destroying the livelihood of those who threaten their profits. Tobacco did this for years. Pharmaceutical corporations have also been caught in the act of doing exactly what Mr Heckenlively said. “We need to find them and destroy them where they live.” What is so humourous about this is that Dave doesn’t seem to realise that this is commonplace in today’s corporate environment. He tries to paint Kent as a conspiracy monger and accuses him of paranoia and seeing shadows in dark places.

Oh, the irony.

“I have a hard time characterizing Kent's post as anything other than disturbing, if not downright scary. Think about it this way. When someone starts to view his opponents as "wicked people" deserving to be wiped out by God (or, as other translations of this particular psalm put it, to be "destroyed for their wickedness"), it's just a short hop to thinking that perhaps believers should take matters into their own hands and start smiting the evildoers themselves, thinking it doing the Lord's work. In any case, it's very clear that Heckenlively is, at the very least, praying to God to "deal with" those whom he considers to be "wicked people out there trying to keep our children from getting better." In the context of the psalm, "dealing with" these wicked people clearly means to destroy them.”

That seems pretty bleeding paranoid, doesn’t it? Notice how poor little Dave tries to milk as much drama from this as possible by saying that some translations of Psalm 94 call for the wicked to be destroyed, all in an obvious and transparent attempt to color Mr Heckenlively in the worst possible light. Only paranoid conspiracy theorists pray to God to destroy the wicked! Notice how he tries to twist the meaning of what Kent wrote and claim that Kent is praying for God to destroy the evil-doers. He says that “dealing with” these wicked people means that they must be destroyed. I’m quite certain that if Mr Heckenlively meant to use that particular translation of Psalm 94, he would have. No, it’s not clear that Kent is praying for them to be destroyed; he’s praying for them to be punished. But the half-witted twit has to make this more menacing, more ominous, by changing the meaning of the words to suit his own agenda.

Ah, poor Dave. So persecuted. Such a drama-queen.

“Heckenlively and I are clearly on different sides of the autism-vaccine issue. Even so, I have never wished ill upon him. Hell, I've never wished ill upon even J. B. Handley, even though he has frequently attacked me. Well, maybe just a little bit of ill, such as embarrassment for his ridiculous statements and his promotion of anti-vaccine quackery and that his efforts to harm public health fail. Certainly I have never wished that God Almighty destroy him or Heckenlively for his wickedness or publicly wished ill upon him. Yet here we have Kent Heckenlively praying to God publicly to destroy his enemies. Presumably, that would include me, plus a number of people who are my friends, acquaintances, and fellow travelers in promoting vaccination and refuting anti-vaccine pseudoscience.”

Smell that? No no, you don’t need to scratch your computer monitor as I am more than certain you can smell it from where you are sitting. That, my friends, is called Bullshit! He’s never wished ill on Kent or the people at Age of Autism? What about wishing that they would all go to jail for their beliefs? Or using one of his masturbatory fantasies that he describes as a “meme” to go after the anti-vaccine movement (chomping their brains)? Yes, I understand that it is his poor attempt at humour, but we all know that deep down in his cold, barren, childish and bent little mind that he fervently wishes for this to come true. Repeatedly, he twists Kent’s words to get as much drama as possible, all so that Orac can seem more saintly. Yes, Dave is such a martyr! Oh, what he goes through to distribute his moronic drivel to his drooling arse-lickers. I’m sure you can all hear him sighing with his burden. Also, it would appear as if Mr Gorski has a bit of a guilty conscience, yes? Orac’s paranoia is so deep seated that he thinks that Kent is actually calling out for violence to be done against him, that he should be destroyed for his wicked ways.

Then he closes with this shart:

“I don't know what is going on in Heckenlively's life right now that has brought him to this. The pain in his writing is palpable; he really does sound like a man on the edge, a man who is ready to break. I can only hope he finds a way to deal with whatever is going on in his life right now and return to a state of normalcy. We might be opponents when it comes to the issue of vaccines and autism, but, unlike Kent, I don't want God--or anyone else--to destroy anyone over this.”

Nor does he care. He’s too self absorbed in his own narcissism to care what happens to anyone outside of his myopia. Once more, he promotes the myth that Kent is praying for God to destroy him, all so he can make himself more saintly. I swear, reading this, you’d think that he was in line for a beatification.