Categories
Hitler Zombie Holocaust Intelligent design/creationism Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

Hitler Zombie massacre over evolution!

Things had been quiet. Too quiet. So quiet that Orac couldn’t even enjoy his usual recreational pastime of analyzing limericks and jokes linguistically in order to try to understand what made them so amusing to the humans among whom he was forced to exist. Even probing the perturbations in the electromagnetic fields caused by the […]

Categories
Evolution History Holocaust Politics Pseudoscience

John Wilkins on eugenics and Darwin

John Wilkins over at Evolving Thoughts has posted an excellent brief summary of the history of the eugenics movement. In the process, he makes a strong argument that it was genetics far more than evolution that influenced eugenecists and that the entire eugenics movement was based on the concept that evolution was being thwarted by […]

Categories
Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

A plethora of HIV straw men

It never ceases to amuse me when a blogger known for his embrace of bad science anxious to claim the mantle of “skeptic” falls flat on his face doing so. For an example of just such an occurrence, check out Skeptico’s latest post, A Straw Man Gets AIDS. In it, Skeptico systematically demolishes an AIDS/HIV […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

The “pharma shill” gambit

It was a late night in the O.R. last night; so I didn’t get to spend my usual quality blogging time. However, it occurred to me. In honor of being called a “pharma moron” on Whale.to, coupled with all the antivaccination lunacy that’s been infesting the comments of this blog, only to be tirelessly countered […]

Categories
History Holocaust World War II

Another reason why bans on symbols lead to bad policy

As much as I oppose Holocaust denial, fascism, and neo-Nazis, you might recall that I am very much in favor of free speech. Indeed, I tend to take as broad an interpretation of the First Amendment as possible, and remain very grateful to our Founding Fathers for enshrining this freedom in the Constitution, where it’s […]