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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine History Holocaust denial Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Antivaxers supported President-Elect Donald Trump. Now they want him to satisfy their demands.

If you’re a skeptic dedicated to promoting science and reason, these are scary times. My country, the United States of America, just unexpectedly elected a racist, misogynistic, conspiracy-mongering, scientific ignoramus (who, by the way, is rabidly antivaccine) as its next President thanks to the political relic known as the Electoral College. In actuality, Hillary Clinton […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media History Holocaust Holocaust denial Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

An antivaccine activist explains how she uses Facebook reporting algorithms to harass and silence pro-science bloggers

I wish this post were an April Fools Day joke, but it is not. Three weeks ago, Skeptical Raptor and I wrote posts describing how a particularly vicious, nasty antivaccine troll named Heather Murray had successfully gamed Facebook reporting algorithms intended to report abuse in order to silence pro-science bloggers. It is, unfortunately, a tactic […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine History Holocaust Holocaust denial Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery Religion

Nobody promotes antivaccine nonsense in my state…without receiving some Insolence

Readers who’ve been following this blog a while would probably not be surprised to learn that one of my all time favorite movies is Ghostbusters. In fact, it’s hard to believe that the movie is now 30 years old. It makes me feel so old, given that I saw the movie in the theater when […]

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Blogging Complementary and alternative medicine Evolution Medicine Science

On teaching the controversy in medicine

Dr. Kevin Pho responded to a recent post by Orac criticizing a post on KevinMD that was overly credulous about alternative medicine. His response was…disappointing. Since he seems to want to teach the controversy, I thought: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. And then I came up with some ideas for other controversies to “teach.”

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Anti-Semitism History Holocaust Holocaust denial Politics Religion

Elie Wiesel: Carve out an exception to free speech for Holocaust denial

It occurs to me that I haven’t written about this topic in quite a while, but a recent event makes me think that maybe now’s the time to revisit this topic. I’m referring to Holocaust denial. Newer readers may not know that part of what got me involved in online discussions back in the late […]