July 2nd is World UFO Day, no doubt much to the disgust of leading US popular science magazine Skeptical Inquirer, which, issue after unbearably smug issue, devotes much unnecessary time and effort to trying to disprove wild claims that shoddily-built alien spacecraft ever crashed at places like Roswell.
Supposedly, it is a matter of profound public importance that some mistaken people really do believe such things, as accepting such ‘anti-scientific’ ideas opens the ever-credulous general public up to belief in supposedly even more harmful ‘anti-rational’ beliefs, such as vaccine-wariness, climate-hesitancy or maybe even voting for Donald Trump! I don’t think it does; I think it just keeps some people happy and entertained after work-hours, harmlessly reading about charred alien corpses being spirited away by the CIA. Associating saucer-crash fans with climate-dissenters is just a crude rhetorical sleight-of-hand, akin to the old trick of subliminally linking them to Holocaust-deniers by calling them ‘climate-deniers’.
Special K
The general idea can be well summarised by a new book from author Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, a fellow-traveller of the US Skeptical movement. In specialist usage, the upper-case ‘Skeptic with a k’ American spelling has a specific ideological connotation, as opposed to the lower-case UK spelling ‘scepticism with a c’, which is supposed to be more about temporarily suspending belief and assessing all evidence and propositions critically and dispassionately. If you think about public figures like Richard
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The New Scientist is no better these days, sadly.
Just another example of how The Left is motivated and unified by its opposition to Deplorables, deployed recently against Trump voters, vaccine and lockdown sceptics, and Brexit voters.
The Left is not only unsceptical of institutional authority, it is prepared to do battle on its behalf, this must be how communist regimes survive for so long.
I’d argue that Americans (generally) have ‘enthusiasms’. Enthusiasms like Prohibition, the Red Scare, the race to the Moon, the fights against Communism, Terrorism, Drugs. And, of course the Climate Crisis, Black Lives Matter, COVID, the cognitive capacity of Biden, and Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Yes there are many Americans who do not share these beliefs. The beliefs may or may not have some practical benefits but the enthusiasm they generate is powerful and may be harmful.
From Quote Investigator: In 1721 a slim volume titled “A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Enter’d Into Holy Orders by a Person of Quality” was published. The author was Jonathan Swift, and the following salient phrase was included:
People in the grip of an enthusiasm will resist contrary reasoning and will probably not even realise that they are in the grip of a belief, rather than a factual opinion. Until a few years later when the enthusiasm has run its course or been displaced by one more fashionable.
Are we immune in this country? No. But I believe our beliefs tend to be less absolute.
According to his profile on-line John Cook was born in 1972 and got his education in 2012 to 2016. So apparently he had no education before then.
Methinks a little disinformation is being peddled here, because I remember him coming to prominence before then. When he was a cartoonist he came up with the famous “97% of scientists” claim which you may choose to believe or disbelieve as you see fit; he also set up the Skeptical Science website.
Subsequently he got his PhD in Cognitive Science, which fits well his skills as a manipulator of information and propagandist.
For the record, I do not believe that Cognitive Science is a science in the true sense of the word – it is opinion made to sound important.
“a man who in 2017 attempted to appoint a ghost-hunter as a federal judge.” – talk about deliberately misleading – it implies that he was appointed as a judge because he was a ghost hunter rather than any legal qualifications
There’s also the ‘Skeptical Scientist’ website which managed to convince me AGW CC was a scam by misrepresenting Richard Lindzen.