Why people go anti-science

Mark Hoofnagle at Denialism Blog hits the hail on the head:

In fact, if there is a unifying theme of denialism, it is that any extreme of ideological thinking leads to the necessary denial of fact. When one considers the causes of denialist worldviews, one sees again and again some form of fundamentalist belief. Fundamentalist religion leads to the rejection of evolution. Free-market fundamentalists are the leading source of anti-global warming denialism. On the liberal side, a mixture of technophobia and neo-luddism leads to paranoid suspicions about everything from GM crops causing non-existent illnesses to fear of harmless radio technology such as wifi to the fear of vaccines and medicine innovations exemplified by the HuffPo cranks and the evidence-based medicine/HIV/AIDS denialists like Mike Adams and Gary Null.

Any dogma that gets any followers is likely to be (a) simple and (b) emotionality satisfying, at least to some people. In fact any belief system must be simpler than reality, since reality is vast and probably not fully comprehensible to the human mind anyway. Once people become adherents of a dogma, they are likely to hold tight to it, since it’s their intellectual comfort blanket. And when reality proves that their dogma is at least partly wrong — as all dogmas must be, even though they are probably partly right, too — then the adherent is drawn into conflict with reality, and resolves that conflict by simply pretending that the uncomfortable truth isn’t there. And then the more serious of the adherents erect whole intellectual edifices, founded on bullshit and wish-fulfillment fantasy, as to why reality isn’t real.

What’s the cure for this? Simply to realise that any simple, pat, belief system isn’t going to be the whole truth, even if it does have good points. Put simply, no belief system about how the human world works is entirely correct, or is any widely-held belief system likely to be entirely nonsense. For example:

Religion: God may not exist, but nevertheless it is still bad for people to murder or steal from each other.

Free markets: are an efficient way of allocating scarce resources, under many circumstances, but they are not the solution to all human-organisation problems.

Medicine: some medicines have genuinely harmed patients, but most do good, and by spreading panic about vaccines etc one is almost certainly doing more harm than good.

Technology: most technology leads to humans living longer, more fulfilled lives; but some technologies have lead to a diminution of human happiness (e.g. telemarketers and spammers)

Britblog roundup #167

Welcome to this week’s roundup of all that’s best in British blogging!

Sport

We start off with a sporting link from Norfolk Blogger: Why England didn’t qualify for Euro 2008. Here’s an excerpt:

A wall is not a difficult thing to kick. A wall does not move and is a pretty large target. What highlights our problems as a footballing nation is that Rio Ferdinand apparently missed the wall (presumably it jumped out of the way) and instead he kicked a female Chelsea steward.

History

We have a few posts relating to the reformation in one way or another…

Natalie Bennett has a post up about women’s lives during the dark ages, in particular about how women did work for the church. The late middle ages were a time when most people’s leisure and social activities (an many people’s working lives) were bound up with the church, and the reformation, which ended or modified a lot of these links, must have seemed a revolution at the time.

One thing that wasn’t killed off by the reformation was St George’s Day which this year for the first time ever was a bank holiday. Greenman and Diamond Geezer celebrate it in different ways.

Philip Wilkinson recently visited Launde Abbey in Leicestershire. During the reformation, when Henry VIII abolished the monastries, his henchman Thomas Cromwell bagged it for himself. Reminds me of Mugabe’s land seizures in Zimbabwe. Plus ça change…

Crime and punishment

PC Bloggs recounts the career of Judge Julian Hall who has made a number of questionable statements — although to be honest I thought most of the judge’s comments were reasonable — but not this one:

August 2007: Two years for a child rapist because she “dressed provocatively”. How provocative can a 10yr old really be?

I disagree with PC Bloggs when she says this:

March 2008: He jails a woman for a year who lied about a rape allegation. He also denounces her as “evil” and says she has let down “womankind”. Slightly different language than that used to describe the child rapists and pornographers he has discharged from his court on previous occasions, no?

The bit about letting down womankind is obviously absurd, since no one person can be held responsible for the reputation of the entire group of people with similarly-configured genitals as themselves. But anyone who makes false allegations is in my opinion committing a very serious crime, one at least as serious as the allegations they are making of others, because they are offending against the legal system itself.

Meanwhile, Bystander at The Magistrate’s Blog recounts this master criminal:

A man was stopped for money laundering after a dog detected a million of our English pounds in a bag that was on its way to the Middle East. So far, so average. But the smuggler had checked the bag in as hold baggage: given the combined track record of airport loaders and airport baggage handling systems (T5 anyone?) would you entrust a million quid, even a million dodgy quids, to airport check in?

Society

The British apparently care more about donkeys than abused women, says Louise Livesey, who notes the amounts given to different charities:

The 200 biggest charities working with abused women or campaigning against abuse received a total of £97 million funding (all sources). This is contrasted with £110 million for the RSPCA and £149 million for the Lifeboats.

The Thirteenth Carnival of Radical Feminists is up at Shut Up, Sit Down. One bit that caught my attention (though possibly not for the reason the author had in mind) was this:

There is nothing immoral about eating something that tastes good, even if it does become apparent that you’ve done so after the fact. There is nothing ethically unsound about nachos (they make vegan ones, you know). What’s ethically objectionable is harming your health and removing all the joy from your life in order to increase the number of Coors Light drinkers who want to pork you.

Quite right too! The ignominy of being lusted after by people with crap taste in beer!

Simon Bellwood writes about his whistle-blowing at Greenfields secure centre in Jersey.

Earthpal gets nostalgic about the teachers’ strike:

Yes, a real-life proper strike. How retro does that seem? Remember those glorious days of industrial action and picket lines and angry workers shoving placards into car windows and shouting things like scab! scab! at anyone who crossed the picket line . . . days of trade-union power and militant solidarity and passionate working class heroes?

Gavin Whenman writes about the OGC’s striking new logo. Personally I think the agency who designed it are a bunch of wankers.

Politics

Jim Jay is concerned that the BNP may win a seat or two in the London Assembly elections:

But it is the BNP who are the real threat here. With 5% of the vote the BNP could gain the highest profile political position that they’ve ever had but, worse, with a touch more they could win two seats on the assembly which would notonly be disastrous in the fight against fascism but could also have a significant impact on the direction the Assembly takes over the next four years.

However, fortunately the far-right vote may be split several ways:

In this sense it is very good news that the BNP have four main rivals for their detestable affections, not including the single issue anti-congestion charge grouping who may also steal some of the BNP’s potential vote.

Jonathan Calder has his Lord Bonkers column up.

Bill Jones notes that Gordon Brown has climbed down over the 10% tax band, but thinks he could have done it more gracefully:

Brown would have done better to admit that he just got it wrong rather than keep on that he had not reneged on his determination to abolish the 10p band. But the question remains, how come he missed the significance of the measure to 5.3 million of the poorest people in the country?

Ministry of Truth writes about the EU’s transnational regions. Yes, they are rather artificial and silly. No, they are not a sinister plot to abolish England.

And that’s all for this week! Hope you enjoyed it. Next week’s Britblog roundup will be by Jonathan Calder at Liberal England; nominations should go to the usual address, britblog at gmail dot com, unless you’re a spammer, in which case you should ritually disembowel yourself.

FucksYouUpForSure

Remember a few years ago when Microsoft released a music DRM system called PlaysForSure? The idea was that a load of online music stores would sell music in this format, and lots of different MP3 players would support it, and so if a customer bought “PlaysForSure” music they could be sure it would play on their “PlaysForSure” music player.

(Of course, if you want music that really does play for sure, get it in MP3 format, since that is supported by essentially all music players and computers. PlaysForSure, because it’s a DRM system, is intrinsically about preventing stuff from working, rather than making it inter-operable. So Microsoft’s name for their system is essentially fraudulent.)

Anyway, some people fell for the Microsoft lies and bought PlaysForSure music, although the system was never a big success, and Microsoft didn’t support it for their own Zune music player.

But now, Microsoft are turning off the servers which authenticate PlaysForSure music:

Along with that, Microsoft shut down its failed online music store, and now for the kicker, it’s telling anyone who was suckered into buying that DRM’d content that it’s about to nuke the DRM approval servers that let you transfer the music to new machines. That means you need to authorize any songs you have on whatever machine you want — and that’s the only place they’ll be able to reside forever. And, of course, any upgrade to your operating system (say from XP to Vista) and you lose access to your music as well. By now, hopefully, everyone is aware of why DRM is problematic, but it’s nice of Microsoft to give one final demonstration by basically taking away more rights for the music it sold people with the promise that Microsoft would keep the music available.

The moral of this story? Never, ever buy DRM’ed media or any DRM system — the companies selling it will fuck you up the arse as soon as they think it’s in their interests to do so. Instead, get media in an uncrippled format — either buy it, or if it’s not legally available in a non-DRM format, acquire it via a P2P network such as BitTorrent.

About Includipedia

As some of you know, I’m building an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia, called Includipedia.

I’ve added some content to Includipedia’s about page, detailing my goals for the project.

Nazi Germany and the Olympics

From a pro-Tibet rally in San Francisco, reproduced without comment:

(Via Mr Eugenides)

Britblog roundup #166

Britblog roundup number 166 is now up at Mr Eugenides.

I’m hosting next week’s Britblog roundup; nominations should go to the usual address, britblog [at] gmail [dot] com.

Mr Eugenides on psychics

This is good:

Was there ever a more transparently fraudulent money-making scheme than the “psychic industry”? Most of the psychics I am [dimly] aware of operate out of tiny fleapits in run-down shopping arcades, or do guest readings in the upstairs rooms of Edinburgh pubs between 1pm and 4pm on weekday afternoons. If I had the gift of second sight, you can be fucking sure I wouldn’t be reading people’s palms in the Felcher and Firkin for a fiver a time; I’d be making thousands of pounds an hour on Betfair from the balcony of my villa in the Seychelles, watching a naked girl try to mix a pina colada with her free hand. No, wait; two naked girls.

Britblog roundup #165

Britblog roundup number 165 is now up at The Wardman Wire.

Next week’s Britblog roundup will be hosted by Mr Eugenides, and nominations should go to the usual address, britblog [at] gmail [dot] com.

Fighting back on safety paranoia

Free Range Kids is a new blog aimed at countering today’s paranoid overly-safety-conscious society:

Do you ever let your kid ride a bike to the library? Walk alone to school? Take a bus, solo? Or are you thinking about it? If so, you are raising a Free Range Kid! At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail. Most of us grew up Free Range and lived to tell the tale. Our kids deserve no less. This site dedicated to sane parenting.

(via Boing Boing)