The Encyclopedia of American Loons

[Strelnikov]

This is the dullest list of people (presented from A to Z) advocating stuff the author doesn't like that I've ever seen. "G.D." is that author, and he hates alternative medicine, creationism, religious fundamentalists, etc. That he uses the term "woo" a lot marks him (to me) as either being a member of one of CSI(COP)'s skeptics groups or a fan of James Randi, who created the skeptic's definition of that word, possibly a user of the James Randi Educational Foundation messageboard that is now called the International Skeptics Forum. "G.D." has been at it since May, 2010 with the first entry being Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com ("Orac", aka Dr. David Gorski the Wikipedian, is down there in the post comments) - the problem is that many of the entries in the "Encyclopedia" are people who are barely known outside of whatever thing they are "notable" for, and he updates nothing. For example, there is an entry on Leo Berman, a Texas state representative who spent a lot of time in the Bush II years trying to pass a law to let the Institute for Creation Research hand out degrees that meant something. "G.D." will not tell you that Berman died in 2015. And he has an assistant, "chaospet", who runs his own skeptical web cartoon series that looks like a better-drawn but less funny version of xkcd (and xkcd is only funny to burned-out STEM grad students) so there is no excuse to not update the list. And Dave Gorski is giving "G.D." leads on the most obscure anti-vaccination people, such as Joel Lord, who is on the list despite being Canadian, because Gorski hates antivaxxers that much. (Gorski's blog Respectful insolence gets a "hat tip" acknowledgement from "G.D." for pointing him towards Joel Lord.)

If you are a creationist, he goes after you, even Forrest M. Mims, III., a well-known electronics writer, whose how-to manuals were published and sold by Radio Shack. He doesn't like Abby Martin of Russia Today shows The Empire Files and Breaking the Set, writes this about her: "Often described as a spokesperson for the Millenial [sic] generation, Martin is probably at best a specimen of Millenial [sic] conspiracy mongerers [sic]. Addle-brained fop. Don’t listen to her." His entry on Cynthia McKinney used Wikipedia and Cracked.com as sources. Not a word about her being one of the tiny few to vote against the Afghanistan invasion in 2001. He does mention a few people I've mentioned on my blog or this board or its predecessor, like the people behind Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, or Stanton Friedman (but then "G.D.'s" writings about the man are on the same level as Phillip Klass' poison-pen letter to the National Research Council of Canada in 1980.) Of course they have Ken Ham and all the wanna-Hams.

The site reminds of what Al Franken said about Rush Limbaugh's short-lived TV version of his radio show - "It punishes you for knowing anything" - if you aren't a smug, college-educated STEM major and skeptic/atheist who scours the internet to find people to laugh at, then he's either laughing at you or you are ignored. No understanding that these are issues created by living in an economically unequal country with no free college educations and no national health service, but one with freedom of press and religion, and traditions within Protestantism that create Fundamentalism. The vaccination paranoia is partially done out of love for ones own children, and blinding fear that they will wind up wrecks and never be able to be economically self-sufficient. Skepticism is a neo-liberal half measure to deal with a society that is not intellectually up to date.

[ericbarbour]

People have been sending me American Loons links for a looong time, right back to its beginning. So the skeptics are sharing it around aggressively. Even though the posts tend to closely resemble the equivalent RationalWiki articles.

As I've said before, a hundred dollars sez "G.D." is a regular on RationalWiki and is probably very friendly with Gerard, if he isn't just another Gerard sockpuppet. He's still grinding new content despite a total lack of interest--I see almost no user comment posts. So he's screeching to the converted. (But then, Blogspot has been slowly declining for years in general.)

Funny how these "supporters of science and rationality" are so fond of irrational raving, and wind up resembling the people they hate, eh?

Get this: a lot of the traffic to American Loons comes from VDare and the blogger Nicholas Stix, who is VERY obscure. So obscure he doesn't have an RW article or a WP article or much of any other notice. Huh.

[ericbarbour]

That Philip Klass letter is a classic. What is it with this "Stanton Friedman Must Be Destroyed" stuff? Why even bother?

Of course there's a long Wikipedia article full of dripping contempt. A lot of it was the work of someone I've never run across before, Holon. Another item for the sock drawer?....

[Strelnikov]

People have been sending me American Loons links for a looong time, right back to its beginning. So the skeptics are sharing it around aggressively. Even though the posts tend to closely resemble the equivalent RationalWiki articles.

As I've said before, a hundred dollars sez "G.D." is a regular on RationalWiki and is probably very friendly with Gerard, if he isn't just another Gerard sockpuppet. He's still grinding new content despite a total lack of interest--I see almost no user comment posts. So he's screeching to the converted. (But then, Blogspot has been slowly declining for years in general.)

Funny how these "supporters of science and rationality" are so fond of irrational raving, and wind up resembling the people they hate, eh?

Get this: a lot of the traffic to American Loons comes from VDare and the blogger Nicholas Stix, who is VERY obscure. So obscure he doesn't have an RW article or a WP article or much of any other notice. Huh.

Nicholas Stix is a raging white supremacist and writer at VDare (named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in colonial America), the outfit that picked up ex-National Review writer John Derbyshire after he went feral over Chelsea Clinton and Buckley gave him the pink slip. That was the '90s; I haven't seen Peter Brimelow (VDare founder) on TV in decades - they let him on some PBS show when the Bell Curve was big to argue about immigration and it was flamingly obvious the man was a crypto-Nazi and an angry, angry man.

Funny how these "supporters of science and rationality" are so fond of irrational raving, and wind up resembling the people they hate, eh?

That's the thing, skeptics/militant atheists share mentality and style with Fundamentalist rant preachers. Meanwhile you talk to the people involved with serious UFO investigation groups* (MUFON, for example) or independent researchers like Jacques Vallée, and they are very serious people dealing in a subject that has been left to the tabloid press. Then you look at the skeptics and you find that CSI(COP) gave up on their only scientific investigation in the late 1970s (CSICOP co-founder Dennis Rawlins wrote about this for Fate magazine in 1981), and that most of the work they did as CSICOP and even today as CSI was/is as a press outfit, going after alternative medicine now as they went after astrology in the 1970s-80s. If a story can be quickly debunked by Joe Nickell, it gets attention in Skeptical Inquirer - anything that requires lab work is strenuously avoided. I bring up CSICOP because they created the model for what it means to act as a skeptics group, and if you look at the groups that have no contact with CSI, they exhibit similar behavior: they are aligned with atheist groups, their populations are white (N. European) in the main, they are college educated and either getting ready for grad school or working in industry (because they were STEM majors), there is a growing cadre of women (because woman are the majority of undergrads on American college campuses.) There may be an overlap** as with CSICOP in that professional stage magicians or wannabes are involved, and the problem with that is that skeptic magicians bring in their own hard cynical view of the phenomena they can fake, mainly ESP and psychokenesis, and if they also know how to do ventriloquism, then ghostly voices in seances, "electronic voice phenomena" (field audio or video recordings of ghosts answering questions put to them by researchers) as well. Their argument is usually "if I can fake it, it isn't real", which can be countered with "they fake car accidents in movies, does that mean they don't happen?" I would say that CSI(COP) and Skeptic magazine and the Guerilla Skeptics on Wikipedia have had a real chilling effect on research into paranormal topics in America, meanwhile Sony Electronics was running a lab called "ESPER" ("Extrasensory Perception and Excitation Research") in Japan in the 1980s-90s and their very low-key spokesman was claiming that ESP existed, but the lab closed after Sony founder Masaru Ibuka died - either because they could never find a way to make an electronic device that could harness ESP in some useful way or Ibuka's "outside the box" thinking was considered too far out for the Board of Directors. Sony can't be the only one out there quietly doing this work, and you can bet they aren't American.

__________________

* I picked UFOs because they were the most maligned subject when I was reading Skeptical Inquirer years ago, but it also applies to groups like the Society for Psychical Research in Britain (they started off cranky in the 19th century and got better as time went on) and numerous serious parapsychologists.


** scroll down to page 45, Magicians’ Activities. From George P. Hansen's paper:

MAGICIANS WHO ARE OR HAVE BEEN OFFICIAL MEMBERS OF CSICOP (circa 1992 - S.)

Richard Busch

Shawn Carlson

Milboume Christopher*†

Persi Diaconis*†

Eric Dingwall*

Martin Gardner*†

Henry Gordon*

Ray Hyman*

Joe Nickell

Mark Plummer

James Randi*†

Robert Steiner*

Marcello Truzzi*

* Indicates sufficiently known to be included in Who’s Who in Magic (Whaley, 1990).
† Indicates sufficient prominence to be included in The Encyclopedia of Magic and Magicians (Waters, 1988).

[Strelnikov]

That Philip Klass letter is a classic. What is it with this "Stanton Friedman Must Be Destroyed" stuff? Why even bother?

Of course there's a long Wikipedia article full of dripping contempt. A lot of it was the work of someone I've never run across before, Holon. Another item for the sock drawer?....

Klass was very good at defaming people he didn't like; he claimed that John Lear (son of Bill Lear of Learjet fame) had gotten brain damage from an air crash he had suffered and that's why he was pro-UFO*. He never wrote that one down (probably for fear of a lawsuit) but he would pass it along to people like Tim Cridland when Cridland went to Klass' house in D.C. to interview him which became "Walking the Dog with Phil Klass" in Cridland's zine Off The Deep End. Cridland, whose day job is being a "human blockhead" under the stage name "Zamora the Torture King", did an interview with Greg Bishop for the latter's Radio Misterioso podcast/former Internet radio show, but I can't seem to get the stream to work. Bishop also talks about how Klass called Richard Doty up, asked him to go to this airport that was miles from Doty's house to pick Klass up. Doty drives four hours to get to the airport but Klass isn't there. He calls Klass' house in Washington, D.C. from the airport and Mister Two-Packs-A-Day picks up and an incredulous Doty asks why he hadn't flown and Klass answers "I just wanted to see if you would drive down there if I asked" (or words to that effect.)

So to answer your question "What is it with this "Stanton Friedman Must Be Destroyed" stuff?", well it's because Friedman was a nuclear physicist, and those people are heroes to the skeptic/science nerd types. And then he crossed the line, and started dealing with UFOs outside of the Approved Mode, which is to poo-poo the whole thing or call it woo-woo like James Randi and get back to running the atom-smasher at CERN. Really they want to give the business to J. Allen Hynek (who gave us the "Close Encounter" system of classifying UFO sightings and made a silent cameo in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind) but Hynek died in 1986. And Hynek was an astronomer, so the heresy is up there with the Pope actually being a Satanic priest on the weekdays. That's literally what all of this is, total intellectual inflexibility by science fanboys - you become a scientist and you can never talk positively about certain subjects. That's it.

_____________________
* Lear has gotten weirder, now claims we have secret bases on the Moon and that Grey aliens are actually robots doing the scutwork of the actual aliens. (God, that would suck being a robot that has the body of a limp weed and a head like a bowling ball doing all the abductions, weird probing, probably cleaning gunk off the floor after the monthly cattle mutilation - we always assumed the aliens liked doing all this Tinkertoy science. Now it's just a machine doing an absurd job for arcane reasons like something out of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.)

Bishop never explains how Klass, a writer at Aviation Week & Space Technology, knew Doty, a former Air Force Office of Special Investigations special agent - I would blame CSICOP. Why he was a dick to Doty might have to do with the Paul Bennewitz case.

[ericbarbour]

Nicholas Stix is a raging white supremacist and writer at VDare (named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in colonial America), the outfit that picked up ex-National Review writer John Derbyshire after he went feral over Chelsea Clinton and Buckley gave him the pink slip.

I remember that. And there is nothing about it on Derbyshire's lengthy Wikipedia article.
He posted the original 2001 article on his website. Yes, he's attacking a teenaged girl here. And people still hate her today--some on the left even. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Republican anti-Chelsea sentiment congealed as soon as she embarked upon the roughest White House childhood in living memory. When she was 12, Rush Limbaugh called her a dog; when she was 18, and her family was contending with the Monica Lewinsky affair, Senator John McCain asked the audience at a fund-raising dinner, “Do you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly?” The punchline: “Because Janet Reno is her father.” Yet the insults came from the other side, too — Saturday Night Live made fun of her looks in a “Wayne’s World” sketch when she was still an awkward 13-year-old. It’s baffling that she came in for so much ridicule; the Obama girls were generally fawned over on social media, and the hard-partying Bush twins were seen as reality-TV-style entertainment.

Attacking daddy president for his politics is understandable; this sniping at presidential children is a new development, and extremely insane. Not to mention pointless.

I bring up CSICOP because they created the model for what it means to act as a skeptics group, and if you look at the groups that have no contact with CSI, they exhibit similar behavior: they are aligned with atheist groups, their populations are white (N. European) in the main, they are college educated and either getting ready for grad school or working in industry (because they were STEM majors), there is a growing cadre of women (because woman are the majority of undergrads on American college campuses.) There may be an overlap** as with CSICOP in that professional stage magicians or wannabes are involved, and the problem with that is that skeptic magicians bring in their own hard cynical view of the phenomena they can fake, mainly ESP and psychokenesis, and if they also know how to do ventriloquism, then ghostly voices in seances, "electronic voice phenomena" (field audio or video recordings of ghosts answering questions put to them by researchers) as well. Their argument is usually "if I can fake it, it isn't real", which can be countered with "they fake car accidents in movies, does that mean they don't happen?"

Excellent point. It's like Scientology: "kiss the power ring of James Randi or be flung into outer darkness" and so forth.

[ericbarbour]

Klass was very good at defaming people he didn't like; he claimed that John Lear (son of Bill Lear of Learjet fame) had gotten brain damage from an air crash he had suffered and that's why he was pro-UFO*. He never wrote that one down (probably for fear of a lawsuit) but he would pass it along to people like Tim Cridland when Cridland went to Klass' house in D.C. to interview him which became "Walking the Dog with Phil Klass" in Cridland's zine Off The Deep End. Cridland, whose day job is being a "human blockhead" under the stage name "Zamora the Torture King"

Ha ha ha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zamora_the_Torture_King

So to answer your question "What is it with this "Stanton Friedman Must Be Destroyed" stuff?", well it's because Friedman was a nuclear physicist, and those people are heroes to the skeptic/science nerd types. And then he crossed the line, and started dealing with UFOs outside of the Approved Mode, which is to poo-poo the whole thing or call it woo-woo like James Randi and get back to running the atom-smasher at CERN. Really they want to give the business to J. Allen Hynek (who gave us the "Close Encounter" system of classifying UFO sightings and made a silent cameo in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind) but Hynek died in 1986. And Hynek was an astronomer, so the heresy is up there with the Pope actually being a Satanic priest on the weekdays.

Which reminds me: American Protestants have hated Catholics since the Plymouth Rock landing. And what you hate, you develop conspiracy theories about.....
https://www.history.com/news/when-ameri ... gee-crisis

According to “Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia,” some Protestants feared the pope and his army would land in the United States, overthrow the government and establish a new Vatican in Cincinnati. They believed the Irish would impose the Catholic canon as the law of the land.

This is why all the complaining about Trump's bigotry is ineffectual; this country has been down this road before. It's always flirted with "banana republicanism". The bigotry has always been there, and will continue to be there, no matter who runs Washington. Stop posting complaints on Facebook and get out and ORGANIZE.