Appeal
to Incredulity & Scopie's Law
[back] Ad hominem
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are
kept secret by public incredulity."---Marshall McLuha
Scopie's Law (a logical fallacy): "In any discussion involving
science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses you the argument
immediately ...and gets you laughed out of the room."
[Welcome to Pseudo-Skeptic land, and an Allopath get out of jail card. Orac invented a new logical fallacy (Scopie's Law), after a gang member to hide the fact they have no argument. Mostly founded upon Appeal to Incredulity--unbelievable = untrue, so the more unbelievable items you can find the heretic believes in, the better, and easy to sell to Pyjama people or people with an investment in the status quo. It is an ad hominem variant, a classic example of a Rationalization, and you can see they are just about building a Temple to it. You get this one from pharma people (just shows the weakness in academic intelligence) who just can't argue their corner when faced with the truth (eg Brain Deer uses this). They round up all the most unbelievable (to them) pages on whale, hold them up and hope that frightens people from looking at all the medical pages that shred vaccination very easily. Shouting the popular buzzword CONSPIRACY or 'conspiracy theory' is standard fare. Some examples below, the homeopathic one being a common one with Allopaths like Ben Goldacre. No doubt this will work in a big group of pharma people--the Pharma gang. This is David Aaronovitch's main 'argument' (an Oxford man using a logical fallacy).
See: Shills
"Newspeak was the official language ... The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits ... but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought should be literally unthinkable." Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell.
Right John, the coverup….tell me again – is it the Lizards or the Black Helicopters? Or is it the Lizards flying the Black Helicopters?--Kevin Leach http://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/?p=998#comment-52111
How about the flying dolphins, John?
Kind regards,
Becky
http://jabs.org.uk/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2437&whichpage=2
John - no-one is ever going to take you seriously on any medical matter when
the same site that purports to "prove" vaccine / autism links etc also purports
to prove the authenticity of The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, the flying
dolphins, the Royal Familybeing lizards and the burning ley lines. (The fact
that most of your "scientific" information is also utter nonsense doesn't help
your cause either).
So once again, I claim Scopie's Law.
Kind regards
[This from a Wikipedia
Allopath editor,
which was their only argument there--they used that to block all links to
whale.to.]
"I agree with 86.128.165.240
that information about vaccines and their side effects should not be suppressed. However,
the whale.to link is not an appropriate source for this information because of the
competing extremist information and conspiracy theories as outlined on the RFC on Talk:MMR
vaccine. As already reviewed by InvictaHOG, the commentary on Illuminati mind control, Jewish conspiracy, genocide via vaccination, Roman Catholics, psychic assassins,
Mormons, Walter
Cronkite, demons sacrificing girls for growth hormone, or
links to alien implant removers distracts from
the criticisms of vaccines and decreases the value of whale.to link." Andrew73
13:12, 9 December 2005 (UTC)
Recently she wrote a rather stunning post illustrating the ties between an anti-vaccine “expert” and anti-vaccine lawyer and a web site that can only be described as a freakish hive of prejudice and nutjobbery. The web site is Whale.to, a clearinghouse not only for — to put it extremely charitably — less mainstream scientific ideas, but also for copies of the infamous anti-Semitic tract the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, anti-Catholic tracts, and writings tying vaccines to Illuminati plots http://www.popehat.com/2008/06/18/the-fiendish-flouridators-are-nothing-compared-to-the-vicious-vaccinators/
"Whale.to is one of the biggest repositories of altie woo, pseudoscience, conspiracy mongering, and New Age nonsense you'll ever be able to find anywhere. Anyone who uncritically cites anything from Whale.to as evidence to bolster his position clearly has a problem with critical thinking skills."--Orac
Many people confuse homeopathy
with herbalism and do not realise just how far homeopathic remedies are diluted.
The typical dilution is called "30C": this means that the original substance has
been diluted by 1 drop in 100, 30 times. On the Society of Homeopaths site, in
their "What is homeopathy?" section, they say that "30C contains less than 1
part per million of the original substance."
This is an understatement: a 30C homeopathic preparation is a dilution of 1 in
10030, or rather 1 in 1060, which means a 1 followed by 60 zeroes, or - let's be
absolutely clear - a dilution of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000.
To phrase that in the Society of
Homeopaths' terms, we should say: "30C contains less than one part per million
million million million million million million million million million of the
original substance."
At a homeopathic dilution of 100C, which they sell routinely, and which
homeopaths claim is even more powerful than 30C, the treating substance is
diluted by more than the total number of atoms in the universe. Homeopathy was
invented before we knew what atoms were, or how many there are, or how big they
are. It has not changed its belief system in light of this information.
How can an almost infinitely dilute
solution cure anything? Most homeopaths claim that water has "a memory". They
are unclear what this would look like, and homeopaths' experiments claiming to
demonstrate it are frequently bizarre. As a brief illustration, American
magician and debunker James Randi has for many years had a $1m prize on offer
for anyone who can demonstrate paranormal abilities. He has made it clear that
this cheque would go to someone who can reliably distinguish a homeopathic
dilution from water. His money remains unclaimed. Ben Goldacre
Propaganda 1 On two separate
occasions, someone mentioned something to me about terrorism, or the war on
terror, and I responded by asking "you do know that there is indisputable
scientific evidence that proves beyond any doubt that the Twin Towers were
demolished with explosives, right?" For me, any discussion of terrorism has to
begin with the understanding of what actually happened on 9-11, rather than what
we were told to believe.
On both occasions, the person I was talking to responded by
saying "I heard that the president of Mexico saw a UFO."
The first time this happened, I shook my head and thought to
myself "what the hell is this girl thinking? Maybe the president of Mexico
sniffs glue and sees all kinds of things, but what does one thing have to do
with the other? How did she make the jump from 9-11 to Mexican UFO’s without a
sentence between the two subjects?
The second time it happened I thought to myself "Holy shit.
This is a conditioned response." Somehow, the herd has been taught to
immediately make an association with UFO’s, Bigfoot, or the ghost of Elvis
whenever someone talks to them about crimes committed by people within our
government. This is incredibly convenient for a government comprised of crooks
and perverts, but how did they accomplish this?
......Look closely at every TV character who questions or mistrusts the
government, and you will see that this behavior is linked with one abnormal
personality after another. The sub-conscious lesson here is that anyone who
questions the government or suggests they may be involved in any crime has an
abnormal personality, so you can quickly dismiss everything he has to say.
Through decades of repetition of these messages, you’ve been taught to ignore
any criminality on the part of anyone in our government, and anyone who might
make such an accusation. While you were being so trained, you were robbed of
your wealth and freedom.
....Their mind makes an association between the important information, and the
ridiculous information, and they feel confident that it’s nothing they need to
worry about, but they may carry on the silly conversation about UFO’s and stuff
just to be polite. Silently they’re convinced that because you tried to warn
them about their criminal government, you must also spend your nights on the
roof searching the skies for E.T.
