Critical Thinking

Claim: “Poor people are genetically inferior”

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This has been doing the rounds … There are potentially a couple of rather important points here, but they are all trumped by one key one. We could perhaps start by taking this as a cue for an immediate rant because it is quite frankly an abhorrent idea for an elected official to promote and … Read more

This week’s Insanity: Invitation to a Chickenpox party

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One manifestation of the rising tide of the non-scientific anti-vaccine movement has been the arrival of the pox party. The idea is that when somebody has a kid who has chickenpox they hold a party and invite all their friends around so that their kids can catch it and thus get it all over and done with early. … Read more

What Did jesus really look like?

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OK, let’s start with the quick short TL:DR; version … anybody who claims that they actually know what Jesus looked like is promoting complete and utter BS. The claim The context here is that I’ve seen a few claims floating about within the media regarding a supposedly “scientific” analysis that has yielded the above picture. … Read more

Why are some inclined to embrace Bullshit as truth?

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We live in a world that is awash with rather a lot of pseudoscientific claims that are pure grade one gold plated Bullshit, and so it is worth thinking about why some are very susceptible to such influences and others demonstrate a robust immunity to it all. A fascinating paper that yields some insights has been published within the journal Judgment … Read more

Morality with and without a god

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So I have a Morality claim from “TheBlaze” … well yes, identifying that as the source is perhaps sufficient to trigger a “here be some BS” alarm, because taking anything from TheBlaze seriously would perhaps be as viable as using Answers In Genesis as your go-to reference for science. As a bit of background context, TheBlaze was founded by Glenn Beck, a … Read more

UK’s NHS to Blacklist homeopathy .. hopefully.

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This has been announced by the Good Thinking Society … Simon Singh and the Good Thinking Society have today welcomed the decision of the Department of Health to consult on adding homeopathic remedies to the NHS ‘Blacklist’.  Following a proposed judicial review by the Good Thinking Society(1), the Department of Health have announced a consultation to … Read more