I’ve been getting slapped upside the head with this “dick” meme that’s roaring through the skeptic community lately, largely because it seems that any time someone makes a generic criticism of rude, abrasive, confrontational critics of foolishness, the audience all thinks of the life-size poster of PZ Myers they’ve got hanging on their bedroom door back home. It’s a little annoying. Everybody seems to imagine that if Granny says “Bless you!” after I sneeze, I punch her in the nose, and they’re all busy dichotomizing the skeptical community into the nice, helpful, sweet people who don’t rock the boat and the awful, horrible, bastards in hobnailed boots who stomp on small children in Sunday school. It’s just not right.

Of course, there’s a range of criticism, too. I think Rebecca Watson is hitting the problem about right: it’s about picking your battles, and making a scene over trivial customs practiced with charitable intent is not a good idea. So, really, I don’t have to punch Granny in the nose—I can just say “thank you!”, and that’s fine. But when Granny tells you to get down on your knees and praise Jesus right now or you’re going to burn for eternity in a lake of hellfire, then some dickishness is not only justified, it’s necessary.

The thing is, the dickishness practiced is not nose-punching, it’s not even howling four-letter words at Granny…it’s a flat statement of “That’s crazy, I’m not going to do that, and here’s why.” That, apparently, is the New Dickishness.

One recent flashpoint in this argument was Phil Plait’s talk at TAM 8, in which he asked a rhetorical question, “How many of you … became a skeptic, because somebody got in your face, screaming, and called you an idiot, brain-damaged, and a retard?” And the Pharyngula switchboard lit up. Lots of people wrote to me via email or twitter, some gloating, some just unhappy, stating that Phil had just called me out.

No, he didn’t. He didn’t mention me at all. He opened up against a strawman New Dick, which is unfortunate, because there isn’t anyone who fits that description in the skeptical movement. There are people like that elsewhere: drill sergeants and televangelists come to mind.

A few people are speaking out against the talk. Stephanie Zvan points out that Randi is one of these ‘dicks’, that his willingness to sneer at charlatans was an important factor in her own acceptance of skepticism. Matt Dillahunty thinks Phil was making a bit of a dick move himself, which actually demonstrates the utility of the making people think with a little harshness. I also fear that one of the reasons for the popularity of Phil’s talk (it did strike a chord with many) is that it reassured many that certain aspects of belief were going to be walled off from skeptical criticism in the name of politeness and tone and courtesy.

There is a fair point being made, that there are multiple strategies that work to convince people to rethink bad ideas, and they don’t all involve punching people in the face…and many of the best strategies do involve politely listening and criticizing. But I think the best ideas involve a combination of willingness to listen and politely engage, and a forthright core of assertiveness and confrontation — tactical dickishness, if you want to call it that.

I don’t, actually — it also seems like a dick move to try and associate a strategy with gender, since some of the most wonderfully dickish skeptics I know are female. But that’s a separate issue.

Once again, the Huffington Post features front page quackery. In this case, it’s a ridiculous article that accuses dermatology of being a conspiracy to make doctors rich; you know that stuff about UV damage to the skin inducing melanoma? It’s all made up by doctors who are in the pocket of the vast sunscreen industry.

I don’t link to Huffington Post anymore, so you’ll have to settle for Peter Lipson’s deconstruction.

The lineup for SkeptiCon 3 just keeps getting better and better — James Randi and Sam Singleton are going to be there now, too. One other important feature of this meeting: every time I mention one of these posh meetings with the fancy-pants speakers, someone looks at the registration fees and swoons theatrically at the cost. That won’t happen here.

It’s free.

You’ll have to get there somehow, but that shouldn’t be a problem. There are lots of flights into Springfield, Missouri because it’s the gateway to Branson, the old-timey c’ntry western entertainment capitol. Just think, you’ll get to rub shoulders with happy families on their way to watch wholesome entertainment like Debby Boone and the Gatlin Brothers and Michael Bolton, and when they chirpily ask watchoo doin’ this weekend, you can glower under your sinister cloud of doom and intone, “I’m going to curse God and Jesus in the heart of the Assemblies of God church, while destroying the blithe delusions of quacks and frauds.” Fun!

You’ll also have to pay for a room, and here’s the deal: if you book your room at the University Plaza Hotel, not only will you get a good room rate, but every 50 rooms booked means they’ll comp a room for a speaker, which is one of the tricksy things they’re doing to get the costs down. Do it now. You’ll want to stay there. One of the features of this con is the all-night conversation and partying with the speakers. You are expected to keep DJ Grothe and Richard Carrier and Dan Barker and Rebecca Watson and Debbie Goddard and Amanda Marcotte up all night. James Randi might vanish in a puff of smoke whenever he feels like it, but the rest of us…fair game.

So no excuses. Mark 19-21 November on your calendars now. Make plans.

Rachel Roberts says, “I don’t know how, but homeopathy really does work“. Oh, I thought, let’s give it a try and hear why. But then I was five paragraphs in and getting nothing but this inane anecdote about how when she was 21, and she was at this party, see, and this lady said she used to have some ailment of an unspecified nature and then she took two sugar pills and zip-zap-alakazam, a couple of days later, she was cured!!! Of what, I don’t know. Could have been a cold. Coulda been terminal pancreatic cancer. Coulda been the Zombie Plague, and the lady could have been green and dead with her left arm gnawed off and moaning for “braaaains”, and now she’s serving tea at the Ladies Club and singing every Sunday in the church choir. We don’t know. But whatever it was, it convinced Rachel Roberts to throw away her scholarship to a graduate program in neuroscience and go to homeopathy school.

The Zombie Plague theory acquires a little more credibility. That dinner party encounter seems to have sucked her brains out.

She does throw out a little flurry of studies that have shown the efficacy of homeopathy, but I’m unconvinced. I’ve looked into a few of those papers in the past — the homeopathic dilutions of thyroxine inhibiting metamorphosis sounded interesting — and found nothing but confusing protocols, extremely weak effects, and poor experimental design, not to mention the complete absence of a mechanism and that their results contradict good studies on the effects of concentration of thyroxine on frog metamorphosis (we have very good data on how increasing the concentration of thyroxine speeds up metamorphosis, with charts and tables and everything.) It’s funny how when advocates do some sloppy research, they get an effect…and when critics start controlling for bias and errors, the effects disappear. Almost as if they weren’t really there.

Skip Rachel Roberts. Read Ben Goldacre instead.

That’s the latest news, anyway: radio masts operated by the Vatican have been implicated in an increased incidence of cancers nearby.

It is such a juicily evil story — it would just fit the Pope’s Bond villain image so well — but, and I really, really hate to defend the Vatican, I don’t buy it. Sorry. I know it’s my mission to smack the Catholic church around, but this is a case where I just find it highly unlikely.

I have not read the report; all I’ve seen so far is the accusation, the small numbers (19 deaths in 23 years) and the excessive charges — 6 people are being investigated on criminal charges of manslaughter. Something’s just not right here.

These stories crop up regularly. People claim power lines or cell phones cause cancer, but none of the data really support it — there is no plausible mechanism where these very weak fields could be causing cancer, and at best the epidemiological studies show there can be only a very small effect…or more likely, no effect at all.

Maybe there are some new and persuasive data and statistics in this new Italian study, but even if they actually have a believable measure of an effect, it’s not going to justify criminal charges. It’s also peculiar to focus on just the Catholic church; are there no other shortwave radio antennas in Italy?

Apparently there are: the Italian navy has radio masts in the same area, but to make the report even weirder, only Catholic antennas and not naval antennas cause cancer. I’d like to know how they determined that, and what makes Catholicism carcinogenic.

Barbara Ehrenreich critiques positive thinking — and blames some of our problems on it. There’s a lot of truth here, and it’s also entertaining to watch.

Warning: Country. Otherwise, good message.

The Australian Vaccination Network is an awful little organization that exists to spread fear and disinformation about vaccines, under the pretense of caring about children. They’re getting an official comeuppance, though: the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission has put together a report condemning AVN. They’re announcing that AVN’s claims are inaccurate and misleading, and further, that AVN harasses people. There’s a terrible story at that link of a couple whose child died miserably of whooping cough…and Meryl Dorey, head of AVN, responded by demanding medical records and insisting that the child couldn’t have died of a disease preventable by vaccination.

AVN is a couple of truly rotten people with an office. It’s a shame that the only punishment the HCCC report is doling out to them is a demand that they put a disclaimer on their web site.

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An excellent report on ABC:

Oh, crap. This was the first time I’d heard Meryl Dorey — she’s an American! Australia, I have to forgive you for Ken Ham now. You gave us a moron who makes kids stupid; we gave you a moron who kills children. We got the better end of the exchange, sad to say.

So don’t call her Dr McKeith. She hasn’t earned it. Also, it irks her something fierce when you question her title.

If you’re an American, you have something you can take real pride in: you’ve probably never heard of Gillian McKeith. I hadn’t. Apparently, she’s a prominent woo-peddler in the UK, with her face and various encomiums plastered on magic chlorophyll pills and dong-distenders and ingredients for superfoods that will make your hair grow and your liver do backflips. She also writes popular books that make outrageously silly claims about medicine and science. She also claims to have a Ph.D., a bit of fraud that she was told to stop making because it is a lie — she seems to have bought some pieces of paper from quacky diploma mills.

If you contact the Australasian College of Health Sciences (Portland, US) where McKeith has a “pending diploma in herbal medicine”, they say they can’t tell you anything about their students. When you contact Clayton College of Natural Health to ask where you can read her PhD, they say you can’t. What kind of organisations are these? If I said I had a PhD from Cambridge, US or UK (I have neither), it would only take you a day to find it.

She’s one of the citizens of the evil empire we bravely and patriotically broke free of 221 years ago (good thing, too — I hear their queen is a baby-eating reptoid). We don’t have to worry too much about her here in the ex-colonies. Note, though, where she got her fake degrees: here in the USA. That contributes to a recent twist.

Rachel Moody made a casual comment about McKeith not having a Ph.D. on Twitter, which really annoyed the quack. She fired back, and what’s weird is she is now arguing that questioning her degree is a sign of anti-Americanism. Say what? I didn’t know all the foreigners were also expected to be patriotic pro-Americans! This will make Glenn Beck so happy.

So you believe if you tell a lie enough times it becomes fact. It doesn’t honey! Your anti-American bigotry is too glaring. gx
6:43 PM Jul 8th via web in reply to rachelemoody

Miss Anti-American: How sad a life to enjoy reading lies about another by an ass who makes money from pharmaceutical giants
6:22 PM Jul 8th via web in reply to rachelemoody

Sad thing Rachel that your excitement comes from negativity. Think about it. U can shift yourself when you decide
5:57 PM Jul 8th via web in reply to rachelemoody

Is it that you don’t like my Doctorate (PhD) because it’s from America and you’re discriminatory? USA knows how to educate too
5:56 PM Jul 8th via web in reply to rachelemoody

I’m a little creeped out. It’s annoying enough when our pundits wrap themselves in the American flag and announce their loyalty, but really…a citizen of the UK groveling over a colonial affiliation? Don’t they take people like that out and have them keelhauled or put in stocks or flogged around the fleet anymore?

I would agree with McKeith that the US does have very good universities where you can get a good doctorate-level education. McKeith did not attend any of them. Also, for every Stanford and Harvard we have our share of diploma mills and fake, unaccredited pseudo-universities. Case in point: Kent Hovind, creationist jailbird, has a “Ph.D.” from Patriot “University”, a ranch-style house and fundamentalist church in Colorado. If McKeith would like to add to her woo credentials, she could also pick up a degree in astrology from Kepler College.

We are a nation rich in crackpots. Just saying your degree was bought in America is not a guarantee of quality.