Could you expand on this or provide a link?

I'm skeptical of your claim, OZ. Prove it.

Everyone resorts to sophistry in order to win arguments once in awhile. He wouldn't be human if he didn't! The real questions are, what does he lie about, to whom, and how often does he do it?

You mean crazy person dog ESP fiasco?
http://www.sheldrake.org/D&C/controversies/randi.html
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=22074

He should have just said "fuck no I didn't watch that dumb shit, dog ESP is stupid."

The most terrifying thing in the universe to both the true believer and the skeptic is the physical truth. Both run from it swiftly and without fail. This is what is so tiresome to me about skeptics; at least the true believers are honest about deluding themselves.

Yes, skepticism is all about running from physical truth. They avoid it without fail.

No wait, that's one of the dumbest statements I've heard. Skepticism is a necessary step on the path to truth, you can't engage in truth seeking without it. Even if using this to apply to James Randi specifically it's incredibly stupid. If he runs from truth without fail, and disbelieves all crackpot claims presented, then presumably all crackpots all correct, even the crackpots that contradict the other crackpots.

If the true believers are deluded, and the skeptics don't believe the true believers, the skeptics can't be wrong. I don't know how you found a way to feel superior to both groups in a binary true/false situation.

Or I guess more to the point: What deluded nonsense is it that you believe that skeptics don't, which leads to this bitterness?

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is stained by his ignorant anti-Mayan tweets on the run-up to THE APARKALYPSE.

Does he really have intellectual integrity after penning "Dear Muslima"? That's gotta be the dumbest fallacy ever because no matter how inconsequential the issue someone else is complaining about you are by definition, making an even more frivolous complaint than they are by complaining about them.

"Dear Muslima" was Richard Dawkins, not Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

"Does he really have intellectual integrity after penning "Dear Muslima"? "

Yes, he does. One snarky jab at a feminist doesn't cost a person forty years of intellectual rigor, regardless of how silly the situation was.

I wouldn't say his argument was fallacious because his complaint was also frivolous. That would be a form of ad hominem; a pot has every right to call a kettle black, when the kettle in question IS black. While the pot may be a hypocrite and lack self-awareness, his argument can still be logically and factually sound. As an example: Donald Rumsfeld's recent criticisms of Obama's Syrian agenda.

That's not to say that I think "Dear Muslima" was a particularly elegant piece of reasoning. Dawkins resorted to a variant of the Right To Speak/ Shut Up tactic, that is, "unless your suffering is equal to or greater than an arbitrarily defined valued, you don't have a right to complain". Everyone has a right to complain about anything they want, bullshit or not, and whether it IS bullshit or not is a question that can not be resolved by simply pointing out the speaker's shortcomings. Consider MRAs. Men face a number of unfair obstacles in society today. These obstacles may be smaller and less significant than those faced by, say, Hindu hermaphrodite prostitutes in India, but the fact that there's someone out there worse off than them does not, in and of itself, invalidate the legitimacy of their complaints. *Other things* may invalidate the legitimacy of their complaints, but not their comparative level of suffering.� (as an aside, I was with Dawky on that one, just not with the way he put it. Lighten up, babe!)


Anyway, this isn't really about Dawkins; I meant to post that comment as a reply to OZ. Even if both Dawkins and Randi are off the table (which they're not), that still leaves us with dozens of public intellectuals who are respectable, honest skeptics.




�(this is unless, of course, the person is complaining that their suffering is UNIQUE or WORSE than anything anyone else is enduring. In that case, pointing out analogous situations can be sufficient to counter the argument)

I don't think we'll be hearing too much from Michael Shermer anymore what with the rape accusations and all....

People really have to stop slut shaming Michael Shermer. :(