Responding to Holocaust Deniers

Orac at Respectful Insolence recently commented on how he first got involved in responding to Holocaust deniers. In reading his commentary, I was reminded of my own limited involvement on GEnie and Usenet's alt.revisionism in responding to the Holocaust deniers, at a time when Bradley Smith's organization, Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) was placing full-page ads in student newspapers at universities across the United States. I did a Google Groups search and found this posting that I made on alt.revisionism in response to some people who were attacking Holocaust deniers using namecalling and without offering facts or evidence to refute their claims. As it turns out, Orac was also a contributor to this thread, as were the Scientology-supported "random poetry" bots, which forged the names of major contributors to various newsgroups in an attempt to drown them out and make the groups unreadable. (Read Scientology defector Tory Bezazian's account of the spamming of Usenet.)

This posting led to a short debate with science writer Andrew Skolnick, who strongly disagreed with me--his opinion was that Holocaust deniers should get nothing but ridicule, and no one should bother trying to respond to them. I think this is the wrong approach to Holocaust denial, the wrong approach to creationism, the wrong approach to 9/11 conspiracy theories, and the wrong approach to Scientology, for reasons I give below. I do agree that it can be a bad idea to give advocates of crackpottery wider exposure or a respectable forum, but there are plenty of fora on the Internet and elsewhere where these bad ideas should be responded to with good and accurate information.

From:		James J. Lippard
Date:		Fri, Sep 24 1999 12:00 am
Email:		lipp...@discord.org (James J. Lippard)
Groups:		sci.skeptic, alt.revisionism

I first encountered claims that the Holocaust never happened sometime during my undergraduate years in college. At that time, I had recently abandoned the religious faith of my family, and I had gone from being a somewhat gullible believer to a somewhat militant atheist. I felt that I had been betrayed by authority figures in my life, and I set out to find the facts for myself. I was prepared to find that "everything I know is wrong."

Fortunately, my first exposure to Holocaust deniers was on the GEnie online service, where there were some extremely well-informed people responding to the Holocaust deniers with facts. For me, the sometimes emotional appeals were the kinds of argumentative techniques I had come to distrust, and those who clearly had facts at their disposal were the ones to be relied upon. While the Holocaust deniers tried to present themselves as being cool, dispassionate observers presenting the hard facts, it quickly became obvious that their collection of facts was similar to the collection of facts of creationists which I had been fooled by earlier in my life.

I've never spent a whole lot of effort on examining the history of the Holocaust, primarily because I was devoting my effort to other things, and because I saw that people like Ken McVay, Jamie McCarthy, and Danny Keren on alt.revisionism seemed to have things well in hand. (My big "bogus" issues which I've done a large amount of research on are creationism and Scientology; the patterns of delusion and deception seem to be pretty much the same.)

What has prompted me to write this is that I fear that there may be others here who are in a situation like I was when I first encountered this stuff. This present discussion seems to be dominated by emotional responses and namecalling, by claims that Holocaust deniers are Nazis, that they should be silenced, driven off, or even thrown in jail. I suspect that I would have taken the Holocaust deniers much more seriously in my younger days if that had been the nature of the responses to them on the GEnie service. Those of you are responding in that manner, please give this some thought. If you don't have the facts at your disposal to respond to the actual claims being made, then maybe you should leave the bulk of the responding to those who do. I'm not saying there is no place for the emotional response, or for pointing out what you see as the ultimate consequences of the views being expressed, or the motivations behind them--but just keep in mind who may be in the audience and how they may react to what you are saying. You may be accomplishing exactly the opposite of what you want.

--
Jim Lippard lipp...@discord.org http://www.discord.org/
Unsolicited bulk email charge: $500/message. Don't send me any.
PGP Fingerprint: 0C1F FE18 D311 1792 5EA8 43C8 7AD2 B485 DE75 841C

Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests 15 aliens in Roswell working for U.S. military contractor

I guess the skeptics were wrong on this one. Turns out the aliens were in Hangar 1083, not Hangar 18.

(Via jwz's blog.)

The hypocrisy of the FreeRepublic.com crowd

In 2000, an article about "The Secret FISA Court: Rubber Stamping Our Rights" created outrage and prompted comments like this:

This is beyond frightening. Thank you for this find.

This does not bode well for continued freedom. Franz Kafka would have judged this too wild to fictionalize. But for us - it’s real.

and this:

Any chance of Bush rolling some of this back? It sounds amazing on its face.

But today, when there's warrantless NSA surveillance that makes the FISA Court look like significant judicial oversight, the comments are like this:

Privacy is a false argument and has been for some time. Your insurance company and the credit bureaus have more on you than the feds do and you can do nothing about it. I would rather be secure knowing that the feds were looking over my shoulder and keeping me safe. I have nothing to hide, and in times of war, these steps are necessary.

So when Clinton engages in eavesdropping (rubber stamped by the FISA Court), it's a threat to the republic, but when Bush does it (without any judicial oversight), it's no problem.

Hat tip to Gene Healy at Cato, by way of The Agitator.

Tech Liberation Front brings on a Discovery Institute representative

The Technology Liberation Front is a blog I've been reading for a few months for its quality contributions on issues involving technology, regulation, copyright, digital rights management (DRM), network neutrality, and so on. It covers a lot of the same topics as Ed Felten's excellent Freedom-to-Tinker blog, with a strong libertarian bent.

What a disappointment it was to see that the newest contributor, Hance Haney, comes from the Technology & Democracy Project at the Discovery Institute. While Haney is in Washington D.C. and is not affiliated with the intelligent design wing (the Center for Science and Culture), crackpot George Gilder is a senior fellow of the TDP.

I commented to this effect at the Technology Liberation Front, which prompted a response from Lewis Baumstark:

As I have no previous knowledge of Hance or the Discovery Institute, I prefer to allow him to live or die here on the merits of his debate and analysis, not on his link to a pro-ID institution.

Lewis should remedy his ignorance of the Discovery Institute before coming to a conclusion about whether such an association taints Hance's reputation and credibility--surely he would not have said the same if Hance was a representative of the (in some ways more honest) Institute for Creation Research or International Flat Earth Society. As readers of this blog know well, the Discovery Institute has a long history of dishonest and deceptive public statements and attempts to influence public opinion, public policy, and educational standards. Do a Google search for "Discovery Institute site:lippard.blogspot.com" or "Dembski site:lippard.blogspot.com" for numerous examples at this blog; many more can be found at scienceblogs.com (especially Dispatches from the Culture Wars and Pharyngula) or The Panda's Thumb.

Jim Harper of TLF responded to Lewis's comment by writing "And the winner is . . . Lewis Baumstark! Curious. Courteous. Way to go, Lewis!" How odd that he would declare Lewis the "winner" when Lewis claimed ignorance of the Discovery Institute, or call him "curious" when his comment betrayed no interest in rectifying that ignorance. "Courteous," I'll grant.

I agree with the comment at TLF from Cog (of the Abstract Factory blog):

The Discovery Institute ought to be shunned by all right-thinking people, simply as punishment for so shamelessly polluting our public discourse about science. Everybody associated with the Discovery Institute should know, and never be permitted to forget, that their affiliation with that institution tars their name and calls their integrity into question.

This isn't to say that we should pre-emptively dismiss everything Hance says, but that he should never forget the cost that this affiliation will have for his professional reputation and all the views that he professes to hold. The suspicion of Lippard and others (myself included) is entirely rational, and promotes the proper working of the information ecosystem, just an investor's skepticism about former Enron executives would be rational and promote the proper working of the market.

Precisely so--it's not that Hance can't make valid or useful contributions, it's that anything he says needs to be given extra scrutiny because he willingly associates with and is employed by an organization with an established and continuing record for deception and dishonesty. "Guilt by association" is fallacious for evaluating the validity of an argument, but the company you keep is often a good indicator of your character and can create prima facie evidence about your reliability that your own words and actions may then confirm or refute.

I've experienced this myself--I'm employed by a company with a financial scandal in its past (Global Crossing). I continue to work there because I believe that the scandals are in the past and those responsible for them are no longer associated with the company, though my resume will likely always be somewhat tainted by the association and give me an extra hurdle to overcome. I consider myself fortunate that not only has the company cleaned up its act (the financial filings under the current CFO have been praised by former critics of the company for their completeness and transparency) but that my area of employment was quite distant from the scandal and has received public praise.

UPDATE August 28, 2006: Julian Sanchez comments on this subject here. Adam Thierer has responded to the controversy at the Technology Liberation Front, but he does not even attempt to address the issue raised by the Discovery Institute's regular practice of deception and dishonesty.

UPDATE August 30, 2006: Tim Lee has responded to the controversy head on at TLF.

Ed Brayton fisks Seth Cooper

At Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton has an excellent fisking of Seth Cooper, former attorney for the Discovery Institute. Cooper tries to argue that Judge Jones (of the Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board case) displayed bias and hostility towards Jon Buell of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics both in his behavior and by refusing to allow the FTE to intervene in the case.

Brayton points out that there's no evidence of any hostility in the questioning of Buell and that the facts and legal precedent strongly supported the refusal of FTE intervening one month before the end of discovery. He points out dishonesty by Buell, who falsely stated that "Neither "Creationism" nor its synonym, "Creation Science" was ever used in any Pandas manuscript, as alleged."

The post is a pleasure to read, go see it here.

John Mueller: Is there still a terrorist threat?

In the September/October 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, OSU professor John Mueller has an article titled "Is there still a terrorist threat?" He argues that the best explanation for the lack of terrorist attacks in the U.S. and the failure of authorities to uncover and prosecute any terrorist cells in the U.S. is that there are "almost no terrorists exist in the United States and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad."

I think it's a mistake to minimize the threat just as it is to exaggerate it, but I think he makes a strong case that the threat has been greatly exaggerated.

Also see Mueller's related Fall 2004 article in Regulation, "A False Sense of Insecurity? How does the risk of terrorism measure up against everyday dangers" (PDF), which I referred to in this blog post.

Accidentally drop iPod in airplane toilet, get caught in a Kafkaesque mess

This is complete absurdity. This bureaucratic overreaction (in Canada) should never have happened.

Some of the more interesting questions from the interrogations:

What do you think about 9/11?
What are your views on the Iran issue?
Do you think government is too big, too powerful?
Do you connect to the Internet on this laptop?
Have you downloaded any images?
Do you have any pornography?

Via Bruce Schneier's blog.

Phoenix comes in at #22 in Forbes list of drunkest cities

Phoenix made the list of Forbes magazine's "drunkest cities" in America, coming in at #22. 35 cities for which the appropriate data were available were ranked on levels of alcoholism (actually, based on number of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the city), number of binge drinkers (from CDC survey data), per-capita drinkers (from CDC survey data), per-capita heavy drinkers (from CDC survey data), and state laws about alcohol (with least restrictive laws counting towards "drunkest"--it would be interesting to see if there is any correlation between this measure and the others). The specific ranking measurements are described here.

The full list:

1. Milwaukee
2. Minneapolis-St. Paul
3. Columbus
4. Boston
5. Austin
6. Chicago
7. Cleveland
8. Pittsburgh
9. Philadelphia (tie)
9. Providence (tie)
11. St. Louis
12. San Antonio (tie)
12. Seattle (tie)
14. Las Vegas
15. Denver/Boulder
16. Kansas City (tie)
16. Cincinnati (tie)
18. Houston
19. Portland
20. San Francisco-Oakland (tie)
20. Washington-Baltimore (tie)
22. Phoenix
23. Los Angeles
24. New Orleans (tie)
24. Tampa (tie)
26. Norfolk
27. Dallas-Fort Worth
28. Atlanta (tie)
28. Detroit (tie)
30. Indianapolis
31. Orlando
32. New York
33. Miami
34. Charlotte
35. Nashville

Deception from Jonathan Wells

P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula reviews chapter 3 of Jonathan Wells' new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, as part of a series of critiques of the book which will appear at The Panda's Thumb. The chapter, titled "Why you didn't 'evolve' in your mother's womb," includes quote mining of this sort:

This is the heart of Wells' strategy: pick comments by developmental biologists referring to different stages, which say very different things about the similarity of embryos, and conflate them. It's easy to make it sound like scientists are willfully lying about the state of our knowledge when you can pluck out a statement about the diversity at the gastrula stage, omit the word "gastrula," and pretend it applies to the pharyngula stage.

As background, it's important to note that the "developmental hourglass" (Myers provides a couple of diagrams to illustrate) is a summary of a century and a half of observations showing that organisms tend to be diverse in form in the earliest stages of development (blastula, gastrula, and neurula), converge on a similar form at the pharyngula stage (from which Myers' blog gets its name), and then diverge again into a diversity of adult forms. Thus, if a creationist engages in the above tactic, they will take a quote about differences at an early stage and make it look like a denial of similarity at the pharyngula stage.

Myers points out a specific example where Wells does exactly this with a quote from developmental biologist William Ballard. Wells writes, quoting Ballard:

It is "only by semantic tricks and subjective selection of evidence," by "bending the facts of nature," that one can argue that the early embryo stages of vertebrates "are more alike than their adults."

As Myers points out, multiple quotes stitched together in a sentence like this are a red flag in the writings of creationists and intelligent design advocates. The full passage Wells is quoting says:

Before the pharyngula stage we can only say that the embryos of different species within a single taxonomic class are more alike than their parents. Only by semantic tricks and subjective selection of evidence can we claim that "gastrulas" of shark, salmon, frog, and bird are more alike than their adults.

Ballard did not mean to assert that these "semantic tricks" and "subjective selection of evidence" are used to claim that there is similarity at the pharyngula stage, as he also writes:

All then arrive at the pharyngula stage, which is remarkably uniform throughout the subphylum, consisting of similar organ rudiments similarly arranged (though in some respects deformed in respect to habitat and food supply). After the standardized pharyngula stage, the maturing of the structures of organs and tissues takes place on diverging line, each line characteristic of the class and further diverging into lines characteristic of the orders, families, and so on.

This is a clear case of deceptive writing by Jonathan Wells.

Read the rest, which includes further examples of dishonesty by Wells, at Pharyngula.

Soap writer Kola Boof joins the bogus sex slave claim party

There's a market for books by women who claim to have been the sex slaves of the famous. In Cathy O'Brien's book, Trance Formation of America, she claims to have been raised to be a mind-controlled sex slave for presidents and celebrities on behalf of the CIA. The book is filled with completely absurd claims and unbelievable scenarios, and written in such a way as to be simultaneously titillating gossip about famous people and condemnation of such immoral acts. In short, it's pornography for gullible prudes, much like the Meese Commission Report on Pornography that was sold by Focus on the Family (with the nastiest parts edited out). "Brice Taylor" (Susan Ford) was another mind control sex slave claimant, whose book Thanks for the Memories is similar in content to O'Brien's--she tells of being the sex slave to both Henry Kissinger and Bob Hope.

Kola Boof, a Sudanese-American raised in Washington, D.C. who has written for the soap opera "Days of Our Lives," claims that she was Osama bin Laden's mistress in Morocco in 1996. (A time when Bin Laden was in Sudan.) In addition to claiming that Osama bin Laden was interested in Whitney Houston and liked to listen to the B-52's, she says she was forced to have sex with other al Qaeda members, including two terrorists who were long dead at the time she describes.

The publisher of Boof's book has been contacting bloggers who refer to Boof as a "sex slave," stating that she was bin Laden's mistress. Wonkette has an appropriate response.

Boof may not be as crazy as Ford and O'Brien, but it sounds like her book may fall into the same genre.