Sunday, July 31, 2011

Diversifying the Skeptics Movement?

If this doesn't show up the still uncritical insipidity of the "skeptics" movement, I don't know what does:

The Skeptical Canon by Austin Dacey, July 26, 2011 (CSI)

The one glimmer in this cavalcade of banality is the cryptic reference to Greta Christina's suggestion (not specified in this essay). The best thing that could be done for the so-called skeptics movement would be to boot Jillette, Shermer, Dawkins, and Harris out of it. The increase of "diversity" appears to have done little for actual rethinking of the tacit ideology underlying the whole movement, where the social superstitions that really cause harm—libertarianism for example—are swept under the rug as issues.

Penn Jillette's libertarianism—advocacy of sweatshops & other bullshit!—Michael Shermer's love of Ayn Rand and his pseudoscientific "evolutionary economics", Dawkins' pseudoscientific drivel about "memes" and religion as a virus, Harris' political backwardness and philosophical childishness concerning morality's relation to science—all of this shows up the tacit ideological underpinnings of the so-called skeptics movement. "Diversity" has not changed this ideological culture, or the culture of celebrity, one iota.

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