Dan Olmsted
oracknows | November 12, 2015A typical response to a charge of being antivaccine coming from someone whose rhetoric is definitely antivaccine is to clutch her pearls mightily and retort, "I'm not 'anti-vaccine.' I'm pro-vaccine safety." Similarly, a common retort of antivaccinationists who believe that vaccines cause autism, particularly those who believe that vaccines caused their children's autism, is to declare themselves "autism advocates." Indeed, the bloggers at one of the most wretched hives of scum and antivaccine quackery on the whole Internet, Age of Autism, routinely declare themselves an autism advocacy…
oracknows | September 14, 2015Note added 9/17/2015: I knew it. The vaccine issue came up during the second debate and Donald Trump repeated basically the same nonsensical antivaccine tropes that he's been repeating for at least eight years. It rather puts the lie to his claim that he listens to experts and changes his opinion based on what they tell him. Hilariously, Mike Adams is painting it as an attempt by CNN to "destroy" Donald Trump using the vaccine issue. Depressingly, Ben Carson, while defending vaccines, fell into the "too many, too soon," trope, something a pediatric neurosurgeon should know better than to say…
oracknows | March 16, 2015I've been writing a lot of posts on what I like to call the "antivaccine dogwhistle." In politics, a "dog whistle" refers to rhetoric that sounds to the average person to be reasonable and even admirable but, like the way that a dog whistle can't be heard by humans because the frequency of its tone is higher than the range that humans can hear, most people don't "hear" the real message. However, the intended audience does hear the real message. The way the "dog whistle" works in politics is through the use of coded language recognizable to the intended audience but to which most other people…
oracknows | July 27, 2014Just three days ago, I updated my ongoing series How “They” View “Us.” This time around, I used Mike Adams’ likening of various pro-science activists, including Steve Novella and myself, among others, to Nazis and compiling what appeared to be a hit list. In the process, I also discussed the antivaccine movement, in particular Age of Autism regular Kent Heckenlively’s fantasies of being Aragorn, son of Arathorn, doing battle with the forces of Mordor at the Black Gate. (I also just recalled in the past that he’s likened his struggle to that of Ann Frank in the past as well.) In both cases,…
Can antivaccinationists knock it off with the autism Holocaust analogies already? (RFK, Jr. edition)
oracknows | May 29, 2013Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is despicable.
I just wanted to get that off my chest. (Do clear Plexiglass boxes full of multicolored blinky multicolored lights even have chests?) The reason for my outburst will become painfully apparent all too soon, but I just had to say that. There's also one other thing that I just have to say as well, and that's this. When the managing editor of the antivaccine crank blog to rule all antivaccine crank blogs gives me a blogging topic and practically begs me to blog about it, in general I usually blog about it because, well, how can I resist? Think of it this way…
oracknows | April 6, 2013It's very clear that many antivaccinationists hate autistic children. The language they use to describe them makes that very clear. Such children are "damaged" (by vaccines, of course); the parents' real children were "stolen" from them (by vaccines); they are "toxic" (from vaccines); the "light left their eyes" (due to vaccines). Autism is an "epidemic," a "tsunami," even a "holocaust," with "denial" of that "holocaust" being equivalent to Holocaust denial. All of this likens autism to a horror on par with these calamities, and paints vaccines as the instrument of annihilation of…
oracknows | February 25, 2013It's been well over two weeks since I urged everyone to get out the popcorn and sit back to enjoy the internecine war going on over in the antivaccine movement. The reason for my chuckling was the way that everyone's favorite Boy Wonder Reporter Propagandist for the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, Jake Crosby, had apparently turned on his masters because he was ticked off at a perceived betrayal of purity in their antivaccine beliefs, so much so that he actually posted a screed against the other wretched hive of scum and quackery besides AoA or The Huffington Post, namely the…
oracknows | February 8, 2013Alright, I give up. I'm getting out the popcorn. It's a Friday night, and it's on, baby! It's so on that I'm breaking one of my blogging rules and writing up a blog post on Friday night, which is when I usually try to relax. I suppose that it helps that I'm working tonight anyway, with a grant deadline coming, something I usually don't do on a Friday night either if I can help it, and could use a brief entertainment break. Besides, right now I'm watching my favorite guilty pleasure Spartacus:War of the Damned, and wasn't going to be working while I watched anyway. So off we go! The reason is…
oracknows | January 17, 2013I sense another disturbance in the antivaccine Force.
Yes, I realize that it was just a couple of days ago that I sensed a previous disturbance rippling through the antivaccine Force. That's when antivaccinationists brought David Kirby out of mothballs from whatever journalistic slime pit he's currently residing in to use every trick at his disposal to convince you that somehow the government has compensated two families of children for vaccine-induced autism when in fact he's playing the same game he's always played: Claiming that if any child who's ever been compensated by the National…
oracknows | October 21, 2012I like the word "manufactroversy."
It's a lovely made up word that combines the two words "manufactured controversy" and is, to boil it down, defined as the art of creating a controversy where none really exists. In the case of science, it's the concerted effort to make it seem as though there is a legitimate scientific controversy when in reality there is not. Indeed, one might say that the very purpose (or at least the main purpose) of this blog is to discuss manufactroversies. These include issues such as quackery, where promoters of pseudoscientific, unscientific, and prescientific…
oracknows | September 12, 2010THE PAST IS PROLOGUE
Location: Central New Jersey, deep within the brick and steel of a secret pharma base.
Year: 1999.
A shadowy figure dressed in gray, bald, and stroking a white cat enters a nondescript room in the middle of which sits a massive conference table. More than a dozen men and women leap to their feet at attention and wait until the man pauses at the head of the table and then very deliberately sits in high-backed leather chair.
Shadowy figure: Have they arrived?
Lackey #1: Yes, Leader.
Shadowy figure: Let them wait a few minutes. First, we have pressing business. You have…