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JCOY -> RE: Whacking, Cracking, and Chiropracting (October 25, 2007 10:51:34 AM)
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BTW, the Skeptoid podcast is probably the 2nd best podcast out there, next to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.
It is disappointing that you consider these two sources as your "best" sources for reliable, objective information. I submit the following for your serious consideration(from a source I consider to be highly credible). Perhaps after thoughtful reading of the links below, you will judge the information disseminated by your two "best" sources with a bit more skepticism.
http://randomjohn.wordpress.com/2006/02/16/scooped-sciency-debunkery-and-other-pseudoskeptical-topics/
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http://randomjohn.wordpress.com/category/skepticism/skeptics-skeptics-dictionary/
AND-
http://www.suppressedscience.net/skepticism.html
"Many who loudly advertise themselves as skeptics are actually disbelievers. Properly, a skeptic is a nonbeliever, a person who refuses to jump to conclusions based on inconclusive evidence. A disbeliever, on the other hand, is characterized by an a priori belief that a certain idea is wrong and will not be swayed by any amount of empirical evidence to the contrary. Since disbelievers usually fancy themselves skeptics, I will follow Truzzi and call them pseudoskeptics, and their opinions pseudoskepticism.
Organized (Pseudo-)Skepticism
The more belligerent pseudoskeptics have their own organizations and publications. In Germany, there is an organization called the Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften e.V., or GWUP, ( "society for the scientific evaluation of parasciences") which publishes a magazine called Der Skeptiker ("the Skeptic"). In the United States, there is the so-called "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal", or short, CSICOP. The name suggests a serious, unbiased institute or think tank whose mission is to advance human knowledge by sorting out true anomalous discoveries from erroneous or fraudulent ones. Indeed, that was what some of the original members of CSICOP envisioned when they founded the organization in 1976. But in the very same year, CSICOP faced an internal crisis, a power struggle between the genuine skeptics and the disbelieving pseudoskeptics that was to tilt the balance in favor of the latter.
...........After the true skeptics had been purged from the committee, CSICOP and its magazine, the Skeptical Inquirer, degenerated into little more than a propaganda outlet for the systematic ridicule of anything unconventional. Led by a small, but highly aggressive group of fundamentalist pseudoskeptics such as chairman and humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz, science writer and magician Martin Gardner and magician James Randi, CSICOP sees science not as a dispassionate, objective search for the truth, whatever it might be, but as holy war of the ideology of materialism against "a rising tide of irrationality, superstition and nonsense". Kurtz and his fellows are fundamentalist materialists. They hold the nonexistence of paranormal phenomena as an article of faith, and they cling to that belief just as fervently and irrationally as a devout catholic believes in the Virgin Mary. They are fighting a no holds barred war against belief in the paranormal, and they see genuine research into such matters as a mortal threat to their belief system. Since genuine scientific study has the danger that the desired outcome is not guaranteed, CSICOP wisely no longer conducts scientific research of its own (such would be a waste of time and money for an entity that already has all the answers), and instead largely relies on the misrepresentation or intentional omission of existing research and the ad-hominem - smear, slander and ridicule. "
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P.S. I'm not posting this for the anti-chrio, part; more so the pro-PT part.
Really? Your thread title leaves me unconvinced.
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