{"id":2288,"date":"2010-11-25T08:37:09","date_gmt":"2010-11-25T13:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/2010\/11\/25\/personal-attacks-in-science-denial\/"},"modified":"2010-11-25T08:37:09","modified_gmt":"2010-11-25T13:37:09","slug":"personal-attacks-in-science-denial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/2010\/11\/25\/personal-attacks-in-science-denial\/","title":{"rendered":"Personal attacks in science denial"},"content":{"rendered":"

Orac, of Respectful Insolence<\/a>, has a post<\/a> about how global warming wasn’t "invented" by Al Gore, contrary to what many global warming deniers seem to think. However, the part I find especially interesting in his piece is his explanation of why denialists tend to attack people.<\/p>\n

Here’s an excerpt:<\/p>\n

\n

If there’s one characteristic of denialists of all stripes, it’s that they have a strong tendency to personalize their dislike of their particular bete noir science.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The reason, of course, is that cranks can’t attack the science using good science and, of course, it’s far easier to attack a person than well-supported science. After all, all people have flaws that can be ridiculed or used as the basis of ad hominem<\/em> attacks.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Like Orac, I’ve seen this from global warming deniers, anti-vaxxers, religious fundamentalists, and anti-evolution creationists. Whatever motivates them in their denial, it seems they share this common tactic of attacking the messenger.<\/p>\n

…any messenger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Orac, of Respectful Insolence, has a post about how global warming wasn’t "invented" by Al Gore, contrary to what many global warming deniers seem to think. However, the part I find especially interesting in his piece is his explanation of why denialists tend to attack people. Here’s an excerpt: If there’s one characteristic of denialists … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Personal attacks in science denial”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[70,264,311,362,378,721],"class_list":["post-2288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","tag-anti-vaxxers","tag-denier","tag-evolution","tag-fundamentalism","tag-global-warming","tag-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}