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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9533155" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>This has been an increasing problem with "skepticism" and related self-proclaimed "rational" atheism (not atheism in general, that specific subset of it) since the late 1990s. I remember in the mid-90s (like 1994), as a teenager I got quite into US-style skepticism and back then it was mostly good stuff because they were fighting back against stuff like The Bell Curve as pseudo-science and trying to get people out of such a conspiratorial mindset in general (which as you may recall, was pretty common, as it is once more today). But already by about 1998, Dawkins-esque weird "rational" atheism and really reactionary faux-skepticism which actually translated to contrarianism were seeing a bit of surge, and I got out. This linked to early anti-vaxx stuff too - there were a lot of self-declared skeptics trying to big-up Andrew Wakefield, even though even dimwits like me could tell he was full of nonsense simply by looking at what actual scientists were saying (Private Eye even got caught up supporting him, albeit I think that was down to Ian Hislop trusting their medical columnist way too much). I think there's a real issue with this sort of mindset where they're desperate to latch on to contrarian voices, no matter how obviously pseudo-scientific or poorly evidence, on the off-chance they'll turn out to be right (a losing proposition, mathematically, I'd suggest!), and a lot of them are fundamentally reactionary people who are just desperate to be both the self-perceived underdog or iconoclast and "right" as part of what makes their personality tick.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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