Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

To link - Rapture Ready: The Science of Self Delusion

"I do have plenty to back up that taking RFK's anti-vax position as representative of most Dems'
views and practices is something that only an under-educated fucking moron would do.
Where's YOUR link to support your implication? "

I knew there are a few few re that anti-vax Dem outlier on the board. Lol, on seeing
this one knew it was right up your alley, then saw Chicago!
Haha, that was a bonus.

Illustration: Jonathon Rosen

Why Harold Camping's flock won't give up the faith, whatever happens on Saturday.


[ http://motherjones.com/special-reports/2011/04/fact-free-nation ]
By Chris Mooney [ http://motherjones.com/authors/chris-mooney ]
May/June 2011 Issue [ http://motherjones.com/toc/2011/05 ]

"A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger [ https://motherjones.com/files/lfestinger.pdf ] (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study [ http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9781617202803-1 ] in psychology.

Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, "Sananda," who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. The group was led by Dorothy Martin, a Dianetics devotee who transcribed the interstellar messages through automatic writing.

Through her, the aliens had given the precise date of an Earth-rending cataclysm: December 21, 1954. Some of Martin's followers quit their jobs and sold their property, expecting to be rescued by a flying saucer when the continent split asunder and a new sea swallowed much of the United States. The disciples even went so far as to remove brassieres and rip zippers out of their trousers—the metal, they believed, would pose a danger on the spacecraft.

[...]

So is there a case study of science denial that largely occupies the political left? Yes: the claim that childhood vaccines are causing an epidemic of autism. Its most famous proponents are an environmentalist (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-and-david-kirby/vaccine-court-autism-deba_b_169673.html ]) and numerous Hollywood celebrities (most notably Jenny McCarthy [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jenny-mccarthy/vaccine-autism-debate_b_806857.html ] and Jim Carrey). The Huffington Post gives a very large megaphone to denialists. And Seth Mnookin [ http://sethmnookin.com/ ], author of the new book The Panic Virus [ http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781439158647-0 ], notes that if you want to find vaccine deniers, all you need to do is go hang out at Whole Foods.

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=63423905

You would know his family denounced him for that belief.