Thursday, July 22

Cool

Periodic Table Of Irrational Nonsense

Because it's (a) neat and (b) actually periodic.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:35 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Meh. This sort of hyper-rationalism is usually more revealing of lacunae in the professor's rationalism than anything else. Given the gaps in the array, I'm willing to bet that the author is some sort of scientism-flavored Gaia worshipper, probably with a side of Animal Rights and possibly a garnish of Eugenicist. Me, I want to know why there's Magick, Wicca, Witchcraft, and Neo-Paganism. That's at least two redundancies, and depending on your definitions, all four are variants on the same blamed thing.

Where's the animism? Pantheism? If you weren't trying to piss people off, you could replace the "Religions" with "irrational" doctrines of the religions, such as reincarnation, transubstantiation, transmigration of the soul, theism, "hard" atheism ("I *know* there's no god, [array of arbitrary scientific assertions] proves it!"), scientism, predestination, free will, etc. Some of the quackeries just seem to be practices which piss off the author - what exactly is irrational about trepanation, for instance? Where's bleeding? Or humour theory? Also, I'm not sure if the "Zombies" thing is about people who expect Night of the Living Dead or the Haitian abomination, which seems to be a real enough practice of kidnapping and assault-via-drug-abuse & manipulation.

Posted by: Mitch H. at Thursday, July 22 2010 01:29 AM (jwKxK)

2 If you were to periodicise all the different categories of nonsense that our species has invented, the electrons in the outermost shell would exceed the speed of light.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 22 2010 01:42 AM (PiXy!)

3 Mitch's point is quite valid. The author included chiropractice. But my operating surgeon sent me to a chiropractor for post-op rehab, without which I would not be able to use my leg for years, or ever. At least he didn't include Climategate, probably the table is old.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, July 22 2010 12:51 PM (/ppBw)

4 Chiropractors are insane.  They believe in a magical energy field called innate intelligence and that all diseases are caused by distortions of this field by what they call subluxations which they fix via spinal manipulation.

(They are also litigious and not overly bright.)

Not sure what your operation was for, but chiropractors, when they skip all the voodoo, can be adequate physical therapists for some courses of treatement, albeit unlicensed and poorly trained for that role.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 22 2010 04:38 PM (PiXy!)

5 One should make a distinction between garden-variety chiropractors, who are by and large competent physical therapists with an emphasis on joint and bone adjustment, and the old-school chiropractors, who subscribe to the mad pseudo-religious cant that Pixy is talking about.  90% of the bad reputation that chiropractors suffer from are due to these lunatic quacks.  It's *sort* of like psychiatrists and Freudians, but amplified three-fold.  And kind of like with psychiatrists, people seem to get addicted to regular chiropractic visits.  My supervisor is one of those inexplicable people who regularly go to a chiropractic despite not having anything obviously wrong with them.

Posted by: Mitch H. at Friday, July 23 2010 03:03 AM (jwKxK)

6 Have to disagree with you there.

If they were genuine medical practitioners, they would have studied medicine.  If you want to be a physical therapist, there are degree programs in that field that don't involve rampant pseudoscience.  Or you can do the hard yards and earn an MD, and specialise in that field.

Or you can throw rationality and responsibility to the winds and be a chiropractor.  They're not all lunatics, but they sure ain't doctors.

The field of chiropracty has no reason to exist.  Where it overlaps actual medicine, it's redundant; where it doesn't, it's ineffective and potentially dangerous.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 23 2010 03:38 AM (PiXy!)

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