"[The American fascists] claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection." --Henry Wallace, 1944
"When you have trained yourself to believe that you are self-sufficient, that you are the source of your health… when a public health official comes around and says 'Actually, you may be an asymptomatic carrier of a disease that you're not aware of', that's really insulting,' says Mr Remski."
At BBC News, Joshua Cheetham asks, "Does yoga have a conspiracy theory problem?"
And at the CBC, Nahlah Ayed asks, "Are conspiracy theories really 'a new religion'?"
"It is not quite sufficient, in answering this question, to point to a near-consensus on the part of the scientific community, thus in effect arguing that science is what the vast majority of scientists say it is. If this is largely how the argument does indeed function in the cases of debates about the safety of vaccines or the causes of global warming, we should nonetheless be aware of its flaws. Scientific revolutions, after all, involve rejections of scientific orthodoxy by a committed minority. If many anti-vaxxers or climate-change denialists appear more like Venkman than Galileo, it is nonetheless Galileo's mantle that they seek. We're back to Popper's problem: is there an in-principle way of distinguishing a revolutionary from a dedicated flim-flam artist that doesn't assume the correctness of either position in advance?"
Suman Seth at the Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Michael D. Gordin's On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience.
