You know your antiscience movement is full of it when even Cracked Magazine calls you out on it, like they did antivaxxers in their Five Ways People Are Trying to Save the World (That Don’t Work). Antivax stuff is #4 on the list, and despite the juvenile tone of the article as a whole (and who am I to judge that?) the message is pretty much right on target.
Just to warn you, there’s some marginally NSFW stuff there, including language and ads. But it’s pretty funny.
Tip o’ the syringe needle to JREFer Paul Begley.
February 26th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Love the zombie baby.
Expect comments agreeing with #4 but having a problem with at least one of the other points in 5… 4… 3…
February 26th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
I LOVE Cracked. I’m all about juvenileness…ity?
Though sometimes they could research their things a bit more, this is one they did right.
February 26th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Cracks me up that Jenny McCarthy was recently quoted in Michigan Avenue Magazine saying loves to get Botox. So vaccines are going to destroy the world but putting Clostridium Botulinum into your face is A-Okay!
February 26th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
I think cracked is downright mature by my personal standards! But then I never really grew up!
February 26th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Their humor is frequently juvenile, but they’re starting to endear me with their habit of publishing pro-rationality humor pieces. “5 Things Hollywood Thinks Computers Can Do” was hilarious.
February 26th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
And #1 on the list?
Buying carbon offsets.
Yes, indeed–couldn’t agree more.
February 26th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
I knew I should’ve sent you the link when I saw it. I wake up around the time Cracked updates and check it daily so I would’ve been first to alert you easily. I totally could’ve stolen the “tip o’ the syringe needle.”
February 26th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
I can’t believe that these days you have to fill your children with a bunch of pharmaceuticals like water in a bottle just to keep them from getting diseases! It’s really disturbing and disgusting!
February 26th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Cracked is pretty funny. I frequently click on their stories when they show up on Digg.
February 26th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
QUASAR,
It was so much better in the good old days, when kids would just get sick. Some would be permanently disabled from the illnesses and some would die, but at least they didn’t have to get filled to the top with disturbing disgusting vaccines. If you are filling your child like a water bottle, you probably do not have a real child, just some Disney Store replica.
February 26th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Loved it; excellent article
February 26th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
I think they could have added a few more to their list.
Like for example, buying bottled water.
February 26th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Some sloppy fact gathering in some of the them (recycling and landfill), and erroneous assumptions. When I taught I told me students to be wary of any author who makes basic mistakes in areas that they (the student) is familiar with, because you never know if they’ll make basic mistakes in the areas you aren’t familiar with. So by that standard, their anti-vax bit would be viewed with suspicion and skepticism (which is what we’re good at anyway).
February 27th, 2009 at 2:48 am
BA and Cracked. Two of my most visited sites. On the same post.
I just wet myself.
February 27th, 2009 at 2:56 am
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,500453,00.html
You’ve probably already heard this, but I thought it worth pushing at you anyway.
I love Cracked, even got my dad into the website.
February 27th, 2009 at 4:17 am
“Some expert at Gonzaga University, with a lot of time on his hands, calculated that at current rates all the garbage in the US over the next 1,000 years would fill up a 35 square mile landfill 100 yards deep.”
oh, good to know. that’s only the whole of the usa covered with a 3cm layer of garbage. we’re doing perfectly fine, keep on spilling!
like daniel said, the sloppy reasoning in the article almost makes me think the antivaxxers do have a point.
February 27th, 2009 at 5:27 am
I’m sure that the AV crowds are not very happy at being mocked.
Somewhere on one of their Internet conclaves, someone is planting the seed that this is another example of the Vast Media Conspiracy(tm) that is of course slave to Big Pharma(tm) those pesky Lying Scientsts(tm) all in the service of Big Government Trying To Kill Us All(tm).
Once some folks read that, they will fan out across the Internets to “tell us how it is.”
Because they…just know.
February 27th, 2009 at 5:43 am
Nice that the linked article stomps all over the antivaxxer crowd, but after reading the rest of it, I’d squarely place the author in the antiscience camp together with them. It’s terribly researched and terribly written junk.
I’m sure you can find a better class of article to link with a little effort.
February 27th, 2009 at 7:46 am
Rogue Medic,
What other animal on this planet injects a “reservoir” load of pharmaceuticals into their children, anyway?
February 27th, 2009 at 7:52 am
Interesting article. Pretty much the only time I prefer to go for organic foodstuffs is milk and meats, since the massive (ab)use of growth hormones and antibiotics in livestock gives me the willies.
February 27th, 2009 at 8:09 am
Cracked is on my “Morning Coffee” Firefox. Love it. I’ll take that with a glance at XKCD and have a smile.
But that said – I’m really hoping the BA can address another Anti-Vax article on the Huffington Post. Goofnut Robert Kennedy Jr’s last one.
That page gets read by hundreds of thousands, its readership is fairly young and progressive – and, not to be too coy about it – probably having more children than the people that read Cracked. I know the HuffPo is liberal and Democratic and the BA is that way too, fine and dandy, but they need to be called out on this monstrosity of idiocy. The BA was just listed in Time Magazine as one of the best blogs -richly deserved – so he has the stature to take them on. Hope he does.
February 27th, 2009 at 8:15 am
@QUASAR
What other animal on the planet has the technology to do it?
February 27th, 2009 at 8:16 am
Well, sure – just because they’re right about one thing doesn’t mean they’re right about everything else. For example:
Well, I average about 6 mugs of tea a day, and I only wash my mug once per day (max), so I reckon it would take me somewhere around 2 whole months to see a benefit from re-using a ceramic mug. I haven’t bought a new mug in several years. In fact, well looked-after ceramics can easily last several lifetimes, which is why ceramics are so important in archaeology – they’ll last for thousands of years in the right conditions. So yeah, a mindbogglingly stupid argument that I have no hesitation in dismissing.
The wider question of whether recycling is a good idea is much more complex than they seem to appreciate. It depends on what you’re recycling, exactly how you’re recycling it, where you’re recycling it, what you’re recycling in into, how you’re separating the material from the rest of the waste stream… I could go on.
February 27th, 2009 at 8:24 am
From the one on recycling:
Also, re-using something is not always better than just tossing it away. A chemist at the University of Victoria calculated that you would need to use a ceramic mug 1,000 times before you would see benefits over using disposable polystyrene cups for those 1,000 cups of coffee.
…three cups of coffee per day (I’m sure most people have at least that many) and you’ve covered that in a year. Less if you don’t always wash out your mug between drinks. Most of our mugs are WAY older than that.
>_<
February 27th, 2009 at 8:41 am
You do realise that the mug is just one example, hardly reason to dismiss that entire section. But of course, they are sort of attacking recycling… I think it is still too early to tell if recycling is having a noticeable impact on rubbish generation. It is hard to ignore the numbers that are solid now though, that is, that to recycle something, we spend a heck of a lot more energy then would have been spent to toss it into a hole in the ground. Once again, who knows though which is better in the long run. I guess we will have more solid numbers the further down the track we go.
*shrug*
funny article, great website, chill out
February 27th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Crack’s take on the buying of carbon offsets schemes was great too by the way. It’s just too much to bear to listen to Al Gore lecture and pontificate about how many offsets he buys – and then learn that he is buying them from his own shell company. It’s like a priest buying an indulgence from his own church.
All that matters is how much one contributes to CO2 emission (and methane too if you eat at the burrito shack nightly – this sounds like a joke setup for how Al Gore is fat and full of gas but I won’t go there. Unless I already did.). I just would so love to see a CO2 audit on everybody that lectures me on global warming. How many times they fly a year to how many miles they drive to what they do to heat their homes.
February 27th, 2009 at 8:58 am
The choice is not between (a) recycling something, and (b) chucking it in a hole in the ground – they choice is between (a) recycling something, or (b) chucking it in a hole in the ground and manufacturing a new item from virgin resources. In the case of aluminium, recycling requires only 5% of the energy of making new aluminium from scratch. That leaves plenty of scope for your waste separation and transport during recycling to still use less energy in total.
Of course, if you’re shipping stuff to the other side of the world to recycle it, that’s a very different matter to shipping it across town… Like I said, it’s complicated if you look at it in detail.
February 27th, 2009 at 9:43 am
they claim the number of tress has actually grown. do they really think it’s only about the number of trees? it takes years, maybe even decades before a bunch of trees become a forest, an ecosystem. and that’s what counts, not the number of trees.
then they’re dismissing co2 compensation because some companies don’t invest our money as promised. what about calling for some official standards that compensating companies should adhere to. seems better to me than saying people should stop compensating completely.
and one of the arguments against recycling seems to be that if we keep throwing stuff away at the current rate, we’ll only be left with 35 sq mi of garbage, 100 yards deep. that’s ‘only’ the whole of the usa covered with 3cm of garbage. (as i already pointed out above)
even if recycling costs more energy, would stop recycling be the solution? i don’t think so. what about motivating companies to make stuff that is easier to recycle, what about streamlining the process of recycling?
bad articles like these is where urban myths are born. and we’ve seen with the antivaxxers where that can lead.
February 27th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Recycling aluminum calculations are fine, as long as you ignore the energy it takes to collect the aluminum and to transport it. I have no data for that, but it reminds me of a dude who used to throw his pop cans out his car window, so homeless people would have something to collect and turn in for cash,,,
manveet: In 1997, there was a double blind taste test run in San Francisco to compare city water with bottled water. They compared S.F. and Oakland city water with several well known brands of bottled water,,,Oakland won the taste test hands down,,,
Go figure,,,
Gary 7
February 27th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Um, that would IIRC be about every egg-laying or mammal species, that imparts a reservoir of, say, antibodies to the egg or through the milk along with a motherload of other chemicals. I googled to make sure, and you can find many articles describing research on this.
For example, from http://jds.fass.org/cgi/content/full/90/12/5490 we have:
That is, a rich variety of antibodies are supplied to the calves; especially early on, from healthy cows and from experienced mothers according to the paper. I assume that you can find articles explaining why that is, I believe I’ve read that it is because the natural immune systems of young animals aren’t yet productive so they need a reservoir of antibodies from the mother.
The difference between those antibodies and antibody shots is that they are much more massively protecting on every day ailments compared to specific shots that supplement them with antibodies on a few epidemic diseases. But both work.
February 27th, 2009 at 10:58 am
QUASAR,
What other animal on this planet injects a “reservoir” load of pharmaceuticals into their children, anyway?
Excellent point. We should be more like wild animals.
We should go naked in cold climates and hope to survive, because that is what other animals do. Death by exposure is more ethically honest than wearing clothing.
We should return to being hunter/gatherers, because we should not use technology to improve our ability to feed ourselves. Death by starvation is more ethically honest than farming.
We should abandon medicine, because other animals do not use doctors. Death by disease is more ethically honest than having good health.
As long as we are abandoning medicine we might as well get rid of the category of medicine that saves more lives than any other. That evil vaccine. Children dying of all of these preventable diseases is more ethically honest than having healthy children grow up in a world where disease is no longer the number one killer of children. And disease has not been the number one killer for a long time.
The life expectancy before vaccinations was about half of what it is now. Most of the change has been due to decreases in the deaths of children due to fatal childhood illnesses. Most of this has been due to vaccines.
a “reservoir” load?
Only you are full of a “reservoir” load. The volume of vaccines is small. The volume is not harmful. The promoters of disease (You) and the diseases are very harmful, at least if you consider death to be harmful.
QUASAR, why don’t you like healthy children?
February 27th, 2009 at 11:26 am
What other animal has infant mortality rates as low as ours?
February 27th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
This article contains many strawmen.
#3. Wrong. Mowing down a forest area and replacing it with just the trees means replacing just one species out of hundreds destroyed.
Land fills. In #5 the author complains about organic food having to be trucked 1000 miles but then doesn’t mind if garbage is shipped even further. Some areas are more crowded and/or more sensitive to landfills. His argument assumes all-things-being-equal such as uniform land availability and uniform population distribution, neither of which are the case.
#1. He treats carbon credits like it’s a plan already fine-tuned and in-place. Let’s fillet cold fusion while we’re at it. Maybe we shoud assume he’s conflating carbon credits at the international/governmental level with silly scam websites since it;s not explained what he’s referring to and just using the term as a talking point phrase. This does a disservice to all the morons out there (not that they read Cracked) who don’t know the difference between Al-Qaeda/Iraq or, to be “modern”, have no idea they voted-in the deficit/economic recession in ’04.
Come to think of it, the errors miscalculations, distortions and partial truths do a disservice to the correct info and the article wasn’t even funny, considering it’s a humor rag.
Sure it’s not the Onion, but,
FAIL.
February 27th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
I thought QUASAR was joking at first, but as s/he is serious…
QUASAR, in this day and age, just as in any other, various diseases will not take a look at us and say “Whoa, dude, they’ve got technology; better not infect them”. A virus or bacterium just sees an opportunity to spread. If we drop immunity rates, we give them that opportunity. And if you don’t like the “unnatural” aspect of innoculation, better research Edward Jenner and his observations on cowpox. Before he tested innoculation with smallpox, he noticed that people that contracted cowpox were immunised against smallpox. Innoculation is just as natural as catching the disease but with a lot less risk.
February 28th, 2009 at 7:02 am
Mick Says: You do realise that the mug is just one example, hardly reason to dismiss that entire section.
Yes, I realise that. It’s just a stupid thing to be using as an example. And if your examples fall apart under a few seconds of common sense, it’s not very good for your arguement. (Which I disagree with anyway, but everyone else has covered that already.)