Actually, I’d call it “intellectual honesty.” Something that far too many blog commenters know nothing about. His last two posts basically said, “mea culpa.”

ETA: I understand gcruse’s standpoint. I love Phil Plait’s astronomy posts and writing style, but I seldom read his political stuff even though I agree with it. That is only because I read pretty much the same things in other blogs I follow. However, I’m glad he speaks out about this garbage because really, it needs to be said.

“Bristol Palin continues to stand up for abstience only education despite admitting its failings. Why?”

Well, because that worked so well for her didn’t it? Oh wait ..

When in doubt follow the money. Examples to follow.

Bristol Palin continues to stand up for abstience only education despite admitting its failings. Why? She made a salary from a group that promotes this view to the tune of about $250,000. That is roughly seven times what the group gave last year to various clinics in charitable donations by the by.

Wakerfield falsified lab documentation and a research paper, scaring parents around the globe and damaging children for generations to come. Why? He had a very lucrative amount of money coming to him from a law firm that wanted to find a link between autism and vaccines.

I could go on and on with examples of this theory but I just ate lunch and feel sick just from the two I listed.

Why does willful ignorance seem to be regarded as a virtue by a growing proportion of our population?

Because people don’t actually think they’re ignorant about things. Take anti-vaxxers: the majority are educated people. Likely those people are educated enough to think to ‘research’ things before deciding. And when that research points them to anti-vax stuff, and they don’t know anything about the subject already, then they’ll think “oh, I didn’t know this” and stop there, not bothering to double check their facts. Other people who they meet in forums and whatever reinforce this new ‘knowledge’. And they consider themselves well read and educated on the subject because they took the time to look it up.

I don’t think most of it is willful, simply not knowing the difference between good websites and bad. Hence Jenny McCarthy and her Google University degree.

Honestly, it does take a certain skill to figure out the good websites from the bad ones when you don’t even know anything about the subject. Pretty web designs and clear writing do more for professionalism than proper facts ever will.

As for the money making aspect: the money makers wouldn’t earn anything if they didn’t have a willing and uninformed audience. The best thing we can do is interrupt the path between audience and profiteer. Exactly what this post is about!

If myself and a highly trained search and rescue team crash on a desert island I’d be a fool not to give way to the greater knowledge and experience of those around me. Sure I could go off on my own and try to find everything myself, but I’d be smarter to take orders from the team and do what I can to assist them.

Reality is never that one sided, but we all have things we’re better at. I don’t pretend to be able to be able to run my own medical studies, so I trust that, as a community, scientists will give me the information needed to make an informed opinion.

Being a “leftist” has nothing to do with waiting for the answers to come to you, but having more faith in your fellow man then you seem to have. You’ll always have people abusing the system, no matter what that system is, but we are better off working together. As you pointed out, reality is Darwinist. If having a complex social structure was not advantageous, by your logic, we would not have one.

Yes, I have noticed that too. It is a very scary trend! What do you suppose is the cause of that? Why does willful ignorance seem to be regarded as a virtue by a growing proportion of our population?

Quarantine the unvaccinated? No need to do that to protect the vaccinated, most of whom are in fact vaccinated and so are already protected.

But vaccination is not 100% effective, so the vaccinated are only fully protected when enough people are vaccinated that herd immunity effects kick in.

Plus, also, those who cannot receive a vaccine for medical reasons need herd immunity in order to be protected.

The increasing number of people who choose not to vaccinate their kids are creating a breeding ground for many preventable diseases. It is this pool of people I suggested quarantining. And I was not wholly serious, just pointing out the foolishness of their choice.

It would serve only to concentrate the potential pool of infected together, making the spread of infection more likely in that population. Perhaps are you suggesting a sneaky atttemt at eugenics?

Yes, you found me out. Let’s round up all the by-choice non-vaccinators and put them out of our misery.

[And, for the hard of thinking - j/k]

In the western world unvaccinated people are no risk at all to the population at large,

They are if there are enough of them to break down herd immunity. Partly because some folks cannot receive particular vaccines for medical reasons, and partly because vaccines are not 100% efective.

and the extreme rarity in the west of these diseases makes them only a very small risk to themselves and their children.

And the whole antivax movement seems to be causing diseases like pertussis to make a comeback. These diseases are not as rare as they were 10 or 15 years ago.

So long as the overwhelming majority of us are vaccinated these folks are just stupid and annoying, not really dangerous.

True, but the antivax campaigners are scaring people away from getting their kids vaccinated. This is actually happening.

Authoratarian measures like you suggest would create more antivax believers and make the problem worse.

And yet I feel very strongly that schools should have the option to turn away shildren who are unvaccinated without a good medical reason.

We should strive to educate, to minimize the number of people that fall into this trap, but we should accept that some people will, just as some will believe in astrology, homeopathy, ghosts, little green (or grey) men, and unknown large primates in the forest’s of Washington.

Yes, and this too. But some people refuse to be educated. (Come to think of it, this proportion seems to have increased over the last 20 – 30 years as well).

Now we just have to convince you that Phil’s blog having 95% astronomy and 5% other is OK and we can all agree and go get some beers!

Actually, it’s completely up to Phil what he posts and how. Recently, it seems to have been 95% astronomy, but he has had phases of being about 50% astronomy and 50% non-astronomy topics. And that’s OK too.

As long as Phil is fighting for critical thinking and for science, that’s fine by me.

And – yay, beers!

Reality is Darwinian, and quite brutal. Reality is liberatarian.

In the western world unvaccinated people are no risk at all to the population at large, and the extreme rarity in the west of these diseases makes them only a very small risk to themselves and their children. So long as the overwhelming majority of us are vaccinated these folks are just stupid and annoying, not really dangerous.

Authoratarian measures like you suggest would create more antivax believers and make the problem worse. We should strive to educate, to minimize the number of people that fall into this trap, but we should accept that some people will, just as some will believe in astrology, homeopathy, ghosts, little green (or grey) men, and unknown large primates in the forest’s of Washington.

Jim – I think religion is based on superstitious, manipulative lies. But I don’t think religious speech should be banned, neither did the Founders.

Actually, the Founders did want to ban all religions except their own. Somehow, after the 13 colonies rebelled and independence was declared, the mood had changed enough that religious freedom was written into the first amendment.

The idea of letting people decide for themselves is not only not silly, but its antithesis is, indeed, authoritarian.

Letting educated, informed people decide for themsleves is indeed not silly.

Most USA citizens these days do not have the educational background to understand the issue to the level at which they can make their own decision. They perforce must choose in what the media represent as a “he said, she said” situation.

In reality, the lies spread by the antivax movement have a genuine impact on public health. An extreme example comes from Nigeria, where, several years ago, antivax campaigners actually prevented the worldwide eradication of polio. IIUC, the WHO is trying again, but it now has to tackle polio in about half-a-dozen countries (that had been polio free before it spread again from Nigeria) instead of only backwoods Nigeria.

By way of analogy, do you consider it reasonable to prohibit the publication of information that harms a person’s reputation? What about the publication of information that compromises national security? IIUC, these are both prohibited in the USA.

Freedom of speech is a good thing, but it is never absolute. Your comments look like an ignorant attempt to polarise the issue.

If they wish to no longer use vaccines, then it is their problem, is it not? So long as they do not enforce their will upon others, there is no problem.

Except it is not only their problem.

Vaccines are not 100% effective. Some people cannot receive certain vaccines for medical reasons (such as allergies).

People who choose not to get vcaccinated (or, more commonly, choose not to vaccinate their kids) are creating a potential pool of infection. The fact that such a pool exists can impact on other people, unless you quarantine the unvaccinated.

@Byron – Let the facts prevail. The first amendment isn’t just for protecting popular speech.

This is true, but naively unaware of realpolitik.

What is your opinion on censorship of media such as TV and movies in the USA?

Right up until the late ’60s, TV, movies, newspapers and books were either self-censoring (something that some of these media still do to avoid public outcry) or were subject to active censorship, despite the fact that no-one (no, not even the Supreme Court) ever defined what the word “obscene” actually meant.

Would you agree that it is OK to censor a medium to avoid offending people on the grounds of obscenity or the portrayal of religious beliefs?

If not, why not, and to whom have you protested about the continuance of censorship in the USA?

If so, why is that acceptable but it is not acceptable to censor on the grounds of factual accuracy?

@Regner Trampedach: Thanks for that quip by Colbert: “Reality has a left wing bias”.
I never heard anyone say that before, but the more I think about it, the more I think that is correct. It is becoming more and more obvious to me that to many, perhaps most conservatives, merely giving more credence to hard scientific evidence and sound reason than to subjective, religious faith is unacceptable, left wing bias. At the same time, though, as has been pointed out, some extreme left-wingers can be every bit as irrational and anti-scientific as the most reactionary, right-wing religious fundamentalists. Some of the former seem to be firmly in the anti-vax camp.

In the documentary “The Atheist Tapes” the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Steven Weinberg, recounted a story about a devoutly Muslim physicist colleague (now deceased) who lamented the reluctance of Muslim learning institutions to fully embrace science in their curricula, though they loved to take advantage of the technological products of science. Their reluctance was due to their fear that openly teaching science and its methods of discerning and testing for truth would tend to be corrosive to religious faith. Unlike his Muslim colleague, Weinberg agreed that it would indeed be corrosive to religious faith, and that that would be a good thing!

I didn’t know what that was, so looked it up. I love learning stuff from random blog comments.

Thanks VinceRN.