Experiences with RationalWiki and MetaPedia?

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Re: Experiences with RationalWiki and MetaPedia?

Post by wexter » Sun Jul 10, 2022 3:15 am

Kumioko wrote:
Sat Jul 09, 2022 7:27 pm
Milton Friedman is one of the partners of Milton Bradley that makes all the board games right... :lol:
And he is best friends with the guy that invented "Cajun Economics" John M."McGumbo" Keynes


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"The invisible hand of Wikipedia operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand of enlightenment and knowing"
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Re: Experiences with RationalWiki and MetaPedia?

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Jul 11, 2022 12:31 am

oranges33 wrote:
Sat Jul 09, 2022 7:02 pm
This is a technocratic, American liberal politics wiki with hundreds of pages on dense American political subjects written a decade ago.
No it's not. It's a trolling and bullying wiki. Read this, and tell me what it has to do with "liberal politics".
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/William_Nelson

They have a very strange concept of what "transgender" means.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Transgender
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Transmedicalism

That is not "medical information", that is incoherent raving. Both articles began as jeering putdowns of transgender people. Later editwars made it longer, less contemptuous, but more pretentious and incoherent. All of which is quite consistent with the David Gerard view of humanity.

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Re: Experiences with RationalWiki and MetaPedia?

Post by Strelnikov » Mon Jul 11, 2022 5:37 am

Their short-ish article on James Randi (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/James_Randi ) avoids the the story of the Randi hoax ("Project Alpha") at the "Mac Lab" at Washington University during 1981-93 where he sent in two young spies (Steven Shaw* and Michael Edwards) who claimed to the lab administration to be psychic and they tried to find holes in how the lab was operating, passing along their findings to Randi, who publicly announced in 1983 that the lab was not operating properly. There was a lot of media about the episode at the time. It made fellow CSICOP member Marcello Truzzi (himself a professor of Sociology) angry**, because Randi was fiddling with research in the middle of an psychology experiment. A recounting and rebuttal to Randi's showboating from the Journal of the American Society of Psychical Research in 1995: https://www.aiprinc.org/para-c05_Thalbourne_1995.pdf

Other crap the article will not mention: his time as a mentalist ("Randall the Telepath") in the 1940s-50s, his time at WOR-AM in the 1960s when he was still not a flaming skeptic, his decades-long fight with Uri Geller (the "Pigasus award" was originally the "Uri" and was a bent spoon, in mockery of Geller's on-stage metal-bending), his various libel cases in the 1980s-early 1990s because Randi never could keep his mouth shut during that period. And then there's the Carlos hoax.....

Randi went down to Australia in the late 1980s with a fake channeler (a person that allows a spirit to talk through them, it was popular in New Age circles in the 1980s), played by his later partner Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga. He claimed to have snowed crowds with the beyond-the-grave nonsense that Devyi was slinging as Carlos...though the Australian skeptics were not taken at all by Carlos, and they pointed out the crowds were not overwhelming, which is understandable if you have a medium that appears out of nowhere, has not been on television beforehand, has no real buildup....though Ramtha (Judy Zebra Knight) pulled it off with little media attention and word-of-mouth. Randi had to stay in the background for this scheme to "work"; Carlos had a fake manager, one of his backstage assistants was Randi's then flunkie-magic student William "Roudy" Rodriguez, who had previously helped Randi zap the faith healer Rev. W.V. Grant as a fake maintenance worker. Rodriguez and Randi later had a falling out, and Roudy wound up working janitorial at the World Trade Center in New York City. He was one of the staff that got people out of the building on September 11. 2001, but he's also convinced he heard bombs going off in the tower he was evacuating; he's a 9/11 Truther today, speaks at Truther conferences. Because of this, he is not mentioned by name at all in the 2014 Randi biography-documentary An Honest Liar, though a tiny snippet of a home video taken during the Australia tour shows his face. The Carlos Hoax was also where Randi bought a fake ID for Peña Arteaga, and he assumed the life of Luis Alvarez....who was an actual NYC substitute teacher. That fraud went on for nearly twenty years.

"So what is all the f*@kin' point of this, fake Russian man?", you might be asking. Well, the entire article is written in such a way to deflect the worst about Randi while mentioning some of his lesser sins as a "cover"; they mention Randi's Social Darwinism that Will Storr drew out in an interview, and his short-lived global warming skepticism. Not the smallest fleck about how Randi's Million Dollar Prize moved goalposts repeatedly (and that the prize was mostly in IOUs if somebody did win it against all odds). No mention of the internal drama at the James Randi Educational Foundation (example: JREF President DJ Grothe was accused of sexism by Rebecca Watson in 2012); how they lost an office, that their messageboard is run by a made-up "International Skeptics" group today, and how moribund the group is now. They have an article on Elizabeth Loftus (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus ) which mentions her involvement with CSICOP and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation***. They in turn do not mention that Martin Gardner and James Randi were advisors to the FMSF as can be seen here: http://www.fmsfonline.org/?about=AdvisoryBoardProfiles Both Gardner and Randi knew each other from before the founding of CSICOP, and they hung around each other after Randi was forced out of the skeptics group for all of his libel suits. As Columbo said to Dr. Eric Mason (Nicol Williamson) at the end of How to Dial a Murder, "You left enough clues to sink a ship."

__________

* Shaw later became the stage magician Banachek; he has stuck to the Randi line on Project Alpha.

** Tim Cridland's recounting of Project Alpha is just perfect:

A portion of An Honest Liar is devoted to Project Alpha, something that Randi would characterize as a sociological experiment. This was a hoax conducted on Mac Lab, a parapsychology laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis. Two young men, Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards, were sent in representing themselves as genuine psychics with the intent to fool the scientists conducting the research.

The events are shown in great detail in AHL, with the revelation that it was all a trick revealed with great fanfare at a press conference that had been intended to be a showcase for the scientists.

At least that is how it played out in the media and how it is remembered.

What was the intent of Project Alpha? I had always assumed that Project Alpha was in reaction to Uri Geller, who had been tested under controlled conditions by the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, California with some of the results being published by the prestigious science journal Nature.

Indeed, this is just what Steve Shaw, who is now better known under the name Banachek, the name he uses as a professional mentalist, says in AHL.

Shaw states "If I could replicated what Geller and SRI had done, in essence, in terms of established scientific protocol on testing a psychic, we could undermine Geller of being deemed legitimate by scientists."

I had always assumed that this is exactly what they did.

But it seems that Project Alpha could just have been more of Randi's Beta Sigma.

A long report by Dr. Michael Thalbourne, one of the scientists involved, states that all of the success of the two boys happened under informal testing conditions that were building up to the formal testing. When it came to controlled tests they did almost nothing and this was noted before Project Alpha was revealed.

This most important statement in the report is: "He [Randi] has stated, and his young men have signed declarations to the effect, that they were not able to cheat under the formal conditions imposed."

If this is so, then Project Alpha was an utter failure; Geller was tested under controlled conditions and was successful while the Alpha kids got no results. And it also means that Randi, again, had no problem with letting the truth get in the way of a good story, especially if that story is about him.

Ethics and Alpha

In Randi's writings he often talks about ethics and has chastised magicians and others who he thinks have violated them. Yet Randi seems to care little for ethics if he is the one running the game. In AHL Steve Shaw does express some misgivings he had while participating in Alpha, saying We thought the ends justifies the means. but feeling guilty for fooling people he had befriended.

Randi has characterized Alpha as a sociological experiment. He made this clear, saying "It must be stressed that Project Alpha was designed as a legitimate, serious sociological experiment." at his press event. But not every prank and hoax is an actual experiment, even if the results have sociological implications.

Marcello Truzzi was at one time a friend of Randi and a founding member, along with Randi, of the skeptics organization Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, henceforth referred to as CSICOP. He was also the first person to be "excommunicated" from that organization.

Truzzi wrote an overview of Project Alpha, something he was well qualified to do, as he was a professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University.

Truzzi wrote "If Randi had been a psychologist and not a conjuror, some pointed out, he very possibly might have been expelled from the American Psychological Association for what would surely be viewed by many as unethical interference in another scientists research program. The norms within the psychological community about such matters are far from clear, but had Randi been a psychologist and APA member, sanctions against him could have been sought and perhaps obtained."

And furthermore: "A normal scientist would be criticized even if his facts were true if he first went to a major popular science magazine and held a press conference at which he announced his revelations and told us that details would soon appear on his forthcoming TV show. (Note that Randi would similarly criticize a psychical researcher who ran to the media with a popular account of his work before having it published in a proper technical/scientific forum.)"

Project Alpha Raised many conflicting ethical and sociological issues and it is recommended that you read both Truzzi's and Dr. Thalbourne's articles to get views beyond those presented by Randi and AHL. Certainly it is obvious that Project Alpha was not a legitimate sociological experiment.

Randi, outwardly at least, advocates scientific investigation of paranormal claims, yet the few science labs that have conduct this type of research get mocked, and in this case, sabotaged by Randi.

Because Randi is not a scientist, he is able to operate outside of the protocols and ethics of science and this may be precisely why scientists, or at least some scientists, like him. He is able to do what they would like to do but would face consequences if they did. As Truzzi wrote "He is, I think, what [fellow CSICOP member] Ray Hyman termed a 'hit man' brought in by scientists to discredit (rather than disprove) unorthodox and extraordinary claims."

*** The mouthful name of their skeptics group, the "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal", which is a misnomer because they barely did one investigation (the "Mars Effect" case which did not go their way) before turning into a full debunking group, nailing low-hanging fruit.

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation is a bizarre case where a husband-wife pair of academics (Pamela and Peter Freyd) formed a foundation to combat claims that memories can be repressed and that there are no such things as disassociated identity disorder (aka "multiple identity disorder") because their adult daughter Jennifer claimed she had pulled out a memory of Peter Freyd sexually abusing her as a girl during a therapy session. Very quickly the the FMSF grew in the early 1990s, forming branches in Britain and Austrailia, and they had a ton of advisors, but the two outsiders to psychology were Martin Gardner (mathmetician) and James Randi (Canadian high school dropout and stage magician). They were there to debunk. Whatever they did, I don't know, but the general use for the FMSF seemed to be a group that defended men accused of child molestation in court cases, they were the "expert testimony." Today the group is nearly defunct in the US, dead in Britain, and chugging along in Australia.
Screenshot 2022-07-11 at 12.10.18 AM.png
'Carlos' on left, Roudy on right. Stolen from Tim Cridland's 2016 post on 'An Honest Liar'.
Screenshot 2022-07-11 at 12.10.18 AM.png (124.81 KiB) Viewed 1764 times
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: Experiences with RationalWiki and MetaPedia?

Post by oranges33 » Mon Jul 11, 2022 6:27 pm

ericbarbour wrote:
Mon Jul 11, 2022 12:31 am
oranges33 wrote:
Sat Jul 09, 2022 7:02 pm
This is a technocratic, American liberal politics wiki with hundreds of pages on dense American political subjects written a decade ago.
No it's not. It's a trolling and bullying wiki. Read this, and tell me what it has to do with "liberal politics".
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/William_Nelson

They have a very strange concept of what "transgender" means.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Transgender
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Transmedicalism

That is not "medical information", that is incoherent raving. Both articles began as jeering putdowns of transgender people. Later editwars made it longer, less contemptuous, but more pretentious and incoherent. All of which is quite consistent with the David Gerard view of humanity.
I should have said scientism & liberal politics wiki

but yea a lot of their attack articles go too far, in the direction of bullying

Like I don't think they have Emil Kirkegaard's online dating photos for example on there. And I'm not a fan of Emils, just saying.

I think over half their editors are self-professed mtf transgender, autistic and "non-binary" at the same time. If there's anti-trans stuff on there it'd be from a different RW era.

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Re: Experiences with RationalWiki and MetaPedia?

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Jul 11, 2022 8:04 pm

Strelnikov wrote:
Mon Jul 11, 2022 5:37 am
who had previously helped Randi zap the faith healer Rev. W.V. Grant as a fake maintenance worker.
That reminds me: the Wikipedia article about Grant spends almost as much space talking about Randi as it does about the actual subject. Plus splutters repeatedly about his tax-evasion conviction in 1996. THAT is quite routine for the extreme-fringe "church leader" in America, whether they do faith healing, "prosperity gospel", speaking in tongues, whatever. Wikipedia has that specific ongoing bias: overstating the questionable histories of fringe churches.

The two primary authors of the Grant article: one is a sockpuppet with a classic Guerrilla Skeptic profile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... s/BBiiis08
The other is one of the very few black Americans I've seen editing Wikipedia heavily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/Special:Cont ... oundAWhile
Rodriguez and Randi later had a falling out, and Roudy wound up working janitorial at the World Trade Center in New York City. He was one of the staff that got people out of the building on September 11. 2001, but he's also convinced he heard bombs going off in the tower he was evacuating; he's a 9/11 Truther today, speaks at Truther conferences. Because of this, he is not mentioned by name at all in the 2014 biography-documentary An Honest Liar, though a tiny snippet of a home video taken during the Australia tour shows his face. The Carlos Hoax was also where Randi bought a fake ID for Peña Arteaga, and he assumed the life of Luis Alvarez....who was an actual NYC substitute teacher. That fraud went on for nearly twenty years.
And Wikipedia will never mention all of it. Rodriguez's article very delicately tiptoes around some of his weirder history. The term you're looking for is "pathological liar".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rodriguez

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Re: Experiences with RationalWiki and MetaPedia?

Post by Strelnikov » Wed Jul 13, 2022 3:18 am

.....the Wikipedia article about Grant spends almost as much space talking about Randi as it does about the actual subject. Plus splutters repeatedly about his tax-evasion conviction in 1996.
The evasive Randi article makes a big deal about him running Peter Popoff into the ground with his investigations (even the Popoff BLP has a big chunk about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pop ... ames_Randi ) but the Randi article does not mention that Popoff rebuilt his scam empire and is still rolling along (because he was allowed to keep his mailing lists after the first organization imploded). In fact, if a scammer is religious, there is a good chance they will return because they have copies of their mailing lists; Texas TV stations and Ole Anthory (The Wittenberg Door magazine) busted Robert "Pastor Gas*" Tilton (Success in Life), and the guy crawled out of the hole a few years later to run a smaller version of his televangelist/faith healing racket, with a slot on Black Entertainment Television late at night. The only people that Randi took down that stayed down were the sort of "psychic performer" that would show up to talk shows in the 1970s; his little war against "psychic surgery" in the Philippines never killed it off.




Nick Bryant talking about Disassociated Identity Disorder with Dr. Warwick Middleton, MD. The last 15-20 minutes is about the False Memory Syndrome Foundation; Dr. Middleton doesn't mention Gardner and Randi by name, but he mentions "the fringe of the skeptic world" that was involved with the FMSF, which as I've written before, became a cover organization for men accused of child abuse by their teenaged or adult children.

Bryant talks about DID (formerly "Multiple Personality Disorder") because he was one of two journalists who wrote books about the Franklin scandal (the Lawrence E. King, Jr.-run child prostitution ring that Wikipedia denies existed) in Omaha, Nebraska, and many of the abused children (now adults) have either been diagnosed with it or have the signs.

_______

* Tilton's weird facial expressions were perfect for editing in fart noises.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: Experiences with RationalWiki and MetaPedia?

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Jul 13, 2022 6:20 am

And none of THAT is mentioned on RationalWiki. But there IS an article about Randi. Oddly, it bears a remarkable resemblance to an Encyclopedia Dramatica article, minus the trying-to-offend juvenile potty-mouthings. I'm wondering if Gerard and Toulouse have a certain contempt for Randi and for many other skeptics.....

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Michael_Shermer
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/PZ_Myers
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Brian_Dunning

And why does Paul Kurtz get only one paragraph?

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Re: Experiences with RationalWiki and MetaPedia?

Post by Strelnikov » Wed Jul 13, 2022 9:57 am

ericbarbour wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 6:20 am
And none of THAT is mentioned on RationalWiki. But there IS an article about Randi. Oddly, it bears a remarkable resemblance to an Encyclopedia Dramatica article, minus the trying-to-offend juvenile potty-mouthings. I'm wondering if Gerard and Toulouse have a certain contempt for Randi and for many other skeptics.....

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Michael_Shermer
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/PZ_Myers
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Brian_Dunning

And why does Paul Kurtz get only one paragraph?
There are reasons: if they don't mention the "dark sides" of these people (and Shermer has a lot of issues), it will be used by conservatives or pro-paranomalists as proof of hagiographies being foisted onto the Internet-using public. So they are honest about them (unlike the people they hate like Rome Viharo and William Nelson). The trick is, you have to follow the skeptics movement to know these people in the first place, just like you have to follow cryptocurrencies and NFTs to know who the Hell "Gary Vee" (Gary Vaynerchuk) is. In that way, it's a lot like how Fundie pastors shit-talk each other and various private Bible colleges when they think nobody is looking.

And why does Paul Kurtz get only one paragraph?

Because that opens various cans of worms, and I don't know all the cans. What I can tell you is that Kurtz pretty much set up the American Humanist Association and that The Humanist magazine was like a dry run for CSICOP and The Skeptical Inquirer and this was done through the Center for Inquiry. He was also the boss at Prometheus Books. They had some interesting publications for sale in the "Human Sexuality" section, including the Dutch academic magazine Paedika: The Journal of Pedophilia that Professor Vern Bullough was involved in. The magazine lasted from 1987-1995, and Bullough's involvement is mentioned on his Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vern_Bullough ). Certain ranty blogs have alleged lists of sexuality books they sold sometime in the 1990s; one title they list, S&M Studies in Dominance and Submission by Thomas S. Weinberg, was published by Prometheus Books in 1994. This was sent to Professor George Gerbner at UPENN, probably unsolicited, at some undisclosed time around 1996, from a "Renate Zellmann" of the "APCRIS (Association for the Protection of Children's Rights in Society) of Holland, Denmark and Norway"; it mentions the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, James Randi and Martin Gardner being a part of the FMSF, Ralph Underwager and his wife, Elizabeth Loftus, that Ray Hyman (CSICOP) was also a FMSF member, much more. Why Gerbner got it might have to do with being the Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication....if it was in 1996. If it came to him in 1997, he had retired from UPENN and moved east a handful of blocks to Temple University, which means it was possibly mass-mailed to every professor at Temple. Otherwise I find it bizarre that this document was part of a collection of documents in an online UPENN George Gerbner shrine; he was not a medical doctor, psychologist, neurologist, etc.

The other element I know is how Paul Kurtz ended his time with the Center for Inquiry in 2010; there was a power fight between Kurtz and Ronald Lindsay in 2009, Kurtz lost leadership. In May of 2010 he completely resigned. According to Jerry Coyne, it was an utter clash of personalities to the point where, after Kurtz left, Lindsay charged the locks on the Amherst, NY. building to keep Kurtz out. Link here to Coyne's blog post, which uses a New York Times article as a source. Kurtz may have had other controversies or personal drama before the 2000s; I don't know if his private papers were published. After reading all of this, would you want to polish this material (and probably other stuff I didn't even mention) into a RationalWiki bio that is somehow neutral towards Kurtz, Ron Lindsay, the CfI, the AHA, CSICOP, and Prometheus Books? If your response is "no", then that is why Paul Kurtz gets a stub-let of an article on the Dime Store Nosferatu's wiki.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: Experiences with RationalWiki and MetaPedia?

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Jul 13, 2022 9:29 pm

Strelnikov wrote:
Wed Jul 13, 2022 9:57 am
The trick is, you have to follow the skeptics movement to know these people in the first place, just like you have to follow cryptocurrencies and NFTs to know who the Hell "Gary Vee" (Gary Vaynerchuk) is. In that way, it's a lot like how Fundie pastors shit-talk each other and various private Bible colleges when they think nobody is looking.
Very few people whould have the time and patience to keep track of all this. And Gerard is unquestionably a short-attention-span type.
What I can tell you is that Kurtz pretty much set up the American Humanist Association and that The Humanist magazine was like a dry run for CSICOP and The Skeptical Inquirer and this was done through the Center for Inquiry. He was also the boss at Prometheus Books. They had some interesting publications for sale in the "Human Sexuality" section, including the Dutch academic magazine Paedika: The Journal of Pedophilia that Professor Vern Bullough was involved in. The magazine lasted from 1987-1995, and Bullough's involvement is mentioned on his Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vern_Bullough ). Certain ranty blogs have alleged lists of sexuality books they sold sometime in the 1990s; one title they list, S&M Studies in Dominance and Submission by Thomas S. Weinberg, was published by Prometheus Books in 1994. This was sent to Professor George Gerbner at UPENN, probably unsolicited, at some undisclosed time around 1996, from a "Renate Zellmann" of the "APCRIS (Association for the Protection of Children's Rights in Society) of Holland, Denmark and Norway"; it mentions the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, James Randi and Martin Gardner being a part of the FMSF, Ralph Underwager and his wife, Elizabeth Loftus, that Ray Hyman (CSICOP) was also a FMSF member, much more.
Googling shows no "Renate Zellmann" associated with any such "organization", and that there is no trace of "APCRIS". Chances are great this was a backstab using a pseudonym.

American history/stupidity repeats itself. For much of the 20th century, people who hated each other (any reason) pointed at each other and screamed "COMMUNIST!!" But now they scream "PEDOPHILE!!"
The other element I know is how Paul Kurtz ended his time with the Center for Inquiry in 2010; there was a power fight between Kurtz and in 2009, Kurtz lost leadership.
Which means that Lindsay went from being Kurtz's lawyer, to being his tormentor. Nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_A. ... gal_career

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Re: Experiences with RationalWiki and MetaPedia?

Post by Strelnikov » Thu Jul 14, 2022 5:56 am

....Googling shows no "Renate Zellmann" associated with any such "organization", and that there is no trace of "APCRIS". Chances are great this was a backstab using a pseudonym.

American history/stupidity repeats itself. For much of the 20th century, people who hated each other (any reason) pointed at each other and screamed "COMMUNIST!!" But now they scream "PEDOPHILE!!"
I looked for this woman and her odd organization and found nothing either, but I expected that -- there are a bunch of activist or social groups from the '60s to the '80s where you might find the bare minimum about them online because nobody digitized their pamphlets, meeting agendas or meeting transcripts. Also, we haven't translated the names into Dutch or Danish; I tried with Norwegian and got no matches, but I don't think I went deep enough. If this is a backstab on CSICOP and the FMSF, it is the most bizarre one; the document consists of a short cover note, two pages from a larger typewritten newsletter, what looks like a presentation agenda to this British "Accuracy About Abuse" group, then a newspaper clipping from the Toronto Sun.

There have been other weird gambits done by CSICOP members or people opposed to CSICOP; Phil Klass (CSICOP member and aerospace journalist) wrote that poison pen letter* to a key member of the Canadian science organization against Stanton Friedman (who was moving to Canada at the time) in 1980, he tried to stop that UFO conference in 1983 at the University of Nebraska claiming that it "helped the worldwide Communist movement" somehow**, he told Tim Cridland in an interview that John Lear's interest in UFOs was the product of brain damage he had gotten in an aircraft crash*** (John Lear is the son of Bill Lear, the guy who gave us the Lear jet and eight-track tapes). Klass may have also created the MJ-12 ("Majestic 12") documents himself, and then debunked them in the pages of Skeptical Inquirer; he was the guy who knew where the first document was in the government archives and the original copy bore signs that it had been folded (hidden in a jacket?) and placed there. And that's just Klass; I'm sure you could dig up stuff on Joe Nickell**** if you look hard enough. As for things done against CSICOPers, there is the "blackmail tape" against James Randi which was his stolen answering machine tape from the early 1970s which has Randi getting "pick-up" calls from young men for sex. Eldon Byrd sued Randi for his Twilight Zone Magazine interview where Randi called Byrd a "child molester", Byrd won but was only paid a dollar because Randi "mis-spoke"; what he meant to say was that Byrd had gone to jail for distributing child porn. This was Randi's attempt to discredit Byrd, who was doing research work in "psionic devices" for the CIA and also training dolphins for undersea spy work; the Federal government knew damn well Byrd's history and they didn't care, he was doing what they wanted. This is what I was talking about when I wrote above that "Randi could not keep his mouth shut in the 1980s-early '90s"; he burned up most of his McArthur "Genus grant" money on fighting these libel suits, and that included lawsuits by Uri Geller. That's why I think they ditched Kal Korff in the 1990s, because he was probably showing his craziness early on, and they didn't want any more Randi-style legal action. As it was, I am amazed that Klass was not sued into the ground as well. As it is, because the "Mars effect" astro-statistical experiment failed in 1979***** and they never did any real scientific research on paranormal topics (only simple debunkings), they changed their name to CSI (Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) after Kurtz was safely dead. And "skeptical inquiry" could be anything: book reviews, discussions of scientific programs, more debunkings, whatever. The term is so vague it could apply to Holocaust denial (pro or anti) or denying climate change.


American history/stupidity repeats itself. For much of the 20th century, people who hated each other (any reason) pointed at each other and screamed "COMMUNIST!!" But now they scream "PEDOPHILE!!"

It was "ANARCHIST!" before "COMMUNIST!", and a lot of that seemed to fit into the "moral panic" framework until anti-Communism became a business in the 1950s. I can see why people would scream "Nonce" or "Pedo" in the case of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation; as I wrote before Ralph Underwager was pro-pedophilia, his wife Hollida Wakefield wanted a longitudinal study of 100 12-year-old boys in "loving" pedophilic relationships. Dr. Harold Merskey (FMSF member) defended ex-Dr. Leo Pilo (accused of abusing a client when she was a girl) in a 1996 civil trial by using the "false memory syndrome" claim (https://groups.google.com/g/alt.abuse.t ... AD6o?pli=1 ); Pilo lost his doctor's license in 1993 admitting to a medical board that he had abused clients but due to a quirk in Canadian law, he couldn't have been tried then. Merskey never examined the woman and based all of it on how she behaved in court. As the CSICOPniks I haven't listed who were in the FMSF, Thomas Sebeok was a semiotician and polymath/genius and why he was involved is utterly beyond me; Ray Hyman is an actual psychologist and opposed to parapsychology, Loren Pancratz is the only psychologist in the group to say outright that he thinks DID is just acting and not the fake syndrome, so that makes him the super-skeptic. But that was the statement of Dr. Warwick Middleton, that the FMSF was a collection of disparate people and not united on the syndrome model.


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* https://www.richarddolanpress.com/new-p ... tter-found

** https://www.nicap.org/debunk1.htm

*** http://radiomisterioso.com/tag/tim-cridland/ (It's in this interview, deep in there. The host Greg Bisop also tells the story of Klass calling up ex-USAF intelligence man Richard Doty to meet him at an airport that was multiple hours from Doty's house. Doty drove there, Klass never showed, Doty called Klass' house and he was there and he asked him what the Hell was going on. Klass replied that he just wanted to see if Doty would do as he asked. The point is that Klass disliked Doty, probably over Doty's involvement in driving Paul Bennewitz insane....it's a long story.)

**** He is their debunker in the field, rose to prominence in 1980 for appearing on In Search of.... demonstrating how the Shroud of Turin could have been faked by dunking the blank shroud in hot water, wrapping it tightly around a made-to-purpose Jesus bas relief, shaping the cloth by hand to the features, and then artfully staining it. Afterwards the 14th century French art forgers destroyed the semi-statue and we are left with the fake, according to Nickell. Here is the episode, fast forward to 13:50 to see him demonstrating the technique on a small bas relief of what looks like Bing Crosby: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU2OXswtECU

***** In 1980 Dennis Rawlins wrote a scathing takedown of the "Mars effect" experiments he was roped into in Fate magazine. The Effect in question was discovered by Michel and Francoise Gauquelin (French neoastrologers) -- statistically, atheletes born when Mars is astrologically ascending do better than those when it isn't. Paul Kurtz though it was nonsense before CSICOP was formed and he made it CSICOP's first test to disprove it, and CSICOP blew it and tried to hide the damage. Rawlins (an astronomer) still thinks the Effect is tosh to this day, but is furious as to how he was used by Kurtz, Gardner, Zelen, Abell, etc. This article is where we get the Randi quotes "Drink the Kool-Aid, Dennis!" (right after Jonestown happened) and "I always have an out." (talking about his then-10,000 dollar psychic ability prize.) Note that Randi, like most people, screws it up -- they used Flavor-Aid as the medium for the liquid poison at Jonestown, not the more famous Kool-Aid.

http://cura.free.fr/xv/14starbb.html <--- "Starbaby" the original, which is quietly seething.
http://www.dioi.org/stb.htm <---- Rawlins outright angry 25 years later, mentioning even more details and what happened afterwards, including the Phil Klass and Robert Schaeffer rebuttal "Crybaby" which rips Rawlins hard: https://www.beyondweird.com/conspiracies/crybaby.html
When you look at Rawlins' site ("sTARBABY Eternal"), the letters may look huge, his site design is now 15-something years old.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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