- American Fascists
The Christian Right and the War on America
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2006
Hedges examines the Christian Right's origins, its driving motivation and its dark ideological underpinnings, with interviews and coverage of events such as pro-life rallies and weeklong classes on conversion techniques. Hedges argues that the movement resembles the young fascist movements in Italiy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, movements that often masked the full extent of their drive for totalitarianism and were willing to make concessions until they achieved unrivaled power. He challenges the Christian Right's religious legitimacy and argues that at its core it is a mass movement fueled by unbridled nationalism and a hatred for the open society.
- An Annotated Bibliography of Nonsense
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1998
Academic critics today not only question the impact of science upon society, but they also question the very idea of scientific rationality.
- Anti-Science: Left and Right Together?
A Systematic Attack on Rationality
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2012
The suggestion that left and right thinking may be converging on matters scientific will, no doubt, be offensive to some on the left. After all, the right chooses myth over evolution, and oil profits over climate science.
- Anti-Vaccination Fever
The Shot Hurt Around the World
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2004
Sensationalist media, religious fanatics, and alternative medical practitioners fanned the fires created by questionable research to spawn worldwide epidemics of a disease that has almost been forgotten.
- Bright-sided
How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2009
Ehrenreich traces the strange career of Americans' sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude.
- Can We Really Tap Our Problems Away?
Thought Field Therapy is marked as an extraordinarily fast and effective body-tapping treatment
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2000
Thought Field Therapy is marketed as an extraordinarily fast and effective body-tapping treatment for a number of psychological problems. However, it lacks even basic empirical support and exhibits many of the trappings of a pseudoscience.
- Chomsky on Post-Modernism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1995
What I find in the writings of the post-modernists is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish.
- Connexions Library: Science Focus
Resource Type: Website
Published: 2009
Selected articles, books, websites and other resources on science.
- A Consistently Erroneous Technology
A Magician in the Lab
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
A look at the polygraph, or lie detector technology, and why it is unreliable.
- Extrasensory Deception
Resource Type: Book
- Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1998
The authors criticize postmodernism in academia for its misuses of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. Fashionable Nonsense examines two related topics: (1) The incompetent and pretentious usage of scientific concepts by a small group of influential philosophers and intellectuals; (2) the problems of cognitive relativism, the idea that "modern science is nothing more than a 'myth', a 'narration' or a 'social construction' among many others". The stated goal of the book is not to attack "philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general...[but] to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism," and in particular to "deconstruct" the notion that some books and writers are difficult because they deal with profound and difficult ideas. "If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing." The book includes long extracts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard who are considered by some to be leading academics of Continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis or social sciences. Sokal and Bricmont set out to show how those intellectuals have used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics incorrectly. The extracts are intentionally rather long to avoid accusations of taking sentences out of context.
Published in French as Impostures Intellectuelles and in the United Kingdom as Intellectual Impostures.
- A field guide to critical thinking
Resource Type: Article
- Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1994
Describes attacks on science, and on concepts of truth and rationality, in areas of the humanities.
- Kleine Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1934
- Malik, Kenan
Resource Type: Website
Website and blog of Kenan Malik, featuring articles on race, identity, multiculturalism, diversity, and censorship.
- Media Watch: When the Media Tell Half the Story
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1997
Twenty-eight years after Chariots of the Gods? author Eric von Däniken brought pseudoscience to new lows by suggesting that our ancestors were too stupid to create the pyramids, Stonehenge, and other monuments without the help of space aliens, his ideas are alive and well.
- Merchants of Doubt
How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2012
Investigative reportage on how private interests and lobbies in America use hired gun scientists to spread doubt and misinformation. The media's binary understanding of balanced repoting has given these individuals a soapbox and allowed the public to believe there are divisions in the mainstream scientific opinion on global warming where none exist.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - April 23, 2016
Science and its enemies
Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
Published: 2016
Our society and its institutions, public and private, regularly tell us that science, and education in the sciences, are crucial to our future. These public declarations are strangely reminiscent of the equally sincere lip service they pay to the ideals of democracy. And, in the same way that governments and private corporations devote considerable efforts to undermining the reality of democracy, so too they are frequently found trying to block and subvert science when the evidence it produces runs counter to their interests. Real live scientists doing real live science, it seems, are not nearly as loveable as Science in the abstract.
- Postmodern Disrobed
Review of Intellectual Impostures
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1998
An admirable job of exposing the daffy absurdity of postmodernism intellectuals.
- Pseudoscience and the Paranormal
Resource Type: Book
- Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2019
A small number of researchers, mostly well outside of the scientific mainstream, have seized upon some of the new findings and methods in human genetics, and are part of a social-media cottage-industry that disseminates and amplifies low-quality or distorted science, sometimes in the form of scientific papers, sometimes as internet memes – under the guise of euphemisms such as 'race realism' or ‘human biodiversity'. Their arguments, which focus on racial groupings and often on the alleged genetically-based intelligence differences between them, have the semblance of science, with technical-seeming tables, graphs, and charts.
- Rationality/Science
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1995
Chomsky writes: "It strikes me as remarkable that the left today should seek to deprive oppressed people not only of the joys of understanding and insight, but also of tools of emancipation, informing us that the "project of the Enlightenment" is dead, that we must abandon the "illusions" of science and rationality--a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use."
- The Skeptic's Dictionary
Resource Type: Website
A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions.
- Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1996
Alan Sokal submitted this parody of postmodernism, poststructuralist theory, deconstruction, and political moralism to the journal Social Text. The editors failed to spot the hoax and published it as a serious article. The hoax caused a fierce debate between the postmodernists and those who consider postmodernism reactionary nonsense.
- Why Bogus Therapies Seem to Work
At least ten kinds of errors and biases can convince intelligent, honest people
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1997
At least ten kinds of errors and biases can convince intelligent, honest people that cures have been achieved when they have not.
- Why People Believe Weird Things
Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1997
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