After Fumento had been worked over by yours truly, Chris Mooney and PZ Myers, you'd think there would be nothing left, but Steve Reuland has taken just one paragraph from Fumento's column and found as many mistakes as I found in the whole thing. Fumento's columns aren't just wrong, they're fractals of wrongness!
P.S. Fumento.
More like this
Powerline. Round about these parts, that name is pretty much a synonym for stupid, and I see they're doing a good job of maintaining their reputation. You'd think they'd learn that whenever they step into the domain of science, their level of ignorance is even more palpably apparent than usual.…
I wrote earlier how it seems that you must fail a qualifying exam before you can write on a topic at Tech Central Station. Now the errors in Fumento's critique of the Lancet study.aren't errors in epidemiology---they seem to result from not having read the study. Indeed, in comments…
Revere, over at Effect Measure, has a solid critique of Michael Fumento's opinion piece about avian flu. What the piece shows is just how ignorant of public health Fumento really is:
1) Many of the necessary steps involved in preparing for a flu pandemic, such as surge production capacity, can be…
I don't know about you, but I've been waiting with delicious anticipation to see what Fumento's defence would be after he got fired by Scripps-Howard. Fumento does not disappoint. Why did he not disclose that Monsanto had paid him $60,000 to write a book about biotechnology? Fumento says:
I had…
What I find telling is Reuland's observation that it takes much more space (and, of course, time and effort) to explain Typhoon Fumento's ineptitude than to read Fumento's drivel itself. Perhaps it's his strategy.
Thanks for the plug, Tim! I just started that blog about a week ago, so I'm still tweaking it.
"fractals of wrongness!"
Phrase of the year nominee.
You may have skipped another whole fractal dimension: political framing. I identified 7 different debatable frames in one 24-word passage. See:
http://critiquesoflibertarianism.blogspot.com/2004/11/libertarian-frami…
Tim
For the record. I didn't think of this when I read this post many months ago, but in Summer '05 I took on two paragraphs of a creationist's malarkey about the San Andreas fault on wiki and found, in a text of a bit over 200 words [and a map], 93 lies.
And these two paragraphs were part of an inundation of many scores of pages he linked to from of Wiki, all containing roughly this concentration of dishonesty. Most grating was his handle...."Truthteller."
The analysis is on my wiki user page, User:Skookumplanet.