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SHERMER SHREDS

Mass Public Shootings & Gun Violence: Part I

At 59 dead and over 540 wounded, the Las Vegas massacre that took place on October 1, 2017 is now the worse mass public shooting in U.S. history.

As is usually the case with such gun-related tragedies, within hours social media and political punditry was abuzz with talk of gun control and Second Amendment rights, with both the left and the right marshaling their data and arguments. The two most common arguments made in defense of gun ownership are (1) self protection and (2) as a bulwark against tyranny.

In this video, Michael Shermer “shreds” these ideas with skeptical scrutiny.

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BABA BRINKMAN’S SKEPTIC RAP

Rap Artist Performs Science-Based Hip-Hop

Baba Brinkman is a Canadian rap artist based in New York. He is best known for his “Rap Guide” series of science-based hip-hop albums and theatres shows, including Rap Guides to Evolution, Climate Change, and Religion.

The world premiere of this rap was performed at a live variety science show hosted by Dr. Michael Shermer, in partnership with YouTube Space NY in late September 2017, celebrating 25 years of Skeptic magazine and the Skeptics Society combating ‘fake news.’ The event explored the question: ‘How Can We Know What’s True?’.

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A NEW STORY!

How Brian Brushwood Became a Card-Carrying Skeptic

As we announced a few weeks ago in eSkeptic, we asked several friends to tell us about those “aha!” moments that led to their becoming skeptical thinkers. As promised, here is another one of their incredible stories on YouTube. Enjoy!

American magician, podcaster, author, lecturer, and comedian, Brian Brushwood is the host of Scam School for Discovery, Hacking the System for National Geographic, and co-host of The Modern Rogue. He is the author of several books including: Scam School: Your Guide to Scoring Free Drinks, Doing Magic & Becoming the Life of the Party, and The Professional’s Guide to Fire Eating.

TELL US YOUR STORY!

Tell us your story and become a card-carrying skeptic! Thank you for being a part of our first 25 years. We look forward to seeing you over the next 25. —SKEPTIC

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The Crypto-Kid
MONSTERTALK EPISODE 141

In this episode of MonsterTalk, we interview cryptozoology enthusiast Colin Schneider, a young and enthusiastic researcher of Fortean and paranormal topics about his research into animal exsanguination. It’s a fun discussion of the field of cryptozoology, the disturbing topic of animal mutilation and the work done by the British organization, the Center for Fortean Zoology.

Get the MonsterTalk Podcast App and enjoy the science show about monsters on your handheld devices! Available for iOS, Android, and Windows. Subscribe to MonsterTalk for free on iTunes.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Margret Schaefer reviews Freud: The Making of an Illusion, in which its author, Frederick Crews, convincingly argues that Freud constructed psychoanalysis on a fraudulent foundation. How did Freud convince so many people of the correctness and the profundity of his theory?

The Wizardry of Freud

by Margret Schaefer

“Clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging claim.”

The above is from a 2011 British Medical Journal article about Andrew Wakefield, the British physician whose “discovery” of a link between vaccination and autism fueled a world wide anti-vaccination movement. Since its publication in 1998, the paper’s results were contradicted by many reputable scientific studies, and in 2011 Wakefield’s work was proved to be not only bad science but a fraud as well: a British court found him guilty of dishonestly misrepresenting his data, removed him from the roster of the British Medical Society, and disbarred him from practice.

In his new book, Freud: The Making of an Illusion, Frederick Crews presents a Freud who was just such a fraud and who deserves the same fate. This is not the first time that Crews, a bona fide skeptic whose last book, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (2007), was reviewed in the pages of this journal, has written critically about Freud. Crews had been drawn to psychoanalysis himself (disclosure: this reviewer was, too) in the 1960s and early 1970s when, along with the late Norman Holland, he pretty much created the field of psychoanalytic literary criticism. But a prestigious fellowship to the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (he was a professor of English at UC Berkeley at the time) gave him time to delve deeper into Freud, and convinced him instead that psychoanalysis was unscientific and untenable. Since then he has contributed to the growing skeptical scholarly and historical scholarship on Freud.

Psychoanalysis is not only pseudoscience (as most philosophers of science agree, though for different reasons), but “the queen of pseudosciences”.

Freud: The Making of an Illusion (book cover)

Philosophers of science have indicted key concepts of Freud’s psychoanalysis such as “free association,” “repression,” and “resistance” as circular and fatally flawed by confirmation bias. Historians have tracked down the actual patients whose treatment served Freud as evidence for his theories and have sought to place Freud and his theories in the historical and cultural context of his time. Crews—to his own surprise—became well known as a major, if not the major, critic of Freud in the public eye because of a series of articles he published in the New York Review of Books in the 1990s. For Crews is that now all too rare and rapidly disappearing creature—the public intellectual—who is able to explain and make accessible an otherwise unwieldy amount of erudite scholarship in clear, elegant, and jargon-free prose. Defenders of Freud have sought to discredit him as a “Freud basher,” thereby continuing the (not so honorable) tradition that Freud began of questioning the motives of a skeptic and attributing it to “resistance” instead of answering his objections. […]

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