Tuesday 2 November 2010

Quote of the Day

"Of course, Professor Nutt is entitled to his opinions. But when he dresses them up as science, he is playing a disengenuous and dangerous game."

- Daily Mail leader column.

The Mail has yet to hold forth on whether it is dangerous and disengenuous to claim that age, asbestos, aspirin, babies, baby bottles, being black, bubble bath, candle-lit dinners, childlessness, Chinese medicine, dogs, eggs (free range), Facebook, false nails, the Internet, menstruation, metal, milk, older fathers, pastry, peanut butter, rice, sausages, sex, shaving, soup, space travel, turning on the lights at night to go to the toilet, vitamins, the war in Iraq and Worcestershire sauce give you cancer.

Or whether it's dangerous and disengenous to present the views of a lone "moral" campaigner as a reason to not vaccinate girls against cancer.

Or whether it's dangerous and disengenous to repeatedly ignore the scientific evidence and suggest that the MMR jab causes autism (including a widely read columnist "dressing up her opinion as science").

Or whether it's dangerous and disengenous to fiddle the facts and distort the truth and sometimes just print outright lies in order to make Muslims look bad.

But I'm sure they'll address this in a holier-than-thou editorial in the near future.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The last time Professor Nutt said something, the Mail ended up comparing all scientists to Mengele, claiming that the Nazis were only evil because they had scientists, and claiming there was some sort of cover-up about "that very fallible genius Charles Darwin". This should be fun...

John West said...

Totally, utterly agree with you about the Mail's hypocrisy here.

Can't get away from the fact that they're right on this one, though.

A more useful denunciation of the latest Prof. Nutt piece can be found here:

http://petebrown.blogspot.com/2010/11/main-reason-professor-nutt-is-bad-for.html