This is why, when a skeptic is present, ghosts do nothing. Ever sat in a glass divination session with the glass whizzing around only for it to stop when a skeptic is present? Ghosts are scared of being killed. The “doubt” thing we skeptics do, it’s just a cover up. When nobody is looking BAM! ghost murder, and then comes the ‘it looks to be an environmental artefact to be honest’. 
h/t Carmen
credit: Cyanide & Happiness
“I’m going to play it, okay?”
“Yep”
Suddenly, over the phone, I can hear the unmistakable voice of James Randi. I’m stood in the silence outside of the building I work in and journalist Will Storr has called me so that I can hear exactly what Randi said to him with regards to Social Darwinism during an interview that went on to be published in ‘The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science’. It has been suggested by some that Will Storr quote-mined Rand by stating he’d said:
I’m a believer in Social Darwinism. Not in every case. I would do anything to stop a twelve-year-old kid from doing it. Sincerely. But in general, I think that Darwinism, survival of the fittest, should be allowed to act itself out. As long as it doesn’t interfere with me and other sensible, rational people who could be affected by it. Innocent people, in other words. James Randi, The Heretics
In fact Doubtful News reported today that James Randi, in a direct quote to Sharon Hill, stated he didn’t say he believed in such a thing.
“The statement “I’m a believer in social Darwinism,” did not come from me. In fact, I had to look up the expression to learn what was being referred to. This attack appears to be calling me a Nazi, nothing less. I demand that Mr. Storr refer me to the original sources to which we assume he has referred. Until then, I’ll only say that he has carefully selected phrases and statements out of context, not the sort of referencing that I would have expected from him.” James Randi
Godwin’s Law aside, when this was published I got in touch with Will to let him know what had been said and that’s when our phone call took place. I listened to the interview being played to me over the phone and I heard James Randi talk about how he believed that those addicted to substances should be allowed to “do themselves in“. He then said ‘I’m a believer in, if you call that Social Darwinism, I would have to generally agree”. There’s a pause and then Storr points out that many would consider such a belief to be a right wing view of other people. The conversation continues.
What is of interest to me here isn’t what sort of person such a belief makes James Randi (everyone is susceptible to faulty thinking, after all), but instead how quick people have been to accuse Will Storr of quote mining the man he was interviewing. As Will pointed out to me in our conversation, it isn’t something he would do because of the legal trouble he would inevitably get into, and the fact that such behaviour would put his journalistic reputation on the line.
Quote Mining
Quote mining is the deceitful tactic of taking quotes out of context in order to make them seemingly agree with the quote miner’s viewpoint [RationalWiki]
James Randi said that if his beliefs that drugs should be made legal so that those with addictions can “do themselves in” is Social Darwinism, then that is what he believes. This was not taken out of context in ‘The Heretics’. It also also not a radical new announcement from Randi, who has previously written about such beliefs.
James Randi demands that Will Storr refers him to the original source to which he has referred to in his book, and I hope that he’ll get in touch with Will so that he too can hear what he said during the interview and retract the allegation that Will Storr has quote mined him. Will doesn’t want to put the audio online because he doesn’t want to “start a war”.
James Randi isn’t perfect – I’m not stating he should be or that he has ever claimed to be. Perhaps, in the rush of the interview Randi said things he didn’t mean – or he forgot what he’d said during his time talking to Storr? I don’t know, but what I do know is that this reaction from some skeptics supports the main theme of ‘The Heretics’ – that we all believe weird things, that we’re all susceptible to confirmation bias, and can be a bit closed minded when those beliefs and ideas that we hold to be true are challenged with new or conflicting information.
Just six years ago I could be found sitting at a table in a dark room, eyes closed with concentration as my team mates and I built up psychic energy to allow ghosts to use the table to communicate with us. Earlier this month the president of the James Randi Education Foundation, DJ Grothe, referred to me and others as ‘the workhorses of skepticism who actually do scientific paranormal investigations of claims’.
Why am I telling you this? So that you know exactly the kind of skeptic that I am. There’s a stark difference between who I was and who I am, and it’s one shaped by belief.
I’m not content with simply pointing out ‘it can’t be a ghost because ghosts defy the rules of physics’. The difficult and often lonely transition that I went through – discarding my beliefs and picking apart the very things that had defined me as a person – makes me the kind of skeptic who knows what it is like to be wrong, to hold her hands up and say ‘holy shit, look how wrong I’ve been all of this time!‘. I’m the kind of skeptic who is sympathetic to those who believe weird stuff because I know why they do and how easy it is to convince yourself that you are right.
It’s this theme that runs through The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science, in which journalist Will Storr documents his often scary adventure to discover why people believe strange and bizarre things. It isn’t just the unconventional belief systems that Storr is interested in though, it’s why those he meets believe what they do, and how they interpret the skeptical world around them.
Storr also speaks to a wide range of experts about neurological, psychological, and environmental factors that cause people to reach weird conclusions, with fascinating insight being presented that often demonstrates how everyone is biased and susceptible to irrational thinking – but he has received criticism for giving scientific research an equal footing to the ideas promoted by the likes of Holocaust denier David Irving, homeopathic practitioners, and ESP researcher Rupert Sheldrake.
“It is not enough for Storr to consider why people believe weird things; he also wants to challenge whether these things really are weird. He seems to accept, deep down, that they are, but he doesn’t want to admit this. He is like the child who still wants to believe in Father Christmas, but who is just old enough to know better. Life would be more magical, more fun, if the story were true. So it is that homeopaths are given a more sympathetic hearing than sceptics, with no discussion of the harm that unscientific medicine can do” Mark Henderson, The Guardian
Although at times it did feel as though Storr was too trusting of people with faulty reasoning, the reviewer at The Guardian could have stopped to ask why those with odd ideas are given a more sympathetic hearing. In Heretics Storr admits that when attending a Skeptics conference he cannot justify why he feels a dislike of those in the audience. Perhaps, as one of the skeptics on stage with Prof Chris French I should feel offended, yet Storr goes on to wonder if it might be because of the time he has spent with people who might be considered as stupid by those who identify as skeptics, and as someone who used to be mocked by skeptics I can confirm it probably is that. Even now, as I stand in front of audiences of skeptics as a speaker, I sometimes feel as though I don’t quite belong. Like I’m some sort of an imposter who will be outed at any moment – ‘you used to *feel* psychic energy, get the fuck out!’
That said, not all skeptics are killjoys who parrot every word of the big name skeptics such as Dawkins, Goldacre and more. Storr writes about peoples beliefs stemming from their stories, and it’s exactly the same for nonbelievers. Someone who has never believed in ghosts probably isn’t going to be as sympathetic to the biased thought-processes that someone who does believe in ghosts is going to use to convince themselves they are right. People arrive at their skepticism through different means, and that’s often reflected in their approach to different ideas and topics. Skeptics often have an image problem because the conclusions they reach and the ideas they are skeptical of are what other people use to form their worldview. That cannot be helped, but the way in which skeptics communicate can be. It’s something I’ve written about many times before – how the ‘Ghost don’t exist, move on’ approach isn’t going to convince anyone who disagrees with you that you’re right.
A therapist happily explaining to Storr how Satanic cults eat babies might sound like a ludicrous idea to an outsider, but when you know how easy it is to fall into the routine of validating your ideas, you know why that sounds plausible to her. A voice-hearer whose fantasies of being recruited as a spy turned into an alternative version of reality for him tells Storr how he used to turn the radio on and “detune” it to pick out messages being transmitted to him by those recruiting him as a spy. To demonstrate this to Storr, he “detunes” the kitchen radio and a voice on the radio says ‘…the British Government has a shoot-to-kill policy’ shocking Storr and the others in the room. It’s a random broadcast, but listened to by someone convinced secret messages are being transmitted, it becomes something entirely more than just a chance coincidence. It reminded me of the hours spent listening to Dictaphones to hear the voices of the dead – when you seek validation you often find it, even though it isn’t even there…
Listening to people with strange beliefs, getting to know both them and what they believe can make you more understanding of them than you might feel if you’d just heard about the ideas they think are true. That isn’t a bad thing. A passage at the end of the book summed things up perfectly:
I will try to remember though, that as right as I can sometimes feel, there is always the chance that I am wrong. And that happiness lies in humility; in forgiving others, and in forgiving myself. We are creatures of illusion. We are made out of stories. From the Heretics to the Skeptics, we are all lost in our own neural tjukurpas, our own secret worlds. We are just ordinary heroes fighting phantom Goliaths, doing our best in the service of truth when the only thing that we really know are the pulses.
- Will Storr, Heretics,
Go and buy this book,I loved it. Read it, and read it again. Take notes, explore the ideas being discussed for yourself, and take time to ponder. Be warned though, fans of James Randi might be forced to make some difficult considerations about the leader of the JREF. Though, it’s important to point out that unsavory views held by an individual do not represent all of those who identify as a skeptics, and that surely the comments made by Randi just provide further proof that we are all biased in our beliefs one way or another, intelligent or not…
The ‘This is Somerset’ news website reported on photos taken by local photographer Annie Henderson that shows an odd and unidentified object in the sky. The object appears to be fiery orange and red, and travelling upwards at quite some speed. The apparent speed lends weight to the idea that the object is propelled, and initial speculation between local researchers is that what we’re looking at is a water propelled rocket of some type (hat tip to Robert Moore).
Below is a photo of a whole load of water propelled rockets being shot up into the sky, they don’t look overly similar but that’s laregly due to the fact that the lighting conditions are different. In the photo below the sun is high in the sky, whereas in the Annie Henderson photos the sun is very low.
World Record for Most Water Rockets shot into the sky simultaneously. Source: Wikimedia
In this comparison photo (click image for a larger view) you can see similarities in the movement of the objects. The current record for greatest altitude achieved by a water and air propelled rocket is 2044 feet (623 metres), held by U.S. Water Rockets on 14 June 2007, and it’s difficult to calculate how high a rocket would have to be during sunset to be illuminated like it is in the Annie Henderson photo. However, it was pointed out by both Robert Moore and Tim Farley that this could simply just be a jets contrail illuminated brightly due to the position of the sun in the sky. This was my initial thought too.
A jet with illuminated contrail Source: The Living Moon
Jet with sunlit contrail Source: The Living Moon
Could this UFO be a water propelled rocket? Or perhaps a jet? Without knowing more about the time the object was seen, how it moved and how long it was in the sky for we can’t really be sure. I have contacted the newspaper that published this story to see if that information is available, and to see if it might be possible to get a copy of the original photo for further analysis. I’ll update the blog if I get more details. In the mean time, what are peoples thoughts?
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