For the Sake of Science

I was searching for PZ Myers YouTube videos but moments ago when I came across this magnificent piece of garbage from Christopher Maloney.

Let’s start from the top:

Maloney did collaborate with Andreas Moritz. Maloney can keep claiming that PZ retracted this or that, but the fact of the matter is this is what PZ actually said:

However, at the very least, Maloney was used as a pretext to shut down the blog. WordPress sent Hawkins email demanding changes to his posts, specifically this one:

[Email from WordPress]

…Someone targeted Hawkins, and sent a demand to WordPress to shut him down. This is someone in communication with Maloney, because Maloney just sent me this email:

And he goes on to quote an email in which Maloney admits to being in contact with Moritz. There is no doubt that these two acted together to report me to WordPress; does anyone believe Maloney didn’t know what Moritz was doing? does anyone believe Maloney didn’t tell Moritz exactly what to send to WordPress? does anyone believe anything Maloney says?

Next Maloney claims my original letter about him has since been pulled from the Kennebec Journal, as if to suggest the paper saw how dastardly it was and just had to remove it! In fact, the KJ remodeled its website shortly after my letter was published – no letter from that period can be found. As evidence for my point, take a look at my response to a couple letters others wrote in response to what I wrote. Now try to follow the links to those letters back to the KJ’s website. (Let me know how that works out for you, Maloney.)

Maloney then goes on to claim he’s just a poor victim who is being harassed by the big mean mob. In fact, since destroying his web presence for getting my blog shut down with the help of Moritz, all the posts about him have been responses. I’ve often said he can’t make things better, he can only not make them worse. Apparently I was being too subtle: stop trying to promote your quackery and everyone will stop ‘harassing’ you. You, Maloney, make things worse by creating elaborate responses months after the fact – case-in-point, this YouTube video.

Next Maloney, for some bizarre reason, tries to say what atheists oppose: authoritarianism. It’s perplexing because atheism is not a philosophy, not an indicator of how to act (or how one will act), and it isn’t a normative position. Atheism is a position that says, for whatever reason, theism is not worth holding. Even then it is necessary to qualify that this only means it is not worth holding for that particular atheist. Many atheists are pro-theism and see it as a positive in the world; they just reject what they see as being positive as also being true. Of course, many atheists do happen to reject that theism is positive (mostly because arriving at atheism is generally for rational people and it’s only rational to see theism as a propagator of evil) but that does not mean that it is possible to know what positions an atheist holds by virtue of knowing he is an atheist. As usual, Maloney is out of his league.

After some rambling Maloney tries to bumble his way out of being called a quack by saying what he does doesn’t fit into the etymology of the word. Feel free to skip over that part of the video. He’s a quack because he practices a form of medicine for which there is no convincing evidence.

Weird that continued attempts to reestablish himself and promote his quackery have resulted in yet another blog post, huh?

Filed under: Pure bullshit | Tagged: Christopher Maloney, Naturopathy, pz myers, Quack quack quack, Steven Novella |