So, there it is - a list of loons from "A" to "Z".
But ... the title of the blog is "Encyclopedia", and as many have pointed out, there are some glaring omissions. Where is Gary Bauer or Ann Coulter or E. Calvin Beisner? Surely the rabid insanity of Linda Harvey deserves an entry? And can the American Taliban really be considered covered without Cindy Jacobs, C. Peter Wagner, Lou Engle or Bradlee Dean? Or Gary North and Hal Lindsey?
Perceptive readers may have noticed the absence, in our first round, of Dr. Oz. That will need to be remedied. As will the absence of legends of pseudoscience such as Gary Schwartz or Raymond Moody - or, in a different vein, Frank Tipler. There is no entry, thus far, on Dean Radin, nor any entry for Allison Dubois.
Central creationists are missing as well. Carl Baugh and John Baumgardner are just two obvious examples. And how could an Encyclopedia of loons consider itself even close to complete without an entry on geocentrism advocate Robert Sungenis?
It couldn't, of course. We'll kick off round two tomorrow with Adam Abraham.
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Round 2? Huzzah, Huzzah!
ReplyDeleteYou gonna move on to some of the ones who have shucked their mortal coil (yet their lunacy still affects us today)?
ReplyDeleteFor the A's, I can think of Sharron Angle and Dick Armey.
ReplyDeleteFor the B's, I have Brent Bozell, Dave Blount (the borderline mentally ill blogger and founder of the far-right Moonbattery.com, which is quite possibly even more hateful and bigoted than Free Republic, and that's saying something), Jan Brewer, Gary Bauer, Robert Beale, Paul Broun, and Ken Blackwell.
Huzzah^2!!!
ReplyDeleteStuart Wilde!
ReplyDeleteThanks for suggestions. Bozell, Broun, Beale, Bauer and Angle are definitely upcoming (though comments on Beale were included in the entry for his son Vox Day, he deserves a separate one - as does Mel Gibson's father Hutton). Dave Blount is new to me, and I'll have to look up that one. Stuart Wilde is a thoroughly annoying loon, and fully deserving of any negative press he might get - but he is also British, so including him would be bending some self-imposed rules (should think about doing a Commonwealth round at some point, though I don't know how the British libel laws might affect blogspot entries).
ReplyDeleteArmey and Brewer are trickier; they're politically repugnant, methinks, but as long as I wish to stay politically neutral it's hard to point out anything they've said that is clearly and politically neutrally loony (as opposed to Santorum, Perry or, for that matter, Gingrich, who we may have to include). Ken Blackwell irritates me. We considered him for round one, and his affiliations might suffice to justify an entry, but he is pretty careful with how he formulates himself, and we haven't managed to find any quotes that really displays critical thinking failures. Being evil and hateful isn't enough - Karl Rove is not a loon, just evil (and I suspect at least Armey falls in that category as well).
Personally, the more people you can do from my fav. new guilty pleasure -- RenewAmerica.com -- the happier I'll be. My personal suggestions include Laurie Roth (a whack job of truly epic proportions), Alan Caruba (a retired PR flack who morphed into the world's greatest expert on ecology and climate... or so the voices in his head tell him), J. Matt Barber (a truly, deeply despicable human being) and Tim Dunkin (a rather amusing, though thoroughly vile, crank).
ReplyDeleteI think Matt Barber is actually already on the list.
ReplyDeleteYay for more Loons!
ReplyDeleteIt would be great if there a way this blog can also rant and/or highlight the consumers of these loons ... they are the ones feeding these nutty birds, so to speak.
I think you're off-base in classifying Raymond Moody and Dean Radin as loons. There is too much substance to what they say to brand them loons. I am not saying they are 100% right -- but they certainly aren't loons. I would bet a large sum of money that you wouldn't score a 70% on simple quiz on the main points of Radin's book, "The Conscious Universe." Moreover, I doubt you can comment comprehensively and knowledgeably about the research that was stimulated by Moody's initial work, research that is scientifically rigorous, such as Dr. Pim von Lommel's. The work you are doing here on this blog is laudable, indeed, but you appear to be falling prey to a weakness that very often afflicts snarky sarcastic skeptics, which is that they become so accustomed to being right in picking off the low-hanging fruit of the woo community, that they get careless and sometimes deride meritorious bodies of work, such as much of that of Radin and Moody. I've seen James Randi and Micheal Shermer and Skepdic's Robert Carroll, for example, have their cocky attitudes lead them to make lazy mistakes in judgement, and I am now seeing that with you. Be more careful! Your hubris is biting you in the ass! A friendly heads up.
ReplyDeleteIn "The Physics of Immortality," Tipler said his arguments were correct IF the mass of the Higgs boson was 220±20 Gev. Experimentally it's turned out to be 126 Gev. I expect he's pencil-whipped his calculations by now, though.
ReplyDelete