#370: Kim Stagliano

A.k.a. Stagmom

One of the things we try to achieve here is to keep track of the movers and shakers in the anti-vaxx movement, since these are demonstrably among the most dangerous loons out there. Kim Stagliano is another such. She is one of the most ardent bloggers at the denialist organization Age of Autism, and she even writes for the execrable pile of fecal waste, the Huffington Post. In her contributions she makes some feeble attempts at humor, but it is mostly a long row of standard fallacies (confusing correlation and causation, the fallacy of the perfect solution, non-sequiturs, strawmen, the Big Pharma gambit, selective use of evidence, double standards of evidence, blame the victim, moving goal posts, anecdotal evidence, appeals to emotion, and appeals to conspiracies, to mention a few of the more frequent ones).

She has also made appearances as a staunch defender of Andy Wakefield after the latter was unmasked as a fraud.

Furthermore, Stagliano is famous for what amounts to a remarkable lack of self-awareness. One of Stagliano’s schticks is the “censorship of vaccine critics” by the media. Of course, Stagliano confuses censorship and criticism (the fact that everyone with actual competence completely disagree with her is not “censorship” even if Stagliano demands to call it so). The irony is that she herself deletes all dissenting comments on her blogposts: “we have made a conscious decision to moderate the site so that it does not become a cesspool of dissent.” Her persecution complex is well-developed, however.

And of course she is enthusiastically peddling untested chemicals and woo for autistic children, which seems to be more or less part of the job description for anti-vaxx bloggers.

Diagnosis: Ignorant, ardent loon who are on the verge of taking the anti-vaxx movement well into TimeCube territory. The fact that she is unable to avoid a fallacy in every other sentence she writes should not be taken to indicate that she is anything less than extremely dangerous.