Welcome to Monday! I hope you’re all ready for the work week. Is it just me or have weekends gotten shorter? Let’s get rolling with our open thread. Post whatever’s on your mind.
This is scary, and very close to my house. Ladies, please be careful out there.
Delaware State Police believe a man is responsible for two separate abductions Wednesday and Saturday in which two women were sexually assaulted near Christiana.
Both incidents happened in the morning, police said. In both cases the women were approached at gunpoint while sitting in their cars in a parking lot near Del. 7 and Churchmans Road.
The man forced the women to drive him around to undisclosed locations, sexually assaulted them and then returned them back to the area where he picked them up, police said.
This is very sobering because right now they tell you if you need to do something – like answer the cell phone or play with the GPS – you should pull off the road and park. Now it’s not even safe to do that. I guess your best bet is to turn off your phone completely an make sure that you set your GPS while your still inside and some place safe.
New Scientist has an interesting column on denialism:
Whatever they are denying, denial movements have much in common with one another, not least the use of similar tactics (see “How to be a denialist”). All set themselves up as courageous underdogs fighting a corrupt elite engaged in a conspiracy to suppress the truth or foist a malicious lie on ordinary people. This conspiracy is usually claimed to be promoting a sinister agenda: the nanny state, takeover of the world economy, government power over individuals, financial gain, atheism.
This common ground tells us a great deal about the underlying causes of denialism. The first thing to note is that denial finds its most fertile ground in areas where the science must be taken on trust. There is no denial of antibiotics, which visibly work. But there is denial of vaccines, which we are merely told will prevent diseases – diseases, moreover, which most of us have never seen, ironically because vaccines work.
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All denialisms appear to be attempts like this to regain a sense of agency over uncaring nature: blaming autism on vaccines rather than an unknown natural cause, insisting that humans were made by divine plan, rejecting the idea that actions we thought were okay, such as smoking and burning coal, have turned out to be dangerous.
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Greg Poland, head of vaccines at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and editor in chief of the journal Vaccine, often speaks out against vaccine denial. He calls his opponents “the innumerate” because they are unable to grasp concepts like probability. Instead, they reason based on anecdote and emotion. “People use mental short cuts – ‘My kid got autism after he got his shots, so the vaccine must have caused it,'” he says. One emotive story about a vaccine’s alleged harm trumps endless safety statistics.
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He [Seth Kalichman, social psychologist at the University of Connecticut at Storrs] believes the instigators of denialist movements have more serious psychological problems than most of their followers. “They display all the features of paranoid personality disorder”, he says, including anger, intolerance of criticism, and what psychiatrists call a grandiose sense of their own importance. “Ultimately, their denialism is a mental health problem. That is why these movements all have the same features, especially the underlying conspiracy theory.”