#Bigfoot (also known as Chewbacca Sasquatch) is a mythical creature alleged by some to live in remote North American forests in the Pacific Northwest. As there is zero real evidence for the existence of Bigfoot, the study of the "beast" is considered to be a #pseudoscience. Bigfoot is also one of the more famous examples of #cryptozoology.
Bigfoot is sometimes described as a large, hairy, bipedal hominid creature, and many believe that this animal, or its close relatives, may be found around the world under different regional names, such as the #Yeti of Tibet and Nepal.
The most famous sighting is the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film, which shows a hairy bipedal figure walking away from the camera.
The Bates eye method is an alternative therapy that purports to "cure" defective #eyesight and diseases of the #eye by means of specific exercises. It is based on the work and theories of William Horatio Bates, a medical doctor and eye specialist practicing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although rejected and later soundly debunked by his peers, Bates's method was readily adopted into the alternative medicine and health freedom scenes, where it became interwoven with nutritional and other pseudoscience in the hands of early "health fad" figureheads such as Bernarr Macfadden and Gayelord Hauser.
#Ballotpedia is a website that provides information on #US#elections and candidates for voters. It started out as a community-contributed site, but is now only edited by paid staff. It has information related to both US Federal government and US state governments, with a database of information on US state executives, legislators, districts, candidates for such positions & ballot measures.
The website claims to be #neutral & accurate. Due to the nature of the site, it does sometimes show decidedly non-factual quotes from other sources (such as public figures). Despite this, the site was founded by the Citizens In Charge Foundation, a #libertarian activist organisation. The site is currently run by a remarkably well-fed nonprofit called the Lucy Burns Institute, which is substantially funded by #Koch Industries money, funnelled in via various corporate shells.
The balance #fallacy is an informal logical fallacy that occurs when two sides of an argument are assumed to have equal or comparable value regardless of their respective merits, which (in turn) can lead to the conclusion that the answer to a problem is always to be found between two extremes. The latter is effectively an inverse false dilemma, discarding the two extremes rather than the middle.
While the rational position on a topic is often between two extremes, this cannot be assumed without actually considering the evidence. Sometimes the extreme position is actually the correct one, and sometimes the entire spectrum of belief is wrong, and truth exists in an orthogonal direction that hasn't yet been considered. Furthermore, oftentimes the two sides being compared aren't equally extreme, so a conclusion drawn from this fallacy will end up benefitting the more extreme side.
Austrian economics (or the Austrian school of economics) is #libertarian#philosophy masquerading as a school of economic thought. This school is notable for its lack of formal mathematical modeling and empirical testing. Among its more unusual traits, the Austrian school draws its conclusions based on deduction and thought experiments, rather than data. In place of the conventional tools of science, the Austrian School favors a narrative approach called "praxeology". Despite its shortcomings, some less nutty features of the Austrian School have leaked into mainstream economics while the more nutty have found a home at libertarian think tanks (Cato Institute and Ludwig von Mises Institute).
A curious trend I noticed on other social media hellsites:
Apparently it is now popular among the alt-right crowd to claim that if something doesn't adhere to Mussolini's original definition of #fascism, it's not real fascism.
(Which then seems to lead to claims that the Left are the real fascists somehow, because what else did I expect?)
Post-World War II, there have been several attempts on defining what fascist ideology consists of, e.g., separately by John McNeill, Robert Paxton and Jason Stanley:
The Appeal to ancient wisdom is a naturalistic fallacy and thus an informal fallacy. It is the unholy love-child of the appeal to tradition and of the appeal to authority. In this sense, the appeal to ancient wisdom can be understood as being the appeal to traditional authority.
The appeal to ancient wisdom is most commonly used by woomongers of the New Age, some indigenous science advocates, and/or alternative medicine varieties.
'The reason It's a Wonderful Life (1946) holds up so well is that George's line, "You know how long is takes a working man to save $5000?" has somehow not aged even slightly.'
The alkaline diet is a diet fad that started gaining popularity in around 2010, based on the notion that it's possible to alter your blood pH through a change in diet to make it more alkaline, receiving numerous health benefits. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever for the alkaline diet and there is no connection between the foods the proponents recommend and the actual pH of those foods. This craze is fueled by the fact that acidity and alkalinity are chemical concepts that people are likely to remember from school. In practice, the diet follows mainstream dietary advice mixed with high amounts of nature woo. Once someone has been convinced consuming alkaline substances is beneficial, that opens the door to selling them the hard stuff: coral.
I get kind of worked up about attempts to rob young people of the few interesting things that we really know about nature and the universe. This anti-evolution content is designed as a kind of inoculation against gaining further knowledge on the topic.
It contains neat little counter arguments that prompt kids to stop listening before they hear anything really interesting.
"[Darwin] avoided discussing his views on religion in public, but his private writings (from the Beagle era onwards) show that he was increasingly critical of theology and Biblical literalism, and had many doubts about God, including concerns about the problem of evil. In a letter of 1879, he described himself as an #agnostic rather than an atheist, but stated that belief in evolution is not incompatible with #theism."
Citation: Letter to John Fordyce, 7 May 1879, transcribed at the Darwin Correspondence Project
#Objectivism is a peculiar #philosophy formulated by novelist Ayn Rand. It sports a range of convoluted tenets, but is most infamous for redefining #greed as the prime moral virtue — and, to take things even further, literally redefining altruism as evil. The name "objectivism" was chosen because, as Rand was the single smartest person in the history of the world, anything she said had to be "objective".
As one might imagine, objectivism is very popular amongst those who already hold a rather egocentric view of the world. It lets them say, "Hey, I'm not being a selfish jerk, I'm following a philosophy!". Of course, this incredibly short-sighted and narrow outlook — only seeking short-term gains no matter the cost to everyone else — will not even maximize long-term individual gains (let alone short- or long-term societal gain).