Monday, January 21, 2013

#383: Ginger Taylor


Ginger Taylor is an ardent anti-vaccination activist and conspiracy theorist perhaps most famous for her attempts to blame criticism of the anti-vaccine movement on misogyny. The fact that science doesn’t support the vaccine-autism link is explained by “there seems to be a denial of the fact that scientific consensus has quite often been (and most assuredly still is in many places) wrong.” Yes, it is the Galileo gambit again – it doesn’t matter that Taylor has no evidence in favor of her cherished position (though she has some “other ways of knowing”, specifically “I am a mother, so I know what caused my child’s autism”). Furthermore, according to Taylor “science" is the new religion and their dogma cannot be questioned. Scientists are the priests, and those who diverge from the cannon are branded heretics.” She has also claimed that listening to science rather than her is “elitism”. In short, instead of actually engaging with the science, the data, or reality, she tries, feebly, to discredit the results by all other possible means.

Taylor has her blog at Adventure in Autism. There’s a decent takedown of her idiocy here. Her lack of self-awareness is rather stunning, even for a hardcore denialist.

After the utter discrediting of anti-vaxx hero Andy Wakefield, she was one of the people who tried to distance herself from Wakefield while simultaneously portraying him as the victim of a conspiracy, providing for instance blathering attacks on Brian Deer (who was a large extent responsible for having Wakefield exposed).

Diagnosis: A particularly dimwitted denialist, Taylor has apparently applied every single fallacy known to man, though she harbors a particular fondness for appeals to emotion. She seems to have some readers, however, and must be considered dangerous.

6 comments:

  1. You may want to read this http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=discredited-vaccine-autism

    Just sayin.

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  2. And.. by the way... your likely hero, Paul Offit evidently "proved" Wakefield wrong. I feel so great about that. Nevermind that Offit holds patents on the vaccines or anything. Nothing to see here... move on... no man behind the curtain.

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    1. I have no idea what you think that 2011 article shows that challenges anything I have said, though perhaps that's not the point?

      The vaccine-autism link has been discredited by an overwhelming and uniform body of literature, so much so that anyone who is able to rationally assess evidence would be forced to say that it's conclusive. Your ad hominem argument involving one of the people involved in vaccine research, Paul Offit, is weirdly irrelevant in that respect.

      I suggest keeping in mind one of the oldest rules of rational debate when you evaluate Offit's work: "You are not allowed to try to explain *why* someone is wrong before you have shown that they *are*, in fact, wrong." You haven't even tried to engage with Offit's actual research before you launch your pharma shill gambit - the typical ploy of a critical thinking-challenged conspiracy theorists.

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. Ginger Taylor was set straight on her own blog, and reacted the way you'd expect - by deleting the comment.

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  5. I'll just leave this for you, Max. That is, if you can read.

    https://spectrumnews.org/opinion/viewpoint/1977-paper-on-the-first-autism-twin-study/

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