How to write an article that appears balanced, but is secretly one-sided…
@dgerard looks like Dr Miller here is completely rationally and altruistically examining the issues despite being one of the go-to “sciencey words” providers of various fundamentalist organisations in the UK.
I remember when LW at least tried to prevent this by doing the ‘epistemic status’ thing (which was a bit silly as it depended on the honesty of the author but at least they tried, and I am annoyed they gave up on that).
Edit: I was looking up a source for what you said (and discovered Miller has deleted his twitter) and came across this: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cpk3gZqLkQ1/ “Ever wondered what it’s like to be pro-life and in the medical sphere? Look no further and join Alexandra as she speaks to the UK’s most prolife-ic (see what we did there) doctor against abortion, Calum Miller.” yeah really something he should have disclosed.
Edit 2: lol ow god he didn’t delete his twitter he actually renamed it from cdoggmiller to DrCalumMiller but forgot to update his own blog. ‘cdogg’ ow god. He is also a pretty vocal anti leftwinger (at least in his student days). Edit 3 No wait, he still is
@Soyweiser He’s also oddly reluctant to disclose in his polemic that his ongoing association with Oxford is as a research fellow at the tiny Blackfriars Hall, which is a combination Dominican friary and heavily Catholic college. Not wholly out of the question that the post is funded by, you know, “a group of concerned individuals”.
He also went on a ‘why I changed my mind on abortion’ video. ‘changed your mind’ sure buddy. I’d hope at least that his association with friars makes it very unlikely he actually pipebombs anything, he also didn’t seem (in looking at his socials for like 5 minutes) to be the stochastic terrorism promoter type.
Tradcaths gonna tradcath, but it’s interesting he feels he can reach the EA audience with his views.
Not a huge distance to travel from Bayesian reasoning to Stochastic terrorism
On one hand it’s encouraging that the comments are mostly pushing back.
On the other hand a lot of them do so on the basis of a disagreement over the moral calculus of how many chickens a first trimester fetus should be worth, and whether that makes pushing for abortion bans inefficient compared to efforts to reduce the killing of farm animals for food.
Which, while pants-on-head bizarre in any other context, seems fairly normal by EA standards.
Meh. I’ve seen similar on here.
I got a ban the other day for pointing out some memes about blowing up McDonald’s.
Funny part was I was immediately downvoteded to oblivion (one of the .ML domains) when I pointed out that they’d all freak the fuck out of it were abortion clinics.
