Skepticism Can Turn Septic (Skeptical Inquirer)

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Product:	Skeptical Inquirer
Date:	21/09/00 (30 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Deflates and debunks many worthy targets.

Disadvantages: Sometimes seems dogmatic and doctrinaire.

Eye-opening, stimulating, often very funny and informative, and refreshing as an ice-cube down the neck on a hot day after the muggy illogicality of the mainstream media, but I'm still a little sceptical about The Skeptical Enquirer. I want to like it, because I oppose a lot of the things it opposes, but there's a disturbing whiff of inquisitorialism in the way the organization behind the magazine, CSICOP, or the Committee for Skeptical Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, goes about things.

Because its members sometimes seem to want not just to defeat their opponents but to stop them being allowed to speak as well. I agree that astrology is mostly nonsense, for example, but I was disturbed to read a reader's letter in one issue announcing that he'd managed to have an astrologer banned from the air-waves for contravening an advertising rule, and there's an interesting exchange in Douglas Hofstadter's *Metamagical Themas* between Hofstadter -- a member of CSICOP -- and a sociologist in which the sociologist seems the true sceptic: neither dismissing astrology completely, like Hofstadter, nor thoughtlessly embracing it. It's a tired old response to people who dismiss the paranormal, but there ARE more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy and I'd no more want CSICOP and its organ to have control of the media than I want the present crew to have control of it. There's a golden mean of scepticism and CSICOP don't seem to have found it yet.

Summary: