Disinformation Bullshit by William Harwood

Less than one hundred persons worldwide believe that the earth is as flat as a dinner plate, and defend that belief on the ground that the Judaeo-Christian bible says so in fifteen places. That is not enough believers to discourage the media from treating the flat-earth cultists as peddlers of unmitigated bullshit. Less than fifty thousand Scientology cultists worldwide believe that aliens called Thetans colonized the earth billions of years ago, and that their presence was detected by the cult's founder, L. Ron Hubbard. That is a large enough number, even ignoring Scientology's Big Lie that it has eight million members, to intimidate the media into pretending that Scientology's claims are not unmitigated bullshit. The number of people who believe that extraterrestrials resembling humans in Star Trek makeup are kidnapping humans may be as high as the number of Scientologists. The media apparently think it is, since they refuse to denounce such claims as unmitigated bullshit. Disinformation peddlers to whom the media tend to pander include creationists, who offer the same spurious defence of their bullshit as flat-earthers; self-styled teachers who have turned North American schools into a babysitting service in which teaching has been illegal since World War Two; self-styled psychics; quacks who pretend that their placebo scams constitute alternative medicine; psychiatrists who claim that sympathetic listening is a form of medicine when they do it, but not a form of medicine when bartenders do the same thing; and trade unions that came into existence to combat a clear and present injustice, and evolved into a more Stalinistic despotism than the one they replaced. This book will not please the ignorant, the gullible, the brainwashed-or the media. ISBN 978-1-934209-67-7