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Joe Nickell
The recent death of Joe Nickell, the leading American skeptic of the paranormal, brought to mind a few questions about just what precise sort of things the committed investigator might have been skeptical about in life. Going around laughing at supposed backwoods rednecks saying “Hahaha, you believe in Bigfoot!” might have been OK, but skeptically questioning uncritical witness testimony about the existence and habits of certain other unlikely North American primates like Martin Luther King was quite another.
Obituaries of Nickell, who died on 4 March aged 80, were very careful to focus upon the fact he was One Of The Good Guys by mentioning his youth as a proud civil rights activist as much as his later activities exposing fraudulent weeping Catholic statues (but never any equivalent fraudulent Muslim miracles, funnily enough). In Nickell’s own prior account of Dr King’s “profound influence” upon his anti-racist Weltanschauung:
I can scarcely imagine the life I would have had without Dr King’s profound influence. Although I never met him, I feel I knew him very well. From time to time, in some situations, I think of him and how he would be likely to advise, so I still feel privy to his guidance.
For someone who spent so much time exposing fake mediums, Nickell almost sounds like a Spiritualist himself here: his essay on this topic is called “Following Martin Luther King In Life and Death”. Cross out “MLK” there and put in “Jesus” and Joe would have laughed at you. In order to demonstrate the Turin Shroud was a scam, Nickell once bravely copied what he thought were the medieval forger’s techniques to create an equivalent shroud of Bing Crosby. Again, it would have been more genuinely daring to have faked one of the Prophet Muhammad.
Wooden Nickell
Joe Nickell might not have believed in UFOs, ghosts, pyramid-power, pendulums or astral projection, but he certainly believed in many other of the far-out hippie nostrums of the 1960s, marching with King, registering black voters in the Deep South, and just generally falling for the lie that, once Jim Crow laws had been dismantled, such universally lovely, grateful people would want to live in hippie-dippy peacenik love and harmony with their kind white emancipators forever – despite, for example, there being far more evidence that malign and eldritch entities like Jesse Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers all existed than that poltergeists or extraterrestrials did not.
Draft-dodging the Vietnam War in 1968, Joe fled across the border to Canada, before returning back to the USA in 1977 when President Carter pardoned all deserters. Nickell’s next chosen secular pilgrimage in life was to head to Kentucky to do a PhD in the invented-sounding subject of “Solving Literary Mysteries”: I imagine him systematically opening 12,000 separate wardrobes in order to empirically prove there is no Narnia.
Maybe you shouldn’t speak ill of the recently dead, but as a hardline skeptic, Nickell was absolutely sure there was no afterlife, so if it turns out there is and he’s upset by reading these words, we can rest assure his wounded pride will never allow him to let us know, via Ouija Board or otherwise. To me, Nickell’s brand of militant skepticism seemed more like a brand of militant spoilsportism than of genuine enquiry: his “introduction to forensic science” as a child was deducing the soot on letters supposedly written to him by Santa had actually been put there by his grandmother. Any normal kid’s conclusion would have been just “Oh, Santa doesn’t exist, then,” before moving swiftly on. Nickell’s was to treat it as some big revelation, and an epistemic model for later conduct in life.
Of course, in a free society, a person should be free to criticize beliefs of any kind. Many of the cases Nickell looked into were, I am sure, perfectly crazy. But do purported post-mortem sightings of Elvis in the mall or Christ on a slice of toast really deserve to be taken apart with such forensic glee as he did? Where there not better, more important issues he could have cast his skeptical scientific glance towards? Did Nickell ever feel minded to publicly wade into the debate about whether or not trans women were really women, or just mad biological men wearing bras, for example? And as for looking into truly verboten scientific controversies like the possible genetic basis of differing racial IQ levels … well, he was a hardline MLK idolater, so what do you think?
I can’t help but notice that, for a supposed free-thinker, most of Nickell’s opinions in life, on matters from race, to climate change, to anti-Christianity (but not any other religion, as far as I can tell), seemed to come down on the side of the left-wing establishment, not of any other, more genuinely dissenting, perspectives.
Asked by the family of Nazi war-criminal John Demjanjuk to prove his SS card was a fake, Nickell gleefully obliged by (correctly) demonstrating the precise opposite. However, when looking into the disputed manuscript of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, which purported, to the doubts of some, to have been the first novel written by a black American slave, he was happy to report (again, I’m sure accurately) he thought it was real. But would he have been quite so happy to report back to the world that it wasn’t, I wonder?
Prometheus Unbound
Nickell published many of his books debunking spooks (but only “spooks” of a certain kind …) with an outlet called Prometheus Books, a sort of arch-skeptical press. Looking it up for this article, though, I found the book currently most prominently advertised on the company’s website was not one called Bigfoot Is Bollocks, or 101 Things Nostradamus Failed To Predict, From 9/11 to Women With Penises, but instead one titled The White Storm: How Racism Poisoned American Democracy.
So, Beelzebub and Mephistopheles might not be real, but the Evil Invisible Demon called Systemic Whiteness is. Here’s an extract from the book’s blurb:
The book reveals how every step forward for Black Americans is met with a fierce backlash from white Americans, taking two recurring forms: violent extremism and a flight from the commons. The white backlash always grows in proportion to the black advances. After Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, a Black man at a polling station in Detroit said: ‘We used to pick cotton, now we pick presidents.’ It is precisely this Black agency that white nationalists refuse to accept.
What has stuff like this got to do with exposing fraudulent faith-healers, or pulling the masks off of criminals pretending to be werewolves, like in Scooby Doo? Ironically, is not swallowing this book’s particular unlikely narrative wholesale every bit as credulous as swallowing one about a whole family of goblins living in your local park and eating discarded hamburgers out of the trashcans? (Unless they just turn out to be Haitians, obviously.)
It seems the skeptical movement to which Nickell belonged has some kind of vested interest in presenting itself as being innately anti-racist in nature. Joe had a long-term association with the anti-pseudoscience magazine The Skeptical Inquirer, whose covers in 2018 included wholly expected topics like ‘A Skeptical Look at UFOs and Aliens’, illustrated by an image of a big Gray extraterrestrial.
But the 2018 run also, for some reason, included covers dealing with less predictable topics like ‘A Skeptic’s Guide to Racism’, illustrated by an image of a big black human.
I don’t know about you, but if I’d just ordered my latest copy of Why Ghosts Don’t Exist Monthly, and I got an issue like that through the post, I’d be cancelling my subscription immediately – for much the same reasons as, should I happen to have been a subscriber to Aren’t Black People Absolutely Bloody Marvellous Magazine, and got an issue through my letterbox filled with totally irrelevant screeds about the Roswell UFO crash and Mothman, I’d be cancelling my direct debit likewise.
Say It Ain’t So, Joe!
Much of The Skeptical Inquirer’s usual output is normally locked away behind a paywall, but the race-related content of this particular issue was deemed so incredibly Important with a capital ‘I’ that it is today available for free for anyone to read – unlike certain much more interesting-sounding articles in the same volume with intriguing titles like “Is Elvis Presley in Home Alone?” and “DNA Test: Salvador Dalí Not Father of Spanish Psychic”, both of which I would genuinely like to have read, but can’t.
This is interesting, because Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is basically what the special issue pushes to its readers, is the very definition of a pseudoscience in and of itself. It just isn’t falsifiable, a quality which, as I’m sure the magazine’s editors knew full well, has been defined as one of the key characteristic markers of what constitutes a genuinely scientific theory at least since the days of Karl Popper.
For example, the Skeptical Inquirer crew of whom Joe Nickell was an absolute model exemplar would doubtless scoff at a Christian Creationist who, when presented with evidence for the Darwinian view of evolution, just says something like “Well, but God made the laws of evolution in the first place, didn’t He?” because, realistically, there is no way of proving or disproving this assertion one way or the other: it simply can’t be falsified. Likewise, however, whenever it is pointed out by race-realists that, right across Europe and America, black crime-rates are consistently higher than those of white people, and CRT advocates reply, “Well, but that’s just because of systemic racism, isn’t it?” this is ultimately not falsifiable either.
The idea of an all-powerful systemic racism, like the idea of an all-powerful God, can be used as a convenient, all-encompassing automatic MacGuffin to retroactively “explain” absolutely anything at all that ever happens. If your wife dies in a flood, a Christian might say it’s just an act of God. If she gets shot in the head by a black man with a revolver, a CRT fanatic might likewise say it’s just an act of systemic racism: the murderer may never have grown up to be a killer if he hadn’t had to labor under the oppressive, character-malforming weight of whiteness in the first place. Even if, for the sake of argument, that theory happened to be true, how could you possibly prove it?
A journal like The Skeptical Inquirer promoting an idea like CRT would seem to make about as much consistent sense as them promoting an idea like Stonehenge being built by mermaids. So, why did they run such pieces in their special 2018 issue? One word: Charlottesville.
Confirmation Bias: Confirmation These People Are Biased
Promising to provide “a skeptic’s guide to the plague of racism”, advertising material for the special issue declares that:
We are living through a time of heightened racial tension and hostilities, particularly due to the aggression of white supremacists who have crept out from the shadows of society and onto the front pages … That’s why now is the time for an exploration of America’s racial divides that is rational and evidence-based.
However, what then appears printed inside the covers is anything other than “rational and evidence-based.” An editorial decries “The racial divisiveness and tensions that erupted this past year … specifically in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August”, events which led the editorial board to invite “several distinguished experts” from the fields of psychology and sociology “to contribute their brief thoughts and observations about how best to deal with racism through evidence-based strategies.”
I wonder what the editors would have done if one of the “evidence-based strategies” suggested had been “mass remigration now”, on the perfectly logical and provable grounds that, in 99 percent monoracial societies, large-scale internal race-conflict is by definition impossible? I guess they would have reacted in the same way they would have done to anyone submitting a paper providing clear, close-up photographic proof of the existence of the Loch Ness Monster: blocked it immediately out of their minds, thrown it into the nearest trash-can, and burned it. Where is the “empirical evidence” that mass multicultural societies really work in the world at the moment? Lebanon? Syria? Rwanda? South Africa? America itself? Nah, just Utopia.
One piece in the self-contained “A Skeptic’s Guide to Racism” section of the relevant issue is called “Are Racist Beliefs Pseudoscientific, and What Do We Do About Them?” by Psychology professor Terence Hines, author of the book Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Myopically, he begins his essay by specifically stating that “One of the defining characteristic of a pseudoscience is [its] non-falsifiability”, a quality he also ascribes towards racism, which he therefore goes on to describe as being “junk science” – before then displaying absolutely zero awareness of the fact that, judged purely upon such terms, CRT can be described likewise.
Hines’ key paragraph is as follows:
The cognitive processes that maintain racist beliefs are quite similar to those maintaining many pseudoscientific and paranormal belief systems. The major one is confirmation bias. The racist who sees a minority individual doing something bad will be more likely to remember that than if they see that same person doing something positive. [Hines means just as, for example, a Christian might remember a sick man who recovers after they pray for his recovery, but forget about the ten others they pray for who simply die.] Racist beliefs share another feature with paranormal ones: stereotyping. There is little difference, cognitively, between holding that African Americans have natural criminal tendencies and saying that people born under a particular astrological configuration are more aggressive.
“Little difference”, that is, apart from all the vast and consistent crime, violence and murder data available out there which clearly indicate that black people across America and Europe commit such acts at a disproportionately greater rate than white people do. Astrologically speaking, I guess Professor Hines must have been born under the Sign of Taurus – because he is full of absolute bullshit on this matter.
The clear implication here is that, if you believe black people have, on average, higher criminal tendencies than, say, whites or East Asians, then you are every bit as retarded and mockable as someone who believes that your star-sign means you will win the State Lottery this week. Yeah. Or maybe such people have just been to inner-city Chicago or London lately with their eyes open, Professor?
Don’t people like Hines have a bad case of “confirmation bias” themselves to the extent that, if they hear someone in the mainstream media repeatedly portraying George Floyd as an innocent “victim” of systemic white racism, they somehow manage to completely blank out the rather more telling image of him gaining false entry into a woman’s home before pointing a gun at her stomach in order to steal the drugs and money he thought she had stashed away inside there?
The Queer of Magical Thinking
Even more pathetic is the essay “Combating Racism Through Shared Goals” by Stuart Vyse, author of Believing in Magic – something which he does himself, he just doesn’t realize the fact. Vyse’s basic hypothesis is that, merely by exposing persons of different races, political beliefs, etc, to one another’s extended company, they will all somehow realize that, in the end, they are all just different earthly manifestations of, like, the same collective human being, man, and iron out all their differences in eternal peace and harmony, like the Jews and Arabs have been doing living cheek by jowl in the West Bank for quite some time now. Vyse actually makes the suggestion that Jews should make the effort to start befriending neo-Nazis and then invite them to their religious Shabbat dinners. What if the neo-Nazis just say “No, you’re a Jew”?
Here’s the personal anecdote Vyse tells to prove this might just be true (do note how professional skeptics like him usually dismiss all first-hand witness testimony of UFO or ghost-sightings as being merely “anecdotal” in a pejorative sense, and thus constituting no real wider scientific proof at all, by the way):
When my oldest child was in high school, the school encountered its first openly gay student. The young man in question was an exuberant thunderbolt of warmth and talent who, from the moment he entered kindergarten, was loved by all who knew him. When he hit high school, he came out in a big way. “I am gay—very gay,” he said, and he started attending school events with his boyfriend … this young man was born into a family of Republicans … But more important to them than politics or religion was their unquestioned love for this boy. Almost overnight, his family became some of the strongest and most vocal advocates for gay rights our town had seen.
So what is Vyse’s expert prescription to replicate this ‘social experiment’ on a more purely racial basis, then? Force all white couples to enjoy a free in vitro fertilization black baby to have and hold as their own?
The author then brings in a well-known social sciences trial from 1954, the “Robbers Cave Experiment“, in which “twenty-two well-adjusted white Protestant fifth-grade boys” were split into two rival gangs at a summer camp and taught to hate one another. Then, however, they were given “situations that required the boys to co-operate across groups for common goals”, like pulling a broken-down truck along, which fostered a spirit of shared camaraderie to the extent they all became friends and probably even turned “gay – very gay” with one another too.
Vyse’s conclusion? That “competition for limited resources breeds prejudice and co-operation toward superordinate goals breeds inter-group harmony.” Great. So all governments in newly demographically transformed nations like the USA have to do now is devise a simple means of abolishing any and all “competition for limited resources” by making food, housing, medicine and utilities free for everyone, then, and everything will be absolutely fine.
How is the above experiment even vaguely relevant towards the current situation of endemic and growing racial tensions across the West? I do note that all participants involved were “well-adjusted white Protestant fifth-grade boys”, for example – i.e., Boy Scouts. If the rival group had happened to be the Bloods, the Crips, MS-13, or the Triads, I wonder how matters would have ended?
Here is the essay’s conclusion:
The message is clear: we do not solve our problems by demonizing our enemies. We do not change minds through argument or violence. We have to treat each other as equals and find new superordinate goals that we can all work toward together. And, of course, elect leaders who will do the same.
Translation: now THE SCIENCE says “Vote Democrat! It’s the only way to avoid inevitable race-war!” But where is the science or skepticism in any of this crap, actually? Nowhere, it’s all just evidence-less wishful thinking on every bit as much of a Panglossian level as those 1950s UFO Contactees who honestly thought the benign and wonderfully advanced Space-Brothers were about to land on Earth any moment and abolish all war, sickness, poverty and nuclear weapons forever. Stuart Vyse’s author bio says he is “an expert on irrational behavior”. In that he practices it himself, maybe?
Nickell and Crime
The only race-related article in the whole magazine with any true scientific meat to it, rather than merely airy idealistic waffle, is “A Hard Look at How We See Race“, which details the genuine findings of black Harvard social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt, who in her role as a criminologist managed to prove that, when previously primed by being shown subliminal images of black people rather than white ones, American cops were able to more quickly perceive subsequent images of guns during slide-shows.
Yet Eberhardt’s debatable (and unfalsifiable) CRT-tinged conclusion was that her findings demonstrated unconscious racial prejudice at play here: a more daringly skeptical hypothesis might have been that the trial just demonstrates how the human brain is automatically primed to subliminally recognize and be alert to sources of known physical danger like urban black males, whether percipients consciously vote Democrat or not. As for Eberhardt’s other finding that priming viewers with subliminal photos of black men also enabled them to more quickly recognize images of monkeys on slides, by the way, I’m saying nothing …
Here, I must in conclusion confess to holding a prior long-term aversion to the whole modern-day skepticism movement. A paranormal enthusiast since I was a child, I think some of the stuff men like Joe Nickell and the Skeptical Inquirer team set out to rather sourly disprove is actually real, and have written so myself in the past. I’ve always felt the methods professional skeptics use to debunk such things are often rather disingenuous and dubious, and that their constantly professed “impartiality” is substantially a sham. Their skepticism is, in my view, all too frequently ideological in its nature, not dispassionate. But, when it comes to some of the non-paranormal things they do seemingly believe in – CRT, for example – the situation appears even worse!
But then, what do I know? I believe in ghosts. Just not in outright full-blown fairy-stories like the so-called “skeptics” do.
40 comments
The ‘paranormal’ and ‘skeptical’ community are another jewish Punch and Judy show designed to keep the attention of a certain kind of intellect busy with pointless crap while the jews go about the business of subjugating the White race. As ‘mainstream’ narratives unravel, the jews have found it useful to cultivate and weaponize ‘fringe’ narratives. That’s all that the ‘skeptical’ and ‘paranormal’ community amount to. The ‘information’ provided is mental chewing gum intended to keep ‘the mind’ busy doing nothing.
While I don’t believe in anything supernatural, it is also true that so-called skeptics have been anything but. By giving their magazines such titles as Skeptical Inquirer it’s almost like buying the domain name of a website to prevent competitors getting it first. Now you have this high-falutin name that tells people what you do, and this then allows you to push any agenda you like under such reasonable auspices.
The New Atheists, Michael Shermer and the like, they were all race-blind poseurs donning the fedora to lead the midwits away from tracing any logical conclusions. Here, get stuck in the sandbox of disproving flat eartherism, collect every issue, we are all equal.
Good riddance!
The Left loves that schtick: Hope Not Hate; Bread Not Bombs; Good Not Evil; Right Not Wrong.
Audacity and shamelessness go a long way; I would have never thought to name my movement, essentially, “I’m Smart, You’re Dumb.” I’d feel absurd.
“The New Atheists, Michael Shermer and the like, they were all race-blind poseurs”
Not quite all. Richard Dawkins defended the biological reality of the race concept in ‘The Ancestor’s Tale“.
Admittedly, he also said it was “of no social value“, but, to his credit, also said this was “why [he] object[s] to positive discrimination [i.e. affirmative action] in job selection“.
Dawkins has also opposed the ‘sex denialism‘ of the transgender lobby and said that eugenics could work in humans and bemoaned the the fact that we can’t have an open, adult conversation about eugenics after the second world war.
He’s certainly not ‘woke‘ or PC.
I believe another of the so-called ‘Four horseman of the New Atheism‘, Sam Harris, also got into trouble for discussing race differences in IQ on his podcast and for interviewing Charles Murray.
The so-called ‘skeptic community‘ is (or at least was) also a lot more diverse in its views on these sorts of topics than this article, and a lot of the comments beneath it, seems to suggest.
Frank Miele, a senior editor at Skeptic magazine, for example, was an unabashed fully signed up race realist, who had published articles at the Mankind Quarterly and has co-authored books on on the subject Vincent Sarich and Arthur Jensen, both of which books I wholly recommend.
I also recall some controversy about some race realist vloggers associating themselves with the so-called ‘skeptic community‘ on youtube in the 2010s.
I’ve known many of these “skeptics” in real life and they are all completely unimpressive. They massively overestimate their own intelligence. The whole practice is masturbatory for them, constantly reminding themselves that they’re smarter than everyone around them because they’re part of the elite few who dare to question the Loch Ness Monster. The fact that ghost stories and the like are mostly just for amusement is lost on these textbook midwits.
These people are typically so emotionally unintelligent that they would devote time to explaining to a child why Santa Claus couldn’t physically visit every house in the world in one night. And they do this sort of thing with a hugely smug self-importance, as though disproving these legends is some social service, rather than just the equivalent of an autistic nerd taking a joke literally because he’s unable to decipher tone or context in a social interaction. It doesn’t click for these people that the merchandiser selling Bigfoot tee shirts in Washington state might not be a true believer in need of conversion to scientism.
In every case, without exception, their conclusions rest on an appeal to authority. They reject racism and Bigfoot on the same grounds – the expert science with the big seal of approval tells us so. Rest assured that these same people were triple masking and taking weekly vaccines into 2023. The most entertaining thing, of course, is when they’re proven completely wrong even in debunking the low hanging fruit of urban legends. It was very satisfying to imagine their reaction to the US government’s admission that UFOs exist and it has known about them for decades.
For amusement, I once pretended to be a fervent Bigfoot believer while talking to a “skeptic.” Even in that low effort trolling, I beat him in debate because he had no answer for why Bigfoot would be different than the Popa Langur, a species of primate that went undiscovered until the last ten years.
Your description is very accurate. It matches my impressions of skeptics back in the 90s when I first encountered them. Their key traits are conformity to orthodox beliefs (thus not skeptical at all), the habit of taking on only weak enemies, and an inflated view of their own intelligence.
The religious instinct is strong, isn’t it? Even – or especially – among liberal “skeptics”, it would seem. I realize that some folks here may not much care for Christianity. Yet even you must admit that it would have given boomer hippies like Joe Nickell something higher to believe in than MahLoofuhKang.
That was an interesting read, thanks!
Regarding the other side of the UFO/paranormal VS debunker divide:
The pro UFO/Big Foot/whatnot people are often enough just as hostile to racial pattern recognition as Nickell. I noticed this in many small things:
a) Nick Redfern, author of books such as “The Slenderman Mysteries: An Internet Urban Legend Comes to Life”, once appeared with an Antifa/smash racism T-shirt (or something to that effect) in a video
b) there was a bit of a scandal several years ago when one of the leaders of an UFO organization ranted about Black people on Facebook (of all places)
c) you sometimes read complains about the Blonde Venusians/Pleiadeans from Contactee lore
d) the Miami Mall Alien incident (New Year’s 2023/2024), where “about 50 or more juveniles … were shooting fireworks at people” and the resulting chaos and mass police presence led to the creation of a strange urban legend that (ironically pitch-black) aliens had appeared in the mall
I can only scratch my head and wonder how one can be interested in extraordinary possibilities when it comes to aliens and everything spiritual, mysterious & paranormal, but not extend that openness to anthropology or history (or anything political).
I’ve read people who were bordering on schizophrenia, wondering whether reality is even real, yet absolutely refused to question egalitarianism or the WWII narrative (or consider that a certain group may have tremendous power). Imagine how it must be when your whole sense of reality is breaking down but all the Leftism remains firm, as if it was branded into your subconscious like the faces of your parents.
A beautifully written and brilliant takedown of smug jackasses. I really liked this.
It just goes to show: everyone is a theist. The only disagreement ever is about which god (Jesus, Allah, MLK, oneself,…) everyone else should bow down and worship.
Brilliant piece. One can only speculate how many times these pompous cretins appeared on the George Noory show. I’m sure that all of them were keenly aware that if you don’t have the right beliefs and opinions your work will never see the light of day. By the way mermaids didn’t build Stonehenge, black people did.
“By the way mermaids didn’t build Stonehenge, black people did.”
Finally, someone had the courage to say it! lol
No need to speculate. Michael Schermer is a regular guest of George Noory on Coast to Cosst AM. Search CtoC archives for the exact number.
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Brilliant article I used to be one of those skeptics. After I life the church I was raised in, I sorta threw out everything and started over. What did I *really* know? I adopted atheist materialism as my worldview, and eagerly read the books of Schermer, Randi, Hitchens, Harris et al. There is indeed much to be learned there, but eventually I made my way to Jared Taylor, and realized all the so-called skeptics had a serious blindspot with regards to race. And don’t even get me started on how they have parroted without question the official narrative around 9-11.
I also had two experiences of high strangeness in a very old movie theater. Do ghosts exist? Are haunted buildings really a thing? I know the answer now with absolute certainty, and I do not need Michael Schermer to validate my experiences.
By the way, Schermer had his very own paranormal experience (Google it) but decided to disregard the evidence observed with his own senses, so strong does his ideology have a hold over his mind.
If you’re a skeptic, all I can say is that real skepticism is good. Keep an open mind, examine the evidence, ask yourself “how do I really know this?”, and always trust your intuition. Outside of math and formal logic, we probably cannot “prove” much of anything.
Interesting comment. What were your experiences?
It all goes back to Hume on miracles, doesn’t it? He recognized that it’s always more likely that your sense are tricking you in some way than that you’ve experienced a genuine miracle. So the default position does indeed become a kind of gentle (not this dipshit’s aggressive) scepticism.
But men like Nickell were really just hardcore liberals who liked to use Humean methods to cast doubt on any old verities at odds with their preferred narratives. Aggressive atheist and Christophobe Revilo Oliver had their number many decades ago, noting how much more justifiable it was to believe in God than observably false racial equality in ability and temperament.
I was a teenager back in the 70s. By this point I had entered my atheist phase. One night my older sister invited me to go either her to an old movie theater where her friend worked. Sure, I wasn’t doing anything. I had never heard of the theater before.
We went to see Pretty Bany, a movie that you could not produce today. We got there an hour before the theater opened and took a tour. We ended up in a storage room. My sister, her friend, and myself. In a good mood. At some point I decided to go check out the storage room across the hall. I took three steps in and immediately froze. Extremely dark energy in that room. Something I had never experienced before. My brain could not comprehend what my feelers were picking up. All I knew was that I wanted to leave that room.
We went down to watch the movie. A week later my sister told me that her friend told her about the lire connected to the theater. Supposedly some time in the past an employee had killed himself in the theater. Stories passed down among the employees of very strange occurrences.
My sister told me later that she had expected me to roll my eyes. Instead I knew that the employee had killed himself in the storage room with the bad mojo.
A few months later my sister and I were in the balcony watching Harold and Maude. We were the only ones in the balcony. She nudged me. “Look,” she said.
I turned to look where she was looking. It looked like s white shadow, a silhouette of a head and shoulders slowly moving across the back wall. It moved in front of the projectionudt booth without casting a shadow.
We quickly left.
Fast forward four decades. I was walking my fog past the theater. We stopped and walked in. I struck up a conversation with the ticket taker. “So,” I asked. “Is the theater still still haunted?”
She looked at me.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“It was haunted when I worked here back in the 70s,” I said.
For example, the Skeptical Inquirer crew of whom Joe Nickell was an absolute model exemplar would doubtless scoff at a Christian Creationist who, when presented with evidence for the Darwinian view of evolution, just says something like “Well, but God made the laws of evolution in the first place, didn’t He?”
I appreciate this essay, and perhaps I am nitpicking, but no Christian Creationist (that I have ever met) would make this claim. Their creation story comes from a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis. God created the world in seven 24-hour days. Then they add up all the generations of [this person] begat [that person], and arrive at the conclusion that Earth is about 5000 years old.
That (the so-called “young earth” creationist) is what I usually think of first, too, but I have also met Roman Catholics, for example (a priest in particular comes to mind) who have reconciled creationism with evolution, who’d say something like that; in other words, that evolution is the creator’s mechanism for creation.
That’s not some ‘oddwad’ position; it’s the official view of the Catholic Church.
If aliens did come to earth, would they consider all races equal? Inquiring minds want to know.
The rationalist movement is almost entirely nerdy White leftists. Being agnostic, I used to post on some of the forums about 15 years ago, and they made me “skeptical” of progressivism more than anyone else.
Rationalists actually overlap somewhat with the racial Right, oddly enough. I found that if just remind them how White and male they are, they could sometimes be a little more willing to listen to other ideas.
A similar (and connected) phenomenon is how atheism morphed into Atheism+ – that’s what they called it – where all the typical leftist egalitarian sentiments are somehow entailed by atheism and required of its adherents.
Indeed, I remember that one:
How Social Justice Warriors wrecked the atheist community – rainbowalbrecht (wordpress.com)
I’m an atheist of over three decades standing and I find the lefty atheists (the overwhelming number of atheists are lefties) to be insufferable pricks. They eschew religion and yet hold on to ludicrous modern ideologies like egalitarianism, feminism, etc.; basically, whatever is trending.
The reference to Prometheus Books caught my attention because I was, during my more callow days, linked with this entity via the atheist/secular humanist movement. Prometheus Books and its affiliate/parent company (I can’t recall the name as it’s been over two decades) were founded by a Jewish philosophy professor, Dr. Paul Kurtz, who taught at SUNY Buffalo. He was christened, so to speak, as the doyen of secular humanism.
In short, I attended only one of his organization’s meetings in upstate NY and I was taken aback by the peanut gallery: Jews everywhere, a disgustingly obese and brazen homosexual who kept making Lee references about his younger Pakistani lover, Czechs who wouldn’t shut up about Hitler and Lidice, everyone a liberal, anti-White type. Interestingly, there were wholesome young White guys who knew something was off. They just railed about religious nonsense and wanted something better, but not the Jewish offal being peddled.
I put that chapter quickly away as I saw the bull in the China shop they refused to admit existed. I am proud to say that my inherent honesty won the day and I left that dead-end and destructive movement.
Yep. The vast majority of atheists I’ve met were liberal jackasses. I have no idea why, but as I’ve encountered this so often in my increasingly long life, and being something of a genetic determinist, I think there is likely some positive brain chemical correlation between atheism and leftism – especially true-believer leftism (as opposed to the don’t-give-a-shit leftists who use leftism as a mask to hide their underlying sociopathy). I have a neighbor exactly like this. Highly intelligent; totally contemptuous of (to his credit, all) religions; but otherwise credulously laps up every liberal conspiracy theory out there (but, again to be fair, he is not a puppet of the Jews, but a true “river to the sea” anti-Zionist).
It’s a genetically determined mindset.
As to Prometheus Books, to be fair, they publish a lot of great stuff. I must have at least 15-20 of their books, most not about atheism (though several take Darwinism in interesting directions).
The skepticlown, gone now to meet his maker.
This individual should have never been born, I hope his death was painful. I could not find any references to jews in this article. 🙃
C’mon, that’s uncalled for. Nickell was an obnoxious Liberal, not a Bolshevic mass murderer or big drug seller.
Regarding your second point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kurtz
nickell and his ilk would delight in the bolshevik treatment against people like us. Like all atheist/‘science says’ frauds, he wouldn’t dare say a word about islam.
Great article. These ‘skeptics’ are skeptical on certain topics and completely credulous on others. They seem to have accepted the liberal views on race without any critical thought at all.
Skeptic movement has always been a shameful joke. It starts out as this pious debunking of psychics or something, to get to the golden turd of protecting lib-corporate-left-centrism. It’s not an honest intellectual framing of anything. It’s a kind of feel, a social posture that uses the decoration of reason, but is actually anti-reason. Wasn’t Sargon something to do with this ? I guess there was some kind of split with a more right-leaning branch.
None of these people are intellectuals. They’re hardcore midwits drowning in their own midwitism.
whenever it is pointed out by race-realists that, right across Europe and America, black crime-rates are consistently higher than those of white people, and CRT advocates reply, “Well, but that’s just because of systemic racism, isn’t it?” this is ultimately not falsifiable either.
It’s funny how Occam’s Razor ceases to be a thing when the subject of race is involved. It’s not because blacks are more violent or less able to control themselves, oh no, it’s because of this vast societal conspiracy (that we can’t prove) to keep the sacred POC in their place.
And yes, you will be hard-pressed to find a more Stalinist, totalitarian grip on what is and is not allowed than in the atheist/skeptic community. Don’t believe me? Just google any debate with [insert your favorite smarmy atheist douchebag] and see how quickly they go from espousing the value of logic, evidence, data, rationality, and clear-thinking (when discussing the existence of a supreme being) to spouting off buzzwords, cliches, dogmatic phrases with witch-burning enthusiasm (when discussing “muh racism” or some other precious shitlib sacred cow).
Reminds me of the revived and amusing Flat Earth theory which has to have been created as an amusing epistemological game. Taken seriously by several people without a brain but also poo poo’ed by equally stupid but self unaware humourless twits.
Also for much of human history the human mind did conceive of the earth as a flat disk carried by four elephants rotating on the back of a spacefaring turtle. So why not step into that frame of mind anyway, at least for a laugh?
killjoys all, and of course they ignore the real goblins and orcs living down the street ruining things.
I was thinking of giving Terry Pratchett’s Discworld a chance, but not if he was against us. Even as an apolitical indifferentist I could tolerate but nothing of the current that’s ruined England.
Richard Dawkins is an example of the ‘skeptic type.’ Spends his time arguing with creationists (low hanging fruit), but is predictably leftist in many of his political views, suffers Trump Derangement Sydnrome, and generally overestimates his own intelligence.
The “skepticism” movement really showcases how desperate the Talmudic left are to be part of a snooty group of elites looking down their noses at the plebes. Their racial egalitarianism pretty much precludes 90% of instances where they can do that, so they have to grab their pleasures where they can, and that typically is going to involve going after low-hanging fruit such as big foot and UFO enthusiasts. Other favorite targets include people who live in trailer parks and go to rodeos. Wow. How daring and bold.
These are all the same exact people who comment religiously on George Takei’s Twitter feed, hoping and praying that he’ll reply back to them some day and give them validation.
Just for the record: it’s quite possible that both the sasquatch and alien visitations are real. Until there is authentic empirical proof, it is indeed best to adopt a sceptical attitude: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But the sheer volume of alleged sightings should cause one to be at least a bit, well, sceptical about excessive scepticism respecting these topics.
I’m disinclined to believe in (space) aliens, if only because of the vast gulfs in space, and the idea that we should pick up some kind of off-world communications long before an alien race would be capable of interstellar travel.
I’m totally agnostic on Bigfoot, however, but would not be surprised if some day there were empirical proof (though of what, exactly, I don’t think anyone is sure). There have been so many sightings, and with such specificity of detail that to me has often seemed to have been beyond what I would have taken to be the imaginative capacity of many of the persons I’ve seen interviewed, that I have tended to grant credence at least to the sincerity of many of the Bigfoot witnesses (as to whether they actually saw Bigfoot, or merely think they saw it, I can’t say).
I was peripherally involved in the skeptic space from 2007-2014 so can say confidently that the vast majority of members are motivated by the idea of climbing the social status ladder by “applying rational thought”. The rationality vanishes upon contact with race realism because they know that being honest about race will incur social opprobrium, and the method is subordinate to the goal.
The message is clear: we do not solve our problems by demonizing our enemies. We do not change minds through argument or violence. We have to treat each other as equals and find new superordinate goals that we can all work toward together.
Note that it is considered perfectly legitimate for “liberals” to demonize opponents as “racists,” “sexists,” “oppressors,” and the rest of the heresies. And not just demonize them, but remove them from public and private life via cancel culture as well as trumped up criminal charges.
As for violence, it has been the left and left aligned groups which have been behind the vast majority of urban mayhem: the Long Hot Summer Riots of the post civil rights years, the Weather Underground bombing campaigns, the more recent antifa attacks on campus and in the streets, the mostly peaceful (c) arson, looting and assaults of the summer of 2020.
Nickell claims that white people have opposed black civil rights, yet the history of the last eight decades is to the contrary. Virtually every elite American institution in the mid-20th century was behind the civil rights movement (Supreme Court, television, the armed forces, the universities, federal law enforcement, the Rockefellers, Coca Cola ™, etc.). And if your average Southern state citizen did not want to get in line with the civil rights establishment…wasn’t that their right as citizens to dissent?
More fundamentally, if the facts support race realism, would Nickell support those facts and debunk the egalitarian worldview?
A case in point is with the United the Right demonstrators back in 2017. They had a court approved First Amendment right to be at Charlottesville. It was the left, including its egalitarian arm, which employed violence in conjunction with local and state actors to shut down the rally. But the facts on the ground do not match Nickell’s ideology, so the facts are tossed down the memory hole.
Viewed with skeptical inquiry, Nickell comes across as a deluded ideologue, operating not from the scientific method but instead rearranging reality to suit his own prejudices.
I’ve read many books from Prometheus Books. In the past, I subscribed to Skeptical Inquirer, and attended two CSICOP conferences. CSICOP (pronounced ‘psi cop’) was founded by Paul Kurtz and later presided over by Joe Nickell, whom I met in 1994, and who was right about the two books by him I own: one on the shroud of Turin and another on the paranormal.
While CSICOPers (recently renamed CSI—Michael Schermer belongs to another group) are sceptical about the paranormal, some are incredibly gullible about other subjects.
I used to read the Skeptical Inquirer during its golden age, when the magazine was published in small format. It deteriorated when it grew in size. In the previous century the magazine hadn’t taken the shift toward wokishness. This happened after Kurtz’s death.
I cancelled my subscription when the content fell off. However, if anyone wants to become familiar with a pre-Nickell CSICOP, read the incredibly hilarious books of Martin Gardner!, with whom I exchanged a couple of letters before his death. (Gardner, Ray Hyman and James Alcock, all CSICOPers, helped me enormously in losing my faith in pseudoscientific parapsychology.)
For those who don’t know me, I blog here:
https://westsdarkesthour.com
Did Nickell have anything to say about holocaust denial laws which are in effect in over 20 countries worldwide ? In these nations you can say you don’t believe in God and nothing will happen. But if you dispute the holocaust you will go to jail. Therefore belief in God is not compulsory. Belief in holocaust propaganda is compulsory.
https://codoh.com/library/document/the-luftl-report/
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