Respectful Insolence

Respectful Insolence is a blog by a breast oncology surgeon and researcher which focuses on medical issues in woo and pseudoscience as well as cutting edge research in the author's field. It is written using the pseudonymous nom de blog "Orac", named after a sentient machine from the British sci-fi series Blake's 7.[note 1] Orac was later "outed" as David Gorski.File:Wikipedia's W.svg[1] Gorski is also a managing editor of Science-Based Medicine. Respectful Insolence was originally started on Blogspot in 2004, it was a part of ScienceBlogs from 2006 until November 2017.[2]

David H. Gorski
This might be
Skepticism
But we're not sure
Who's asking?
v - t - e

Orac is best known for his posts examining vaccine hysteria and the "mercury militia" claims of a link between autism and vaccines. He has had several Internet debates with neurosurgeon Michael Egnor (now a Discovery Institute fellow) about Egnor's claims that modern neuroscience has provided evidence for a non-materialistic interpretation of mind. In 2012 and 2013 he also took on exposing pseudoscience in anti-GMO activism, drawing parallels between it and the anti-vaccine movement.[3][4]

The comments section in the blog is surprisingly good. Of course, there are trolls here and there, but they are frequently shot down by the commenters. Herr Doktor Bimler is the wittiest commentator, and Narad is a tremendous douche suffering from Dunning-Kruger.

As of November 2017, in response to the shutdown of ScienceBlogs, Orac will continue blogging in a new domain.[5]

Some subjects
  • Age of Autism
  • Anti-vaccination movement
  • GreenMedInfo[6]
  • NaturalNews. Mike Adams, has been breaking his back at character assassination and ruining Orac's reputation. He calls him one of the evilest persons in medicine and "malevolent", "psychopath", "[he] controls Wikipedia!" and more than 200 other snarl words in one page!(redirect)[note 2] Breaking our own record for their page! Since they are incapable of debunking his work, each paragraph resorts to shill gambits and snarl words, claiming that he has psychotic behavior/is mentally unstable, refering to his work as a "rant" or claiming that he has impersonated the families of vaccine injured people to convert people (without proof of course).
gollark: Great, now you have to restore your friend's brain from backup. Great job LyricLy.
gollark: The SPUDNETv4™ protocol is complicated.
gollark: I think I may end up having to implement some weird state machine.
gollark: Oh, that's interesting, slightly.
gollark: No.

Notes
  1. Ironically, "ORAC" was also Wilhelm Reich's abreviation for his orgone accumulator.
  2. Yes, we counted

References
  1. Crosby and AoA got a thing for Orac, Open Salon
  2. http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/02/13/respectful-insolence-rebooted/
  3. Bad science about GMOs: It reminds me of the antivaccine movement
  4. Oh, no! GMOs are going to kill your babies and permanently change your gene expression!
  5. Gorski, D. (October 18, 2017). The Future Home of Respectful Insolence. Respectful Insolence. Retrieved October 28, 2017.
  6. http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/tag/sayer-ji/
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