Yeah… The problem is that I’ve run into too many self-professed “skeptics” who are actually “debunkers,” and let their ableism (or other prejudices) guide their conclusions about what is or is not likely to be true, then insist that their conclusions are unbiased because they have the right ideology. Critical thinking is not an excuse to be an elitist ableist jerk (or any other kind of -ist). It should be a method of self-defense, not a reason to act like a bully.

Basically… I have a problem when people’s “skepticism” becomes a condescending paternalism that runs over the actual lives and voices of disabled people (and when the people doing this condescending-skepticism stuff have a lot of power and privilege they’ve never even bothered to examine, or even realized the fact that the power relationships between them and the people they’re trying to debunk as hoaxes or gullible fools are massively unequal). I touched on it vaguely in this post that I made recently, which is not quite as serious as some of the FC debates, but still wholly dismisses an accomodation we’ve gotten help from, on inadequate grounds.

It seems like some people, instead of trying to stay thoughtful and skeptical, have this widget they call “skepticism” and apply it in kind of a sledgehammerish way to anything anyone else with this widget says isn’t scientific or worthy of consideration. Whenever anyone suggests it might be worthy of consideration after all, it gets compared to magic or Ouija boards or “crystal healing” or whatever, even though there’s a massive distance between “this doesn’t seem to work the way its promoters claimed it did” and “this isn’t even worth investigating scientifically.”

When it’s just a matter of online debates, it’s just annoying to deal with; when something like whether someone is considered to be a communicating person or not is at stake, there’s so much wrong with that attitude that I can’t even begin to describe it. And I say this as a person who loves science– I just don’t want to let that love and respect blind me to the fact that it really can be used to oppress people, if used in the wrong way. (The fact that my existence could and probably would be labeled a delusion, needing to be therapized or drugged away, if the wrong people found out about it, only increases my sense of that.)

http://www.srmhp.org/0401/media-watch.html

I have always found a connotation difference between “debunk” and “skeptic”. To me, a skeptic is someone who will not take things for granted to be true without some kind of evidence or proof, whereas a debunker has acquired a belief as to the validity of some idea and is selectively skeptical to things that contradict that belief.

If I understand correctly: I think what confuses some people is that the only kind of “touch-typing-without-looking-at-the-keyboard” that most people know is the standard 10 fingered system. I think most people who type with one or two fingers look at the keyboard more (I wouldn’t know; I usually use the more standard 10 finger system, though I’ve had to modify it in the past three weeks because of an injury to multiple fingers–still mostly without looking). So many people just assume that one or two finger typing NECESSARILY requires one to look at the keyboard to see where you are.