Divisions among the "Disabled"; Footnote to Marta Russell

[Carrol Cox]

One more point about Showalter, and a most damning one in respect to her
book and her personal integrity *even* if it turned out that her
individual accounts of Gulf War Syndrome and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome were
accurate -- by placing the sufferers from and believers in those syndromes
(the believers re CFS, incidentally, now include a growing number of
rather prestigious members of the medical profession) in the same category
as believers in UFOs simply showed her as utterly lacking in any sense of
proportion, any minimal social awareness, any sense of responsibility.

If one wishes to get a full belly of this sort of intellectual
irresponsibility, read *Skeptical Inquirer*. I subbed to it the last few
years I was teaching to see if maybe it would provide information useful
in conversation with students who believed in various kinds of real
nonsense. And it does provide a good deal of such information, which is
why, I suppose, persons such as Stephen Jay Gould serve on its board of
"Fellows." But the magazine keeps going (in almost every issue) beyond its
announced mission, "Scientific Investigation of Claims for the Paranormal"
and printing articles by high-school teachers explaining how they teach
"reason" by debunking ecological arguments or articles by plain nuts using
"science" to prove a libertarian politics. One would also gather from it
that all feminists were freaks, etc.

Showalter pulls this same shit by mixing in her book "beliefs" which are
clearly nonsense with beliefs which, right or wrong, clearly belong within
the realm of reasonable differences of opinion.

Carrol