Ugh, it’s moronic. There’s about forty clear and important rebuttals all jostling for position in my head and I’m barely halfway down. I’m going to stop reading before I get cross enough I’m forced to post them and nobody needs to read them all again. I fully credit everyone worth heeding with the ability to figure out the holes in his logic for themselves, not least because, as he points out, schoolchildren can do it.

(Warning: reading may lead to repetitive banging of head on desk)

http://www.ageofautism.com/2009/06/poisoning-young-minds.html

“The longer an argumentative comments thread goes on, the closer the probability that someone invokes the Nazis in a comparison approaches unity” (or something like that).

Antivaccine nutter threads are a famous example of this. The anti-vax nutter stock response to any mention of herd immunity is usually to start bleating about Der Fuehrer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_law

Re. Spiked, they have a slightly odd take on this in that people like Frank Furedi feel that the Govt should impose socialist ideological solutions, hopefully electorally mandated, for roughly everything you can think of, and therefore don’t like the idea of the Govt appearing to “outsource” any part of the decision-making to non-elected and relatively apolitical experts (not that Govts actually do that often – as Spiked correctly says, they just pretend to). The Spiked piece by Brendan O’Neill skewers the Govt quite well, but I think he caricatures Nutt rather for comic effect. When Nutt says that alcohol is far more harmful than dope etc etc, he is only echoing what every single hospital doctor and GP I know routinely tells you as judged by the people rolling up in A&E, or staggering into the surgery.

As to the sacking, the way it was done was utterly ludicrous. If Johnson wants a tame adviser, he can hire one. If he wants an independent committee to tell him what the consensus is among the drug use/abuse harm reduction experts, he has the ACMD. Johnson is perfectly free to ignore their advice (which is what Spiked want him to do), but insisting the adviser must stand to attention and agree with what the Govt has already decided is ridiculous. It is really another version of the “dodgy dossier” problem (”Tony needs this answer – can you make it look like that?”)

Also lately I read Spiked’s take on the whole thing, which essentially said “have you listened to Nutt? the man’s mad” which may or may not be true but struck me as missing the point: if he actually deserved to be sacked it makes it all the worse that this is what precipitated it. His character is irrelevant; you don’t treat anyone this way.

Or is it just argumentum ad Nazium?

Anyway, it is pathetic, however it is badged. I would be tempted to lock A.N. Wilson and Melanie Phillips in a kind of Sartre Huis Clos type eternal metaphysical hell of moralistic argumentative stupidity, were it not for the fact they’d probably quite enjoy one another’s company.

PS I’ve done my bit on the Nuttsack affair here:

http://draust.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/kneed-in-the-nutts-or-shot-in-the-foot/

BTW Have you seen that a government advisor on nuclear submarines has been sacked, and another has resigned, because their views were not considered acceptable? As you say, the Adolf Hitler analogy seems to be back-to front!

btw, love this line…: “which I presume the Daily Mail’s A N Wilson hasn’t read, because it is a book.”

rofl…!!