The Adventures of Tobasco da Gama

I’m still as skeptical as ever, and I still think skepticism is just as important as it ever was, but I’m having a really hard time getting interested in fighting the good fight any more. The fact is, it’s boring as fuck. Pick your woo, whether it be climate denialism, anti-vax, ghost hunting, creationism, UFOs, birthers, Bigfoot, or whatever, and it’s the same fallacies and arguments over and over again. Some days, I wonder whether the believers aren’t using some madlibs variant where they drop in they just fill in the nouns as appropriate.

Worse still, it seems like such a one-way conversation. I don’t consider arguing with a dinner table to be a productive use of my time, but that’s how it is. No matter how many times you explain to a homeopath that, scientific implausibility notwithstanding, no well-designed clinical trial has demonstrated an effect for homeopathy beyond placebo, they’ll never actually address that point. They just jump straight to the special pleading. So I don’t see why I should bother even trying to have the conversation.

Especially when I could be ranting about shitty journalism instead.

How do you deal with it?