Disappointing
Although I am at odds with Brian Dunning's libertarian political leanings I would have been happy to keep listening if his podcast contained evidence to support what he says. I have always said that though I have my disagreements with libertarians on issues of economics, they often tend to be intelligent people worth listening to. I want to make it absolutely clear that I do think he has a right to have a politically motivated skeptic podcast and he doesn't even need to label it as such. That's not the reason I dislike his podcast.
The reason I feel the need to review this podcast negatively is because it is supposed to be a SKEPTICAL podcast. To me, that means it should be logical and evidence-based. So I naturally hold all such podcasts up to a very high standard for accuracy and logic. In the five or six episodes I listened to, Dunning's podcast didn't meet either standard. Instead, I was disappointed to find that quite often, rather than presenting listeners with real evidence and perhaps some challenging arguments to consider and/or research on our own, Mr. Dunning simply presents his own unsupported opinions on whatever he happens to feel like ranting about. I can forgive episodes like the one about the ethics of peddling the paranormal. In that ep he makes it quite clear he is simply stating opinion and he makes a logical case for it. This kind of thing can make for a good discussion (hence 2 stars instead of of 1).
But particularly egregious to me were his "Sustainable Sustainability" and Zeitgeist podcasts. The sustainability podcast was logically fallacious (if you go to his website, you will see where others have pointed this out in the comments section for the episode), full of straw men and argued with a stacked deck-- he conveniently looks only at the information he agrees with, rather than considering all relevant scientific views from respectable sources. The Zeitgeist podcast surprised me. I was expecting to finally get a good explanation of the fallacies in the Zeitgeist movie... but instead he rather hypocritically says the filmmaker is making facts up out of thin air (an assertion I don't necessarily disagree with) and then makes counterclaims without citing his sources. He even talks about what theologists would say without quoting any of them. I mean, is it that hard to find a quote from a theologist mocking the content of the film? Can't you send out some e-mails and ask someone? In my view, this type of conversational attack on what should have been an easy target is at least intellectually lazy if not hypocritical and intellectually fraudulent.
One thing I'll say for SKEPTOID is that it reminded me to be skeptical-- of skeptical podcasts!
