Good As You

ITt's not surprising they'd lie, but it's depressing how many people will believe their lies.

If one didn't drink his own Kool-aid one would realize that putting the true, scientific facts in the front of this piece, followed by the mish-mash of masturbatory navel-gazing that is NARTH and FOF's stock in trade only makes the NARTH part even more unbelievable. I am sure that the edgy TV-static graphics (so 1984!) and the half-off highlights that "Kim Trobee" got will make some people take this seriously - but not people that are likely to do much critical thinking about anything.

By the way, can you imagine the NARTH conference (Nov 20-22, West Palm Beach Marriot - shall we start a protest ala Peter?) Can you imagine the painfully uncomfortable potty breaks, lined up at the urinals? And that Matt Staver, BA, DILF, PNP, BFD...who else can fit in the convention brochure after all his "degrees"? But I digress.

In a lot of ways, I really applaud the newer, non-traditional venues available to researchers for publishing their work. The old, staid, big-brand journals make fortunes off the fact that they gain full and complete ownership of every paper that they chose to publish. Then, even though they are technically peer reviewed, the likelihood that unpaid, overworked and qualified peers will actually take the time to review the work is hit-or-miss at best. So, the quality, even of the most prestigious journals is often lacking.

And when you add that to the fact that the cost of journal subscriptions (some of the subscription packages run in the hundreds of thousands), then the only organizations that can even contribute to the pool of talent, are the major govt research groups and universities. Private firms, and individuals are effectively barred from peer review efforts, and every time that an individual (like me) wants to just read one of the journal articles, it costs $25 to $150 a DAY to get access to the document.

So, efforts like arXiv at Cornell, and others really are much more attractive, not only from the researcher's point of view (they get to retain ownership of their work), but also from individual's as well, because they are effectively free. And, as such, basically anyone (with some caveats) who wants could offer up a peer review. That opens up a lot of research to the public, and provides alternatives to researchers and reviewers without the gotcha's and costs of traditional journals.

But, it also, at least to some degree, does delegitimize the process (of course that presupposes that the flawed system was legitimate in the first place). But, the fact that basically anyone can now brand their own "peer" reviewed journal, especially in the case of NARTH where they also can strictly control who (if any) the peers are, really weakens and undermines the validity of the system.

But, then again, everyone that matters in the ivory towers of legitimate research, completely ignores the lying liars like narth. And, the only ones who do grant them what amounts to false credibility, are the other lying liars like FOF. narth probably gets all of it's funding from the lying liars like FOF. And for that stipend, FOF can pseudo-hide behind a false veil of deniability by attributing the lies to some plausible sounding facade. A facade that is intended to obfuscate the fact that the lying liars at narth are just giddy whores fabricating specious, meaningless nonsense at the whim their Johns (and Dobsons).