Madeleine McCann

[666]

Apparently "Portugal has been praying" for her safe return. I'm wondering how long it will be before a self-proclaimed "psychic" offers to help. Any thoughts, folks?

[666]

Just noticed this thread...
http://www.ukskeptics.com/forum/showthread.php?t=896

Feel free to delete/lock this one. Ta.

[Araneus]

They had a "day of prayer" a while ago for the genocide in Darfur, and I remember thinking at the time what an utterly useless way to spend your day. If people care about Darfur, they should do something useful about it, not sit on their ass talking to an invisible man in the sky.

It's the same with all of these things, candlelight vigils etc. It just seems like a way for people to feel that they are making a difference without actually having to expend any real effort.

[Admin]

I've been following the thread on the GMTV forum. It's actually quite frightening to think that some of the respondents are eligible for jury duty!!

The abundance of emotional thinking and lack of critical thinking is quite shocking. It seems the victims are to blame for this crime happening to them.

Some have even called for the parents, who are doctors, to be struck off and even prosecuted.

There also seems to be a powerful 'anchoring' effect where people are only focusing on the issue of whether the parents should have left their children whilst going out for a meal. All other aspects of this crime are being overlooked.

The naïve thinking seems to go along the lines of: if the parents had stayed in the apartment then this crime would never have happened.

Unbelievable.

[BeverlyM]

A most interesting article appears as follows:

2 May 2007:

www.newmonster.co.uk

Police turn to pyschics to solve crimes. Excellent evidence and more
than enough to quash the idea that the police do not at times use this
resource to help their enquiries.

[vbloke]

A most interesting article appears as follows:

2 May 2007:

www.newmonster.co.uk

Police turn to pyschics to solve crimes. Excellent evidence and more
than enough to quash the idea that the police do not at times use this
resource to help their enquiries.

Beverly, how many times do we have to point you to the links that clearly state that the police DO NOT use psychics?

These statements are from the police themselves, gained under the FOI Act.

Let's try again:
http://www.skeptics.org.uk/article.p...d_psychics.php

That link you provided is dead. Did you mean http://www.newsmonster.co.uk/content/view/183/72/ ?

If so, you might want to read
http://www.tonyyouens.com/ruislip_murder.htm

Let’s look once again at Holohan’s information. Anthony Ruark was already identified as a major suspect at least two days before Holohan wrote down his nickname, “Pokie”. According to both McKinlay and Lundy it was common knowledge that he was a suspect and apart from his arrest he had been seen hanging around both Jacqui Poole’s flat and her place of work. Holohan only lived about three miles from the murder scene and and less than one and a half miles from The Windmill pub. It would be entirely possible to discover much of this information from local gossip. Due to a similarity in their age it is quite likely that they moved in similar social circles and it may be that Holohan knew something about either Ruark or Poole long before the murder had taken place. We cannot even be certain that a close friend or even Jacqui Poole herself had not consulted Holohan in her capacity as a psychic. In Lundy's final report he wrote that, "of all the people interviewed Ruark was still the most likely person to have committed the murder."

A search of the Daily Mail archives shows no such story as quoted by News Monster, although his name does come up against these stories in the Daily Mail:
The factory farm tigers being turned into wine
Suburban poltergeist: A 30-year silence is broken
The Angels of Death
Could spiritual healing actually work?
Miracles or madness?
Sushi - the raw truth

and these in New Scientist:
Carbon nanotubes show drug delivery promise
Pollen cast in starring role as micro-scaffolding
Teenagers face health timebomb
Forty-second ecstasy tablet test developed
Mineral sieve filters out carbon from flue gases
Microsoft monoculture allows virus spread
Singapore man caught SARS in lab
Epilepsy drug helps beat cocaine addiction
First power station to harness Moon opens
Smart glue could spell the end for solder
Geraniums the key to cheap nanoparticles
Cracks appear in China's giant dam
Flattest star puts astronomers in a spin
Micrococktails should be striped, not stirred
Spiders weave a web of light

Odd that none of them in a respected Science journal mentions anything to do with ghosts or psychic powers.

[Admin]

Police turn to pyschics to solve crimes. Excellent evidence and more
than enough to quash the idea that the police do not at times use this
resource to help their enquiries.

The url is here: http://www.newsmonster.co.uk/content/view/183/72/

How is that story (for that's all it is) 'excellent evidence'?

It's just a collection of claims that can't be examined and as such they do not constitute evidence at all.

This is what evidence is about: Do the police use psychics?

Notice how the query is included and each and every response is given with a time and date, the name of the force responding, and the name of the officer responding.

Here's the real key though: anyone else can either double-check that what we've printed is real or anyone else can just as easily ask the same police forces for information regarding their use of psychics with Freedom of Information requests.

This is the difference between simply making claims and actually providing evidence to back up a conclusion on matters.

[Admin]

Here's another corking article from the newsmonster: http://www.newsmonster.co.uk/content/view/133/72/

A list of subjective accounts printed by a believer. I wonder if Danny Penman has tape recordings of these readings. It would be interesting to do a discourse analysis and work out the information flow.

I also like the false dichotomy at the end. There is of course another possibility: that Danny has been fooled by his strong sense of confirmation bias and subjective validation because he doesn't have a clue about the psychology of psychic readings.

I liked this too:

Above all, the fact that we cannot understand how psychics such as Sally operate does not mean that they are not genuine.

Argument to Ignorance - my favourite fallacy!!

I remain as confused as ever about how Sally was able to provide so many accurate details about my own life. But I have come to the conclusion that only the foolish mock what they cannot comprehend.

I'd say it's foolish to mock others when you yourself admit to your own ignorance.

The illusion of psychic ability is not incomprehensible and some people who've looked into it properly (i.e. not simply looking to confirm their own beliefs) understand perfectly well how people are fooled by it all.

[BeverlyM]

I can see that you are really trying to present your own evidence.
That's fine. But it does seem to me that we have very different interests and perspective on this whole matter. I found the Newsmonster piece authentic; you did not (yes, it was from a
newspaper but it quoted a police officer legitimately and yet you
don't even accept that).

I'm not asking anyone to accept 'spiritual beliefs or philosophy' - only
to accept the possibility and concept that as humans we may have
more than three dimensions. Unfortunately, I cannot as yet send you evidence of this in a cardboard box.

As for Dr. Peter Fenwick - a brilliant pioneer in my view and a wonderful
man. Your colleague may have another view but I wonder if he has read all of Peter Fenwick's work and evidence. Probably not.

It is really not my wish to continue this discussion - I have no need to convince you or anyone of my personal beliefs. I am however engaged in the wider field of healing and medicine, where an openness to
complementary approaches is beginning to receive wider interest and
the basis for research. That matters to me in terms of helping people.
I have seen personally over more than 25 years how some people with a very poor prognosis indeed have been helped to recover their health.
This has included forms of healing which the general medical profession
are beginning to recognise as potentially valuable - but only in the hands of dedicated and trained professionals. The model of the person in complementary approaches is related to body, mind, spirit and feeling. I do agree with you on one point; this field is urgently in need of academic and clinical research, and that is my personal area of interest. With best wishes.

[vbloke]

I can see that you are really trying to present your own evidence.
That's fine. But it does seem to me that we have very different interests and perspective on this whole matter. I found the Newsmonster piece authentic; you did not (yes, it was from a
newspaper but it quoted a police officer legitimately and yet you
don't even accept that).

So you would choose to believe a tabloid news story from a non-major news outlet over the word of the Police themselves, that's fine. At least we know where you stand on "standards of evidence".

Individual Police Officers may indeed go to psychics and consult with them, but as you can clearly see, it is not, and has never been the official policy of the Police to use psychics as they can slow down and even hamper Police investigations due to the conflicting and erroneous information these psychics provide.

I'm not asking anyone to accept 'spiritual beliefs or philosophy' - only
to accept the possibility and concept that as humans we may have
more than three dimensions. Unfortunately, I cannot as yet send you evidence of this in a cardboard box.

But you are - by posting the links you have, you are asking for our unquestioning and and uncritical acceptance of psychic and spiritual phenomena.

If you cannot provide evidence for your beliefs, then how can you possibly hope to argue your case?

As for Dr. Peter Fenwick - a brilliant pioneer in my view and a wonderful man. Your colleague may have another view but I wonder if he has read all of Peter Fenwick's work and evidence. Probably not.

Again, in your view. We have shown you and provided you with evidence that, whilst he may be "wonderful man", his workings and conclusions can be shown to be fatally flawed and the product of wishful thinking.

Have you read all of Dr Fenwick's work? All of it? Probably not.

It is really not my wish to continue this discussion - I have no need to convince you or anyone of my personal beliefs.

Then why come here, post what you have, ask for our belief in the things you believe and then provide anecdotal evidence in lieu of actual evidence in an attempt to convince us?

I am however engaged in the wider field of healing and medicine, where an openness to complementary approaches is beginning to receive wider interest and the basis for research. That matters to me in terms of helping people.

We are very open to complimentary health practices where they can be shown to work. Implying otherwise is just an attempt to make us sound bad.

Anecdotes do not evidence make. They are the beginning, not the end of what we demand as good standards of evidence.

I have seen personally over more than 25 years how some people with a very poor prognosis indeed have been helped to recover their health.
This has included forms of healing which the general medical profession
are beginning to recognise as potentially valuable - but only in the hands of dedicated and trained professionals. The model of the person in complementary approaches is related to body, mind, spirit and feeling. I do agree with you on one point; this field is urgently in need of academic and clinical research, and that is my personal area of interest. With best wishes.

I applaud your willingness to help people, although you have to understand that never has the notion of spirit ever been properly defined, and many forms of alternative or complimentary therapies use spirit in very different and contradictory ways.

If you want to show us that this spirit can indeed be manipulated to cure people, you first have to
a) prove this spirit exists
b) demonstrate a method it can be manipulated
c) provide evidence that this manipulation works
d) provide evidence and workings of how the manipulation works.

I have never received an answer, despite asking many times, that people who claim they can "feel" and "realign" or "manipulate" someone's spirit, that they know that they are not actually causing harm.

Every treatment has the possibility of side-effect - manipulation what is, in essence, someone's life force, could have potentially lethal effects.

[Admin]

But it does seem to me that we have very different interests and perspective on this whole matter.

I'm not asking anyone to accept 'spiritual beliefs or philosophy'

I have no need to convince you or anyone of my personal beliefs.

Isn't this the crux of the matter? Belief versus fact.

As skeptics we deal in facts. When it comes to the potential use of psychics in missing persons cases and unsolved murders we would not say it's worth using them because someone believes that they just might have the powers they claim; we would look at the facts behind their claims and as the facts do not match their claims then they are not worth using.

That's apart from the additional issue of their other motivations for getting involved like gaining publicity.

As I've pointed out elsewhere, to make good decisions that maximise the chance of successful outcomes on issues we need to deal with factual, evidence-based solutions. If we make important decisions based on faith, belief, wishful thinking, etc., just because we personally believe they might possibly be true (often despite the factual evidence) then you're going to make very poor decisions: decisions that actually reduce the chances of a successful outcome.

[tkingdoll]

Bloody hell the Pope is in on it now.

Any more woo to add to this case?

[Araneus]

I'm surprised more people aren't sick of the publicity. It's one child FFS, not an international crisis.

People continually yapping on about how they "hope and pray" that she will be found strikes me more as a form of emotional masturbation than anything else; a way of congratulating oneself for being such a sensitive, caring person, without actually doing a damn thing to improve the lives of anyone else.

[Allo Allo]

I'm surprised more people aren't sick of the publicity. It's one child FFS, not an international crisis.

They are probably VERY sick of it - I know I am - but it's not "nice" to admit it!

I think the McCanns have "celebrity" faces - and enough confidence to make big waves - my heart goes out to all the little "plain" people out there who are still wondering what happened to THEIR children who are missing and who never even got a press report!

M

[Araneus]

I think the McCanns have "celebrity" faces - and enough confidence to make big waves

Yeah exactly, the problem is that making enough big waves tends to piss people off. My opinion of the McCanns swung from "devastated parents" to "self-important media junkies" at around the time they got footage of pwettie liddle Maddie displayed at Wembley Stadium.

Oh, and there is of course the Catholic part. You know, how they are good, righteous, faithful people who bad things shouldn't happen to.