User:Rursus/Bad antiastrology

Inferior quality attacks on astrology:

Astronomical Society of the Pacific
The Astronomical Society of the Pacific present ten arguments against astrology that almost uniformly should never be used in a serious debate, since they undermine the scientist position against the pseudoscience astrologers by being consistently fallacious.

The Astronomical Society of the Pacific should preferrably quit from the debate between astrologers versus science, since they obviously don't have enough intellectual stamina to research astrology properly in order to debunk its claims, but instead resort to an ugly cavalcade of misrepresentation of the astrologers' thinking. A skeptic is a true warrior, but these crippled peasants will make the war a chaotic mess. Astrologer Bob Marks easily spanks these squeaks with pretty simple counterarguments. Nine points of ten fails, so the Pacifics must stay at home and hide in the cellar.

The 1975 Bok-Jerome-Kurtz statement
In 1975 Bart Bok, Lawrence Jerome and Paul Kurtz wrote a statement condemning astrology as pseudoscience. This statement was signed by 192 scientists (including 19 sad cases of Nobel Prize winners), but Paul R. Thagard, University of Michigan-Dearborn, dismisses this statement as flawed in its entirety for the following reasons:

Therefore Paul R. Thagard claims that the statement fails to demonstrate the pseudoscience status of astrology, and instead upholds the unwillingness of astrologers to let their claims be put to scientific test, as the real basis for astrology being pseudoscientific. He explicitly enumerates the criteria for a pseudoscience as a theory or discipline which purports to be scientific, but:
 * 1) "has been less progressive than alternative theories over a long period of time, and faces many unsolved problems; but"
 * 2) "the community of practitioners makes little attempt to develop the theory towards solutions of the problems, shows no concern for attempts to evaluate the theory in relation to others, and is selective in considering confirmations and disconfirmations."

We can at the very best use those old 1975 unenlightened signatores as cannon fodder in our war, hoping that they will for a moment bewilder our enemies before the real attack.