Why proponents of intelligent design and climate change skeptics are not getting fair treatment.

More ranting on the BBC Sport "technically dead" issue. This post just collects some of the notes I made about the association between parapsychology pseudo-science and usage of the term "clinical death".

Proponents of intelligent design are not getting fair treatment.

Why?

Because any previous creationist attempts to introduce anti-scientific cods-wallop into the national lexicon quickly gets shot down. As soon as some religious nut pops up with a theory about bananas or peanut butter as being evidence for a designer God, the internet deployed the Hitch or Dawkins to rip them a new one in some glorious moments of ass kickin.


But the efforts of  and Near Death Experience proponents seem to get a free pass, in fact free repetition on major news channels.

So I try and prise open this phrase "technically dead" and what do I find?

I find a festering wikipedia article, and a mother-lode of pseudo-science babble.

This week I got a bee in my bonnet about the BBC using the phrase "technically dead" in a decidedly non-technical, and arguably fucking stupidly incorrect way:

"Bolton midfielder Muamba was technically "dead" for 78 minutes after collapsing in Wanderers' FA Cup tie at Tottenham last month."(BBC Sport http://is.gd/f7SQFB)

In order to determine whether I had completely misunderstood the whole premise of being dead, I was forced to actually do some research.

There are obviously a number of professional organisations that have domain specific usages of words derived from "dead", "death", "die" etc. Comedians have one and I'm sure there is a joke here about cloth and Analine for chemists but I'm not going to bother with it.

It is obviously possible to be declared dead in a legal sense, while still very much living in Vegas.

But I don't think that is the sort of "technically dead" that BBC Sport were getting at given that the man had just suffered a cardiac arrest in front of 60,000 people.

Indeed, the premature execution of Fabrice's will and distribution of estate was the least of his problems, during those 78 minutes.