As someone who probably would identify as a skeptic, I agree with some of the premises here but certainly not his conclusion. He makes some good points about th

As someone who probably would identify as a skeptic, I agree with some of the premises here but certainly not his conclusion. He makes some good points about the skeptic community and the serious issues it has, as well as the issues with some of its figureheads. I've never been a big fan of Dawkins but his response to Rebecca Watson over the elevator story was downright hateful. I've always seen Dawkins as part of the militant atheist crowd more than a skeptic but there's a lot more crossover there than perhaps there should be. Phil Plait laid out a lot of this stuff in his "Don't Be A Dick" talk at TAM 8 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrFRbGjUtJk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrFRbGjUtJk), which I'd highly recommend. Fair enough, I can see all that as a reason to distance yourself from the skeptical community. There are a lot of communities I should, in theory, have something in common with (gamer culture, for instance, or his own example of /r/atheism) that I reject because I can't stand much of their behaviour. However, the author goes too far in outright rejecting skepticism and dismissing its value. I think it is important that there's a group of people protesting homeopathy's use in hospitals and disproving the claims of anti-vaccers and blocking creationist teaching laws. You think psychics provide a little bit of entertainment or false hope? Just a few weeks ago, Amanda Berry was found alive, years after Sylvia Browne had bluntly told her mother that she was dead. Berry's mother died in the interim, thinking her daughter had been murdered. And the rant on Reagan and bankers comes out of nowhere and commits much the same fallacy as Dawkins "Muslima" comment (minus the Islamaphobia). The idea that, just because there are bigger problems out there, no one should deal with the smaller ones. If someone chooses to devote their time to exposing alt. med. con artists, should we really be mad that they're not curing cancer or investigating financial fraud? It's absurd. There are several factual errors as well. Right after his complaint that skeptics simply take the word of big pharma, he mentions Ben Goldacre but he doesn't mention that Goldacre is a prominent opponent of big pharma research practices, as are many skeptics, and he's the author of an entire book about them, Bad Pharma. He greatly overstates the use of alternative medicine and seems to have the common misunderstanding that the placebo effect is something you only get from treatments that do nothing. A scam artist treating you nicely gives the same benefit as a doctor treating you nicely, but the doctor will also provide some actual working medicine while he's at it.