Avital Pilpel Replies to Lawson English

Avital Pilpel posted an incisive commentary about Judy Stein and Lawson English's word-twisting attempts on a.m.t. to disguise the deceit of the TM movement. It begins with a quote from Lawson, in which he insists that the TM article, "Letter from New Delhi," published in JAMA, was NOT a research review -- despite the fact the failed lawsuit filed by the TM movement and one of the authors characterizes it as such. Lawson is insisting that because the TM article isn't a "research" article, the authors' false declaration of no financial conflicts of interest is no big thing:

> I object strongly to the characterization of it as a research review
> article, because that obviously was NOT the intent of the authors. Had it
> been such, the authors would have done things entirely differently.

Concievebly, they might not have lied to to JAMA about their financial and
other interests in the material they wrote about in the article.

The main point is that the authors of the article deliberately lied to JAMA.
Whether the article is a research article or not, is not really the main
issue. The authors' dishonesty and lying is.

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What both you and Judy Stein don't realize is that you are shooting yourself
in the foot with your replies. You think that you're *so* clever, finding
"holes" in Skolnick's arguments "proving" he is a liar; you feign disbelief
that after all these "proofs" people still rather trust Skolnick's claims
over yours.

But these "holes" invariably deal with some meaningless semantic pedantry,
They are either claims Skolnick is a "liar" becasue he didn't use some
common English word they way YOU think it should, or demands that he "stop
avoiding questions" becasue he won't jump through your hoops of defining and
re-defining common English words.

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But the one thing you NEVER deny, becasue you can't, is the MAIN point.

You don't deny that Chopra & co. lied to JAMA, you just say it's no big deal
becasue it wasn't a research article.

You don't deny the Maharishi charges exhuberant prices for his (copyrighted)
brand of enlightment, you just say it's somehow *necessary* TM charge
gullible fools 3000 bucks for a "Vedic observatory" which is a 40-by-40
plastic contraption you put on your coffee table and LOOK at (hence the name
"observatory").

You don't deny TM is essentially a cult as defined by many cult experts and
that most of them agree that it is the cult. You just deny they know what
they are talking about and engage in verbal gymnastic about the definition
of the word "cult", somehow trying to define it in a way that will exclude
TM.

You don't deny TM engaged in censoring and in fudging research, you just
claim they doesn't do it any more.

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The end result of this is that people see your posts for what they are:
pedantic, solipsistic verbal gymnastic whose sole purpose is to bury the
undeniable facts about TM under a deluge of words who are full of sound and
fury, signifying nothing.

Original Post: Subject: Re: Andrew Skolnick's lies, part 4 of 4
Date: Sun, 4 Jul 1999 03:28:27 -0400
From: "Avital Pilpel"
Organization: Columbia University
Newsgroups: alt.meditation.transcendental, sci.skeptic