I have a couple of dozen books that I keep around just to re-read certain chapters, or just pages, before going to bed. Recently, Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas found its way to the top of the rotation.

This was one of those life changing books of my earlier years, after reading it I looked at the world in a very different way.

One of my favorite essays in the book (they were all originally published in Scientific American Magazine) is called "World Views in Collusion: The Skeptical Inquirer verses the National Enquirer". Its a great read on psuedoscience. You can read this chapter on Google Books. Or, buy it on Amazon

So last night I reading this essay and I get to the Post Scriptum and I find this bit pertinent to Storm:

"I have thought quite a bit about the issues you raise, and about the difference in tone, outlook, purpose, vision, etc., between Zetetic Scholar and the Skeptical Inquirer. I find myself more sympathetic than you are to the cause of out-and-out debunking. I an impatient with, and in fact rather hostile towards, the immense amount of nonsense that gets given a lot of undue credit because of human irrationality. It is like not dealing with someone very unpleasant in a group of people because you've been trained to be very tolerant and polite. But eventually there comes a point where somebody gets up and lets the unpleasant person 'have it' - verbally or physically or however - maybe just escorts them out - and everyone then is relieved to be rid of the nuisance, even though they themselves didn't have the courage to do it."

Page 112 of

Douglas R. Hofstadter, 1985
Metamagical Themas,
Section II: Sense and Society;
Chapter 5: World Views in Collusion, p91 to p114.