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August 31, 2012

Will Dora the Explorer Backpacks Kill Children?

Jon Entine, Forbes


AP Photo

Today’s toxic headline: a plastic gun is pointed at your children and it looks like SpongeBob, Hello Kitty and Dora the Explorer.

Campaigning NGOs and many journalists share a not-so-attractive sensibility: they are often uncomfortable with complexity. Dividing the world, and prickly science policy issues, into black and white makes for exciting narratives. Unfortunately it’s invariably wrong, authoritarian and, as Freud would say, crazy (“neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity”).

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TAGGED: pseudoscience, anti-science, phthalates, chemophobia

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