Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax
But you are listening and engaging, should we read anything into that? Would you categorise yourself as a pseudoskeptic?
OMG, got me there!
Of course, I meant something else, and pseudoskeptics and inhabitants of Planet Rossi (same coin, flip sides) focus on fluff, ignoring substance.
I do listen to Shanahan and have, for years, attempted to understand his arguments. Some of them are pretty wild! Kirk got stuck in anti-cold fusion rhetoric on the internet, back in the 1990s, and later was able even to get some funding from his employer to investigate the possibility of cold fusion causing accidents in that huge facility for enriching uranium (Forget about it! Not going to happen! We could have told him that!), and he later was published in several journal articles. He is thus way ahead of the general pseudoskeptical field, pushing into genuine skeptical territory. He is the last published scientific skeptic. But he has mostly lost it, he's been reduced to complaining that nobody is listening to him, journals are rejecting his work, and here we can see how he insists on his own errors.
I have invited Kirk to participate in improving the cold fusion resource on Wikiversity. Declined. I have criticized his work on newvortex and he was invited to respond (in fact, I warned him before I wrote all that, and he rejected it with an accusation that I was simply a stubborn believer.) Declined. Here, he says he "doesn't do newvortex." Does that mean he doesn't read it (in context, that seems to be the meaning) or he doesn't write (which is declining to have a direct conversation, his privilege, but ... nobody else is engaging).
His position is a dead end, as it stands.
Oh, by the way. Am I a pseudoskeptic? Sure. Sometimes. It is relatively easy to recognize if one looks. What was amazing to me was on moletrap, where a community almost entirely composed of pseudoskeptics -- but organized around an obvious scam, Steorn -- denied that pseudoskepticism exists. Pseudoskepticism always hides behind genuine skepticism, but the difference is obvious. Ah, the stories I could tell!