One common thing that AAs do who enter the effectiveness of AA debate, is cite ridiculous sources, or information they do not fully understand. This is the case today with a regular reader of the blog, McGowdog, who cut and pasted from a paper that was written by three AAs, including Glenn Chestnut, who once wrote this about AA:
“…unbelievers will quickly start running you around in logical circles which you will never get out of — so I don’t even try to defend it rationally and logically.”
He was not kidding, either. He and his two cohorts came up with this review of AA’s triennial survey’s. Logical, it was not. It was obviously not written by academics who understand how to interpret the data properly. When I first read this, its conclusions were so far off base, that I gave it to some cohorts of mine at Harvard who specialize in such things. I thought maybe I was missing something. They dismissed it as “junk science”, and we actually wrote about this here last April: How Alcoholics Anonymous Lies With Statistics. It summarizes the way the data in this review was manipulated.
Most of what McGowdog wrote below is plagiarized from this paper. This is another piece of fool’s gold for someone who desperately wants to believe the steps are effective. One rule to remember in reading this: academic language does not make a paper academic. Read more »
Filed under: Effectiveness of AA | Tagged: 12 step, 12-steps, AA bullshit, alcoholics anonymous, cult, dogma, Effectiveness of AA, Slogans, soberrecovery | 4 Comments »


When Richard Heene, part time pseudo-scientist and full time wingnut, set his balloon adrift above the skies of Colorado and falsely claimed that his six-year old son was inside the thing, he did so with the expectation that he would not get caught. When he eventually did get caught, he made what appeared to be a heartfelt apology when, choking back tears, he said in court, “I want to apologize to all the rescue workers out there and the people who got involved in the community.” A month later he told Larry King, “It wasn’t a hoax.” He then went on to explain to Larry that his courtroom apology had been misinterpreted, and he wasn’t apologizing for trying to dupe the world, but was apologizing for causing people such an inconvenience. I’m not sure if this guy is a narcissist or a sociopath. I’m not a shrink, and there is a lot of wiggle room in diagnosing him. One thing I know for certain is that he is self serving, and his apology didn’t ring true to me, even before he pulled his 180 apology reversal on the Larry King show. Some things a person just knows, I knew that Balloon Man was only sorry that he got caught.
