Butterflies and Wheels

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Butterflies and Wheels is a website designed by Jeremy Stangroom and Ophelia Benson and currently run by Benson to fight "fashionable nonsense" [1]. It seeks to defend rational thinking and enlightenment values against religious fundamentalism, postmodernism and pseudoscience. The website features, among other pages, the "Fashionable Dictionary" - a guide to the language of pseudoscience and fashionable nonsense, "Woolly-Thinking Rhetoric" and "Euphemisms and Obfuscations". Written by Ophelia Benson, "Notes and Comment" is a daily commentary on the news and issues of the day while "Bad Moves" is philosopher Julian Baggini's column on bad argumentative moves. The website is widely cited around the blogsphere and was called by The Independent "one of the most useful philosophical resources on the web" [2]. Author Johann Hari called it "brilliant" in this interview with its creators Benson and Stangroom [3] while it was cited as a credible source in articles published by the American Council on Health [4] and the Chronicle of Higher Education [5]. British pharmaceutical giant Monsanto reprinted one of its essays on its own website [6] discussing the "Green Myth vs. the Green Revolution".