Word: charlatanism
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Right, but you have to be careful what you download. Any fool--or charlatan--with a telephone, modem and computer can create a decent-looking website. Result: an epidemic of Internet snake oil, featuring discredited cancer "cures" like laetrile staging a comeback, $200 "second opinions" with more disclaimers than a sky-diving class, and incompetent "diagnoses" from self-styled "professors" and "academicians" at $50 or so a pop. What's next? An e-auction site for an appendectomy or laser eye surgery...
...they say, is simply that by cutting out carbs, these dieters are reducing their calorie intake. In response, Atkins throws out scientific terms like ketones (fat-burning by-products), while The Zone author Barry Sears talks about eicosanoids, which he claims are all-powerful hormones. Opponents use words like charlatan...
...wars. Admiration, even downright adulation, on one side; skepticism, even downright disdain, on the other. This is not hyperbole. A psychoanalyst who is currently trying to enshrine Freud in the pantheon of cultural heroes must contend with a relentless critic who devotes his days to exposing Freud as a charlatan. But on one thing the contending parties agree: for good or ill, Sigmund Freud, more than any other explorer of the psyche, has shaped the mind of the 20th century. The very fierceness and persistence of his detractors are a wry tribute to the staying power of Freud's ideas...
...quickly became clear that certain elements typical of Disney-style animated films would be out of place. A talking camel was cut. Comics Steve Martin and Martin Short, cast as charlatan priests, were directed to turn in subdued performances. Lucrative tie-ins were another sensitive issue. Katzenberg says, semiseriously, "We came up with the Red Sea boogie board. We had the 40-years-in-the-desert water bottle. We had the parting-of-the-Red-Sea shower curtain." But ultimately, both DreamWorks and its partner Burger King concluded that they would be doing themselves "a terrible disservice" if they pushed...
...British historian Alan Bullock's early interpretation, for example, had Hitler as, among other things, a cunning, low-rent charlatan. The other great British Hitler explainer, H.R. Trevor-Roper, constructed a Fuhrer on the grand, demonic scale: a Great Bad Man theory of history. Between the poles of Bullock and Trevor-Roper, historians, psychologists and others have brought an anguished ingenuity to trying to account for the monster or, in the newest scholarly and academic literature, to dismiss the old "Hitler-centric" theories in favor of larger abstractions (the German character, Christian anti-Semitism...