Brave Sir Meryl Chickens Out

Yes, brave Sir Meryl turned about,
And gallantly she chickened out.
Bravely taking to her feet,
She beat a very brave retreat.
Bravest of the braaaave, Sir Meryl!

[With apologies to Monty Python...]​

Meryl is up to her cowardly tricks once again, but even by her standards this stunt is a clanger!

Back in 2012, Meryl applied for Apprehended Violence Orders (AVOs)​ against 3 people who said mean things about her online.

Her applications were breathtaking in their implausibility. While Meryl lives in the infectious disease nutty fruitcake hippy capital of ​Australia, Bangalow, the 3 individuals supposedly causing Meryl to fear for her life were hundreds of kilometres away.

Dan Buzzard, for example, lives in Perth - hardly a location from which to threaten violence against a nutty conspiracy theorist near Australia's eastern most point.

And the subject of Meryl's most recent rantings, Peter Bowditch, lives over 750 kms away in the Blue Mountains, behind Sydney.

Meryl also pencilled on to the end of her AVO applications a request that her 3 supposed nemeses be prohibited from writing about her online, causing everyone but her most gullible supporters to wonder if perhaps that was the whole reason for the AVO applications.

The opportunity to use the courts to silence 3 of her critics was too tempting for Meryl to be concerned with small details like her total lack of supporting evidence.​ No​, that's hardly an obstacle for someone with Meryl's extreme narcissism, so she pressed on.

Meryl dragged the case out for as long as she could, with no less than 9 reschedules and failures to appear before the courts patience finally ran out and the case was heard. Oops, Meryl's application was thrown out on its absurd and unsubstantiated ear!

Peter was even awarded costs, a rare occurrence in AVO applications and a confirmation that the court viewed Meryl's application as a frivolity.

Fast-forward a few months, and Meryl is seeking someone to debate her face-to-face at an upcoming woo festival. So who does she call on, but that "scary" and "threatening" object of her legal timewasting Peter Bowditch!

In the process, she set up this ridiculous scenario for the benefit of her gullible cult members:​

​

​So Meryl, remind us again why you're so physically afraid of Peter Bowditch that you fear to be in the same room as him again?

Hmm, it actually looks like you're afraid of him for a totally different reason. Perhaps it's actually because he calls you out for your absurd claims and repeatedly highlights the idiocy of your comments about vaccines...

Gotcha, Meryl!​

Meryl is once again too dumb to lie and get away with it

No one ever said Meryl was the sharpest pencil in the drawer, but even by her low standards this is quite a clanger:

Oops! Oh, Meryl!

Meryl’s makeup hypocrisy

Not content with with $150,000+ that “disappears” from the AVN accounts each year, Meryl has long had an online business selling makeup to supplement her income as editor of a non-existent magazine.

Oh, but wait a minute gullible AVN cult members! Don’t look too closely…after all, Meryl often insists she shouldn’t be judged by the standards she applies to everyone else…

Errr, little bit of a conflict with the naturalistic fallacies you usually push, Meryl. Oh dear…

Meryl’s downfall

This is a little old, but worthy of a wider audience:

The release of the 2011 financial accounts for the AVN causes the treasurer extreme concern about Meryl’s leadership of the organisation…

This video is loaded with in-jokes that regular AVN-watchers will enjoy and the cast is peppered with the usual suspects from the AVN crowd of quacks, charlatans, nutjobs and fruitcakes.

Enjoy Meryl’s downfall!

Meryl gets it wrong, yet again

A typical day at the AVN Facebook page: starry-eyed acolyte drops by to ask a question of Meryl, self-proclaimed leading vaccination expert in Australia, with some 20 years of “experience”. So far so good, except…oops!

Oh dear, Meryl is schooled in vaccination by a nobody. Again!

Meryl, this is happening so often now it’s getting embarrassing. You’d better do something about it, ASAP! And I don’t mean your usual trick of deleting the whole comment thread, banning everyone involved from the AVN page and pretending it never happened. No, I was thinking of something more like…retiring to save yourself further embarrassment.

Bye Meryl!

Meryl demands respect

One of Meryl’s frequent complaints is that those nasty skeptics are so terribly disrespectful to her.

Now the first problem is that Meryl’s extremely thin-skinned and she considers even politely pointing out the factual errors in her claims to be disrespectful or worse. (The only polite behaviour is complete and unquestioning agreement with whatever The Dear Leader says). Identifying errors certainly warrants deletion of the post and banning the person from any forum that Meryl controls, despite her regular bleating about free speech and censorship, as hundreds of people have discovered.

But more than that, Meryl bemoans the fact that nasty skeptics call her names! Oh dear, how dreadful. Lying in order to persuade people not to vaccinate and causing the deaths of innocent children by doing so is a triviality, but insulting the cult leader herself – that’s serious!

Well, maybe Meryl has a point. Maybe name-calling does lower the tone of the debate, maybe we should be diligent about treating each other with politeness and respect at all times. I think that’s all that Meryl is asking for, is that right Meryl?

Oops! Not very respectful, Meryl.

What does Meryl do whenever she’s caught out saying something truly stupid or otherwise embarrassing? Well, it happens all the time so no need to wonder: she denies and tries to avoid responsibility for her actions. And true to form that’s what Meryl did here, too:

Ha ha, yes “words that I may or may not have said” is destined to go down as another classic Meryl quote and evasion tactic, alongside “Did I say that? I don’t believe I did“, her (failed) attempt on national television to evade responsibility for a particularly callous comment about the parents of a child who died from whooping cough.

Poor Meryl, this evasion attempt failed too because someone took the trouble to document all of her comments and spell them out in this blog post: On the convenience of forgetfulness…The Dorey Dilemma.

Wow Meryl, it turns out you really did say all those words. And no, it looks like you weren’t taken out of context at all.

Caught out telling pork pies yet again! Oh, Meryl…

More Mendacity from Meryl

Meryl does have trouble keeping her lies straight…oops, this is getting embarrassing!

Now she got herself into trouble a few years back when she called a regional Director of Public Health, based at her local hospital, and demanded the medical records of an infant who had recently died of whooping cough. Meryl didn’t believe the stated cause of death and has been referring to the “child who supposedly died of whooping cough” ever since. It’s important to Meryl that she downplay the severity of infectious diseases, otherwise her gullible followers are less likely to pay her to scare them about the evils of vaccination.

Meryl has also harassed the parents of that same infant repeatedly, claiming they’re part of an organised conspiracy to suppress the truth about vaccination, etc etc. Her callousness in harassing even grieving parents has no bounds and public disgust at her behaviour is one of the main reasons why Stop the AVN was formed.

Here is Meryl up to her old tricks again: telling her followers to contact the parents of children who recently died of SIDS and ask if they were vaccinated. Except now she knows that’s likely to get her into more trouble, so she denies doing so when called on it.

[Click to enlarge]

Oops, Meryl – you incriminated yourself there. Not so smart, eh?

For an encore, Meryl got on her high horse about people opposing her even though she isn’t vilifying or attacking anyone – forgetting that she’d just done exactly that to Paul Offit a short time earlier on her Facebook page:

[Click to enlarge]

Meryl, you know that every time you do this stuff you are going to be caught out, right? Too many people are watching for you to get away with it. Maybe it’s time to retire? If not from pushing antivax conspiracy theories, at least retire from being an asshole.

Meryl bites that hand that healed her, rabies results

One might have expected Meryl’s recent stay in hospital and surgery to have softened her rabid criticism of doctors and science-based medicine. If nothing else, most people would want to avoid the obvious hypocrisy of claiming medicine:

• is ineffective
• is all a giant hoax, scam and/or con
• does more harm than good
• is in fact a giant conspiracy by money-grubbing doctors doing the bidding of reptilian shapeshifting aliens
• is rendered completely unnecessary by the ready availability of magic water, vitamin C, illegal acidic ointment, rainbows and happy thoughts as alternative treatments for disease and “whatever ails ya” (as the old-time patent medicine salesmen used to say)

…even while she’s still recuperating from surgery in a hospital.

But we know from past experience that Meryl has no problem at all with being a hypocrite and having the facts against her doesn’t give her the slightest pause for thought. So no one should have been surprised when she grunted out her latest warm & steaming pile of conspiracy:

Really, Meryl? Your entire family, for generations, has been killed off by doctors? I don’t suppose you have the slightest shred of evidence to back up that claim? Didn’t think so.

Things do work differently in Merylworld…we already know that like most rabid antivaxers she confuses correlation with causation.

She’s also hopeless with maths, so much so that she’s had a logical fallacy named after her: the Doreyan fallacy assumes that any percentage lower than 100% is equal to 0%. So a vaccine that is measured at 85% effectiveness becomes, in Meryl’s view, “completely ineffective” and the same as not vaccinating at all.

(Wow, the casinos must love it when Meryl drops in play…perhaps that’s why the AVN rakes in $280,000 per year for magazines they promise but don’t publish and Meryl still begs for cash every week?)

So perhaps that explains why Meryl attributes every death, everywhere to evil doctors?

We’ve seen a hint of her paranoia when ranting about the person who, “…went into hospital healthy…” (she only had lung cancer after all, perfectly healthy!) and was dead only a few weeks later. Of course it wasn’t the lung cancer that killed her, it was the evil doctors who were only pretending to try and save her! Riiiiggghhht…

Meryl does mental gymnastics to be able to blame her favourite scapegoat every time someone dies, but at least she is so clumsy about it that everyone sees what she’s doing.

Meryl is such a dummy, she’s as thick as two planks and makes no attempt to hide it. She’s been described as “The Pauline Hanson of antivaccination” which is fairly apt, like Ms Hanson she is in the twilight of her career but still as funny as hell. Oh, Meryl!

Meryl errs on Ebola

If nothing else, Meryl approaches her antivaccination crusade with total commitment. She’s taken her irrational antivax beliefs all the way to their furthest possible conclusion and come out of the closet as an AIDS denialist specifically and more generally as germ theory denialist.

Even by Meryl’s whacky, crackpot standards this is an amusing blooper though:

Yes, you read that right: Meryl attributes the symptoms of Ebola not to infection with the Ebola virus, but rather to a side effect of vaccination.

Ha ha, go Meryl!

Meryl builds a lie before your eyes

Poor Meryl often claims persecution and even martyrdom in order to attract sympathy and, more importantly, cash donations from her followers. Meryl’s lies are now exposed no matter where she publishes them and her misinformation is corrected immediately by the many rational & educated observers now keeping an eye on her – but this doesn’t make for a dramatic story to bring in the big bucks. So Meryl needs to lie about the opposition to her lies in order to keep the big bucks rolling in. After all, $280,000 per year doesn’t just grow on trees you know!

Here’s a textbook example of Meryl in action:

1. Meryl tweets a link to a truly absurd blog post written by nationally recognised idiot Judy Wilyman: http://avn.org.au/nocompulsoryvaccination/?p=1307
2. Like many rational readers, Tracey finds the dense concentration of wacky conspiracy theories and long-debunked antivax canards to be overwhelming. She laughs out loud, via post on Twitter.
3. Meryl decides to make hay from the ridicule she suffers, and sets up a strawman by trying to link Tracey’s amusement at a retarded blog post to poor little sick kids – a classic persecution play: “Help help, I’m being repressed!”.
4. Then she swings for the fences by tying in her favourite enemies: Australian Skeptics and fans of the SAVN Facebook page. She generalises to claim frequent and widespread callous behaviour towards sick kids – without a single shred of evidence.