I completely agree with this assessment. In a sense, *both* expositions are rhetorical, and I'm sure Disney, a highly respected astrophysicist who in fact deals with the statistics of galaxy counts all the time, somewhat regrets his phrasing, and I'm not certain he said what he meant in the heat of writing a (much needed) polemic.

An even larger whopper in my opinion is the sophistic analogy Cirkovic draws between dark matter and neutrinos. If the understanding of neutrinos were still in its nascent stage after 70 years, that is, it's something but we don't know what and can't tell how to find out, then the idea would have been dropped like phlogiston and homunculi. But in fact there is a dynamics of neutrinos and they can be directly observed, so they have a real, verifiable existence. Certainly Pauli did not envision Cheshire cats with his idea of neutrinos, and fully expected, and helped supply, the theoretical background that allowed the direct observations to be carried out.

Disney to me had the same righteous anger at the perversion of science as did Halton Arp in "Seeing Red" (a fantastic book!) and so I can forgive him. Cirkovic seemed to me to be more of a smart-ass apologist for bad science.

By the way, Cirkovic's rhetorical method, to attack the messenger and adopt a high moral tone, is de rigeur behavior from all Bangers when confronted with unpleasant facts.