Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
If only blogging were like pro basketball…
Never mind the chaos going on behind the scenes! We need a pretty distraction, stat!
Alex Pareene jumps on the anti-HuffPo bandwagon:
Giving a space to quacks to sell vitamin supplements to morons is insulting enough, but actually allowing a shameless asshole like Klinghoffer to use the Holocaust to promote his right-wing crusade to teach children lies is beyond the pale. Platform or no, there’s no reason for anyone rational or even anyone with a sense of shame to continue giving Huffington free content.
Orac is going to be peeved that his jeremiads against quackery at the HuffPo didn’t prompt this response, but what can I say? Jenny McCarthy killing kids with bad advice is small potatoes against stupidity, Nazism, and the Discovery Institute.
Well, not really. The anti-science is just the last straw that broke the back of a camel groaning under a load of Newage garbage.
There once was a gigantic blow-up of accusations that fed into Chris Mooney’s self-righteous crusade against atheists as harming the cause of science education. Remember “Tom Johnson”, the mysterious scientist who told stories of outrageous bias against Christians in academia, driven by people like me and Richard Dawkins? Mooney was very grateful for his brave willingness to speak up.
Well, the fallout from the collapse of the ‘You’re Not Helping’ blog continues. “Tom Johnson” was the same sockpuppeteering undergraduate, “William”. The entire episode was a contrivance built up into a mountain of false accusations fed by one little liar making stuff up that Mooney wanted to hear.
Mooney’s frequent claim of a “New Atheist hate machine” suddenly sounds extraordinarily ironic. The fact that he claimed to have checked on the identity of his source is either an instance of incompetence or dishonesty.
I do believe that Mr Mooney owes us all an apology. I’d also suggest that he needs to do something about his site management; he’s been quick to whine at me that New Atheists need to clean up our act because we use rude words, but I find his tolerance and even encouragement of raging dishonesty to be far more offensive. He doesn’t need to patch up his credibility for me, though, because I’d long ago dismissed him as useless, and these recent revelations have just put him deeper in the toilet.
We’ve known for a long time that the Huffington Post is a stronghold of anti-scientific, anti-medicine woo. They’ve also recently added Discovery Institute propagandists to their roster. I’ve given up on them as a lost cause, but Eric Michael Johnson of the Primate Diaries has been trying to swim up the sewer, posting articles on HuffPo that are pro-science and reason. It’s been a noble but futile effort.
The latest revelation is that being a columnist on HuffPo does not mean you have any independence to write as you please: they have editors who censor content. Write something critical of HuffPo’s lunatic woo side, and swish, that gets conveniently sliced out of your article.
Write ’em off. HuffPo is not on our side.
My post about women’s issues in skepticism/atheism got a lot of comments, and now those comments have been analyzed…so if you didn’t want to read them all, now you can get the numerical breakdown.
One thing surprised me: only a third of the comments were people arguing with each other! When did we become so nice? Also, only a quarter of the arguing comments were by men telling women what they should do, which is a huge improvement over what I expected.
You’re reading this over breakfast, right? Just want to be sure I’ve caught you at an appropriate moment.
The story is simple: scientists have figured out how deep sea squid, which lack a modified arm for sex, copulate. It’s obvious now — the males have an enormous penis, as long as their whole body. It just hasn’t been easy to notice in the typically dead, flaccid, often somewhat decomposed state of many deep sea squid specimens.
The morbid part is that scientists caught a live specimen of Onykia ingens — well, dying specimen, actually — and they started cutting open the mantle, which prompted a surprising response from the animal. It got an erection and started ejaculating on the table. A two-foot long erection. I’m impressed at both its endowment and the remarkably inappropriate timing of its deployment.
Some of you really want to see this, and others are already planning to run away screaming. I’ll be nice and put the photo below the fold.
Speaking of the untrustworthiness of corporate drones, the decision by Blizzard to end online anonymity is already having consequences. Protests have gotten so hot that they are banning complainers and shutting down threads, and people are unsubscribing from the game in protest (impossible to tell if there are enough numbers there to make a dent in their obscene profits, though). There have already been instances of people revealing their own names, only to have a horde of prickly adolescent gamers descend in force on their facebook pages and email, and doing the unimaginative trick of sending pizzas to their home address.
Their player base is already enriched for the competitive male gamer element, i.e. arrogant jerks. I’ve heard from and read about many women who are very careful to hide their sex while online, because they know exactly what kind of harassment they will get. Look at the cases of Kathy Sierra and Jill Filipovic for perfect examples of what to expect. There are some prominent gay guilds on WoW, too — their members may not appreciate being suddenly outed. Sure, it may reduce some of the flood of trollishness online at their forums…by transferring it offline, to real world abuse of anyone who doesn’t fit the smugly heteronormative line of the testosterone-addled.
Interesting experiment is failing spectacularly already. One good thing about it is that having the 900 pound gorilla of the gaming world set itself on fire and jump off a cliff might open up the market to a little more diversity.
It’s nice when we add another blog to the stable here at Scienceblogs — it means another human face added to the collection, another set of opinions to enjoy or destroy, yet more scientific minds committed to engaging in discussion with the culture. After all, that’s what we’re all about, putting a human personality to this weird enterprise of science. And as everyone on this blog is particularly aware, we encourage all kinds of diversions and digressions and transgressions, freely stomping on sacred cows and stuffed shirts because we can. Feels good, doesn’t it?
So what’s with the corporate drones moving in next door?
They aren’t going to be doing any scienceblogging — this is straight-up commercial propaganda. You won’t be seeing much criticism of Pepsico corporate policies, or the bad nutritional habits spread by cheap fast food, or even any behind-the-scenes stories about the lives of Pepsico employees that paints a picture of the place as anything less than Edenesque. Do you think any of the ‘bloggers’ will express any controversial opinions that might annoy any potential customers?
There won’t be a scrap of honest opinion expressed over there that isn’t filtered and vetted by cautious editors before making it online, and it will all toe the Pepsi line. It’s going to be boring. It’s going to blur the line between blog content and advertising. It’s going to be bloodless dull blogging that will diminish the Scienceblogs brand.
So don’t say hello to them at all — don’t even bother to read them. If you want to know more about food science, check out Tomorrow’s Table or Obesity Panacea (more of an exercise physiology blog than a nutrition blog, but they did recently post on sugar-sweetened beverages. Didn’t like ’em.)
Oh, and I don’t care what the Supreme Court said. Corporations aren’t people. I read blogs written by sentient beings, not committees of shills.
