Oh, this is going to be an interesting conundrum. You see, good ol’ Scienceblogs magically reappeared on the internets a short while ago — you know, the original science blogging network that I was part of for so many years, that was then neglected, then transferred to the control of National Geographic, and then allowed to languish and eventually die. But now, suddenly, all of my old posts there are back again! Along with all those other interesting people who contributed so much over the years. Thanks! Nice to see it still exists, even as a dead, static archive. (But a lot of the comments on my site are still lost forever: NatGeo really botched an update shortly after they bought it out.)
But then to have it owned by the ACSH brings mixed feelings. You see, the ACSH (or American Council on Science and Health) is an astroturf organization, a pro-big-businees propaganda front, backed by the likes of the Koch brothers and other pro-industry capitalist shills, and I’ve said so. I’ve irritated Campbell (president of the ACSH more than a few times.
So that’s the conundrum. He’s now hosting my evil socialist anti-religious rants on his site (oh, and I don’t get a penny from that) — how long will that last? Even more interestingly, he’s now hosting anti-ACSH arguments, like this one from Mark Hoofnagle. Will the ACSH start deleting posts, or worse, editing them, now that they own the code?
It’s not as if I can do anything about it. It’s just remarkably sleazy. Unsurprisingly, since that’s been my opinion of Campbell for years.
They cannot alter your posts. Your rights relating to personality are not transferred to the network owner; they are unalienable yours.
(Well, technically, they can alter your posts, but they are not legally allowed to.)
I have no faith that Campbell will honor copyright at all.
He’s a creepy booster of alt-right lies. Really, don’t look at his twitter feed.
https://twitter.com/HankCampbell/status/1010210565464248326
Based upon his twitter feed, I think it is fair to say he is not only an alt-right booster but a dyed in the wool white nationalist. That is what the evidence shows.
Should be interesting. More likely they’ll just delete the entire archives of people like me and Gorski who have provided completely legitimate criticism of Hank for his use of ACSH to advance right wing political positions.
It is impossible to read posts like this from Hank and not conclude he’s got an ideologic axe to grind (but he hates politics in his science!) http://www.acsh.org/news/2017/01/30/evaluating-president-trumps-science-and-health-choices-10784
He would do better to acknowledge his bias and just admit it’s impossible to separate science and politics – especially while failing spectacularly to do so while claiming scientific objectivity.
This is completely off-topic but I am happy to announce that Amsterdam will have its first female mayor in history: Femke Halsema, a liberal. She used to lead the Green party in our national parliament. Alt-right is not pleased.
Time to archive. You can’t stop ACSH fiddling or disappearing the code. You can go public when they do.
rietplum@2 — even if this went to the Supreme Court, I’m sure they’d find a way to make it completely constitutional to fraudulently alter text if you are rich enough to own the platform. Remember, the court just found it was constitutional to deliberately gerrymander districts in favour of Republicans but not for Democrats.
It’s already archived right here. We moved to copy all the old stuff off when they announced it was shutting down.
One annoyance with Campbell resurrecting it, though, is that it killed all the redirects.
Yep. That’s how I first noticed that something was up. I noticed that my 301 redirects were no longer coming through from the old blog a couple of weeks ago. In any event, I had already transferred all my posts from the ScienceBlogs version to my my own blog at respectfulinsolence.com; so my posts are all fine. In a way, it’s not entirely bad that my archives might stay available. In the transfer of my old blog to new, I had problems getting 12 years worth of comments all over. The archives were so voluminous that the import not infrequently froze up, taking multiple attempts go get the old content over. Most disastrous, somehow I failed to get any comments over from prior to 2009, which was the first three years of the blog. I might try again (I saved the export files, obviously), but it’s the sort of thing that I have a hard time finding time to do, given other priorities.
Forgot to add: At least the old comments will still be available at the archive site until I can figure out a permanent solution.
I know. That’s what irritates me the most about him. He proclaims himself as nonpolitical about science, and then he endorses every Trump science nominee, including Scott Pruitt and Rick Perry.
Does this guy even have a background in science?
Maybe you should republish your old critical articles or write new ones. I spent a lot of time studying the problems of electronic records and Orwellian memory holes in library school, and this event would be an excellent case study. Just a suggestion.
If you look at the sleeve of Campbell’s “Science Left Behind” (but I would not buy that silly book coauthored by his shadow Alex Berezow) you’ll realise that his academic background is in psychology. He uses knowledge from that discipline to manipulate people into thinking that he actually cares about science to peddle his hidden agenda.