Both Hank Fox and Token Skeptic are leaving for Patheos. I should warn you what happens to those who leave us.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Both Hank Fox and Token Skeptic are leaving for Patheos. I should warn you what happens to those who leave us.
She has posted a summary of her experience commenting here — entirely from her perspective of course, but worth a look.
My position:
I think she was completely wrong on the Adria Richards issue. She was looking at it entirely from the position of a conference organizer, who prioritizes not rocking the boat and keeping everything running smoothly, and not at all from the perspective of a feminist who definitely would want to do some boat-rocking and disrupt a bad process.
However, man, some of you commenters were brutal. I’m all in favor of letting your views hang out there and letting you express yourselves freely, but this is a case where some of you were so angry that it interfered with your ability to communicate rationally. And then I’m torn, because that anger is actually valid, too.
Anyway, read it and think. I did, and I still think the disagreement was appropriate, but that she might be right that the derision was disproportionate…while at the same time I think outrageous derision is useful.
He’s willing to restart Evolving Thoughts if someone can monetize it for him. Come on, people, he’s a philosopher — you know he’s going to come cheap.
This may be redundant — you all cruise every blog on the site already, right?
Ed is asking for donations, and exploring ideas to get an ad-free site. Give him your input!
The Digital Cuttlefish thinks God is a misogynist. I think he’s right.
Greta has a guest post — it seems that being a member of atheist and gay groups is grounds for suspicion.
Stephanie can recognize a reasonable dialogue when she sees it.
Jen is unimpressed with the paleo diet fad.
Ian’s reputation as a stud is forever demolished.
Maryam discovers that the Muslim Brotherhood is opposed to a UN resolution against violence against women. She doesn’t seem surprised.
Taslima is optimistic about the future for Muslims — that they’ll grow out of Islam.
Brianne talks about rape.
Ashley talks about rapists.
Miri talks about rape and justice.
Steubenville seems to have stirred up a theme.
Avicenna deconstructs a bad Thunderf00t video. It seems he thinks a short clip of a girl video game character punching a guy in the crotch invalidates everything Anita Sarkeesian says.
This is what happens when you stay off the internet all day: you miss your co-blogger’s birthday celebration.
I didn’t even get a card together or anything. Guess I’ll have to dust off this old thing again. Just add 7 to all the ages mentioned.
Actually, from the looks of that cake plate, I think it’s just as well I missed the party. How did those sucker marks get all over the tablecloth?
This is really a thing of beauty: climate pseudoscientist Willis Eschenbach whines at the inadvertent comedy blog Watt’s Up With That that Bora Zivkovic has been moderating comments on his SciAm blog.
Eschenbach, who’s also a Mass Extinction denialist, objects to Bora’s having instituted some basic anti-troll measures at A Blog Around The Clock that relegate comments with certain field marks of the climate denialist loon to the spam bin. Says Bora, in a passage that apparently made Eschenbach’s cranial temperature spike like a Warmist hockey-stick graph:
If I write about a wonderful weekend mountain trek, and note I saw some flowers blooming earlier than they used to bloom years ago, then a comment denying climate change is trolling. I am a biologist, so I don’t write specifically about climate science as I do not feel I am expert enough for that. So, I am gradually teaching my spam filter to automatically send to spam any and every comment that contains the words “warmist”, “alarmist”, “Al Gore” or a link to Watts. A comment that contains any of those is, by definition, not posted in good faith. By definition, it does not provide additional information relevant to the post. By definition, it is off-topic. By definition, it contains erroneous information. By definition, it is ideologically motivated, thus not scientific. By definition, it is polarizing to the silent audience. It will go to spam as fast I can make it happen.
What Eschenbach doesn’t mention, and a basic point of Bora’s post on how trolls derail substantive conversation, is that climate denialism is just the most pernicious and prevalent of a number of kinds of pseudoscience that have afflicted some of the sites on SciAm of late:
I know that I used the example of Global Warming Denialism here the most – mainly because it is currently the most acute problem on our site – but the same goes for people harboring other anti-scientific ideas: creationists, anti-vaxxers, knee-jerk anti-GMO activists, and others.
This post is not about climate denial, it is about commenting and comment moderation. It is about the fact that eliminating trolls opens the commenting threads to more reasonable people who can actually provide constructive comments, thus starting the build-up of your own vigorous commenting community.
There are seven billion people on the planet, many of them potentially useful commenters on your site. Don’t scare them away by keeping a dozen trolls around – you can live without those, they are replaceable.
Eschenbach’s month-late response to Bora’s post is as pure and canonical a paean to the hallowed practice of JAQing off as I have seen. A sample:
I can only bow my head in awe. I mean, what better way is there to keep you from answering people from WUWT and other sites who might want answers to actual scientific questions, than not allowing them to speak at all?… See, Bora, the beauty of your plan is, you don’t even have to think about censorship once you do that. The computer does the hard work for you, rooting out and destroying evil thoughtcrimes coming from … from … well, from anyone associated with Watts Up With That, or with Steven McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit, or anyone that you might disagree with, or who is concerned about “alarmists”, you just put them on the list and Presto!
No more inconvenient questions!
I probably ought to feel sorry for Eschenbach: anyone who would proudly link to a piece like this alleged debunking of extinctions — as opposed to deleting it, salting the earth of the server on which it once resided, and denying under oath that you’d ever heard of the thing — is definitely more properly pitied than mocked. “No continental forest bird or mammal is recorded as having gone extinct from any cause,” Eschenbach says. That’s some Time-Cube-level obliviousness.
But I can’t help snickering, and feeling slyly jealous that Bora was able to elicit a response like that just by mentioning idly that he’s keeping his own comment threads on topic despite a massive campaign by a few fanciers of metallic haberdashery to disrupt them. Well done, my friend. Well done.
In my development class, students have been blogging away for the last few weeks, and I asked them to send me links to ones they wouldn’t mind seeing advertised. I’ve told them that an important part of effectively blogging is to link and comment, so they’re supposed to write something this week that adds to one of these posts and links to it on their own blog, and they’re also supposed to leave a comment on their fellow students’ work.
I warned them too that I’d highlight these publicly and urge my readers to look and say a few things: so go ahead and comment, criticize, praise, whatever — I told them that the good will come with the bad.
I suspect I’ll have to explain to them how to kill spam and remove irrelevant or outrageous comments in the next class…
Our gross observations of nematode worms.
The concepts of mosaicism vs. regulation.
The concept of morphogens, specifically decapentaplegic.
The lab is a lot of photomicrography, and sometimes making photomontages is useful.
Spectacular gynandromorphy.
So today I thought I’d read FtB like our critics do — twisting everything to fit their preconceptions that we’re all evil people. I might be mildly misrepresenting the content of their posts, but you won’t know unless you actually read them.
Stephen hates teachers so much, he wants to launch them all into space.
Hank notes that the deity is all-powerful.
Stephanie promotes the Slymepit, and explains how you can, too!
Dana is a bad blogger who can’t provide original content of her own so she just links to other people’s hard work.
Frederick finds that blacks have gotten richer since the Reagan years. Yay, racism is over!
Kate makes the case that therapists are all wrong.
Zinnia has gone all shallow and materialistic, crassly exhibiting her bling.
Aron thinks the Flintstones was a documentary, and shows proof that dinosaurs and humans lived together.
Nonstampcollector is getting chummy with Ray Comfort, and even photoshopped himself into a Way of the Master video.
Michael Nugent has compiled some examples of ‘nasty pushback’ against some atheist/skeptic feminists on the Internet. I found it painful to read, and could only wade in through the first half dozen — I think I was the target of some of them. I don’t envy Michael the effort of dredging them up.
We didn’t think to take any photos that I know of, so I’ll have to make do with an image to capture the gist of the meetup at the Jupiter in Berkeley on Wednesday.
Artist’s impression
Known hordelings in attendance were Ron Sullivan and her celebrated trophy husband Joe Eaton, robro, moarscienceplz and a lovely gentleman whose real name I caught but whose posting name remains a mystery to me, so I’ll let him decide whether to announce that he was there and bought me a beer. (Thank you.)
There was also someone who came by the table and asked whether any of us was PZ. I jovially identified myself as PZ-lite, and he left in a hurry before anyone could clarify. If that was you,
Also in attendance were a few other good friends from various sections of the last 35 years of my life, and it was an incongruous but simpatico mix of people. It was too bad that Andrew Alden couldn’t stay longer, but he had a geologists’ meeting to run off to, and several in attendance didn’t get a chance to meet him. But you can all still read his geology blog.
I did have a moment of something like terror when I mentioned the BBC show QI and no one there had heard of it. You can no longer say that. Here’s the first episode of Series 1. There are 10 years of QI so far. See you later.
