One of the lesser diaries on Daily Kos is calling for a boycott of Scienceblogs and is asking readers to email the gang at Seedmedia and tell them to spank one of our colleagues here. All this because Dr Charles thinks John Edwards is a piss-poor presidential candidate. Now I happen to disagree on Edwards worth as a candidate, but I do agree with some of the criticisms: Edwards sure is awfully rich, and good lawyerly arguments are often very, very bad scientific arguments. But anyone who had actually read much of Charles’ site would know that he’s a liberal humanist who actually wants Barack Obama for president, a candidate I detest about as much as he does Edwards. Will I be censured by dKos for that? I guess I can kiss my chances of being invited to speak at YearlyKos ever again goodbye.
One of the paradoxes of this medium, too, is that now that dKos has linked to Dr Charles, and I and the Mungers are chiming in, he’s probably going to get a little surge of traffic today. It would be a good idea for him to open that article to commenting, because he’d probably get a lot of vociferous arguments that might win more repeat traffic. I have the impression, though, that Dr Charles really isn’t into long, loud wrangles, which is probably why he didn’t open comments on it in the first place.
By the way, pestering the nice people at Seed about us is ineffectual and counterproductive. None of us were selected for our political views, and any liberal bias here is entirely a side-effect of the representation of conservative thought in America by a rather nasty know-nothing party of anti-science ignoramuses, which does tend to alienate people who favor science. If we were a country of Rockefeller Republicans and Shirley MacLaine Democrats, we’d have more blogs railing at the Democratic party (and if in continued political evolution, the two parties transformed themselves in that direction, I’d be among those railers.)
Also, think about it: if the management were malleable by the flow of complaints from people who were offended by some of the things we bloggers write, who do you think would be #1 on the chopping block? Not Dr Charles, that’s for sure; I think it would be a blog with a name that starts with a “ph” and ends with an “ula”, and “phlyctenula” is an icky subject name, and the “phylum Sipuncula” is poorly represented here.