Update: Well, assuming Thunderboy is not the same person as "Skeptic Tank" I'll make him the same offer, he sends me a link to his publications list and CV with proof that it's really his, I'll post the links. I have a hard time believing that someone who spends even more time than "Skeptic Tank" gossiping with the Tots of Eschaton is a top flight sci-guy. In the absence of that, he's just another blog fly with a propensity to misrepresent what other people say.
Update 2: I had no idea what this "Stargate" you talk of was until I looked it up just now. Unlike the brilliant scientist, Thunderboy, I don't have any interest in the absolute crappiest level of sci-fi TV in between attention getting sessions on Eschaton.
My offer still stands, if he's so dismissive of the publications histories and CVs of Sheldrake and Radin, let's see his. All any of us knows about him is that he wants to get attention on a blog that passed its sell-by date about seven years ago. If not earlier.
You have to wonder what kind of trolls I'd have gotten if I'd gone with another of the blogs out there. I'll bet I'd have gotten a higher class of them if I'd hung out at Daily Kos in the early days.
Update 3: The History of Eschaton: From leftish blog to personality disorder.
I'm ready to conclude almost no one on the intertoobs is serious about anything except having opinions and being outraged theirs is not the only opinion in the world.
ReplyDeleteI include myself in that, since I'm on-line far too much. But even sites like "Crooked Timber" are full of self-important yahoos who are experts in those fields they are most ignorant of.
I mean, this is why I don't hang out in bars.....
I don't mind the internet as a way to share information; but I'm getting sick (again, again, again...I sound like a broken record) or the petty squabbling. All the internet has done is open the sandbox 24/7 to anybody who can type. Which, for better or worse, excludes the real children.....
I'm always reminded of how naive I was when I first came across blogs and how long it took me to catch on. Maybe it's because the first one I read regularly was Media Whores Online which seemed to have been written by someone from the old school of reporting where facts meant something. That she promoted Atrios as a kind of successor would seem to show I wasn't the only one who was being naive.
ReplyDeleteInvincible ignorance is especially common among those who believe they have not only a reason but a right to be regarded as having a solid, absolute guarantee of reliability. For the Eschatonian school of invincible idiots, it's called "science" or "reality" those play the same role as fidelity to the King James Version of The Bible does for some of their ideological opponents and fidelity to some imaginary "original reading" of the friggin' Constitution for other of their ideological opponents.
I'm so much less worried about the atheist fundamentalist pseudo-left as a danger to the general culture than I am the damage they can more readily inflict on the left. I have learned a number of things from them, one of them is that that accommodating that kind of thing was where the real left went wrong. And it had little to nothing to do with knowledge, it had a lot more to do with the stultifying effects of pop culture, which is commercial culture, which is inevitably all about money and profit in the end. Which is why such a surprising number of techs are a. anti-intellecuals, 2. a lot more conservative than they like to think. I used to think Atrios' heart was in the right place even if I often thought his libertarian tendencies were bad, now I see him as essentially a narcissist who is more worried about being inconvenienced by the Pope's visit to Philadelphia and parking problems in his city than he really is in much else. If he's discouraged over the course of his blog he's got no one to blame for that but himself. I think there was always a lot less there than the pixels that meet the eye led some of us to believe.