PZ Watch 08.02.10; The New York Times Hammers PZ and the Science-Bigots

It is interesting to see a large mainstream medium which is riddled by its own ethical ambivalence take on a medium that is riddled with ethical dyslexia. The Times is opening up? Virginia Heffernan explores the ScienceBlogs:

”Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd. Though [PZ] Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that’s not what’s bothersome about them. What’s bothersome is that the site is misleading. It’s not science by scientists, not even remotely; it’s science blogging by science bloggers. And science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word “science” and from occasional invocations of “peer-reviewed” thises and thats.


Under cover of intellectual rigor, the science bloggers — or many of the most visible ones, anyway — prosecute agendas so charged with bigotry that it doesn’t take a pun-happy French critic or a rapier-witted Cambridge atheist to call this whole ScienceBlogs enterprise what it is, or has become: class-war claptrap. “
[Emphasis added].

Actually it is not even science blogging. It is purely prosecuting agendas, as she says. There is barely a remaining pretense of intellectual rigor, at least at PZ’s place.

PZ responds by saying that Heffernan is just another atheist hater, and that she actually negates her credibility by referring to Anthony Watts’ blog. In terms of the usual PZ vitriol, his response to Heffernan is tepid, claiming that she is “completely wrong” because she mis-characterized the bloggers who left ScienceBlogs, at least according to PZ (a minor issue in her overall article). But he compensates with an attack on Rod Dreher, primarily because of who he associates with.

But other ScienceBloggers, such as David Dobbs, also take on Heffernan, claiming that she is “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”. This is possible. I don’t read any of the other ScienceBloggers. I do read science sites, rather than science blather sites. However, I suspect that Heffernan was largely influenced in her opinion of ScienceBlogging largely by PZ’s site, and her comments are accurate regarding that site.

As Vox Day asserts, the “moral authority drawn from the word ‘science’”, that Heffernan describes is precisely the pulpit from which PZ pontificates his Atheism and Materialism each and every day. Moreover, teaching science is not doing science, nor is it being a scientist. As Vox says, he is an Asian if studying Japanese renders him to actually be Japanese.

I will be more clear. None of the New Atheists, including Dawkins and PZ as well as Dennett, Hitchens et al., have done a stitch of empirical science in their careers. Evolution heroes write books about the Just So Stories that they make up which are designed to support evolution. They spend no time in experimental design; they spend their time preaching Atheism based on their own stories. From this empty vault they derive a sense of moral superiority and an elitist attitude of condescension and ridicule, which in turn attracts the intellectually and emotionally juvenile into the ranks of their "ilk". There appear to be plenty of those available to support a site such as PZ’s.