ScienceBlogs, and websites like it, are often not really about science but are mostly scientists blogging. "ScienceBlogs has become preoccupied with trivia, name-calling and saber rattling. Maybe that’s why the ScienceBlogs ship started to sink." For example, "over at Pharyngula — which often ranks in the Top 100 blogs on the Internet— PZ Myers revels in sub-“South Park” blasphemy, presenting (in one recent stunt) his sketch of the Prophet Muhammad as a cow-pig hybrid excited about “raping a 9-year-old girl.”"
Heffernan writes that these pseudo-science websites "chip off one-liners, promote their books and jeer at smokers, fat people and churchgoers. Can anyone who still enjoys this class-inflected bloodsport tell me why it has to happen under the banner of science?"
Some years ago I tip-toed into a discussion at a ScienceBlog-type website and got severely ad hominemed. I tried to make a logical point. It was easy to see, by my logical point, that I believe in God. I got hammered, name-called, jeered, mocked, judged. I was not reasoned with, which I could easily have understood and accepted. There's a lot of that out there.
Such websites hammer away at ideology, substitute stridency for contemplation, and pummel its enemies in absentia. "ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd. Though 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."
Such nonsensical non-science turns some off, especially those interested in the "science" part of a science blog.
Heffernan's analysis gets some disagreement here.
