Unscrupulous ScienceBlogs bloggers getting their comeuppance

As I pointed out, ScienceBlogs is home to some of the worst arbitrary censors on the Internet, e.g., Fatheaded Ed Brayton and Sleazy PZ Myers. Now the New York Times has a scathing article attacking ScienceBlogs -- the article says,

Clearly I’ve been out of some loop for too long, but does everyone take for granted now that science sites are where graduate students, researchers, doctors and the “skeptical community” go not to interpret data or review experiments but to chip off one-liners, promote their books and jeer at smokers, fat people and churchgoers? And can anyone who still enjoys this class-inflected bloodsport tell me why it has to happen under the banner of science?

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 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.

Fatheaded Ed's blog "Dispatches from the Culture Wars" is not even "science blogging" -- most of his posts are about political and social issues.

I am very proud that I am still first on Sleazy PZ's "Killfile Dungeon" list of banned commenters.

Other comments about the New York Times article are here and here.