What I had for lunch today

There are three topics I want to blog about in the near future, but given baby duties, narcotic haze, and a few other factors I won’t get to right away. But I thought I’d tell you what they are in case you have any preliminary remarks that I might find useful. Or, perhaps you can talk me out of addressing these topics.

1) How I can simultaneously NOT be a Chris Mooney Fanboy and chastise many of the commenters on The Intersection (and here) for getting it wrong when they blame everything on him. This would include a subtext regarding commenting and comment policies on blogs.

2) Why William the Blogger of YNH should seriously consider starting a new blog (after a suitable rest period in a witness protection program). There may be a subext linking items 1 and 2.

3) Why Scienceblogs should make all the moves necessary to eventually start up a blog owned and operated by a major consumer-retail corporation such as PepsiCo. But then, at the last minute, not actually do that, but do something else.

That is all. Have a nice afternoon.

Comments

#1 Mike Haubrich
July 8, 2010

As for William the Liar, if he wants to blog he should blog about something totally unrelated to YNH. Perhaps he can blog about how cute babies are.
#2 sailor
July 8, 2010

I can see how this happened. They had corporate blogs before and the were fine (they were not advertorials)so this was just one more. Those who made the decision did not realize the difference. Now Science blogs may need the income from these guy and hosting their blog is fine, they just need to make sure it looks and is known to be in different category from all the other blogs. They should not be able to garner the independent respectability created by you guys. The blogs should look a bit different and have special heading.
#3 Jolo5309
July 8, 2010

1) You could by understanding they are not blaming him for sockpuppeting, they are blaming him for taking at face value a story that corroborated his bias that NA were trashing religion and then using that as a point in his favour.

That is why there is an uproar on Chris’ blog. His latest comment is no better, as neither of you are willing to acknowledge that his issue of accepting a lie without confirmation is different than William’s issue of lying and supporting it with sockpuppetry.

2) Who cares? I don’t have a dog in this fight as I never read YNH until the last two weeks. Who would believe anything he wrote, or anything his commenters said?

3) Does SB want corporate sponsorship and keep it’s integrity? If yes, then they need to lay out rules for corporate blogs and have real science people, not PR flaks, post there.
#4 daedalus2u
July 8, 2010

I suspect that the PR flaks at Pepsico are completely unaware that their PR flakiness would be so obviously different than what real scientists would write.

I really do think it would be a social good if there was a forum where corporate scientists could blog, get comments and respond to comments without multiple layers of marketing, legal and PR BS filtering.