You’re just tourists in our jungle.

Posted by Pointman on April 3, 2014 · 9 Comments 

The leading skeptic blogs have once again done very well in this year’s Bloggies, so my heartfelt congratulations to the winning sites and all you pointers and setters out there for giving them your vote. If you don’t happen to know what the Bloggies are, they’re kinda the internet equivalent of the Oscars, but awarded to various categories of internet blogs. If you don’t know what a blog is, don’t worry about it, sit back, have some nice music, you’ll soon get up to speed.

In the run up to it, all the bloggers get into a frenzy of primping and preening their blogs, and even catch up with that huge moderation queue which they’ve allowed to slip totally out of control. It’s the last best hope of freedom for those poor half-crazed comments which’ve been chained up against the wall of the spam dungeon since well before Copenhagen. That reminds me, I should don the old hazmat suit and pop down there for a quick clear out. Meh, can’t be arsed wading through that amount of schlock.

What makes this year’s results particularly pleasing is that after WUWT last year running away with the best science blog for the third year in a row and therefore winning it outright, the organisers of the competition in my perhaps cynical opinion, abolished any categories they thought a global warming skeptic site could possibly fit into.

The same year, one of the more dreadful alarmist sites, SkS, which I think of fondly as standing for Skank Science, withdrew its science spot nomination which I’d campaigned so vigorously for, citing vague concerns about vote rigging. I hate to say it, but they’re finally starting to wise up but that was always intended to be a win win situation for the skeptics, whatever they did.

The problem with voting, like data, is you have to actually get control of it before you can homogenise, normalise and by diverse and magical means produce a 97% in your favour. They were going to lose badly, knew it and slunk away with their tail firmly tucked between their legs. In passing I’d have to concede that’s a tricky thing for them to do, especially when their dress preference apparently runs to wearing rather butt hugging Sturmbannführer jodhpurs.

Anyway, despite all the category gerrymandering, the skeptics yet again romped home in whatever categories they chose to contest. That leaves the embarrassed organisers of the competition the straight choice of every year chawing down on the same old shitburger of grudgingly awarding the prizes to the skeptic sites or abandoning running the competition all together.

Let’s face it, a supposedly internet wide competition to recognise the best of the best blogs and which doesn’t have a best science category, is bloody silly.

It’s the sort of ludicrous situation you get into when you’re trying to exert control over something which is basically beyond your command. The climate skeptics, like a lot of dissident groups who have been barred any representation in the mainstream media (MSM), long ago decamped to the internet. We got here first, we know so much better than the legacy MSM how it works and it’s our turf.

The desperate manoeuvres of the people behind the Bloggies to avoid acknowledging a popular but unfashionable dissenting opinion are just the politically correct establishment frantically zig zagging around but knowing that at the end of the day, we can mobilise the troops to concentrate on any particular candidate in any given category. You may own the MSM, but we ragged guerrilla fighters own the internet.

Every category the skeptics triumphed in could be dropped from next year’s competition and we’d simply pick other categories and own them too. Give up running the awards, and we’ll simply run the competition ourselves, and that’s not me volunteering by the way; running the Pratties once a year is about all I can handle.

It’s called internet democracy, it works, it’s honest and more importantly, it’s the shape of things to come.

Congratulations and well done to Rog at Tallblokes, Nigel et all at the GWPF, Steve at Climate Audit, Tony at WUWT (a double first), Jo at her place and Kate at Small Dead Animals.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Know your enemy: the establishment journalist.

Ladiees and Gennulmen, we have a winnah!

Click for a list of other articles.

 

Filed under Article · Tagged with Bloggies, Blogosphere