Well, I finally manged to get a coveted membership spot at Litttle Green Footballs last week. I wanted to be able to wade into some of the numerous Intelligent Design discussions that come up there. There are usually one or two a day, so it didn't take long for a story to appear that I thought I could speak to - in this case, the current kerfuffle over Ben's Stein's withdrawal from a commencement address, or, as stated in the purple prose Charles reserves for Jihadi or ID topics:
Creationist Ben Stein has withdrawn as the commencement speaker at the University of Vermont, after a huge outcry erupted over his support for the pseudo-science promoted by the Discovery Institute, and his ludicrous, highly dishonest anti-evolution film "Expelled."Well, I waded in to say basically that Ben Stein is a fine man, that the schadenfreude on display at LGF did them a disservice and that the tone and vituperation directed selectively at ID targets was arrogant and overblown. My comments were roundly and universally criticized and even caused Charles himself to jump in. He was just as caustic in discussion as in his posts. I pointed out the (to me) obvious irony of his misrepresentation of the Discovery Institute's "Wedge Document" and how he used it in a way that was similar to the way Anti-Semites used the bogus Protocols of the Elders of Zion - to fabricate "proof" of a group's evil plan of world domination. I thought that drawing a comparison to a group he held in such contempt would give him some insight into the path he had chosen. But anyone who defends ID or its proponents is immediately and irrevocably the enemy in LGF and and can be safely ignored. Reflectively calling me arrogant, a name caller and, even worse, a "Creationist!", he alternated insults with variants on "I've seen your kind before". As the negative feedback piled up on each of my posts (and the positive feedback multiplied on any post responding to me) Charles repeated a meme I had often heard on the site about being infiltrated by the enemy and promptly closed my account. After my absence the tone returned to its usual navel-gazing and self-congratulation.
LGF is not my site, nor is it really a public forum. Banning me certainly was Charles' right and probably the right thing to do given the kind of site he wants to maintain. I was wrong to try and bring a contrary opinion to such a place as Little Green Footballs - it will not happen again.
