Steve McIntyre wrote:
Update: Both Lewandowsky’s University of Western Australia blog shapingtomorrow and John Cook’s skepticalscience blog appear to have blocked me. Other readers report that they can access these sites, but here’s what I get.
This was followed by screen shots of “access denied”.
Curious, I went to visit SkS. After a long pause, my browser presented this access denied page:
Of course, given the chatter going around, I wanted to see if it was my IP. So, I entered the URI in “Hide My Ass!”. Here’s what I got.
I still don’t know if I’m being blocked or if this was a coincidence. But if you have trouble, give “Hide My Ass!” a try. It’s a good way to present a different IP. Works for KwikSurveys. Seems to work for SkS. Have fun!
Update I get identical results for Lewandowsky’s blog.
It’s a conspiracy against skeptical bloggers!
It was just a timeout, your access was not denied.
I think it’s just damn funny.
BTW: I’ve been reloading. The results are consistent: My own IP, server is taking too long. Hide My Ass: Page supplied.
They may be using ZBBlock or something similar to ban. ZBBlock presents a 50(?) once you are in the banlist. (Well… not here because I escalate to cloudflare and clear out the ban list. But most places.)
HideMyAss did not work for me at SkS. Still no access for me.
I feel left out–blocked, I tell ya. I think I’ll mope. (sniffle)
Franz
Ahh… grasshopper. You think the http headers are always truthful. You have much to learn.
ZBblock (which I use) will present a timeout when you are banned.
See
http://www.spambotsecurity.com/zbblock.php
Yes… the page says time out….
lucia, it’s definitely funny. And it seems incredible. I mean, secretly blocking someone’s access to your site is exactly the sort of thing one would expect by members of a conspiracy!
Bob–
Hide my ass has a number of IPs. If they are blocking IPs, they may get wind of this much blogged and tweeted issue and start blocking Hide My Ass IPs. In which case…. google “free anonymous proxy” and try one of the many hundreds of other proxies. Some are the same service… so you might want to grab a beer and try 3 or 4.
This, from the treehut logs, – to John Cook’s credit. Whoever sent this to him, on the other hand…
……………………………………………………………..
Someone emailed me the following suggestion:
You can stop SkS from appearing in the Internet Archive by visiting this page.
http://www.archive.org/about/exclude.php
Focus will remain on the strongest (latest) rebuttals.
Something to consider in future.
I’m actually thinking we should go in the other direction – more transparency, adding a feature that lets readers see earlier versions of our rebuttals.
Shub–
Oddly, I exclude the way back. Things claiming to be the way back visit so constantly I decided to treat it like all the other SEO bots.
That said, I don’t delete. But if someone wants to archive, they should use webcitation.org– and if my software blocks that, let me know so I can check the work around. (I think it should be permitted– but .. well..I block lots of stuff.)
little offput with the insinuations – SKS wouldn’t work for me either but i’m no “skeptic”. Furthermore that’s not been the MO for SKS when dealing with contrarian commentators. I’m a bit surprised that website loading difficulties suddenly get spun into some conspiracy by some..
I’ve had blocks from webcitation before.
I linked to Wayback’s pages for Skepticalscience for one of my posts on them. I can’t access them anymore. It keeps saying that a server is down. So it *seems* that Wayback’s archiving is not foolproof either.
Just to be clear, this sentence:
“I’m actually thinking we should go in the other direction – more transparency, adding a feature that lets readers see earlier versions of our rebuttals.”
is from John Cook to his readers when he posted the message he received by email, on his secret forum, which was this:
“You can stop SkS from appearing in the Internet Archive by visiting this page.
http://www.archive.org/about/exclude.php
Focus will remain on the strongest (latest) rebuttals.
Something to consider in future.”
Whoever sent the message wasn’t concerned about bot trouble Cook might have been having 😉
“Furthermore that’s not been the MO for SKS when dealing with
contrarian commentators.”
Yeah right, you got that right.
Anyway, how would you know? You don’t seem to be part of the cabal.
“Anyway, how would you know?…”
After you’ve been around the climate blogosphere long enough you learn enough about each of the main websites to know what they do and don’t do. John Cook is not dumb, he wouldn’t block IPs from anyone critical of SKS.
Further to the point – i couldn’t access the site as well – should I feel that I am being persecuted for some critical comment I made 6 months ago? LOL
If they’re blocking you, you must be close.
Robert–
The odd thing is we can all connect using Hide My Ass. You might not recall, but when discussing the Lewandowsky survey which used Kwiksurveys, I pointed out that site has no security. Anyone can connect using Hide My Ass, and so change the IP they use to answer.
I’m getting a kick out of the fact that I can use it to get to SkS but can’t get there otherwise. It might just be a coincidence, but I don’t see why I can’t report observational data just because that might upset you.
“John Cook is not dumb, he wouldn’t block IPs from anyone critical of SKS.”
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Funny. That is a different concept from your earlier “SS’s MO for dealing with contrarian blah blah”.
.
The sad part though is, even though Cook is likely intelligent enough not to try something like this, he is probably enough of a true believer to do it.
.
Keep your fingers crossed! 😉
Robert–
BTW: I don’t feel I’m being persecuted. How would blocking me be “persecution”? I practically never visit SkS and wouldn’t have noticed if Steve hadn’t mentioned it.
I just observe that if I try to connect using my IP, the site claims it’s overloaded. If I use Hide My Ass, it’s not. This situation is persistent.
Clearly, the site is not down. And I know (and use) ZBblock which will tell banned visitors that the site is down.
Lucia,
Reporting it is fine – it is interesting that it works when you change your IP. That being said some here and elsewhere (at CA) are immediately jumping to conclusions which imply something sinister on the part of SKS and i’m just tempering expectations because its not just “skeptics” who are having troubles…
Anybody tell you that Cook must be blocking Climateaudit because Steve McIntyre is skeptical?
Robert–
The
behavior doesresponses returned by the site do resemble what I would see if they were using ZBblock and hand coded my IP to ban it. That doesn’t mean they are using ZBblock or that they hard coded my IP in.They may have suddenly had a need to add some sort of monitoring and their IP went haywire.
Obviously, ZBblock doesn’t auto-ban you. If it did, you’d be banned here. You’re not.
But for the record, I once banned one of the SkS guys. This was his theory:
The SkS moderator’s theory that “Lucia McIntyre et al.” conspire to identify and block the IPs of everyone who challenges and annoys us is false. (Anyone who’d been reading my blog early this year would no I accidentally blocked everyone. All of Norway at one point.)
Never saw that before – that’s quite a “theory”
I know Mosher well enough to know that’s not something he would do but anyways…
Robert–
A whole bunch of messages in SkS’s by-registration-only discussion forum became public. They aren’t online, but … I asked around and got a copy. Naturally, I read the stuff on Peter Gleick and the ones that mentioned me in the title of the discussion.
That conspiracy theory about us sharing IPs wasn’t the only one or even the best one. There were some about Gleick being set up. All kids of conspiracy theories involving how Mosher could figure out it was Gleick.
I got some wine out the other night and spent about 2 hours reading. It got pretty boring though.
That said, my favorite post wasn’t a conspiracy. It was just a repost of my own response to someone:
I got a kick out of finding that quoted in the private SkS forum.
I’ve also spent some time in the last few days looking at the SkS private forum. I hadn’t paid any attention to it when it came out. Nor had I ever paid any attention to SkS. (Other than commenting on one of their posts about the Trick to hide the decline, I don’t recall reading it.) Their attitudes towards me are even more venomous than the Climategaters. In one thread, an administrator stated:
He then bizarrely theorized that I was somehow “implicated” in the plagiarism by a Wegman (student):
It seems like SkS is projecting their own conspiracism on the rest of the world.
In another thread, an administrator wishes for me and Anthony to be led off in “handcuffs”:
I should do a post on their deranged imaginings.
You guys have seen just through a small window, that is all.
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This is Cook to his followers:
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“I’ve obtained Christy and Pielke’s testimonies for tomorrow’s hearing. Please don’t share these around – I can share them on this private forum but not publicly. Feedback is welcome – particularly questions to ask Christy or Pielke or anticipation of what they’ll say in their testimony that we can have answers to:
…
”
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I am not going to blame Cook for leaky Congressional staffers. Though I am not sure Christy and Pielke (Sr I presume) would feel the same.
Dear lord. From the little I’ve seen, it seems like the SkS forum had worse things than the ClimateGate e-mails.
Are you still unable to access shapingtomorrowsworld.org Lucia?
I was curious enough to try http requests for shapingtomorrowsworld.org at http://www.dotcom-monitor.com this morning and 3 of their 19 servers couldn’t fetch the page – the 3 servers being in Shanghai, Montreal & Texas. Up until a few minutes ago http requests from the same 3 servers were still failing as were requests for a site from the same hosting provider http://www.ilisys.com.au and a request for a site with the same (huge) network provider optus.net.au.
All are now working which suggests there was a problem, now fixed, reaching at least some Optus IPs from several places around the world.
It could have been a routing problem to or from Australia. Next time do a traceroute and see where it dies. Also check out other Australian sites, for example JoNova. If the traceroute dies near the last hop then, it maybe blocking. There are lots of open traceroute sites that can also pin point connection problem locations. Hide My Ass could have another route to the site.
It could also be DNS or a connection along the route. GoDaddy had a big outage just a few days ago bringing down many sites and DNS could be different for Hide My Ass.
Seems like the SKS private forum defies the 1st rule of the internet: What’s posted on the internet, can’t be removed. I’ve tried to find a working download link for it but haven’t been able to do it. Any tips on how to obtain it?
I’m back in this morning. SkS may just have been overloaded.
Bog Tisdale: Or they fixed a buggy implementation of something like ZBblock or “fail to ban” or something similar. 🙂
It will be fun hearing what they say– ‘cuz the symptoms were not consistent with ‘overloaded’. They were consistent with ban software that sent out the ‘overload’ header to banned IPs. ZBblock does that. The reason is to try to get ‘bots programmed to believe the 503 to wait before coming back. (I don’t think that works for many bots, but that’s the reason.) It can also sometimes make humans go away. (But not really, because they all just start to use HideMyAss!)
So yet more of SL’s fatuousness is shown for what it really is.
Brandon
Not really. If it had been that juicy, I would have read all the entries.
Since the SkS forums aren’t prefiltered, there is a whole bunch of boring stuff up there. Many of what is there is people discussing posts they plan to write, people’s discussions of proof reading. There’s a discussion of how to make EXCEL plots not look like EXCEL plots, rules for moderating. Stuff like that.
There are perfectly legitimate reasons why the quite large team involved in SkS might want to discuss internal stuff– and that was their forum. But it became public. We don’t know if this was the result of John Cook mixing up his settings resulting in someone finding it when the followed an incoming referrer or if it was because someone hacked in. But it became public.
There’s a section on Monckton. They discuss me. They discuss Steve. They discuss Anthony a lot. (Theres one thread where they are tracking the number of twitter followers for SkS vs WUWT.)
They periodically advance conspiracy theories about lots of collusion by “others” sometimes involving me.
It’s true that some of “us” have become friendly over time. But if “we” have a private forum or email list somewhere where we all conspire, I’m not in the loop!
“It seems like SkS is projecting their own conspiracism on the rest of the world.”
Heh. You’ve come up with your own share of conspiracy theories.
And of course your random right wing person believes that AGW is a hoax as do scores of prominent conservatives and libertarians. SkS may have their own conspiratorial bent, but there’s no need for projection.
Lucia your screen capture seems to show no HTTP response rather a 503 response.
No HTTP response is also what I what I was seeing for 3 of dotcom-monitor’s servers. As I was seeing it for other Optus IPs and as this went away about the same time as people are reporting they can again access SkS (I don’t know about you) – it may have been a networking problem which had nothing to do with SkS or their hosting provider – and neither SkS nor their hosting provider may be able to tell you anything – and the problem may not have even been in Australia. If so there might be a network engineer somewhere who could tell you what the problem was, or the problem could have resolved automatically.
If there one person who the SS group has been *unfair* to, it is Anthony. Granted warmies and skepties are at each others necks anyway, but Anthony Watts has made many friendly and peace gestures to the skepticalscience team, and each time, the group ridicule his efforts and laugh at him.
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For example, Watts sent a strongly worded email to Cook protesting him calling surface station volunteers ‘deniers’. Cook reads out the email in ‘public’ and everyone just lines up to laugh.
andrewt–
I suspect we’ll hear what the problem was today. It’s odd we could connect using HideMyAss, and one guy over at CA was connecting regularly using about 20 IPs. So whatever happened, it was odd.
lucia:
Most of the Climategate e-mails were boring. There were maybe a hundred really worth reading (unless you had some special interest). Of course, Climategate had some “bigger names” involved, and that helps make it more interesting, but otherwise…? I haven’t read the forum dump, but it seems more “juicy.” If nothing else, it seems to have interesting things stated much more openly.
No doubt. Private forums are common. What can be uncommon is the specific discussions they have.
Lewandowsky/SkS have just deleted all of Tom Fuller’s posts from the shapingtomorrow blog operated by Lewandowsky and Cook at the University of Western Australia.
SteveMc–
Amazing!
“Lewandowsky/SkS have just deleted all of Tom Fuller’s posts ….”
First-order moral and intellectual cowardice.
Found this in the treehut logs:
Well, it looks like the images wont show up.
It was this one:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/684/sksmafiosocopy.jpg
“McIntyre is losing it and with each day and passing is showing his true (and scary) colours, not to mention his incredible desperation.”
You did just compare deleting comments on your own blog to the mass murder of Jews (http://bit.ly/R6KX5v).
You’re trolling through stolen forum comments, looking for something embarrassing, although your own blog is full of comments shot through with factual errors, conspiracy theories, right-wing extremism, and insults and defamation.
I’d say “incredible desperation” is a pretty accurate descriptor.
Thanks Robert for your thoughtful input. Having given it due consideration, I have come to the conclusion that you need a change in medication.
Ever notice how “transparency” works for the lunatic warmists (as opposed to the “normal” ones)?
They screw up and leave something open. John Cook admits himself:
… most likely is human error on my part…
and that gets transmogrified into “stolen” and stupidity gets transmogrified into victimhood.
There’s just something bizarre and grotesque about a group of people who actively seek to dehumanize everybody who disagrees with their strident and irrational, unreasoned and unreasoning, poorly thought-out and ill-considered notions.
I don’t think meds fixes this.
Carrick, you should take a look at this page. If what I’m seeing from Dana is any indication of what goes on with the Skeptical Science crowd in general… it’s a bad sign.
“There’s just something bizarre and grotesque about a group of people who actively seek to dehumanize everybody who disagrees with their strident and irrational, unreasoned and unreasoning, poorly thought-out and ill-considered notions.”
Indeed:
McIntyre: Lewandowsky’s pogrom
Maybe medication would help with that projection problem you have there. 😉
Have a lovely Sunday, and try not to steal anything.
“it’s a bad sign.”
No, losing half the Arctic summer ice is “a bad sign.” The Yedoma permafrost spitting up as much CO2 as the entire country of Pakistan is “a bad sign.”
Stealing other people’s private messages and trolling through them for something you can be outraged about is more of a “pathetic attempt at a distraction.”
I’d ask how one person saying one other person is committing a pogrom is “a group of people who actively seek to dehumanize everybody who disagrees with their strident and irrational, unreasoned and unreasoning, poorly thought-out and ill-considered notions,” but I’m afraid Robert might actually answer. I think that’d be like asking willard to explain himself.
Brandon
That was a typical display from dana 1891 whom the late Robert E Phelan referred to as an ‘odious little twit’.
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After claiming boldly that there was a ‘disinformation’ ‘campaign’ underway, dana has now backed off, to say that it is actually a ‘misinformation’ campaign. The evidence for this? His own website (!)
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“So you’re now asking me to provide evidence that the misinformers know their misinformation is false. Since I do not have ESP, that is a rather tall order.”
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If you don’t know that a misinformer is aware that he is lying, then you have no proof, and therefore no basis to call him a disinformer in the first place, Mr Dana.
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Skeptical Science? More like Activist Trash.
Brandon, do you know what a pogrom is?
Do you understand what deleting a blog comment is?
Then you should be able to see why likening one to the other is exactly an attempt to dehumanize those who disagree. It is also strident, irrational, unreasoned and unreasoning.
Here are some links to help you with the difference:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom
“A pogrom (Russian: погроÌм) is a violent riot generally against Jews, condoned by the forces of law, in the 19th- and early 20th- century in the Russian Empire, characterized by killings and destruction of Jewish homes and properties, businesses, and religious centers. The term has been subsequently extended to refer to certain similar attacks against Jews in other times and places, and to certain attacks against other ethnic or religious groups. A similar term is “genocidal massacre.”
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_to_the_editor
Brandon —
It may not be a perfect parallel, but I am happy that Steve has changed the word. I’m not a “PC” fan, but the metaphor for physical violence is far too widespread for my taste. All this talk of “war”, “front lines” &c… As has been mentioned with regard to Lewandowsky, certain efforts have as their goal the dehumanizing of opponents. The war metaphor contributes to this effect. Hence I oppose all such words. By everyone.
This whole thing is turning more depressing by the hour.
Could we agree on some kind of moratorium on this? It seems to bring the absolute worst in all parties concerned.
This whole thing is turning more depressing by the hour.
Could we agree on some kind of moratorium on this? It seems to bring the absolute worst in all parties concerned.
So… Solid paper, solid title? Or is it that you lose standing for saying Lewandowsky kinda crapped the bed on this one, so lets just ignore it please, please pretty please?
Robert: “Maybe medication would help with that projection problem you have there. ”
Lewandowsky’s “denier”.
It’s all in the eyes of the beholder apparently.
TerryMN:
How about we say decent paper, if you stick to the relationship with free market and skepticism, indefensible title, indefensible response to criticism?
Carrick: I’m not sure that Carville or Rove could sleep at night calling it a decent paper 🙂
I’ll also like to note I was pretty careful in my phrasing when I said:
I didn’t say everybody who believed in AGW fell in that camp (otherwise I’d be there too), or even “warmers” (people who believe strongly in immediate climate remediation efforts). There is a loud focal minority of activists within the warmer movement, some scientists, others medical doctors, others paid activists, who aren’t interested in engagement with “the other side” (since they see the world in black and white there is just two “sides”), but who do seek to dehumanize and reduce to pond-scum anybody who disagrees with their in-its-core irrationalism.
That this group exists is painfully revealed by the accidental release of hundreds of messages between the private SkS forum that Robert wants us to look away from now and ignore because it’s “stolen”.
It’s “public”, it doesn’t matter now why it’s “public”. Nobody’s going to ignore it no matter how much that makes John Cook publicly foam at the mouth, even though he privately admits an error while publicly blaming the other side for his own f**k-up.
TerryMN, he’s unfortunately taken a paper whose core results are solid in spite of the “unorthodoxed” nature of the survey, and turned it into a story over outliers of uncertain data quality, for which there is no way to assign a probability to because you have no way of determining which are legitimate responses and which are spoofs.
(Hence my problem with trying to compute p-values. That makes certain assumptions about the statistical nature of the outliers that are almost certainly violated here.)
I think if you restricted yourself to acceptance of free market, then you’d have a dynamic that could really explain rejection of the primary methods proposed for climate remediation, and rejection of AGW becomes simply a proxy for that.
Lets face it how many people on either side really know the science well enough to lucidly argue pro or against on the basis of scientific merits alone? There is a substantial amount of “faith” that is required for people (as a general group, there are specific exceptions, the diety Ramanathan is one) to have a strong opinion either way, IMHO. And how does “faith” get established? Based on ideology of course.
HaroldW:
100% in agreement with you HaroldW.
HaroldW:
Quite frankly, I think Steve’s decision to use that word was kind of stupid. Not only was it (at least) mildly offensive to liken bad moderation practices to what is basically genocide, it was also a terrible metaphor. One of the major components of pogroms was that they were mob actions the government only tacitly sanctioned (and even then, only portions of the government did). Comparing that to actions taken by the “government” itself, against a single individual, seems stupid to me.
But regardless of how I feel about the word, Robert’s comment was idiotic. Steve accusing one person of anything, no matter what it may be, cannot possibly be evidence of “a group of people who actively seek to dehumanize everybody who disagrees with” anything.
I do agree about violent metaphors though. Even if they aren’t wrong, they are usually useless.
Carrick:
Carrick, I disagree. I don’t think any results of the paper are “solid.” As I’ve discussed elsewhere, at least 97 responses give nonsensical answers, ones it would be impossible for a person to hold. At least another 20 gave answers that indicate the respondent either didn’t read, or didn’t understand, what they were asked.
If over 10% of responses fail basic sanity checks, how can you possibly hope to draw conclusions based on your data? What is the basis for having any faith in your data set as a whole once you’ve discovered that? Once you’ve discovered that much data is suspect, why should you believe the rest of your data is fine?
This is especially true since the 97 nonsensical answers have a notably different response pattern than the full set. That means they don’t just add noise, but also add bias. How can you hope to quantify bias like that or its effects on your results? And if you cannot, how can you possibly hope to draw any conclusions?
LOL. Gee, an internet page doesn’t load first time around, MUST BE A CONSPIRACY!!
Chris–
It wasn’t just first time around. It was loading with some IPs and refusing others for hours.
I didn’t say it was a conspiracy. I pointed out that if you want to read the page you can use “Hide My Ass”. (Though, revealing the existence of that is considered by some teaching people to commit fraud! Heh!)
Brandon:
You look for responses that don’t seem to change regardless of your threshold criteria. If you have a result that is stable under retaining 100%, 95%, 90%…50% of the dataset, I’d consider that a robust result.
It’s not atypical to have outlier responses, what is atypical is the lack of controls for gamed responses. I’d actually use the responses to conspiracy questions for that control, and given the otherwise large N, I’d expect the remaining data to be usable.
I figure this will get a retest by somebody else. I’d suspect the free market part to remain a stable feature in the data.
Can you imagine if James Hansen used the word “pogrom” to describe comment purges at WUWT?
The hypocrisy here is amazing. I’ve only got a little popcorn left, but I will be popping it imminently.
Boris, James Hansen has used equally inflammatory language “death trains.” McIntyre reworded his post, and many people on that thread, including myself, commented that we thought the word change was a good idea.
Hansen stuck to his.
I’m glad you find people amazing here. I OTH don’t find anything particularly amazing about you, including your intellect.
Boris,
I don’t know about the hypocrisy, but it certainly was a very poor choice of words. I was surprised that he at first defended it. Being 100% is very difficult, don’t you agree?
And he’s evil because of it, right? But not St. Mac.
Also, lol at you for comparing a vague term like “death trains” to McIntyre’s specific term.
Oh, no Carrick doesn’t think I’m smart. Better put lots of butter on that popcorn to restore the self-esteem.
Boris:
No they’re both human.
Um why?
Let’s try “denier” instead then. Unlike McIntyre, who retracted his word choice, and was congratulated for it, those who use “denier” to dehumanize a group they disagree with not only refuse to change their usage, they seem to relish in the fact it is offensive to the other group.
I’m also pretty sure any warmist who retracted their language choice wouldn’t get congratulated for it. (See Tasmin and Judith’s blogs for how “going off message” gets treated.)
Popcorn is fattening. Bad habit to eat to restore one’s self-esteem. I’d say think a bit less reflexively, stop trying to write subpar taunts, maybe you’ll get somewhere down the road that way.
Given it’s Sunday morning, I’d say you don’t have anything other than hang-over to explain the “depth” of your reasoning here. It’s one I’d accept for the record.
Boris–
Death trains is a vague term? If anything, pogrom is more vague. The thesaurus lists these synomyms:
http://thesaurus.com/browse/pogrom
annihilation, assassination, bloodbath, bloodletting, bloodshed, butchery, carnage, decimation, extermination, genocide, internecion, murder, slaughter, slaying
It would have been better for SteveMc to pick one– and he has removed pogrom after realizing it’s not a wise choice.
While it’s origins are from Yiddish and mostly describes butchery of Jews, it’s used otherwise. For example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C5%82awa_pogrom
MÅ‚awa pogrom
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Jump to: navigation, search
The MÅ‚awa pogrom[1] was a series of violent incidents in June 1991 when a rioting mob attacked Roma residents of the Polish town of MÅ‚awa causing hundreds to flee in terror.
News media are also using it this way
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/italian-football-fans-threaten-pogrom-against-ethnic-roma-7715654.html
Police in the Adriatic port city of Pescara are fighting to prevent a potential pogrom after rising tensions between football fans and the local Roma community – the ethnic minority, rather than the football club of the same name.
I knew btw that it was being used for the roma and googled for that use.
So I went to google news. I find
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-09-01/edit-page/33522091_1_communal-violence-pogrom-gujarat-killings
Here we have pogrom sued for the massacre of muslims.
http://www.thetrumpet.com/article/9815.4.0.0/economy/pogroms-in-greece-racist-violence-sweeps-the-nation
Here pogrom is used for Greek attacks on immigrants.
Here we have an anti-sihk pogrom
http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-9-131113-Monsoon-justice-for-Modis-Gujarat
Pogram is not be the best noun to use to describe annihilation of comments. But all you need to do is read newspapers to discover the word “pogrom” has expanded to other socially unpopular ethnic groups.
j ferguson:
People make mistakes, errors in judgement, etc. Highly visible ones are the hardest ones to admit to. I’m not surprise it took him a little while to come around to it. I am glad he changed the word choice, even if you can argue that death train, denier, are equally poor word choices. What somebody else does that is in poor taste doesn’t justify your own word choices.
I also don’t think titles like “Anatomy of the Lewandowsky Scam” are very helpful either. If what the other person is doing is intellectually dishonest you’re better off using their own words to paint the broad-strokes for you, rather than descend to their level.
Lucia:
I think it’s the association of the word with violence that makes it a poor language choice. I’ve seen it used to describe non-violent acts but it’s clearly over the top in word choice, and there were plenty of people on McIntyre’s blogs who made their opinions known (some I suspect via email, so we won’t be able to get an accurate census of the number of actual criticisms of the word choice, no matter).
Anyway, excising comments from a critic you are unable to intelligibly respond to isn’t an example of a pogram. It’s just an example of extreme stupidity.
I of course find it amusing that Boris, with some searching, can find examples of people’s comments being deleted from skeptial/lukewarming blogs, and that he is able to make the moral calculation to equate what is an infrequent behavior with a prevalent one on SkS and its sister blogs.
“You were human once therefore our widespread dishonesty is to be ignored.”
The phrase “Death trains” means only one thing. It is only in Hansen’s mind that there is any other meaning. (Well OK then there is the FEMA conspiracy, but since lewandowski did not ask about it, it does not exist).
If that is ambiguous then it is no wonder we have a failure to communicate.
well.
type in Illuminati backwards into your browser and add .com
to the end.
Carrick
Agreed. Even as a metaphor, it’s overblown. It’s fair for people to point that out. It appears SteveMc agreed — though it took him a little while to edit the word.
FEMA conspiracy? That’s a good one.
(Note where the photos originate from.)
toto-
I would suggest for “us” to agree on a moratorium, the paper would need to be withdrawn. The authors might rewrite it to focus on those results that will stand up to some amount of fake data, outliers etc. That could be the freemarket notions. But inclusion of the more shall we say “colorful” results highlighted in the title along with failure to mention those methodological aspects that put anything other than clearest results based on many positive responses turns it into a piss-poor paper.
The difficulty, of course, is that if the paper is paired toward discussion only the relationship between free market economy with skepticism and government run economy with alarmism, it’s not all that interesting since that’s been previously identified. Moreover, it hardly tells you which group is biased as, to some extent, it is equally likely that people who large or small amount of government spending will be biased towards believing things that might provide good arguments for their preference. But this doesn’t tell you which group happens to be more right since, in the extreme limit, whichever groups is right about climate change would be right about by accident.
Carrick:
That might work, but if bad data is biased, not random, it very well may not. If you have no idea how much bad data there is, or how strong a bias exists in it, it’s going to be almost impossible to use subsetting to do meaningful tests.
That may be the case, but I don’t believe there’s any basis for saying his “core results” are solid. At least 10% of his data is obviously and unquestionably bad and biased. I don’t think it makes sense to say results are “solid” when obviously bad data is included without any attempt to account for its impact.
Brandon–It seems to me it would be much better for Lewandowsky to just start over. Next time ask around for 100 climate blogs — preferably with larger audience–and then have a disintereted 3rd party use a random number generator to down select 20. Contact all at the same time and ask all to post the link at the same time. (Blogs generally permit you to schedule a post. WordPress certainly does.)
Next time use a survey that is at least a bit more difficult to game and require people to register and confirm emails. Check for IP consistency on that. He should ask various people for advise. (If the academic literature doesn’t happen to mention ways of using different IP addresses, well… he should ask bloggers. It’s ridiculous not to do so when he uses bloggers to announce the survey! Bloggers often are aware of information that is common knowledge who read forums and blogs know– and it might benefit an academic who wants to do an online survey to be aware of common knowledge about anonymous proxies!)
Also, make the questions less leading– and many less obviously loaded or ambiguous.
Oh– and don’t make the survey accessible for months on end!
Announcing the survey an allowing a few weeks to get answers doesn’t take that much time. He ought to at least spend some time trying to to make sure that the survey itself, it’s questions and the method of dissemination don’t ensure the final results are questionable.
lucia, I mostly agree. I don’t think the data he collected really justifies any conclusions so collecting new data is the only option that makes sense to me. Of course, I don’t expect him to do it.
The only thing I disagree about is I don’t think there’s a need to randomly select blogs to host the survey. As long as you collect referral information to track where people are coming from, I think it’d be fine to have any number of blogs host it.
Brandon:
These things are always judgement calls.
I think the paper rewritten to remove obviously politicized nonsense and directed at what is the “most solid” could get peer reviewed and successfully published, even with these outstanding issues. (And deserves to be.)
It’s a not great paper, I would grade it as “good”. (One bump above publishable.)
Mosher – here is the deal with the illuminati like conspiracies (and I think you are aware of this view) :
If you know the Alphabet, then it is not a worry. Its the Alphabet we don’t know about that is of concern. 😉
Brandon sent me over to STW with his comment in #103553. The moderators response to comment #32 from Brad Keys was the best:
.
Moderator Response “Condenscending tone snipped”
.
Yet Dana gets to say stuff like “And reading Skeptical Science would obviously do you a lot of good too, in general. ” I love this.
.
Also, Brandon, congrads, you got Hank Bowers to agree with you. That is something.
Carrick
You mean like this…
There are indications that the 2007 assessment of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was conservative rather than alarmist”
Issac Held thinks the TCR for the multi-model mean is too high here…
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/blog/isaac-held/2012/04/30/27-estimating-tcr-from-recent-warming/
I doubt anyone would accuse Isaac Held of skepticism, he was elected to the National Academy of Science in 2003. I doubt if his views were ‘far from the consensus’ he would have been elected.
Or this
The core aspects of climate science on which there is a strong
consensus are that the climate is changing, that greenhouse gases are responsible, and that we are beginning to witness predicted changes in climate patterns
I would think there is significant disagreement on whether or not we are witnessing ‘predicted climate change patterns’…I.E…where are the hurricanes?
The third construct, the perception that previous environmental problems have been solved, turned out to predict rejection of climate science, but not of the other sciences.
It’s been a long time since I worried whether tossing a burning ember into a river or lake would result in a fire. I am old enough to remember burning rivers and air so dirty that if you wiped your nose your handkerchief would be black.
http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/documents/LskyetalPsychScienceinPressClimateConspiracy.pdf
So what is left of the paper once you remove a Psychologists opinion as to what the consensus is.
Is Lewandowsky more qualified to comment on what the consensus is by reason of his qualifications or whether the consensus is ‘too conservative’ then Richard Lindzen, Izaac Held, John Christy, Roy Spencer or Judith Curry?
HarryWR2:
The meat… the part about the relationship of free markets to positions held wrt to climate change.
To be clear, I’d never in my life publish a paper as bad as this, but given how many bad papers are out there, this meets the threshold, and if the author is willing to brand it with his real name and take the heat for it, I’d let it through.
First it’s clear that getting something peer reviewed is just the first step in getting it accepted. Secondly, if you publish something as weak as this, and it turns out to be wrong, you really get what you deserve in terms of outcomes.
As a reviewer, I’m there to help the process along, not impede the progress of science in recognizing who the sub-par players are. (It’s not the journal’s nor the reviewers job to protect the reputation of scientists when they themselves are behaving poorly.)
Kan:
And this is just a day after I had a comment snipped for being “argumentative.” I’ve seen moderator responses telling people they should be familiar with the site’s Comments Policy, but it’s starting to seem like the moderators aren’t familiar with it at all.
By the way, that’s not the only editing that happened. At least two comments vanished without any trace. Those two, plus the deleted text from the comment you mentioned, can be seen here. It’s interesting just what gets deleted.
I can’t say the name sounds familiar. Should I know it?
Brandon, I apologize about misleading in mentioning Hank Bowers. I saw his name and was thinking of Hank Roberts, a dyed in the wool RC denizen – that would have been amazing.
No prob Kan. That’s an easy mistake to make, and it would have been shocking.
But now I have news. I just had my first deleted comment! Apparently I’m such a rule-breaker I typed:
I posted another comment making the same point, but I don’t have high hopes for it’s lifespan.
(Repost of something I wrote at Jeff’s, but seems relevant here too)
Just curious – but does anyone know if any of the skeptical blogs that we are told all promote conspiracy theories and all think the moon landing was faked actually have private moderator fora?
I had assumed that Jeff’s, Lucia’s, both Peilke’s, Judith’s, Jo’s, Steve’s, Lubos’s, Roy’s, the Bish’s, etc. etc. etc. were run by individuals. I know WUWT has a team of mods, but don’t know if they have a private forum where they discuss policy.
It is looking of late as though the only real conspiracies for which there is hard evidence are at RC, SkS, Lew’s Lunacy, and the like.
steveta_uk–
I do not have a moderator forum of any sort. I don’t know for sure about the others, but if I had to guess: only WUWT could possibly have any group discussions of moderation.
Brandon– I think it’s probably against “shapings” policy for people who disagree with them to use any of the following tones:
* condescencing.
* ironic.
* flat/even
* jubulent/crowing.
These tones are entirely permissible in the blog posts themselves and by anyone who agrees with the blog post.
I suspect the only tones permitted of those who disagree are apologetic and groveling. Awestruck by the intelligence of the main poster might be permitted– but critics aren’t likely to use that.
lucia, that seems to be the case, at times. I’ve had a number of comments go unmolested despite disagreeing. I don’t know if perhaps there is some standard we’re missing, or if they just apply standards on a whim.
I asked on SkS why, when NOAA puffed how confident they were about the temperature record on PBS, they quietly set up an experiment investigating urban encroachment on their stations.
My posts were snipped to bits and I was shown the door!
SkS is really nothing more than a rubber wallpaperd room for paranoid loonies.