[**BartR beautifies the role of blog commenter.**] Nothing false can hide long when exposed to the withering light of truth. Blogs are where truths are exposed to the withering dim of fallacy. I do not agree with what you blog, but I will mildly defend if it takes no effort on my part your right to blog it, if it isn’t too obscenely harmful. And so, to my testimonial. (Note all testimonial is a form of propaganda.) I tried WUWT. I’m assured by its fans that since the long ago days I shook the dust of that virulent den of hypocrisy and ignorance that it’s become much better than it was. I still won’t give it my slender web traffic, and so far as I can tell it never improves, is unhealthy, and makes you unhappy. I’ve learned a lot from Climate Etc. I purposely try to limit myself to just one blog, as let’s face it reading blogs too much is painful, poisonous and a waste of time that could better be used otherwise. Climate Etc. has hosted topics that have led me to research to confirm or disconfirm (by a ratio of about 1:99) what has been posted here about climate science and policy, or physics, or mathematics. It’s led me to review and discover what has been posted here about meta-topics (or because of the form of what has been posted) much about rhetoric, fallacy, propaganda, salesmanship, marketing, cults and the psychology of conspiracy theorists, pronoia and paranoia. I’m thankful to our host for providing such fertile grounds to promote learning and literacy on these subjects. Climate Etc. led me back to my academic roots in Economics, and by debate over topics in climate’s economic impacts, to the policy options I’d recommend were it in my power. This blog led me also back to older roots, to Newton & Halley’s Principia, clarifying the questions of how to settle Science. Not all readers of this blog appear to move forward from their starting point at quite the same learning rate, and some appear to only rivet themselves more and more securely to their errors of logic and abuses of reason. Blogs can develop community, which is often a good thing; were it not for cliques and cults, peer pressure, mob mentality and groupthink, it would be invariably a great thing. Blogs can be the place where individual effort, where the voice of one single free soul, can best find a place, a fulcrum, and a lever from whence to move the world. Compared to the dross of the mass media’s own rhetoric, fallacy, propaganda, salesmanship, marketing, cults, conspiracy theorists, pronoia and paranoia, blogs come off no worse than the commercial or government sponsored (how difficult it is to tell the difference, with the veil drawn back on the incestuous relationships of campaign funders and candidates) television or press. And for academics, failing to be aware of the discourse in blogs is very nearly an attitude that courts failure. All academic papers are part of the aabaan of discovery, energized by ideas in the current state of knowledge. Still, they can’t be considered very significant, for all that, even in the narrow question of must an author search blogs for relevant content while researching their work.
