That was hilarious reading, and I particularly liked how Lewandowsky professed that he abusive blogcomments when making professional presentations (to reinforce the strength of his position and show how deplorable those who disagree must be, I presume):

Wherever possible, I insert some of them into my talks to point out to the audience what sort of people are engaging in this assault on science and by what means they operate

It’s quite common to try to use the gutter scrapings from the opposite side to imply some moral highgrounds, even attempting to estrapolate this to one’s own position. But this is not only a sloppy thinking and a logical fallacy. It exposes how incapable some (quite a few) people are to applying their won ‘arguments’ symmetrically.

If one reads the comments at say Deltoid, RealClimate and Tamino, all who ‘moderate’ heavily to ‘improve discussion quality’, and read what is left, particularly the amount and ‘quality’ at the lower end, and remember that this actively has passed moderaters approval ..

.. if you do this and apply Lewandowsky’s own argument (above)to it, it would be devastating.

But I guess these people rarly reflect over what they are actually saying and arguing, what their arguments actualy say and imply (if taken seriously, and generally applicable). No wonder som many contrived and nonsensical claims come from that corner ..

It’s even worse than that. It doesn’t take much skill to write a bot that could post as many responses as desired from spoofed IP addresses and wipe out any human input whatsoever.

They’re taking the Mickey out of Sceptics?

If so, it has been a delight to read the well argued, the courteous and constructive comments of so many of the Sceptics who have contributed to the “discussion”.

“What is more, I consider the failure to post…indicative of an anti-science attitude.” To me, discarding a post from an unknown sender is indicative only of a well-placed concern for phishing and the like. And the Pielke correspondence showed a positive attitude towards the reliability of results obtained. Perhaps if the study design evinced a more thoughtful approach towards the reliability of results, Pielke would have posted the link.

And I disagree that Lucia’s post was an attempt “to teach people how to scam scientific surveys”. It showed one fairly simple way in which it would be possible to game the survey. There was discussion at the non-”skeptic” blogs about gaming. Whether particular method described by Lucia was used or not, I couldn’t say. But neither can the authors.

I have to say, your prior comments have been of a much higher quality.

It shows that when being blinded by ideology causes a failure to verify an unknown source you can leave yourself looking foolish. Sort of like Crikey, The Drum Unleashed and Lewandowsky.