Sometimes there are things that happen when blogging. You get accolades from unexpected sources, little ego boosts that make it all worthwhile. Such a thing happened yesterday, on the basis of my little blurb mentioning Skeptico’s takedown of Hank Barnes’s misuse of logical fallacies. The reaction, as reflected in the comments in Hank’s blog, was quite hilarious. One reader whined:
Whenever somebody claims to be debunking something, it always means that somebody revealed an uncomfortable truth and now they’ve got to stuff it back in the bottle.
Well no, actually, the only thing “uncomfortable” about Hank’s abuse of logical fallacies was just how badly he screwed them up.
For more amusement, Hank himself called Skeptico a “humorless pedant.” But I bagged the real honor, as undeserving as I was of it, given that Skeptico did the real heavy lifting here.
(See below the fold for why.)
Buried in a standard rant about us nasty and mean skeptics, I was called “low rent riff-raff” and “an incredibly conformist Libertarian” by ace HIV “dissident” Celia Farber herself!
It was five minutes before I could wipe the silly smile off my face after reading that.
You know, it’s little things like that make my humble efforts to bring the scientific method and critical thinking to the masses through my blogging worthwhile.