Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Slow slide into madness

Summary of PZ Myers post about Robin Williams: "a distraction from depressing news about brown people". He does give lip service to the family's grief and then waves it away as unimportant because some political issue does not get enough news coverage. Can you spell "insensitive", PZ? Or is "bad taste" easier to understand?

PZ had been sliding into... something for a long while. He started out with good articles on developmental biology and explaining why creationism is wrong. Nowadays he hardly mentions biology and prefers to just call creationists idiots. (And he is a professor who ought to understand the value of education versus dismissing people with a handwave. Even if they are saying stupid ignorant things - that's more reason to favor education, not contempt.)

But this hijacking of a death to promote a political issue... Even with Myers' blog nowadays consisting mostly of "idiot!", "atheist X says bad things", "minorities are discriminated" and "Israel is evil", this is a new low for him.

Sad to see a relevant, smart person's gradual degradation into rabid activism for a cause-of-the-day. I hope it's just his Internet persona, not his personality.