The NVB is always entertaining reading, and on occasion we have praised its commentary. I for one read it religiously, and it is clear that the NVB reads SDP, though for some reason Professor Newquist nearly always forgets to mention our blog or ourselves by name. I will comment on one post, with the title:
And them microbes just keep a-festering away
What got the good professor's dander up, apparently, was that yours truly was quoted in an Argus Leader column by Dave Kranz. I notice this interesting paragraph:
As one might notice from some of the discussion on the Ouija boards, sometimes called blogs, the regressives think that the data indicating that human activity is contributing significantly to climate change is a vast left-wing conspiracy. They also think that the theory of evolution is a vast left-wing conspiracy, and that the God who rained that shit down upon us created geological strata and the progressive development of fossils in it to play a trick on the vast left-wing conspiracists and make them think that earth is more than 6,000 years old. Iktomi ensnared them bleeding-heart suckers but good.
I note two things that are important in evaluating this paragraph. First, SDP was earlier identified by Professor Newquist as one of the "regressive blogs." That is to say, the term "regressive blog" was linked directly to one of my posts. Second, the rest of the post quoted above is devoted to a criticism of my comments as included in the Kranz article. One might therefore infer that the views in the paragraph above are the views of SDP, since we are one of the "regressives." Professor Newquist likes to huff and puff with righteous indignation about how we misrepresent his writing. Apparently he thinks he has license to misrepresent us.
No one at SDP believes that "the data indicating that human activity is contributing significantly to climate change is a vast left-wing conspiracy." I have posted frequently on global warming, and I have expressed my opinion that global warming is very likely happening and very likely is influenced by human activity. Likewise with the comment that we regressives "think that the theory of evolution is a vast left-wing conspiracy." I have posted frequently in favor of the theory of evolution, and I have published pieces in the American News to the same effect.
In fact Professor Newquist knows this very well. In an earlier post he listed some of the "basic rules of the [regressive] blogosphere." The following was one of those rules:
Argue about whether the world is 6,000 or 6 billion-billion years old, as if no one actually knows.
That was a reference to a post of mine in which I agreed with Chad at CCK that the young earth theory was scientifically absurd. In that same "How to Write a Blog" post, Professor Newquist says this:
The "straw man" tactic involves making representations about what other people believe or profess and then tearing their beliefs and statements to shreds, even though what they are attacking is not an accurate representation of the other people's positions or statments. . . . A cardinal rule among South Dakota political blogs, especially among the regressives, is to never accurately portray what a person of a differing viewpoint says.
The NVB is the blog that the NVB warns us about. And by the way, Professor, microbes do not fester. Wounds fester. One would have thought a retired professor of English would notice that.
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