Does Waylon Lewis employ the Huffington Post's secret backdoor password in order to censor opinions contrary to his own?
The Huffington Post is one of the foremost sites on the web in promoting the belief in catastrophic man-made global warming.
As I wrote about in an earlier DailyKos diary, Huffington Post bloggers can secretly censor dissenting comments in the comments sections that appear below their blogs. Huffington Post doesn't reveal this to the public but their bloggers -- and one can only become a blogger once they are personally chosen and approved by Arianna Huffington -- have a secret backdoor password that allows them to do just that...and Huffington's site does not disclose this to the public.
Here's what happened to me today:
Waylon Lewis, founder of elephantjournal.com and the Walk the Talk Show, posted a blog yesterday on the huffingtonpost.com called "John Mackey, Whole Foods CEO: I Don't Believe In Climate Change" in which he was highly critical of Mackey for making the remarks indicated in the title of the piece. You can find the article here.
After reading the piece, I posted a critical comment in the comments section. For the comment to appear, it had to first be approved by one of Huffinton Post's moderators, which it was.
But then the post was deleted. Who deleted it? Since the comment had already appeared online -- thus indicating it had passed muster with the Huffington Post moderators -- it's a near certainty that it was done by Lewis himself. Indeed, Lewis had even responded to my comment.
I then tried to respond to his response but upon hitting the submit (ie, "post a comment") button, I got the message: "Sorry, you're replying to an already deleted comment. Please reload the page".
Fortunately, I saved all the messages before they were deleted.
The following is the initial comment I made to the article, then Lewis' response, and then my response to his response which couldn't be posted at all because of the "sorry, already deleted comment" message:
1) My initial comment:
I believe Mr. Lewis is totally offbase by invoking consensus as a justification for global warming.
Here is what the late Michael Crichton had to say about "consensus" and global warming:
"I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
"There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period. "
From: http://www.crichton-official.com/...
2) Lewis's response to my comment
Does that mean that if scientists have overwhelming consensus on gravity, it ain't science?
3) My response to Lewis' response
Actually, no.
And gravity is the prefect example of the point Crichton was making because the scientific explanation of gravity has changed so radically over human history.
And whenever it changed, it was a change AGAINST the consensus of what the wise men or scientists of the time believed and accepted:
Galileo, for example, totally disrupted the scientific consensus that unanimously accepted Aristotle's claim that heavier objects accelerate faster under gravity (we all now know that this is not true).
Newton's postulates totally changed consensus-accepted gravitational believes as well.
And, of course, so did Einstein.
Again, what counts are the facts which have nothing to do with consensus. As Crichton indicated, consensus is anathema to science. Consensus is anti-progress when it comes to science and it is only by going AGAINST consensus that progress in science that progress -- and our expansion of knowledge -- ever takes place.