Over the past few years, we’ve noticed something of a stagnation over at Watts Up With That. Where the blog once dominated the climate denial discourse, the rise of more multi-purpose denial websites like Breitbart and the Daily Caller seem to have siphoned off some of its cultural cache.
A couple weeks ago, Watts felt the need to defend his title as proprietor of the biggest climate propaganda website in the world. (His claim is based on the notoriously unreliable Alexa ranking, which only counts users who have installed an Alexa toolbar. Feel free to ask literally anyone if they have an Alexa toolbar, and you’ll get a sense of exactly how accurate a ranking system it is.)
Anyway, if you have to bust out a ranking derived from use of a toolbar only computer-illiterate grandparents install on accident to prove you’re still relevant, odds are you’re not that relevant. And as one of his “bevvy of climate zealot detractors,” we can’t remember the last time a Big Denial Science Discovery was revealed at WUWT.
Content on the website these days tends to primarily be reposts from other outlets. That said, there are still plenty of examples of folks who couldn’t find anywhere else that would run their ridiculous screeds, so it’s still worth keeping an eye on what’s up at Watts Up. And a post yesterday offered a possible glimpse into where grampa’s favorite climate website is headed: into the culture wars.
Last week, Senators Harris (D-CA), Rosen (D-NV) and Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced legislation to fight sexual harassment in science, the press release for which ran on WUWT. The comments were predictably oblivious or demonstrated the ingrained gender bias is in WUWT’s audience, while other displays were just downright sexist and/or accidentally self-revealing of their own past problems.
One commenter, Pat Frank, wasn’t content to merely brush the surface of gender discrimination denial. He instead decided to dive into the basis for the proposed legislation, a National Academies of Science report on sexual harassment in STEM, with a lengthy post that more or less applied the denier’s toolbox to the NAS harassment report. Frank, a longtime commenter and guest essay contributor to WUWT, tells us “the NAS report traverses from wrong to meaningless,” misrepresents the literature and its own data, “is a product of almost unprecedented scholarly incompetence” and “is calculated to stampede universities into a false moral panic.”
Frank runs through a bunch of stupid misrepresentations of the sexual harassment study and literature before claiming that “rape culture, already out the window, is now gone from the universe; except as a residual trope in what I’ve come to call ‘harpy culture.’”
Frank says he “can’t imagine a better program to destroy science” than to take the report’s recommendations that there be equity in hiring practices. And the very much not hysterical or shrill man concludes with a warning that “the NAS Report is the opening barrage of the academic Humanities in their conscious, deliberate, and malignant war to destroy science. They are an existential threat.”
According to Frank, it's the women calling out the sexual harassment they face who are destroying science. Surely the problem is not those doing the harassing, or, you know, denying its existence (among other things.)
So if you’re wondering where WUWT is headed as its climate muscles atrophy, defending the systems that perpetuate misogyny and sexual harassment appears to be a viable option.
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