I've Accumulated Two More Prominent Twitter Blocks

I've accumulated a couple more prominent Twitter blocks. The first is Jerry Taylor. He was an environmental skeptic for the Cato Institute, who sort of switched sides after something of a falling out over advice he used (probably from Pat Michaels) in a debate with Joe Romm. He's now the president of a centrist think tank called the Niskanen Center. Here's a couple links to connect Pat Michaels and Joe Romm.

He's not terribly prominent with 9000 followers, but he does get cited a lot. He's not a 100% renewables zealot, but he does buy into a lot of the renewable hype. He's not anti-nuclear, but also not a big proponent. He does think it should play a roll and castigates anti-nukers. His tweets generally don't get a lot of responses, so I've made a lot of (mostly polite) responses to his climate and energy tweets. In his profile, he says he blocks trolls and in my profile, I refer to myself as a "Fact Mongering Nuclear Troll", along with two other pejorative descriptions.


So I'm a self described troll and he blocks trolls -- fair enough. Trolling is a word that has become a term for bad behavior and personal attacks on the internet. But I think there is an area of trolling that is legitimate -- challenging someones ideas and premises. I've often said that trolls and echo chambers are the yin and yang of the internet. Since they are both negatively perceived things, you can only exclude one or the other, not both, or more precisely, you have to take a position in the range between the two. It's often hard to challenge someone's deeply held notions without them feeling personally attacked. I suppose the way I have this framed, dealing with trolls is more positive than being an echo chamber.

My other Twitter block is from Ken White, who goes by the handle, "Popehat". He's a well respected blogger on legal issues with over two hundred thousand followers. This one is rather complicated and involves a piece he did for the Atlantic. It's a hit piece on John Ziegler, who criticized a well known writer, David Foster Wallace, for committing suicide. I was reading about this in John Ziegler's Twitter feed and decided to check out Popehat's Twitter feed, ... and I couldn't find it with twitters search button. So I clicked on Popehat's handle in one of the tweets and found that I was blocked.

Another one of the pejoratives that I have on my Twitter profile, is "Penn State Truther". This refers to my being a follower and fan, ... and even an active promoter of John Ziegler's work on the Penn State-Joe Paterno-Jerry Sandusky scandal. I even devote a large portion of another blog I have to it, called Canman Canned Facts. The best place to learn about the Penn State scandal is in the links in my pinned tweet. The best way I can summarize this is to say that John Ziegler thought Joe Paterno was getting a bad rap and did a very extensive investigation, in which he destroyed his own career by finding that Jerry Sandusky was innocent. I know it sounds crazy, but please check out the aforementioned links before making a judgment. It really is a great story!

The thing that really bothers me about this saga is that Popehat won't engage in any direct communication with Ziegler and dismisses him as a Sandusky truther. John Ziegler has serious journalistic credentials and a lot of serious people agree with his Penn State conclusions, including renowned science writer, Mark Pendergrast, memory expert Elizabeth Loftus, former Newsweek editor, Bob Roe, reporter, Ralph Cipriano, and more. Ziegler deserves better than this.

I guess the reason Popehat blocked me, was that I'd previously tweeted to him to look into Ziegler's work. It should be right up his alley.