Another Meaningless Name Change

It was pointed out to me by a Commentor (Thanks again Matthew) that the Discovery Institute pseudo-blog has changed it's name.  It was called "Evolution News and Views (ENV).  Of course, I usually referred to it as "Evolution 'news' and Views (E'n'V)" because news was not it's forte.  It was always bringing you their [the DI's] view on nearly any topic.  Oh, they might reference other pieces of information -- including someone else's actual science -- but the purpose of E'n'V was never to educate, but show you the Intelligent Design (ID) perspective.

So, they would sometimes point out some actual science and then spin their ID magic on it and lo-and behold one of two things usually happened.  Either the real science could be spun in such a way as to appear to support ID or they declared that the real science must be wrong because of ID.  Of course, they never bothered to support either contention with anything resembling evidence or scientific experimentation, it was all rhetoric*.

One other point, I also normally referred to it as a pseudo-blog because they never, ever let people comment on it.  For all their talk about 'free speech', letting people comment would probably show more of the weaknesses in their arguments than identify any actual strengths -- but then strengths and weaknesses aren't their forte either (pun intended).  To my knowledge, they never even tried to moderate comments, which is how many other sites control views they do not like.  To date, I have only removed comments that were abusive (once) or sales marketing (three). All other comments are still there.  Funny, I've had more authors remove their own comments than anything I have done.

Back to the topic at hand, the DI pseudo-blog changed it's name.  It's now called "Evolution News and Science Today (ENST)".  I took a quick look through the postings for this month and it really doesn't look like anything has changed.  Sarah Chaffee is talking about a subject she doesn't seem to know anything about -- free speech, pseudo-historian Richard Weikart is busy trying to re-write history, and little davely 'klingy' klinghoffer is bragging that this pseudo-blog is now available in Spanish.  -- which I thought was almost interesting because their new intelligent design center is in Brazil, and their official language in Portuguese.  Nope, nothing new and still no commenting allowed.

Which means the new name is even more misleading than the old one.  I mean not only was it not presenting news, now they are hiding their views under the label of 'science'.  Does anyone actually believe actual science will be coming out from the DI, let alone published in their pseudo-blog?  But then, like their other avenues of publication, be it books, articles, or posts, there is no standard for supporting their 'work'.  Which means E'ns'T will continue in the less-than-proud traditions of E'n'V and give us things to laugh at rather than actually enlighten us!

*rhetoric: language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content.