Cause, Effect, and Crying "Poor Me": Day 3 of the Luskin Thing.

By Mike Dunford

We're now into the [third day](http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2008/02/blogging_about_peerreviewed_re.php) [of the brouhaha](http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2008/02/luskin_and_the_peerreviewed_re.php) that was sparked by Casey Luskin's misuse of the "Blogging About Peer-Reviewed Research" icon. Casey posted a few responses to criticisms in the [discussion thread](http://www.bpr3.org/?p=80) over at the BPR3 blog, then packed his bags and went home because Dave Munger didn't delete all of the comments that had said bad things about Casey. It's pretty clear that Casey got what he was fishing for before he left, though: more stories about how poor Intelligent Design proponents are picked on by mean scientists.

They've been playing up that sort of story for a while now, and it's easy to understand why. Stories - even blatantly fictional ones - are a good way to make a point. We use stories to teach our children. More importantly, our parents used stories to teach us. We've been dealing with stories all our life, so we tend to respond when we're given a familiar story. In this case, they're giving us a variant of the "David and Goliath" story, and we all know who to root for when we hear that one, right?

Casey had to work really hard to get that story, but he's pretty sure he [managed it](http://www.bpr3.org/?p=80#comment-1308):

(1) A large number of the people on this thread continue to oppose approving my request for registration, explicitly admitting that they simply don’t want to allow ID proponents to be part of these discussions. If ID proponents aren’t even allowed to “officially” blog about peer-reviewed research on the internet, who can say that their research would get a fair hearing from the actual peer-reviewers in the real world of science?

The italics were in the original, and Casey really must have meant it, because he used the same phrase again later on in the comment, replacing the italics with boldface. As arguments go, that one is pretty typical. It sounds nice and reasonable and bears only the faintest resemblance to anything that actually happened.

[Read more at The Questionable Authority, where comments may be left:](http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2008/02/cause_effect_and_crying_poor_m.php)