Blogging ... don't pray for numbers, you might get them! - Denyse O'Leary

I had a curious experience yesterday. Over 18 000 people came to my lead blog, The Post-Darwinist. For no clear reason, so far as I can see.

This is the post, and this is my response.

The Post-Darwinist was started in May 2005, to update my book, By Design or by Chance?, a 2004 overview of the intelligent design controversy. As I explained in a recent post:

When I first started monitoring the controversy in 1999, I heard that it was dead every six months. Then every three months, then every few weeks ... . I was fascinated by the difference between what pundits said and what I knew was happening. So in 2003, I ducked lucrative education writing contracts and wrote a book (By Design or by Chance?, 2004) exploring the controversy. In 2005, I started a blog, Post-Darwinist, to log its continued development.

I feel sorry for the third- and fourth-rate tax burdens who have written me shrill missives, advising that I am completely wrong to have ever doubted the old Brit toff Darwin - who ripped off earlier scientists to create a never-demonstrated creation story for atheism.

They did pretty well in forcing the rest of us to pay taxes to support their religion, but that’s where the train stops, I am afraid. And don’t get me started on Darwin's virulent racism either. Just this on that:

Darwin and his fellow Victorian toffs were stuck with the creationist idea that we are all equally human. That's what the Bible said, but they didn't believe the Bible - however, they did not know exactly how to discredit the Bible. Darwin provided the toffs with a "scientific" means of discrediting the Bible, so that the hoped-for break between races of humans

will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. ( The Descent of Man)

So there it was at last. A "scientific" excuse for the toffs' existing sense of vast superiority and entitlement over other races. And the rest is, alas, history.

And Darwinists are still so justifiably sure of their hold over mindless tax-supported popular culture that, incredibly, they have somehow wanted to link Lincoln and Darwin as liberators. A culture that accepts such a patent lie could not be liberated from anything, ever.

But a sudden spurt of attention may be part of what we must get used to in the new weird, wild, world of the Internet. We replace the egg beater with a tsunami. And then what?

Well, one thing was massive abuse. I had no idea that so many people are bored, idle, or insane.

Also - and this might be my fault - I do not have a system in place for responding to abuse. Most of the time, people do not even notice my byline, and I have always preferred that, actually.

However, as an old-fashioned journalist, I feel - so far - that I must maintain a real e-mail address: oleary@sympatico.ca. That's actually ME, no aliases. I live in a town, like most of my readers do, and vote and pay taxes here, and would never represent myself as a better judge than the general public of anything - except how to report news in a way that people can understand.

And that's only from experience, not because of any claim to superiority.