I didn't want to hijack Bolder-dash's thread by posting before he'd had a chance to respond, but it's been a couple days, so I'll say a little bit about why I promoted this thread.
First, if Bolder-dash would like to discuss moderation then Adminnemooseus created a thread for that a while back:
General Discussion Of Moderation Procedures (aka 'The Whine List')
But what intrigued me about Bolder-dash's thread proposal was the suggestion that activity at EvC Forum has diminished. I'm not sure what he's basing this on. I'm going from memory a bit, but I think 2009 had around 52,000 posts, 2010 had 57,000, and this year projects out at 45,000. Moderation hasn't changed in any significant way that I'm aware of during this period.
We do have a creationist moderator, AdminSlev, and the couple times that AdminSlev has responded to Bolder-dash he's been ignored.
But while I can't produce any statistics, I do believe that Bolder-dash is correct that creationist participation at EvC Forum is significantly diminished, particularly informed creationist participation. I have been noting this change since the beginning of 2006, shortly after Judge Jones released his
Kitzmiller vs. Dover decision.
In my mind Dover and reduced creationist participation here are intimately connected. The
Kitzmiller decision marked the end of creationist and ID efforts to overtly promote their views as science within public school systems. This seems to have reduced how much creationists know about their own views. Dover marked the beginning of not only a period of diminished numbers of IDists here, it also increased the number of traditional creationists notable by how little knew, not only about science but even about the very creationist views they were promoting.
In the old days, incoherent and irrational creationists like Ray Martinez were outnumbered by those like Tranquility Base, TrueCreation and Peter Borger. Today our creationist ranks are dominated by those who lack both knowledge and rationality, like Dawn Bertot, Robert Byers, and, when he loses patience, Bolder-dash himself.
I take this change as an indication that while we've won the public battle, the war itself has retreated to less public arenas. There's now less public dialog between the two sides, but the creationist movement is very successfully cementing itself even more firmly among evangelicals. Their new strategy of avoiding public conflict with science (and the public defeats that go with it) while still influencing schools at the local level must be considered a success. The ICR and Discovery Institute approach of aggressively taking on science is becoming more and more a thing of the past.
This means our big "victory" at Dover was hollow, as I predict all such victories will be. The creation/evolution wars will continue to ebb and flow. It will only be a matter of time before creationists develop new strategies for attacking the science they think is wrong, and then creationist participation will increase again.
Edited by Admin, : Grammar.
-- | Percy |
| EvC Forum Director |