I have found that one of the clearest signs that a blog is going downhill is when they switch from tolerating other view points to censoring dissenting opinions. When you are so sure that you have all of the answers or don't want to consider that you could be wrong, it is an undeniable sign that you need to pull your head out of your posterior section and think about what you are doing.
I am speaking specifically of the shinning example of the neurodiversity movement, Left Brain Right Brain. As I said several months back, this once decent site has been on a downward spiral and they seem to have taken a new step down the path towards irrelevance - censorship.
Even though I removed LBRB from the reading list on the side of the page for anonymously stalking a mother who was trying to help her child, I still do occasionally look at what they have to say - mostly for the amusement value (that Sullivan, he is a regular comedian). The last time that I looked in at the site, I read this post on the DAN! doctors that were being sued as part of a messy divorce.
Sullivan was at comedic best, insisting that this law suit was simply because father was lied to by the doctors in question and that the father say that he saw no benefits from the treatments. He spends a lot of time harping on a specific method of testing for the amount of heavy metal in a person's body and how the validity of the test has not been established. The coup de grace of the entire piece is when he accuses someone else of ignoring the "real questions" involved in the case.
The irony of Sullivan's statements was too much for me and I felt the need to comment. I pointing out that he ignored the context of the surrounding "bitter" divorce and the fact that the mother apparently disagrees with the father about the effectiveness of the treatments. I thought I was being at least civil in how I expressed my opinion but, like all of the comments I have left on that site in the past several months, this one came up with the "comment awaiting moderation" and went into limbo.
There the comment still sits, awaiting the blessings of whoever moderates the comments over there now. I don't think it will ever see the light of day. Sullivan gets so touchy when you point out the gaping holes in his logic.
To be honest, I don't really care that the comment wasn't published. Every site has the right to publish the comments that they choose and to not publish the ones that they don't want to. Commenting is a privilege, not a right.
The thing that I find interesting is the break from the long standing policy that the site had of publishing all comments and the fact that the apparent policy has been silently changed without any public sign of the change. The site went from a quasi-open discussion to a restricted one without such much as a whimper. As I understand it, the censoring of contrary opinions of one of the things that LBRB complains about when it comes to the Age of Autism site. I guess they don't notice the hypocrisy when they do what they are complaining about.
As I said earlier, one of the clearest signs that a site is going down hill is when they start censoring other opinions. Left Brain Right Brain is definitely going down hill and at the rate they are going, they are going to hit bottom soon.
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