Seth Mnookin has reasons to hope. It has been clear though for years that Huffpo was a clearinghouse for what I would describe as liberal crankery, which includes things like Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaccine crankery, or Bill Maher’s anti-pharma paranoia.
But now they have a new site, Huffpo Science, and after my head stopped ringing from that particular oxymoron I went and checked it out.
A lead article on going to Mars by Buzz Aldrin was interesting. An article on Frankenmeat came out relatively clean without getting all paranoid about GMO foods or lab-grown nutrients being less pure than those found in nature. I even read an article about the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s move The Birds was an actual case of birds going crazy after being poisoned by a kind of algae.
The fact that they gave Seth Mnookin an opportunity to try and undo the years and years of anti-vaccine crankery on Huffpo is certainly a good sign. If anyone wants to help tamp down the already rising tide of anti-vax commenters, I would suggest you head over there to help him out.
But is this a rare hopeful sign of diminishing crankery in a world where it only seems to increase exponentially? Time will tell.
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