As most of you know by now, Ed Brayton, author of the blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars and founder of FreethoughtBlogs, announced yesterday that he has decided to move his blog to Patheos and has given his reasons why here.
It was Ed who, presumably acting on behalf of a collective decision of the existing bloggers here, contacted me about moving my blog here from its previous home where it was hosted by my university. He and the others were very welcoming and helpful during and after the transition and it went much more smoothly than I expected.
I do not get around much and am not really part of the circuit of conferences and events that skeptics attend and so have met very few of the people in those circles, even among the well known ones and the ones on this network. But I was fortunate to meet Ed twice and found him to be a gracious and delightful guy and naturally I am sorry to see him leave FtB. But this is the world of the internet where ‘moving’ simply means changing that person’s URL and perhaps email address.
But it is still a transition and I want to take this opportunity to thank Ed for all his support and to wish him well in his cyber-travels.
This came as a shock to me and I’m sure many others. I am saddened by this and wish it weren’t so but it is.
I wish Ed Brayton and FTB all the best, things here lately have gone very sour and that really sucks but there are an awful lot of really good and nice people who deserve better. FTB has lost Ed Brayton and Ophelia Benson permanently and it seems Dana Hunter (Plus “DarkSyde” Zingularity) for a while and those are big blows and among my favourite bloggers here. (Despite it all you and PZ also count in that category too, Mano Singham.)
FTB is resilient , it’ll fight and come back stronger than ever -- I hope & think. I expect Mano Singham will be a part of that too.
The actions and attitudes of many in recent days (i.e. those who pretended Ophelia Benson said something which she didn’t, the witch hunt and attempt to enforce exile that followed) leave few FTB pages worth reading from now on. I can count them on my fingers. Ed Brayton’s departure lowers that number by one.
What transpired wasn’t a case of right and wrong as when the annoying atheist (aka thunder-fool) was invited and then quickly tossed out. Recent events were about factions of bloggers seeking to eliminate dissent. It was puritanical ideology, not purification of something tainted as they claimed. I wasn’t surprised that certain people were involved, but the mob mentality of others did surprise.
left0ver1under: Agreed. I only read 6 of the blogs here with any regularity (this being one of them). It’s down to 4 on this site, one of which rarely posts updates anyway, so really only 3 that I feel are worth my rather limited online reading time.