Indy Media Watch

Via my referrer logs, I noticed a link to this site from a comment in Guardian journalist Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column.

Side note: Dr Goldacre is described as a "serious fuck-off academic ninja".

The comment reads:

As someone who considers himself a leftist and supporter of liberal democracy, as well as a rationalist, humanist and scientist, I would put this suggestion:
Indymedia in its various incarnations is not exactly a hotbed of rationalist thought. I often take a look at Indymediawatch. It is quite scary. There have been examples of Indymedias over the world publishing: Blatant anti-semitism. Racist material. Bizarre articles on “Zionist conspiracies”. Other loony conspiracies such as “the US perpretrated 9/11″. Very much tin-foil hat kind of stuff. In this light, the kind of things Smad [the original comment at the top of the page] mentions might be expected. There also seems to be an odd, to put it politely, editorial/moderation system whereby rational arguments against these ravings (my term) are excised.

In short, I don’t think Indymedia is at all representative of the left, it is certainly not representative of me, more that it is a forum, at least in parts, for paranoid oddballs. In my opinion, we shouldn’t even give the swivel-eyes at Indymedia the respect of worrying about their opinions on science.

It begs the question, who exactly does Indymedia represent? The scientists over at Bad Science might be interested in an older post about the scientific method, as at Indymedia.