In a new segment, Bloggingheads chief Robert Wright and Bloggingheads correspondent George Johnson go on for 75 minutes about the trauma of a pair of heretics (me and Paul Nelson, on separate segments) appearing on their site. I would urge everyone who doesn’t have pressing matters to attend to, such as the need to wash your hair, to tune in for the full time. It’s really fascinating in its way to see two grown men in such a hand-wringing lather. It’s also fascinating to see that neither of them in 75 minutes offers a reason for the correctness of their own views, or the wrongness of ours. The closest they come is when George Johnson invokes the hoary “methodological naturalism.”

One little segment was particularly rich. Johnson is faint with indignation that, in a post commenting on Bloggingheads originally pulling my interview with John McWhorter, I put up the well-known picture of Joseph Stalin standing with a group of people and a second photo in which one poor bloke’s image had been removed. Why, lamented Johnson, I was comparing poor Bloggingheads to a murderous regime! These ID folks revel in their supposed persecution!

In that post my only remark concerning the picture (which appeared at the end) was “Below is a time-lapse picture of my Bloggingheads interview. I’m the guy on the right.” (That is, the fellow who had disappeared.) Now, it may be that George Johnson has never heard the phrase “tongue-in-cheek”; if so he should look it up. Otherwise he may be confused that the guy on the right actually doesn’t look like me, and that the interview wasn’t really filmed next to a Russian river.

Interestingly, at one point when he was explaining why he had the interview put back up, Robert Wright said that if you take down an interview that had been put up, why, it looks “like you’re trying to re-write history.” Well, now, what picture might someone post if he was trying to illustrate Wright’s astute point?