After barely a  month, I’ve decided to retire the “Stegosaurus of the Week” award. I’ve begun feeling uncomfortable about it, and decided it wasn’t the right thing to be doing.

Since I only average about a post per day on weekdays, and often don’t blog at all on weekends, devoting up to 20% of my posts to a recurrent, insulting joke probably sets the wrong tone for the blog. For one thing, I just got done chastizing the most recent StegoWeek winner for her lack of collegiality (among many more serious faults); I don’t think pointing out bad thinking by others falls to the same level as using your supposed credentials to justify picking a personal fight with a critic that spills over two Web sites, but it’s not the height of professionalism either. And singling people out for their personal lack of perspecuity, instead of focusing only on the deficiencies of their actual writings, is harsh. (Not, perhaps, unnecessarily so – there are a remarkable number of idiots who just have no clue about themselves, and I think it’s helpful to tell them the truth – but I’ll leave it to others.) After one early award resulted in an avalanche of abuse that caused the (richly deserving) recipient to shut down his blog, it started to seem as if this was detracting from debate, not fostering it. There may be more high-minded (though less satisfying) ways of conducting this discourse, and I think I should probably pursue them.

So I won’t be making new awards. That’s not to say that I won’t be turning my critical eye where it is needed – and boy, is it needed! And, too, that’s not to say that the winners to date have not entirely deserved their awards. A final hats-off to the few, and from now on the only, Stegosaurus of the Week Awardees:

1. (6/20/2006) Vital Signs Blog, for asserting his personal, and grossly ignorant, opinion as disproof of a Mayo Clinic report debunking the supposed abortion/breast-cancer link.
2. (6/30/2006) Dawn Eden, for using her amazing mind-reading powers to interpret pro-choice arguments according to her fantasies of what the speakers were feeling, and not what they actually said. (This is really something of a Lifetime Achievement award for Eden, who otherwise would have qualified almost every week.)
3. (7/6/2006) “Pete”, for responding with an unquestioning rant to a satirical “pro-abortion” article in The Onion, and then generating a total of 5 inconsistent posts and a magazine interview defending himself without ever really understanding his own problem.
4. (7/13/2006) “Ladies Against Feminism”, for posting snotty neo-Victorian crap, notably including an anti-birth-control article that somehow managed to work in leeches and euthanasia.
5. (7/24/2006) “Jacquefromtexas”, for claiming credentials as a professional social worker and counselor while adopting an explicitly manipulative, political-activist stance toward her own clients, and spreading the most malignant falsehoods, under cover of her professional stature . . . and much more.

[No] Thanks to all, for making health-ethics blogging what it is!