Atheists Talk–Maggie Argiente

You wouldn’t think an advertisement asking people to be good would be controversial, would you? Apparently it is–if you ask them to do it for nonreligious reasons.

The American Humanist Association‘s Maggie Ardiente will join us to talk about the reaction to their holiday advertising campaign and about the Winter Solstice. She will be interviewed by Scott Lohman, president of the Humanists of MN. For more information on the show and for related links, visit the Atheists Talk website.

Listen to the show tomorrow, December 14, at 9 a.m. Central time on AM 950 KTNF or stream it live (use zip code 55401). You can also subscribe to the podcasts on iTunes or through our feed.

Atheists Talk–Maggie Argiente
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How to Hijack a Thread

Or, A Primer in Antisocial Attention-Seeking

Lay your groundwork. Watch the group interaction. Make yourself known to the community. Engage on a topic or two. Piss a few people off so they’ll react to you reliably later.

Watch for your chance. If the blog is any good, the host and/or community practices some sort of moderation, active or passive. You’ll have to catch them on a busy day or heated topic to get them to feed trolls.

Commit to the campaign. Prepare not to have a life for the duration. Refresh frequently and respond to everything before anyone else can. Drown anyone speaking in good faith in an avalanche of comments.

Build a fire. Say something known to be controversial. Be sure to compliment community members–in the most backhanded way possible. Extra points for dog whistles.

Make yourself the injured party. Recharacterize any objections to your statements as referenda on your character. Loudly protest your ignorance of even the concept of a dog whistle. Of course you didn’t say that. Abuse yourself sarcastically in strong terms to show how misunderstood you are.

Limit your scope. If the conversation happens across several blogs, pick the one you want to make your own. Most of the community will gravitate to the comment threads where real discussion is happening, leaving a smaller field for you to manipulate.

Divide the community. Pick out a couple of people to side with. Ideally, these should be people with a history of both arguing with the community and making at least occasional good points. Agree broadly as soon as they say anything reasonable, so that anyone else who wants to agree with them must also agree with you.

Deflect topical discussion. Engage with everyone who still wants to discuss the idea at hand. However, don’t engage with them on the topic. If you can turn them to talking about your behavior, this is a plus, but any sideline or distraction will do.

Deny group authority. Insist that if anyone wants to judge your behavior, they must also judge the behavior of all community members by the same standards. Point to their reactions to your bad behavior as bad behavior that also needs to be censured. Ignore the fact that you haven’t contributed to the community in the same way they have.

Prepare to lose. You’ve almost certainly chosen a blog where your disruption will be noticed. After all, that’s what you’re there for. The problem with avoiding chaos is that these people have come together for a reason–to talk to each other, not you. They’re eventually going to go back to doing just that, closing up ranks, and you’re going to have to find a new way, or a new blog, to get anyone to pay attention to you again.

How to Hijack a Thread

Too Pissed to Talk

Dixon said he was denied at least $16,000 in benefits before he fought the Pentagon and won a reversal of his noncombat-related designation.

“I was blown up twice in Iraq, and my injuries weren’t combat-related?” Dixon said. “It’s the most imbecile thing I’ve ever seen.”

Meshell, who is appealing her status, estimates she is losing at least $1,200 a month in benefits. Despite being injured in a combat zone during an enemy mortar attack, she said, her wounds would be considered combat-related only if she had been struck by shrapnel.

Injured veterans engaged in new combat, LA Times

Too Pissed to Talk

All I Want for Christmas

I’m apparently not the easiest person to shop for. By request, I have a wish list around somewhere, but I don’t maintain it. My husband does, and come late summer or fall, he has to ask me what should be on it.

“Um, I don’t know.”

Yeah, I’m annoying. Mostly, though, I’m just not big on stuff. I already have too much. Even books, to which I’m thoroughly addicted, have overrun their allotted space and threaten to overrun their allotted time. If I’m going to add to my stuff, I’m usually very picky about what it is–not the frame of mind in which to receive gifts.

We hardly give gifts of stuff for Christmas anymore, except to the kids in the connection and a very few people whose gifts speak to us during the year. (“Psst. I belong to XX.”) For the past several years, the grown-ups have received a donation–last year to Fisher House–and cookies. Lots of cookies. I’ll happily spend time baking that I’d resent spending shopping in crowded stores.

For some reason, I’d never thought to ask for similar gifts in return. Then, last Christmas, or maybe it was Solstice, some friends gave us a critter from Heifer International. Or rather, they gave it to someone who needed it, for whom it wasn’t stuff.

So this year, my wish list is simple. There are still a few things left on it from prior years, but what I really want are microloans. I want to build a pool of money that I can send off to the unstable parts of the world to help someone create a little stability of their own. I’ve got plenty for myself these days.

If the money comes back, it can help someone else. Over time, if I manage to persuade people that this really is the kind of gift I want, it can help lots of someones.

If it doesn’t, well, it was a gift to begin with. I won’t begrudge someone else a gift as well.

All I Want for Christmas

Podcasting

I know you’ve always wanted to know what I sound like, right? Of course, you say, which is why I went and picked up a radio/podcast gig. It was all just for you.

Okay, the truth is that Mike is moving up from host to cat-herder for the Minnesota Atheists Sunday morning radio show, Atheists Talk. They needed new on-air talent to try to take his place, and Mike asked whether I might be interested. I believe the email said something about being a radio goddess.

This morning was the shakedown show with many lessons learned along the way, but we all came out of it still pretty happy with each other. I think I’ll be doing this again. Next time, I might even tell people about it beforehand.

Oh, and if you do actually want to hear what I sound like, or listen to Austin Dacey, who had much more interesting things to say than I did, the podcast is available.

Podcasting

An Odd Year

DrugMonkey has posted an excellent year-in-review meme that involves posting the first sentence of the first post of each month of the year. Since 2008 was my first full year of blogging, and since almost none of my current readers won’t have read that far back, I must play.

Let’s see what the blog has to say for itself.

January: There’s a character I’ve been wanting to write for a while but probably won’t until the next book.

February: This is one of the cooler memes I’ve seen.

March: I don’t know his name, but he’s awfully cute.

April: I’ve been involved in a few discussions lately in which public school education and teachers got pretty thoroughly dissed.

May: So I’m on this client team at work, one of several.

June: I am not a specialist.

July: Yesterday at work, despite my best efforts to check off the 1,001 tiny things on my to do list and to clean out my inbox so I can figure out whether there’s anything that never made it onto the list, I spent much of my time on two Projects That Will Not Die.

August: Transcriptase is the new site where some writers who had material in the Helix archives have reposted their work.

September: One of the local high schools has a gay-rights student club.

October: Like any good narcissist blogger, I like to see what search terms people are using to find my blog.

November: In my last post, I talked about the many excellent reasons to vote against Norm Coleman for senator.

December: When I was looking at old Animaniacs videos, I noticed that there seems to be a drive to bring them back (although there don’t seem to be any results).

Uh, huh. Interesting. Some politics, some writing, some work (of all things), some silly. It all sounds about right, but it does raise the perpetual question. Can anyone tell me what this blog is about?

An Odd Year

From Out the Past

Facebook dropped a present in my lap today. Well, not literally. He’s several states away, and my lap is hardly the most appropriate place for him. But you get the idea.

You probably have one, too, but I keep a short list of people I’d really love to catch up with but have no hope of ever seeing again. They were absurdly important in some part of my life that doesn’t exist anymore. They’re the folks whose friends I haven’t seen in years, who used to hang out in places that are long gone.

This one was from junior high and high school, another one of the art/science geeks. He was, in fact, one of the infamous Physics Males, although far from the worst. He was also the guy who introduced me to the fact that I’m a very, very scary person. Not that he could explain why I was scary either.

Aside from being mutually terrified of each other, we got on quite well. Then came graduation and poof! He was gone. I saw him a few times after that, but stupidly, I always let some really good excuse get in the way of just sitting down with him for however long it took to properly catch up.

The friends who still connected us to each other drifted away, and more than fifteen years passed without us seeing or talking to each other. I thought about it, but with a name that common, I wouldn’t have known how to track him down if I’d tried. My name, of course, had changed, so even if he had been motivated to find me, it would have been tough.

Then, today, he commented on a mutual friend’s status update. Fifteen minutes later, we were Facebook friends and exchanging notes (which we never did in high school). All due to nearly passive technology.

I love living in the future.

From Out the Past

Nerdcore

I’m in a bar on the west bank in Minneapolis. It really wants to be a dive bar, but nobody appears to have told the chef or the bar manager. So I’ve just had an excellent dinner and a pint of Surly Furious.

I’m there to see a show. More accurately, I’m there to hang out with my husband as he takes pictures at the show.

See, the headliner is MC Frontalot, the recognized father of nerdcore rap, and I’m just not all that into nerdcore. It falls into the category of things that make me happy because they exist but which I don’t personally need to deal with. It’s funny stuff, but too much of it is deliberately awkward. Perfectly in character, but not what I’m looking for in music.

Let’s just say that my hopes for the show aren’t high.

I feel bad for the local opening act. We missed them while eating, and there are only about a dozen people in the stage area when we get there. They played to no one.

Then Schaffer the Darklord (STD) comes out in a long black hooded cloak with his black box, and things start to get interesting. He dumps the cloak after the first song and raps in a purple shirt and black suit. Oh, he’s a geek all right, but he’s also been a musician longer than nerdcore has been considered a genre. And it shows.

Highlights of STD’s set are “Nerd Lust” and “Night of the Living Christ.”

Undead messiah with the entire world
Turning into zombies like him
You’ll die for him because he died for you

We take a break before the Front comes on. I chat a little with Schaffer (once he peels off a drunken fangirl), and pick up both his albums.

Then the lights go down again. Time for the main act.

Frontalot starts by gently coaxing all the geeks in the audience onto the dance floor and up next to the stage. The audience has grown by this point, but it’s still nothing like crowded. Then he announces that this will be an all-request show.

This is when things get truly surreal. Half the audience raises their hands. I kid you not. They raise their hands. At a rap show. This is when I know I am not a TrueGeek(tm).


(MC Chris, not Frontalot, but you get the idea.)

To top it off, once people are called on and make their request, they have to roll for it. D20. Now, it works out that everyone who requests a song that had been rehearsed gets to hear what they want, but they still have to roll.

It also somehow works out that most of the songs from the new album get requested and played. This is a very good thing, because the new album is much more up my alley. Less awkwardness, more music. Still geeky as hell, but danceable. Need I mention that I am the only person demonstrating any proficiency at dancing? (No, pogoing does not count.)

“Bizarro Genius Baby” is the first single off the album. Other gems are “Secrets From the Future,” about how laughable future generations will find current encryption, and “Origin of the Species,” which is saved from Poedom by two words. Needless to say, we pick up another album.

All in all, it’s a good night, much better than expected. I’m still not gung-ho into Nerdcore, but when someone posts some, I now give it a good, solid listen. The stuff is getting much better.

Of course, I still haven’t heard anyone top the original master of the genre.

Nerdcore