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Not one of us is a token

On my own blog, an argument came up — while I was so slammed with work as to be all but totally disengaged from the greater blogohedron — that just happened to become extraordinarily timely through a coincidental confluence that bears mentioning. Liam, on an older post, defended the idea that people encouraging diversity were in fact engaging in “reverse racism”, serving as an excellent foil for my argument that diversity is itself a laudable goal.

This happened concurrently with John Loftus’ rather abrupt departure from Freethought Blogs, and his slamming the door on the way out hard enough to rattle the china on the walls — he intended to do damage on the way out by picking several fights with so-called “mean atheists” when his chief concern was that the commentariat, not the bloggers, were mean to him when he launched on our network and that he’d therefore have a harder time reaching out to Christians. He was invited expressly because he had a perspective that was, while not totally unique, certainly underrepresented in our blogging group, with the hope that when people move their blogs to our network it grows the network readership overall. That doesn’t make him the “token ex-Christian” not even the “token ex-Protestant minister”, so when he suggested that Natalie Reed was only brought on for diversity’s sake rather than her personal qualifications, many of us bloggers rightly rankled.
Continue reading “Not one of us is a token”

Not one of us is a token

Full-out Atheist On Atheist War!

Oh holy shit, we’re talking honest-to-goodness internecene throwdowns happening all along the Great Atheist Rift! Crommunist fired the first shot, like Franz Ferdinand himself, declaring that anyone who likes cats must naturally be infected by toxoplasmosis, which is the only explanation why anyone would subject themselves the nonsense that is a cat’s existence.
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Full-out Atheist On Atheist War!

On helping people move

So as Cuttlefish recently documented, I managed to… uh… persuade the Google Python scripts that handle migrating Blogspot archives to WordPress into allowing him to import his older archives, so his old poetry, all the way back to 2007, is now available here at Freethought Blogs.

Meanwhile, I’ve also converted Libby Anne’s posts and sent along instructions on how to import them, so I expect those should appear shortly, and I also helped move Brianne into her new digs as well. She’s all unpacked now. Hooray for more new neighbors!

You should check them all out. Right now. Especially Biodork (Brianne), though, because she gives unironic thumbs-ups, which is very endearing to us Canucks.

Presently though, I’m probably knee-deep in real-life work. I’m sure I’ll be back to haunt the blogohedron soon enough.

On helping people move

Hits vs comments, controversialism, and a reception metric

DJ Grothe, in the wake of a bit of pattern recognition by Stephanie Zvan that made him look bad enough to evidently cause him to forget that he has a JREF communications director, recently made a claim in his reply (link to Greta’s sur-reply with blockquotes) to Greta’s two questions that certain blogs are under orders to write contrarian and controversialist blog posts in order to drum up hits. He hasn’t yet substantiated that claim with some actual specifics, so while we’re waiting, I thought I’d look at some statistics for the other major component of that claim, that controversial topics drive hit counts.
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Hits vs comments, controversialism, and a reception metric

The 2011 Lousy Year in Review

Happy new year, everyone! Hope 2012, the Year Of Doom, finds you hale and hardy. Remember, rinse your mouth out with water and wait fifteen minutes before brushing your teeth after you’ve vomited, or you’ll wreck the enamel on your teeth. Of course, the same advice goes for after eating an orange, so there’s that.

This is my first time trying something like this. I’ve been blogging since May 2008, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever once gone through my previous posts and highlighted a few things per month like most other bloggers have a habit of doing. This lack of introspection is inexcusable, of course. So, I’ll try right now.
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The 2011 Lousy Year in Review