Feb 06 2013
Wikipedian Brandon Harris takes to Quora to talk about how he felt being the subject of a lot of Internet derision during his famous banner appearances throughout Wikipedia’s fundraising drive. His words were, to say the least, helpful. None of it is real. There is a stream of invective from people saying that I look …
Feb 04 2013
What’s not news is that high school is, for many, hell. But the effects of one’s experiences during adolescence (and for this purpose I’ll use “high school” as shorthand for the general puberty-through-adolescence time period, which can include middle school and junior high) are often minimized, at least in my anecdotal experience. For most of …
Jan 26 2013
We do not like to be told we are being jerks. We do not like to be told we are being demeaning, or belittling, or discriminatory, or bigoted, even if by accident. Particularly we skepto-atheists, who so pride ourselves on our rationality, our grip on reality, our ability to coolly evaluate information on its merits. …
Jan 23 2013
My three-year-old boy Toby and I were talking about presidential politics in the car this morning, like we do. (While his baby sister Phoebe said, “RaaaUUUuUuurrrrRRrgh.”) We were looking back at the 2012 election, and Toby has drawn some interesting conclusions. He often asks whether such-and-such a politician “did a good job,” and this time, …
Jan 22 2013
I feel trapped by Facebook. A recent Salon piece by Sara Scribner has rekindled my nascent desire to exit it altogether. Scribner comes to her own loathing of Facebook from the perspective of someone who, having escaped the cliques of junior high, finds herself once again in a social environment in which approval and validation …
Jan 12 2013
I’ve been looking for ways to express my feelings about online interactions of late, and rather than articulating them successfully, I’ve been having something of a public meltdown. I am therefore grateful to whoever the hell it is behind the Twitter persona @pourmecoffee for his recent post, which included this: I instantly and irreversibly block …
Jan 11 2013
From Miriam Mogilevsky, who blogs here at Brute Reason, but posted this elsewhere for no reason: . . . our society pushes certain types of people down, and then mandates that we all “love ourselves”—and if we fail to do so it is OUR fault. I do think there are things anyone can do to …
Jan 11 2013
My wife asked me a question I at first dismissed when I told her about the previous post. I’ll have to paraphrase from memory. But I was telling her about the subject of the post, how I thought folks were wrong to perennially demand Sam Harris’s, or anyone else’s head on a platter when there …
Jan 05 2013
It’s been almost a week with the Nexus 7, and since the kids are finally asleep, I thought this might be my one chance to follow up from my first post and report on how it’s been going. And much to my surprise, it’s going extremely well. Put it this way. I haven’t picked up …
:)
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