Archive for the 'Bloggery'

Bad news: I’m informed offline by Mattir that fellow hordeling crowepps has passed away, not particularly expectedly. She wasn’t the most loquacious commenter here, and I didn’t know her at all aside from reading what she wrote here. But I always liked what she had to say. She was funny: I am boggled by the lack of logic behind “Make me a sammich.” Seriously, so you don’t want to listen to someone’s opinion, you want to treat them as having no more value than a household appliance, so you send them into the kitchen, where all the *poisons* are, to prepare food? Want a side of Valium overdose with that, or just a garnish of the traditional rat poison? I didn’t know her well enough to say with certainty that she made the world a better place — those who knew her can weigh in on that — but she definitely made Pharyngula a smarter place. Thanks for that, crowepps.  

You’ve all seen it, the increasingly common inept attempt people make to defuse valid criticism of their untenable positions. Most recent sighting for me was this comment at The Mary Sue, which consisted mainly of the commenter saying that no way would any man have pulled the “fake geek girl” routine on Rae Johnston and even if they did no way could she have been clever and snarky enough to leave him in the funniest smoking crater of all time, and then said commenter ended with: Let the bashing commence I guess. You’ve seen variations on this trope. “Flame away,” “I’ll get flamed for this,”  references to asbestos undergarments and SPF 400 flameblock. And there’s a commonality among the people who use that trope, generally having to do with shitty argumentation. As Sally Strange said here last week, Has there EVER been a time when someone preemptively complained about flaming, when the content of their post was NOT eminently flame-worthy? Not in my experience. Sally’s correct, and there’s a reason for that. Well, two reasons. Sally is smart; The reason people adopt the “I am Daniel and you are Teh Lionz” approach is because they’re feeling defensive about their arguments, and seeking to defuse the rhetorical spanking they fear they’re gotten themselves into by way of the deft use of our old friend passive aggression. Frankly, if even the execrable H*go Schw*zer has seen through this particular pathetic trope, it’s time to stop it. As that post with its triggering comments (and OP) points out, trolls use this trope because it works. So I’m calling this a New Rule. It covers my posts here, and it should cover every other person’s posts everywhere else online as well. If you tell people to “flame away,” you will not be taken seriously. Because as any well-read atheist knows, the lions took no interest in Daniel whatsoever...
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…that I was responsible for the Thunderf00t fiasco here? I don’t pay any attention to his videos any more, but Richard carried out an amazingly thorough dissection of one of his recent videos that, as seems to be common nowadays, rants and raves about Freethoughtblogs, feminism, me, and of all things, minorities in atheism. I spot-checked some of Richard’s claims about the video — he references timestamps throughout — and was astounded to hear Thunderf00t actually sneer with contempt at the idea of broadening atheism’s appeal to a wider audience. You know, all these deranged angry anti-social justice atheists are always complaining that FtB is trying to kick them out of atheism, but we aren’t — we don’t have that power or any authority at all (do they even realize that this is just a blog network with no jurisdiction over anything other than our local traffic?) The real situation is that people like Thunderf00t are doing an awesome job of marginalizing themselves.

Both Hank Fox and Token Skeptic are leaving for Patheos. I should warn you what happens to those who leave us.

She has posted a summary of her experience commenting here — entirely from her perspective of course, but worth a look. My position: I think she was completely wrong on the Adria Richards issue. She was looking at it entirely from the position of a conference organizer, who prioritizes not rocking the boat and keeping everything running smoothly, and not at all from the perspective of a feminist who definitely would want to do some boat-rocking and disrupt a bad process. However, man, some of you commenters were brutal. I’m all in favor of letting your views hang out there and letting you express yourselves freely, but this is a case where some of you were so angry that it interfered with your ability to communicate rationally. And then I’m torn, because that anger is actually valid, too. Anyway, read it and think. I did, and I still think the disagreement was appropriate, but that she might be right that the derision was disproportionate…while at the same time I think outrageous derision is useful.