If you haven’t yet, don’t forget to include your vote for the new banner. Some people are ranking them, others are giving 1 or 2 favourites. Whichever design gets the most support will become the new banner for this site. FYI – to the best of my knowledge, I can’t use more than one (but if that ever changes then I will certainly do that).
Go vote!
There is a famous biblical passage that reads: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” Whether or not that’s true in general (spoilers: it isn’t), it is certainly true in the case of my request for a new banner for the blog. I have been overwhelmed with the level of creativity and generosity demonstrated by the readers here, and you have the most sincere thanks that I can muster from my godless, soulless core. I have boiled down the multitude of submissions to 5 of my favourites: [Read more…]
Look up at the top of the page. Now back to me. Now back to the top of the page. What do you see? It’s a banner. It’s not a particularly nice banner (although made infinitely nicer thanks to the hard work of reader aspidoscelis, for which I am very grateful). I would very much like to have a spiffy banner. However, I have no graphic design skills to speak of. I am hoping I can prevail upon you, gentle readers, for some assistance in this regard.
I have no particular requests or ideas for what a banner would look like. I know that it must measure 300 cubits by 50 cubits by 30 cubits… wait no, that’s idiotic. It has to be 728 x 120, and it has to have the title of the blog in there somewhere. My old site had the black power fist:
And this quote from Christopher Hitchens: “The stubborn persistence of chauvinism in our life and letters is or ought to be the proper subject for critical study, not the occasion for displays of shock.”
Either or neither of those things could conceivably be worked in. I throw myself upon the mercy of the internet.
Wow, that sounds like a terrible idea…
The person with the design I like the most will be rewarded in some way that I have not figured out yet.
EDIT: Reader Zugswang has helpfully provided me with this most awesome tweak to the image above:
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So technically the content of the e-mails sent back and forth between my fellow FTBorgs is confidential. This is as much for your protection as it is for ours – Jason’s posts are essentially nothing but profanity, punctuated with enough bestiality porn to make 4chan blush. However, I will tell you that, behind the scenes, the phrase “impostor syndrome” is getting thrown around a lot, as we have just picked up a new slew of really impressive bloggers.
Everyone go say hi to Black Skeptics and Maryam Namazie.
Black Skeptics: I’m not going to lie here – feeling a little insecure at having these powerhouses blogging right next to me, but at the same time I am super-pumped that I am on their team. I’m particularly excited that we’re going to have more discussions of race and race issues, because (obviously) I think it’s the next big component we need to add to our skeptical lexicon. While I’m tempted to say it’s nice to have backup, it’s far more likely that I’ll be the one providing playing Goose to their Maverick (huh?).
Maryam Namazie: What is there to say about Maryam Namazie that hasn’t already been said about The Grand Canyon? She’s deep, she’s impressive, and everyone should check her out before they die. It’s great that we’re picking up an international flavour (which is to say, outside North America), and Maryam is, more than anyone else here, highly qualified to speak about Islamism with authority and proper nuance.
The Freethought Blogs brand is gaining credibility by leaps and bounds. It’s forcing me to up my game (an arms race for which I have coined the phrase “mutually assured construction”). For you, dear reader, this means naught but good stuff coming your way.
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I didn’t get the memo. This is odd, because there are a good 20-odd memos that the authors at FTB send back and forth each day (for example, yesterday’s involved a discussion of cruel childhood nicknames, and which type of porn pays more money – very crucial stuff). I didn’t realize that blog arch-rivals colleagues and valued friends Dana Hunter over at In Tequila es Verdad and the dastardly and conniving forthright and plain-spoken JT Eberhard at WWJTD would begin BRIBING their readers to shell out cash to their illegal money-laundering outfits Donors Choose campaigns.
Dana shamelessly promises the following:
So. Incentives. I shall give thee incentives, because this is something we should all do together.
1. I’ll write a short story for the highest donor. You can even choose the subject, if you like, and you’ll get a paper copy complete with autograph, if you wish. You’ll have to give me until the end of the year, because I’m stupid enough to try NaNo this November, but I’ll have it written and sent to you in January. Yes, I will haul my arse to the hated post office just for you.
2. The second-highest donor will get a personally-collected hand sample. That’s right! I’ll post a list of places I’m going this summer (once I know what they are!), and you tell me what hunk o’ beautiful geology you want me to package up and mail to you.
3. I’ll match 4 (count them, 4) donations of $50. So you $50 folk get to double your money! Don’t let that stop you from donating more, of course! And if you guys manage to fund these projects before I can whip my credit card out, you can each pick a project of your own for me to donate to.
4. Starving Students Offer: Those of you too strapped for cash to manage more than small donations can still get a little something! Send me an email telling me what you’re studying, why you chose your major, and why you donated, and I’ll showcase you guys on the site. Plus, I’ll write a poem for the person whose note makes me punch the air and shout, “Yes! Science can haz future!” Same caveats apply as the short story deal.
5. I’ve also got some super-snazzy Mount St. Helens posters, so all who have donated to any of our projects and want their names in for that have a chance at winning one of Mother Earth’s great works of art. Yahoo knows me as dhunterauthor.
While the cunning JT vows to bestow his own gifts:
I’ll also give some incentives above and beyond general altruism (and the fact that you probably want non-crappy music to put on your ipods in the future). If we hit $2,000, I will produce a karaoke video of singing nothing but Nsync songs all night. I’ll even learn some of the dances.
If you donate $50, I’ll let you pick a song for me to record (if I don’t know it, I’ll learn it).
If you donate $500, I will write a song about you and record it.
Well, the gauntlet has been thrown down! I know that my readers are above such petty attempts at bribery, because you are moral and altruistic people (did I forget to mention really good-looking?). However, I also know that if a bribe is offered, you wouldn’t be so rude as to turn it down. After all, you might hurt the briber’s feelings. So here’s the deal. I don’t have a lot of stuff to give you, but I can do this. The three highest donors will receive signed copies of the CROWN EP record, as well as some pretty fancy CROWN swag. The top donor will also receive an advance copy of our debut full-length record (recording starts in January). If that top donor pledges more than $75, I will harangue the other guys into learning and performing a song of that Donor’s Choice (see what I did there)?
Dig deep, Cromrades! You wouldn’t want to get beaten by a flippin’ geologist and a musician two worthy and respectable adversaries, would you?
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I have been remiss in plugging my DonorsChoose widget and project selection. Aside from a cutesy announcement last week, I haven’t done a very good job in explaining why I chose humanities over science. It’s not simply because I am vociferously staking out my position within the FTB network as a contrarian, although that is probably part of it. It’s because I am a passionate believer in the value of the humanities.
We, as a society, keep expending precious energy and human capital fighting old battles. When I read the newspapers, particularly the politics sections, George Santayana’s maxim “the one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again” repeatedly pops into my head (although apparently that isn’t what it means). Our pathetic knowledge of where we have been as a society and as a species leads us to run down the same blind alleys again and again. Our lack of knowledge about how human beings behave leads us to pie-in-the-sky policies that only work if human beings adhere to a rigid narrative of either decency/rationality/vice/whatever. Our inability to learn from our past mistakes puts us in the dangerous position of repeating them, often with disastrous result.
Science is a wonderful tool – possibly the most important discovery humanity has ever made. Science is, however, only one aspect of an underlying process of relying on evidence, reason and rigour when deciding what is true and what is false. Taught properly, the humanities incorporate this process and help us tie together disparate narratives of what has happened, and what is happening. When applied to literature, it helps us understand the context of great works in order to further our understanding of the subjective realities of our fellow creatures. When applied to philosophy, it allows us to critique ideas based on their utility and how closely they reflect the observed world. When applied to history, it allows us to construct a cohesive picture of how things came to be the way they are, based on all the evidence rather than just some.
Training in the humanities, most importantly, helps nurture our ability to construct rational arguments. To take several facts or pieces of evidence and synthesize them in such a way as to allow others to understand a position that may be foreign to them. In a time when the barrier between the average (first-world) person and new ideas is nearly non-existent, and when these ideas often conflict with each other, it is more crucial than ever to defend those aspects of inquiry which foster critical thinking, and allow us to present ideas coherently. This is a job for the humanities.
So please consider donating a few dollars (if you can) to the worthy causes indexed within the DonorsChoose project.
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I don’t have a lot of ‘favourites’ – I usually find such rankings to be overly reductive. I like many different kinds of things for different reasons, and any single one that I rank as #1 will be an inaccurate label. From the list of writers that I most admire and try to emulate, however, Christopher Hitchens sits among the upper echelon (so too, incidentally, does Greta Christina). He has a talent for wielding the English language the way an artist does a paintbrush – making the rendering of ideas into words beautiful and evocative far beyond mere semantics. He is the kind of writer who could use his words to so utterly excoriate you that you undergo an existential crisis, but to whom you would be grateful afterward for the experience. So, it was with great joy that I picked up my latest treasure from the framing store today:
I purchased this brilliant portrait from a San Francisco artist called Adrian Covert. Here is the description of the piece:
Hitchens is depicted making a point, while toasting his Johnny Walker Black & Perrier. He has what appears to be a halo behind his head, but that’s just superstition. His suit is designed using collage from the writings of Albert Einstein, Richard Dawkins, Salman Rushdie, David Hume, Mark Twain, and John Updike. The background is designed using collage from the King James Bible and the Holy Koran. For reasons both ethical and artistic, no books were harmed in the creation of this painting, or of these prints.
Hitch now proof-reads all my posts as I sit in my living room chair, looking over my shoulder and exhorting me to find ever-better ways of putting my thoughts into the language he loves so dear. Here’s a version without me in it:
“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.” - Christopher Hitchens
I was reading over this morning’s post and I realized there’s one last thing that I’m not looking forward to, and it deserves it own post. Readers who have followed me here from the old blog will have heard me discuss this issue a million times, but new readers may not have thought about it.
I realize this statement is so obvious as to be nearly ridiculous, but I will explain what I mean. My experience has been that people are really shy when it comes to discussing race, regardless of their background. This is understandable – racism has left a psychological scar on our society for generations and is an ongoing source of strife. When someone is willing to talk about it, people are uncomfortable at first. Once the initial reluctance wears off, people then launch into a long list of questions that they didn’t realize they’d always had.
I’m sure you are familiar with this phenomenon if you are the only atheist in your social circle. Making your faithlessness plain to your friends shocked them a bit at first, but eventually you had to start fielding questions. Some of them were out of genuine, benign curiosity (“so are you at least spiritual?”), while others were a bit more hostile (“so what, you think I’m just a piece of soulless meat?”). If you were the only atheist they knew, you started getting confessions about how they had doubts, or attempts to proselytize to draw you back in, or unsolicited opinions about how much they hate Richard Dawkins, or whatever. You became the one-stop shop for questions about atheism.
In the same way, the first person to poke their head out and talk about the taboo of race gets that kind of attention. [Read more…]
Hello readers.
Look to the right of your screen. Now back here. Now back to the right. What do you see? It’s a DonorsChoose widget, where you can donate money to a worthy cause.
Look back to me. What’s in my hand? It’s educational opportunities for children. Look again – the opportunities are in the humanities.
I’m on a blog.
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I started this blog less than 2 years ago, partially in a misguided attempt to impress a girl (how could that possibly have failed to work?), but also because I had some encouragement from friends who liked the kinds of topics I would talk about in periodic Facebook notes. I had also just moved and had started a new chapter in my life – I thought it was worthwhile to write some things down. In that short time my writings have attracted a small but loyal following, and I’ve been lucky enough to place them on a variety of platforms aside from my lowly former home at WordPress. Most recently, this includes a regular gig here at FreeThoughtBlogs.
When I was first invited to write here, I was delirious with happiness. Who would have thought that a pup like me would get a chance to run with the big dogs? How amazing it would be to get a big of splashover traffic from Pharyngula or from Dispatches? What a great chance for me to rub shoulders with people who I’d previously only been able to quietly admire from afar! And hey, maybe I’ll get a couple of bucks out of the deal too! Because I’m not an idiot, I said yes almost immediately.
But as the date for the launch grew closer and closer, I began to feel my anxiety grow. Blogging is not a game for the thin-skinned, to be sure. When you put your ideas out into the world, provided you actually care about your ideas, opening them up to the scrutiny of anyone who happens to pass by is a pretty daunting prospect. Imagine literally living in a glass house, where every move you make could be scrutinized by your neighbours or just people strolling down the street – people who feel entitled to spraypaint their opinions of you on your walls. Now, if you live out in the boondocks (as I have up until now), this kind of exposure might not be a big deal. After all, it’s the same few people passing by, and they’ve seen your man-boobs before – whatevs. Now I was being offered a similarly-transparent accommodation, but this time in a bustling metropolis.
Anyway, I thought I would take this opportunity to share with you some of the thoughts that have been cropping up in the ol’ noodle over the past few weeks. [Read more…]