Y’all remember Pastor Tom, right? Weird cranky Christian who got himself banned some time ago, ran a blog that he called “Hard Truth” in which he recited conservative dogma and called himself brave for doing it? He’s back. He’s started up his blog again, and guess what? I partly inspired him!
I wondered over to Pharyngula, where our old pal PZ Myers writes. I looked at a couple things, who he was picking on now, if my name was still in his “dungeon”(it is), and what his traffic was llike. (He has a “sitemeter” link at the bottom of his page) And I was shocked at what I found.
Yes, you are seeing this correct. Pharyngula’s traffic is way, way down. I must point out that I have absolutely no idea what has caused this. But none the less, it was very motivating to see the great Pharyngula down by around eighty-four percent.
This encouraged me because it showed me that changes in this world, however small, however insignificant (which, let us be very clear, the fact that PZ’s traffic is plummeting is very insignificant) can happen, and that Christians have to remain on offense. This is why I’m back doing this. This is why I hope that I can be the best pastor, husband, soul-winner, father, etc. that I can be. Because I know it makes a difference because I know God is still on the throne. Please don’t misunderstand me, seeing a meaningless atheist blog down in traffic is not why I’ve come back to blogging, it was just something that encouraged me along the way to making this decision.
It’s true. You know, that move we made last August? The traffic at Scienceblogs is way, way down, because I’ve moved most of my efforts here, to Freethoughtblogs. The site at Sb only gets partial content, everybody knows it, and so almost everyone comes here now, where traffic is way way up. He has absolutely no way of knowing what has caused this, except maybe for the big bold banner at the top of every page that says:
More articles by PZ Myers can be found on Freethoughtblogs at the new Pharyngula!
You know, the banner with three links to the new network so that no one would miss it. Except Pastor Tom.
Poor Pastor Tom, I have some HARD TRUTH for you: you’re dumb as a bag of slugs.
Before crying triumph at the decline of the heathen, he ought to take a look at Freethoughtblogs. We’re his worst nightmare.
Don’t ask me what my traffic is like right now. I never look at stats; it’s just a big number.
I won’t ask what your stats are, but may I ask how I can take a look at your stats? Tapping on statcounter on the bottom just takes me to their website.
This is even better than the time-delay April Fool’s joke from the other day!
Perhaps you need to shadow this at the SB site, for the benefit of pastor Tom.
What a total fuckwit this Pastor truly is. Anyone who unironically keeps the name “T. Estes” deserves every mockery he clearly begs for.
Louis
amazing. Poor Tom seems to have no clue on how the intertubes full of cats work. Ah well, pure stupidity and willful ignorance seem to be the only way this type can function.
I’m surprised you’re getting half a million looks on SB. Only a handful of us still post there.
One, two, three, big number? ;)
“Soul winner” indeed. Soul winning is very hard work and it takes a lot of
training. Jack Hyles gives this bit of useful information:
It would be interesting to find out more about the history of the
obnoxious expression, “soul winner”.
LOL
Dumb as a bag of slugs.
Thanks PZ, I’ll use that at work today.
Maybe prick his bubble and inform him of yet a little more reality?
Or…maybe not!
I crossed swords with Mr Estes over at The Freethinker where he was easily dealt with. The man is a delusional fool – aren’t all the religious?
“Soul winner”? I suggest, in this case, there should be an AR in front of the word soul.
Plummeting, sort of like intelligence does as you move toward creationism/Estes.
Glen Davidson
Oh, shit! I am now trying to remember the name of T. Estes’ little buddy.
So does Hard Truth mean that he has a hard time understanding the truth?
We should let pastor T.Estes believe this is evidence of gods. That’s all the poor guy has left. What harm could it do?
And the very last thing we want is for him to realize that he isn’t banned here and take that as an invitation to start trolling again. Granted, he’s not exactly quick on the uptake, but it could happen.
“I wondered over to Pharyngula”? I wander what that means.
Where are you able to see the stats for blogs on FTB?
UC Santa Cruz folks are going to take umbrage with this demeaning of slugs.
I think this atheist’s nightmare was a banana all along.
Thunderf00t had ten million views in the last year.
No comments on Estes’ blog. Almost as if he were worried that the supposedly dwindling pharynguloid horde might…
dano: See the “KILL IT WITH FIRE!” link over on the right? Go there and post, but please don’t post here.
A True Christian ™ seeing evidence, denying it exists and arriving at the wrong conclusion? How odd, never seen that happen before.
Oh my. A Google search for “Pastor Tom Estes” is an amusing little exercise.
Wow – Sb’s traffic has taken a huge hit.
Heh.
Janine @ 14
Shaun? – PZ mentioned him in the linked post
I like the idea of getting his hopes up just to smash them again.
I think you should ask him to make one of those nice charts for the new pharyngula. That’d be the christian thing to do…
Hmm. Looks like you need to know the ID that Pharyngula was given, to pull the states. A bit of googling got me one sites:
http://statcounter.com/p1994522/summary/
So, you would need to replace the p1994522 with what ever this site uses. Good luck figuring out what it is. Maybe there is something in a cookie, or in the web page code…
Got it. It was in the web code:
http://statcounter.com/p7090442/summary/
Interesting. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen slimepit denizens make the same error. So does that mean they’re as dumb as a conservative pastor, or that Estes is as dumb as they are?
What a fucking idiot!
I sent Pastor Tom a message about this, mentioning the move and whether he was willing to update his post. I wonder what he will do.
Travis,
Noooooooo! It might lure him here!
Although we could try to get him on TZT I suppose…
I would probably enjoy his presence for a few minutes. I remember his idiocy being pretty easy to bat around and amusing. Though I should have thought this through a bit better, I forgot about the dungeon amnesty.
Yikes.
Sadly, it appears he is already the best that he can be.
… see also ‘Pastor Tom Estes: Hardly Literate’.
Ground Control to Pastor Tom…please engage thrusters on my mark…no, the thrusters…no, that button at the top of the panel…no…ah, screw it.
I’ve always found this monarchical imagery describing a deity weird.
@SC 39 –
If god’s on MY throne, He damn well better not leave a mess. I swear, every single time, He uses up all my toilet paper, and doesn’t even bother to spray or light a candle when He’s done, like His shit don’t stink.
Come one, PZ, you’re asking him to engage in enough lateral thinking to recognize and click on a link!
For a man of his intellectual leve, that is simply not fair!
Pharyngula commentariat humor, how I missed you so!
Thank you for those gems. Fantastic!
Still learning,
Robert
Pastor, I get, since he likes to try and get his very important arguments across and doesn’t want that muddled by reasonable debate.
Soul-winner, though? How does he do that without wanting to build a community?
Oh my, the ever dense T.Estes shows his…arse again. Poor ol’ Tom, never swift on the uptake.
What a moronic douchecanoe.
I wonder if Tom will ever figure out that he’s one of the morons who received general amnesty after the move.
Give him a little credit for spelling your name correctly.
Kagehi : the link tells me to log in. Can you please post the stats here ?
Thanks!
Good to see T.Estes getting schooled yet again in
realitythe hard truth. Muwahahaha!Not often I can actually say this for real and much as I hate the acronym, but “LOL”.
I would so love to see a picture of his face when he reads this article.
Personally, I am wandering if Pastor Testes is seeing the link to the new Phyrangula correct?
However this makes me happy because seeing him look not very smart, observationally, grammatically (which, let us be very clear, the fact that he’s still blogging is incredibly insignificant), can happen, and is probably a bad argument for him.
[I reserve the right to mock anyone with such a feeble grasp on word choice and syntax.]
My latest Theory is that belief in fundie xianity causes cognitive impairment.
Originally it was just a hypothesis but has been upgraded.
The data:
1. Michele Bachmann, two degrees, one in law, passed the bar. Now she appears incapable of crossing the street by herself.
2. The Tea Party/GOP. All of their candidates, supposedly chosen by god, were morons. Perry, Cain, Bachmann, Satanorum. In fact, the christofascists had to nominate a nonXian who will be our first nonXian president in a long time, if elected.
Great Cthulhu, they couldn’t find a single one of their own that wasn’t a gibbering idiot.
3. The usual trolls that wander through the evolution and freethought blogs. They never ever look remotely intelligent. I keep thinking they should go back to school and finish that grade school diploma some day.
4. Tom Estes and most of the ministers and priests. They never look like they ever actually once tried to figure something simple out.
I remember this dude… for a chortle I’d check out his old blog every now and then. An utter moron.
How will he ever find your new site if you don’t post this on your old site?
Oh… ya.
Never mind.
I lol’d, at least.
Gosh, that’s totally more parsimonious and better supported than “assholes often gravitate to fundamentalist sects”.
They don’t usually.
Most of them are born into and brainwashed by their parents into fundie cults.
The parsimonious thing would have been to think before you post something stupid.
Hmmm, you weren’t raised fundie by any chance?
PS I left out one key piece of data. Fundies score lower than the general population on IQ tests. This was mentioned by Dennett, in two of his printed works, one a meta-analysis of 46 studies. It seems to be a well supported theory.
@ PZ
You probably should have invested a couple of clicks and added the cumulative page views of pharyngula on fb and sb. Nothing more convincing than a figure….
Why slander slugs?
What slander? You must not have been around when T.Estes was screeding at the top of his voice at Sciblogs.
Oh god, all I could think of was the slug mating video you posted a while back. There were squishy noises.
Oh, apologies, madscientist. My brain she no work today. Nope.
Y’all remember Pastor Tom, right?
actually, I had completely forgotten about the little pissant, until you reminded me.
uh, thanks?
:P
I wondered over to Pharyngula
i didn’t know wondered had become a verb of motion.
how, exactly, does one “wonder” to places, without the use of mind altering substances?
or has the good pastor decided to expand his mind a bit?
let us be very clear, the fact that PZ’s traffic is plummeting is very insignificant
but… nonetheless worth devoting multiple days of the good pastor’s time to construct graphs and blog entries about…
*rolleyes*
Not sure how much it matters as to site hits, but I generally only read via Google Reader … unless I need to comment. :)
I just wonder if that is somehow reflected in hit totals.
My latest Theory is that belief in fundie xianity causes cognitive impairment.
that’s nice.
you know there actually are large bodies of research in the peer reviewed pysch and sociology lit on this subject?
or, if you want to jump to the explanation that has the single largest percentage association with the exhibited behavior under discussion, try Altemeyer’s book.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
tested by dozens of independent sociologists over the last 30 years; has a better than 70% accuracy rate in predicting these kinds of behaviors, which is bloody remarkable for a single index!
hit totals.
btw, hits are a grossly inaccurate way to measure real traffic.
you want unique visitor stats instead.
What (reload) do (reload) you (reload) mean (reload)?
@matriculous:
Yeah, I was wondering too, so I started just middle clicking the links to make sure that bloggers I like are getting my page views/hits. I still read most of the stuff using the Google reader interface, then close the tab that had the story when I’m done and don’t want to comment.
What (reload) do (reload) you (reload) mean (reload)?
:)
The slugs were not just slandered they were slimed.
poor slugs
…also included in “hits” are outside page requests for links or images.
so anytime anyone hits a page that loads a link or image from pharyngula, that gets counted as hits too.
well, unless there are scripts in the page using the links or images to prevent it, and few bother with that.
Pastor Testicle probably can’t access Freethoughtblogs because it’s blocked at the church computer he’s borrowing.
Wandering is like ambling, only more random. It’s similar to the drunkard’s walk in statistics.
I haven’t lol’d so much in a while! Now I have cofee on my keyboard and my boss is giving me a funny look.
The slugs of the world do not appreciate the comparison. They’re much smarter than that.
you can get a decent stats from alexa
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/freethoughtblogs.com#trafficstats
but do not take to seriously the summary, better look at the demographic details, since it´s a bit uncommon, as any reader would guess..:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/freethoughtblogs.com#trafficstats
This is like a Persian satrap going to Issus the day after the Battle of Gaugamela, noted the recent decline in the numbers of Macedonians on that battlefield, and gloating over how his side was clearly now winning the war.
I am actually laughing out loud. Well, I was until I recovered enough to post this anyway. I hadn’t heard of those idiot before and didn’t see the ‘T. Estes’ connection until Loius pointed it out. And then Janine asking for the name of his little buddy, as well. Comedy gold. One of the ways Pharyngula brings joy into my life :D
Sorry, I know you were all there too and this is probably old from everyone else’s point of view but I just wanted to express my delight since I’m experiencing this particular bit of nominative determinism for the first time.
I wandered lonely to Pharyngula
where
If you don’t look out they’ll finger ya.
Yes, horrible, horrible doggerel with only a slight pretense to proper scansion or rhyme.
*that idiot, sorry, preview didn’t work without JavaScript is my excuse.
“HARD TRUTH” – perhaps he thinks he is offering up mental Viagra for others like himself, with limp and ineffectual minds.
TEstes is aiming at winning a Grammy now? Impressive!
Am I the only one who thought “bag of slugs” referred to counterfeit coins rather than gastropods?
On the Alexa site mentioned in #77 the search results for pharyngula bring up the link with only three keywords: suckers, octopus suckers and finland. The strangeness of that fills me with delight. I wander which one applies to T. Estes?
So if I’m reading this right, he was inspired to come back becasue he was convinced that his opponent had been beaten into submission. He returned just so he could kick you when (in his perception) you were down. How very brave of him.
I went to go comment on his blog. Guess what? There doesn’t appear to be a comments section. How typically Christian.
Why the gastropod hate?
With all due respect to you bizarre people of Santa Cruz, banana slugs are evil. EVIL! Those ugly bastards are one of the big reasons (pun intended) I live over here in the redneck hell side of Washington. Every once in a while I still see one… *shudder*.
So he admits that he’s doing it out of spite?
It worked this morning, before going to work, since then, it stopped working. They must have noticed people looking at it, or something, and “fixed” the access. :p
With all due respect to you bizarre people of Santa Cruz, banana slugs are evil.
evil?
hardly.
actually, they’re kinda cute.
http://www.ucsc.edu/about/images/mascot-550_v2.jpg
see?
*looks again*
oh wait, wrong picture.
http://www.digital-landscape.net/photo/%28album%29/Insects/%28photo%29/max/banana_slug_2.jpg
there, that’s better.
yeah, that first pic WAS kinda creepy.
Wandering is like ambling
but is wandering wondering?
if you wonder while you wander, does that change your direction or momentum?
inquiring minds want to know!
Saw that post and laughed my ass off.
Some people do more harm to themselves with a little bit of data than we could do with a truckload.
Tim
http://freedomofnonbelief.blogspot.com/
I wouldn’t eat one (unless, I guess, I was literally starving) but I’m always happy to watch ’em living their peaceful slug lives in the redwood debris. And pick ’em up to gross out the kiddies ;)
DON’T CLICK THIS PHOTO IF YOU’RE SQUEAMISH
http://goldmindsblog.com/storage/Banana%20slug.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1302136489365
Still evil.
I fully admit it’s an irrational phobia, but seeing one of those slimers slinking across my path just sends my stomach into a twist. I mean, at least with my bee, spider, or fundie phobias, the things might actually have a chance to do me some harm in some way. Banana slugs? Are they going to wave their eyestalks at me?
It seems that Pastor Tom was well aware of the move to Freethought blogs – here’s the evidence.
If that’s him – and it’s hard to imagine why anyone would pretend to be him simply in order to post such a feeble jibe – this makes him not just breathtakingly stupid but intellectually dishonest with it.
Granted, this isn’t news, but it’s nice to have it spelled out quite so clearly.
@Louis
Wait, so unless he changes his name, he deserves to be mocked?
There are many, many, reasons to mock that idiot. “His name is fucking hilarious because when you put the initial next to the surname it sounds like balls! Yes, balls! That’s his real name! I know, right? For realsies!” is not one of them.
I bet you were a real blast for the kids you went to school with who had a name that sounded even remotely suggestive. I guess they should just change it though, eh?
Thanks, that helped. I was feeling really dumb working on a research project and running out of ideas. Its good to know I am not the dumbest of them all.
I guess they should just change it though, eh?
is your real name Fleegman?
Banana slugs? Are they going to wave their eyestalks at me?
you know, I actually read a horror story once about someone being eaten alive by giant slugs.
it actually was pretty fucking scary.
Imagine having a slimy cheese grater on a conveyor belt, applied to your skin continuously…
and by toothy conveyor belt..
THIS
is what I mean.
oh, did I forget to mention we have carnivorous giant slugs here in Kiwiland?
sorry, let me rectify that now.
oh, and the shelled versions:
http://www.doc.govt.nz/upload/documents/about-doc/concessions-and-permits/conservation-revealed/nz-land-snails-lowres.pdf
Ichthyic:
I saw that movie late-night on CBC when I was about eight. Scared the fuck out of me, to the point I remember it 36 years later.
It was just a bad rip-off of Them!, but it still scared me.
I reckon I was an impressionable child.
@Ichthyic
No. Therefore…what? Therefore we should mock him for having an unfortunate initial + surname combination?
As arguments go, it’s pretty weak.
No, he is NEVER wrong. It is all an illusion. LALALA. He will simply reprint the stats from the old site to “prove” he is right and that we just aren’t very smart. Oh woe is us, like.
Poor Tom kept me amused for about a week on and off before I realised that it was just cruel. It’s like trying to force feed a biology course to someone with a 5 minute memory. Quite literally in some places.
Do.
Not.
Want.
@Fleegman
It’s not the name. It’s the lack of realization that signing specifically “T. Estes” may not be the optimal representation of his name.
I see pastor Tom has responded. Now he claims he does not care, and that it was a minor part of his message. He just cared enough to devote half his article to it and make some graphs. And now he whines about how poorly he was treated. Boo hoooooo. I weep for him.
I have to say I was impressed with this bit. A crank admitting he doesn’t know why something he thinks is good happened, rather than crowing about how he accomplished it? +1, Pastor Tom. (Too bad that doesn’t bring us up to zero, but it’s something.)
I have to admit this whole bit with “hard truth” confuses me. Why is it that religions which specialize in dishing out easy answers take such pains to claim they teach something hard?
So by his own logic he should crawl back under his rock now. Right?
Well, books.google.com/ngrams seems to start the creepy phrase “soul winner” in 1859 with CH Spurgeon’s The Soul Winner, or How to lead sinners to the Savior. A website about the book gives this little gem as an inspiring quote:
…another reason to despise religion, really. Though Spurgeon’s book is a lot classier than today’s televangelists even if that is setting the bar low. “Soul winning” might go back a little further.
Spurgeon got this right:
Let’s have some more raucous and excited atheists, amirite?
More entertainment. T.Estes’ response on ‘hard truth’ lists this:
Goes on to gripe about Obama ruining America by associating with the “homosexuals”. Quite a charmer.
Well, we’re talking about people who for the last 150 years were predicting “imminent” fall of the theory of evolution… :)