The August Molly announcement

I made a dreadful mistake. With the new iteration of the Molly awards, I thought I’d have you people pick one marvelous, excellent comment to highlight each month…and then it turns out you’re all pumping out so many good comments that it’s really impossible to pick just one. It didn’t help that I took the coward’s way out and only narrowed the decision to eight in the Phase II post. And then every single one of the eight chosen comments got plenty of votes.

Lesson learned. We’ll do this again next month, where you’ll get to remind me of what comments you thought particularly worthy over the course of September, and then I’ll make the hard choices and reduce it to just three that you’ll vote on, with one winner. I know, it’s terrible and unfair when there are so many choices, but life is unfair.

This month, though, because I was so slack and put up too many choices, I’m going to post the top three vote-getters. Next time, I will be hard, I will be disciplined, I will be mean.

By the way, I saw all the suggestions for a squid button to mark favored comments. Is this just another name for a “Like” button? I’m sure there are add-ons for that, but before I go digging and prod the tech to put it in, is that what you really want?

A little bit about the new guy

It’s an honor and a treat to have had PZ ask me to join him here at Pharyngula. Though there have been months lately where I haven’t been a particularly exuberant participant in the lively and collegial discussions here, my relationship with Pharyngula goes back a ways — back to ought-four, in fact, back when the blog was hosted on the Cray 2 in PZ’s undersea lair, and commenters underwent a series of strong electric shocks in an early form of CAPTCHA technology. It was just me and Hank Fox commenting back then, I think, and Old Man Buell the painter, and a giant ground sloth name of Shep. Good times.

Despite that long tenure, though, I haven’t been really active here all that much. I read regularly, but aside from that lurking, and the requisite supporting you all in email, I’m really kind of a newbie here. So a few things about me to get out of the way so you know who you’re talking to: [Read more…]

Pharyngula is about to add a co-blogger

Are you ready for this? Chris Clarke now has authorship privileges on Pharyngula.

Those of you who know his work will be awestruck. Chris is a phenomenal writer, a true progressive, and a committed environmentalist. I’d been thinking about bringing in an additional contributor, because let me tell you, this semester is going to kick my butt and I am already stressing out, and when I thought about who I would just dream of partnering with, Chris was right at the top of the list…so it was a tremendous honor when he accepted.

This is going to be awesome.

Phase II of the new Molly awards

Man, you’re a ferocious and mouthy bunch. You gave me links to a lot of excellent comments, and I pared them down to these eight (next time, I might cut them down more). The next step: vote by leaving a comment with the number of the nomination you like best. These are just short excerpts, you’ll have to click on them to read the whole thing.

  1. Anyway, respectful transgender people and transsexual people alike wanted to organize around the common ground that does exist (which is plenty). So they/we needed a word that we could agree *did* represent everyone.

  2. This is fucking serious: A man just made a joke about raping a woman who he’s never met, who never did him any harm, who he doesn’t know at all, and he did this without considering how the fuck it might impact her or people like her.

  3. I’ve done a bit more reading and thinking, and feel more than ever that the 2nd amendment was intended to facilitate well-trained militias, and had diddly to do with personal gun ownership.

  4. Why are you so damned insistent on finding that one special circumstance when it’s morally OK for you to do something horrific to me? Why is it so unacceptable to you that I have bodily autonomy in all circumstances?

  5. That hard truth being: torture is, as many, many competent professionals are telling you, close to useless for getting timely and precise intel. Rather: its only particularly reliable value as a tool of statecraft is as a method of terror and suppression.

  6. The demands religion makes on human sexuality are unreasonable. There has literally never been a human society on the face of the planet, no matter how thoroughly crushed under the thumb of theistic tyranny, where people actually consistently restricted themselves to monogamous marital sex.

  7. BTW, keep your Oogedy Boogedy death cult religion away from my kids and pets.

  8. Playing devil’s advocate does not require lying about your own position. Indeed, that term is generally used only if a person agrees with others in the discussion, but wishes to present the position of someone who disagrees.

The New Molly

You may recall that when I imposed the new rules on the site I also announced that there would also be changes to how the Molly awards were given: instead of giving them to commenters, we’d award them to specific comments. I suggested at that time that you might all start making note of exceptional comments — now it’s time to refer back to those notes.

Here’s the way it works: People should repost a link and quote from their favorite comments here; you can also just chime in and voice your approval for people’s choices. I’ll let you guys chime in here for a few days, and develop a preliminary list. I’ll then pick out the top three and post them in their entirety in a top-level post on Wednesday, and you’ll all vote (Yes! An online poll!) for the best.

So go to it. Think back over the last month or so and tell me what comment you found most enlightening, entertaining, provocative, or otherwise stimulating.