This is how we will lose

Palin scares me, but what worries me more is that we will screw up again and hand the executive office over to another gang of losers, and we can’t afford that anymore. Now look at the open thread I set up last night, and you’ll see why I’m concerned. What did people do? They got distracted by irrelevancies, such as the opportunity to exercise a little macho sexism, and then that turned into a nasty, full-blown knife fight with everyone snarling at each other. This is exactly what the Republicans want, writ small on this little tiny island of the blogosphere.

That’s not how we’re going to beat back the troglodytes.

Palin is a stalking horse for failed social and economic and military policies. We don’t want to get drawn away from the important message of defeating those bad policies by the temptation of cheap shots at her appearance and sex, especially because those cheap shots make her look like a sympathetic victim and help advance the Republican agenda.

So please, think. Casual sexism plays into the hands of the bad guys on both sides. What frightens me most is that Palin got up and lied and said nothing of substance, and people are so distracted by the fact that she has breasts that the lies were allowed to slide by. This is how the Democrats can self-destruct, once again.

Greg & PZ’s Excellent Party

Scienceblogs.com is about to hit one of those arbitrary round-number milestones: sometime soon, someone will make the one millionth comment. Our generous Seed overlords wish to mark this event with celebrations all over the world, and are planning to bestow upon us small sums of money for the purpose of purchasing refreshments at gatherings of bloggers and readers near the places where our physical forms abide.

In other words, we get to have a party and Seed will pay for the beer.

So Greg Laden and I are going to organize a joint party — if I tried to have one in Morris, the contrast with my readership would make me look sad — so we’re going to get together somewhere in the Twin Cities area some evening.

The best time for me will be the evening of Thursday, 18 September, because that’s when I’ll be driving through on my way to Madison anyway. Now we’re looking for a nice venue: something with seating for a throng, that’s not too noisy (we’ll provide the noise, instead of a football game on the big screen or a band on the stage), and with good food and beer, somewhere near the Twin Cities, and where some of you readers might actually show up. Make suggestions here and at Greg’s place and we’ll pull it together.

How nice

Finally, after months of silence, my old server at pharyngula.org lives again. It turns out that all my head-desking was for nought — the reason it was offline is that it had been intentionally blocked on suspicion of harboring illicit p2p activity. They just forgot to mention it.

Anyway, all anybody will really care about there is that my daughter’s blog, Lacrimae Rerum, is back online now.

I may regret this, but…Open Enrollment Thread!

Since some people were envious that I singled out one blog earlier today, here’s your opportunity: leave your url in the comments here, say a little bit about why your blog is worthy of my attention, and I’ll toss it onto the blogroll. Attention for everyone!

Caveats: for technical reasons, your blog must have an rss feed/syndication. I reserve the right to ignore your blog if I don’t like it. Even if you get on my blogroll, I do turn it over regularly, so there’s no guarantee I’ll keep it there for long.

Public intellectuals labeled and targeted

If you’re looking for more members of my tribe, here’s a a list of The Top 100 Liberal Arts Professor Blogs. There’s no indication of how they determined that these were “top” blogs, or what a “top” blog is (there is some sexual innuendo we could indulge in there), and strangely, Aetiology is classified as a psychology blog…it was probably compiled by a liberal arts professor. Anyway, you can find some interesting blogs here!