Blog Against Theocracy

Neural Gourmet has put out a call for everyone to blog against theocracy:

I’d like invite you all to Blog Against Theocracy. This is a little blog swarm being put together by everybody’s favorite panties blogger Blue Gal for Easter weekend, April 6th through the 8th. The idea is simple. Just post something related to, and in support of, the separation of church and state each of those three days. Something big, something small, artistic, musical, textual or otherwise. The topic is your choosing. Whether your thing is stem cell research, intelligent design/Creationism, abortion rights, etc., it’s all good. Separation of church and state impacts so many issues and is essential.

This is hardly a challenge for me—I have to consciously restrain myself from turning this blog into one long sustained growl against religion anyway, so all I have to do is take the muzzle off for three days. And as it is, you people will probably tell me that you don’t notice that the 6th is any different than the 5th of April.

Molly winners for March

Once again, in the nomination thread for the Molly award, two names came up over and over again, and since this isn’t the kind of thing where we should nit-pick, I’ll put up two winners once more:

Date Winners Sample comments
March 2007 Blake Stacey He’s a smart feller.

whenever I’m reading a comment and thinking “Right on, man” I come to the end and there’s his name.
Hank Fox He’s funny and always includes a thought provoking statement with clarity and logic.

Very bright guy who comes up with the greatest metaphors to make his points.

Now I know there are a few complaints about this being a popularity contest, but that’s because it is — that’s the whole point. You all know you don’t just come here because you like me—judging by my mail, a fair number of you are driven to fits by me—but there’s also this community of active commenters here that attracts readers, too. This is a tool to give me an excuse to acknowledge the gang lurking under the articles.

Order of the Molly for March 2007

Last month, I tried a new motivational tactic to reward good commenting, allowing you to nominate and select one of the commenters here for the Order of the Molly award, acknowledging excellence in commenting. Kristine Harley and Scott Hatfield won that recognition that time around. I said it was going to be a monthly phenomenon, and what do you know, another month has come by, and it’s time to do it again.

This is an important award, I’ll have you know. As Kristine noticed, it got some people worked up — John A. Davison is going on at some length about it, although, to be perfectly honest, he only seems to be talking to himself and his little friend, Martin. Still, it is amusing.

Anyway, this is easy. You can see the previous thread for examples, but all you have to do is name some commenter whose contributions you enjoy, and maybe say a word or two to convince others that your choice is worthy. I’ll count up all the mentions on Sunday, and declare a winner then. Don’t turn this into a serious competition, though—it really is intended to just celebrate the good ‘uns, and there will be more opportunities to recognize people in the future.

Bruce Sterling writes an obituary for blogs

Write faster, everyone, you don’t have much time. Bruce Sterling gives blogs only ten more years.

“There are 55 million blogs and some of them have got to be good,” Sterling said, during a speech here at the SXSW conference in reference to the slogan on blog search site technorati.com. “Well, no, actually. They don’t.”

“I don’t think there will be that many of them around in 10 years. I think they are a passing thing.”

I think he’s right, and he’s wrong. This idea of self-publishing and babbling on the net isn’t going to go away—I expect it’ll be going on in some form or another as long as we’ve got a network to play on.

Otherwise, though, sure, something is going to change, it always does. I wouldn’t mind some radical new change that would allow us to jettison the ugly term “blog”, but I think Sterling is being a poor judge of human nature if he thinks us primates will stop chattering at each other, even if the quality of our communications never rise to his standards of “good”.

NSFW? NSFP!

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I had a premonition that this would happen: that when I wrote about The Strange Case of the Woman with a Breast on her Foot someone would suggest that I should have put a “Not Safe For Work” warning on it, even ironically, perhaps. It’s such a common thing, that we voluntarily self-censor; I’ve done it a few times myself, and have felt weird about it. Why should we be at all concerned about linking to a website that might have a picture of a bare breast (or even stranger, a nipple on a foot)? It’s not as if it should be regarded as hideous or offensive, and it’s a bit creepy that we so willingly denigrate the appearance of the human body.

At the same time, would anyone regard that ghastly video in the Rivers of blood post to be “not safe for work”? Probably not. We get all hypersensitive about a little healthy exposed flesh, but animals getting their throats cut? Nah, you aren’t going to get fired for seeing that.

Fortunately, Susie Bright has an excellent post on this very subject. Go ahead and follow that link. I promise, there are no eviscerated animals, horrific traffic accidents, corpses, videos from Iraq, or photos of factories belching toxins into the atmosphere at that site. It might not be safe for prudes to read, but there’s nothing to offend people with healthier attitudes. And it’s a good message: don’t be embarrassed by normal, healthy, positive images of people.

Inside scoop from Majikthise

It looks like Lindsay Beyerstein dodged a bullet—she was offered the position with the Edwards campaign that Amanda Marcotte accepted, and she turned it down. It’s a smart article—there are some good lessons to be learned about blogs and politics from it.

The Edwards campaign wants decentralized people-powered politics. Ironically, by hiring well-known bloggers to manage a destination Web site, it was actually centralizing and micromanaging. Every campaign needs a blog, but the most important part of a candidate’s netroots operation is the disciplined political operatives who can quietly build relationships with bloggers outside the campaign. And the bomb-throwing surrogates need to be outside, where they can make full use of their gifts without saddling a campaign with their personal political baggage.

Lindsay knew she’d be targeted, just as Amanda was — she’s a godless pro-choicer, too. That’s actually a disturbing problem; why should favoring secularism and a woman’s right to choose be a detriment to someone working for a Democratic candidate?

Don’t panic!

Quite a few people have written to me asking what’s wrong with richarddawkins.net…they can’t get through to it, and get DNS errors. No worries, everyone—it’s good news. They’ve been experiencing ever-escalating levels of traffic, so to cope with the incoming hordes, they’ve just migrated to a new and better server. Give the network a little time, you should be able to get to it in the next day or two.