This one isn’t any more cheerful

What nonsense, you may wonder, is going to afflict us next? Surely we’ve hit rock bottom. Nope.

Cult-like extremist movements appear to provide an antidote to the potent mixture of isolation, uncertainty, changing narratives, and fear we have experienced during the pandemic by offering a skewed form of safety, stability, and certainty, along with a cohort of people who are just like us, who believe us and believe in us. As the activist David Sullivan—a man who devoted his life to infiltrating cults in order to extricate loved ones from their grip—pointed out, no one ever joins a cult: They join a community of people who see them. In 2022, this appeal of cults will only grow, and those that arise next year will make QAnon seem like the good old days.

Yeah, great, I’m going back to bed. Wake me up in, oh, 2025 and I’ll reassess.

A little Sunday morning despair

High on my list of evidences that it’s all the media’s fault: that Tim Pool, a shallow, incompetent hack has gotten incredibly wealthy off of YouTube’s inscrutable algorithm.

It’s not just Pool and YouTube, though. I see the entire lineup of commentators on Fox News, FaceBook’s bizarre promotion of quackery everywhere, and the rise of 4chan (or whatever they call it nowadays) and its enabling of conspiracy theories. It’s everywhere. The entire damn country is soaking in a cesspool full of idiots bobbing at the top, and there are no checks on them anywhere. The only checks they see is the money billionaires sow to fuel a chaos they can profit from.

Finally! I’ll be able to use my new bottle brush!

The water in the science building was restored the other day, but yesterday when I used the faucet nothing but rusty brown horrible water was coming out of it. I’m going in today and will flush the pipes in my lab for a while, and then, at last, I will get to use my glorious new bottle brush to wash all the glassware. I am so excited! Wouldn’t you be? Doing the dishes, making everything all shiny, getting all the clutter put away…this is exactly why I got a Ph.D.

I’ll also be able to indulge in some spider therapy. You people don’t know what you’re missing by not spending time with a whole lot of eyes and twitching legs and fanged bodies walking the tightrope of an intricate web. You’re all invited to come on over (as long as you’re masked and vaccinated) and take in the restful spectacle. Maybe you can wash a bottle or two while you’re here?

The face of the Democratic party is tired and useless

I refused to pay any attention to the news yesterday, the first anniversary of the MAGA riot and insurrection. I was just so sure that the Democrats would be taking the event very seriously and working hard to bring justice to the criminals (one of whom is still preparing to run for president in 2024), so, as they assure me, nothing would happen because they’re so earnestly and quietly working behind the scenes.

Nope. It’s hard to believe the Democrats can be this tone-deaf.

Following a solemn discussion of imperiled American democracy between the Librarian of Congress and historians, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) chose to commemorate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by inviting the cast of Hamilton to give a virtual performance with the production value of a tinny Zoom call. The musical’s creator Lin-Manuel Miranda said to his C-SPAN audience, “We should never take our rights and liberties for granted. That’s what I wrote about in the song ‘Dear Theodosia’ from Hamilton.” Cast members, all in separate locations and out of costume, appeared via videoconference on a projector screen in the Capitol. They sang the earnest song straight into the camera, some via visible headphones in their ears. The disconnect between the musical and the severity of the Capitol riot called to mind the celebrity coalition that produced the reviled “Imagine” pandemic video. As one Twitter user quipped, “This is worse than the insurrection.” New York Times reporter Astead Wesley wrote, “We owe Gal Gadot an apology.”

I get so much spam email from Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer because I once donated a small sum to the Democratic party, and I am totally sick of them and their histrionic headlines and pointless posturing. Sit down and shut up, because they’re just driving me away from ever supporting that party any further. Local candidates, yes; the occasional progressive candidate elsewhere, sure; Democrats as a party, nope.

Only a decade behind us

A bit over ten years ago, a bunch of us faced a dilemma: National Geographic had taken over hosting of our blogs, and they were sending not-at-all subtle signs that they did not like people who criticized religion, and they were going to start imposing new restrictions on what we could write. That’s why you’re reading this on freethoughtblogs.com — Ed Brayton and I decided to set up this independent site and move our blogs here, and host other godless bloggers. Others, like David Gorski, just set up their own independent blogs. A few were seduced away by the giant group blog, Patheos, who swore on a stack of Bibles that, while they were primarily a religious site, they’d allow atheists to have their own subdomain, with no severe restrictions on their content. They also had money and could provide a reasonable revenue to their bloggers.

I was never invited to join Patheos (I guess I was too atheist for them) and wouldn’t have been at all tempted to go under the wing of such a site — I wouldn’t like the company I’d have to keep, and I didn’t trust them at all. I’m not surprised at all that now, after a decade of tolerance, Patheos management has decided to change the rules on everyone.

Efforts to reach Patheos’ management team were unsuccessful, but the departing bloggers and their channel manager, Dale McGowan, said that about a year ago, Patheos decided to change its editorial direction. Bloggers were advised they could stay at Patheos so long as they stopped writing negative or critical posts on religion or politics and instead focused on how to live a good life within their own worldview.

All my suspicions are confirmed, and the temptation is great to say, “I told you so!”. We were snookered too, though — for many years we hired Patheos to provide our ad services here. You don’t see any ads now, do you? That’s because their ads were so obnoxious and intrusive that we finally canceled them altogether. So the bloggers that are now departing en masse have my sympathy, and I wish them the best of luck at their new site, OnlySky.

Well, except maybe Heman Mehta, who has been sticking his foot in his mouth for a while.

There aren’t any media outlets that cater specifically to atheists,” he said. “All the other atheist specific blogging networks are run by volunteers and people who are passionate about the subject but don’t do business-savvy anything, so they falter and die. This one has digital expertise.

Oh, really? No other atheist media outlets? Freethoughtblogs is a media outlet, it’s also explicitly atheist/humanist. What about The Orbit?

We are “volunteers and people who are passionate about the subject”, but I’ve never considered that a negative.

We “don’t do business-savvy anything”, because we’ve worked on being independent of any capitalist control, whether it’s NatGeo or Patheos ad services. I presume OnlySky has learned the same lesson we accepted years ago.

What’s this about “falter and die”? We’ve been doing well for over ten years, and even weathered a $2 million lawsuit, with the assistance of our most excellent readership. It’s rather foolish to declare that all other atheists networks have died off, when a) we’re standing right here as a refutation, and b) you’re about to start a new atheist network in what you’ve declared to be such a hazardous and infertile field. We aren’t going to disappear just because Hemant Mehta doesn’t think we exist.

Good fortune, OnlySky, but I hope Mehta isn’t your spokesperson in the future.

Maybe reserve your hope that anyone “falters and dies” for Patheos.