WTF Dawkins? What the flying fuck?!

Dawkins says some stupifyingly derailing shit.

Sean Prophet mentioned at a post in Facebook the following comment that Richard Dawkins supposedly left at PZ Myers’ excellent defence of Rebecca Watson.

Dear Muslima
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

He was then called on it

Did you just make the argument that, since worse things are happening somewhere else, we have no right to try to fix things closer to home?

And replied with more derailment.

No I wasn’t making that argument. Here’s the argument I was making. The man in the elevator didn’t physically touch her, didn’t attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn’t even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that.

If she felt his behaviour was creepy, that was her privilege, just as it was the Catholics’ privilege to feel offended and hurt when PZ nailed the cracker. PZ didn’t physically strike any Catholics. All he did was nail a wafer, and he was absolutely right to do so because the heightened value of the wafer was a fantasy in the minds of the offended Catholics. Similarly, Rebecca’s feeling that the man’s proposition was ‘creepy’ was her own interpretation of his behaviour, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum. But he does me no physical damage and I simply grin and bear it until either I or he gets out of the elevator. It would be different if he physically attacked me.

Muslim women suffer physically from misogyny, their lives are substantially damaged by religiously inspired misogyny. Not just words, real deeds, painful, physical deeds, physical privations, legally sanctioned demeanings. The equivalent would be if PZ had nailed not a cracker but a Catholic. Then they’d have had good reason to complain.

Richard

What is this I don’t even

I won’t go into details, as this and this posts say pretty much all I had to say on the matter ((Dawkings absolutely misses the point, continues derailing and generally dismisses the concerns of a female due to his extreme privilege blindness)). I just was completely stunned by the WTF-ness of the post by someone who should know better.

EDIT: Dawkins has provided yet another reply, showing that he still doesn’t get it

Many people seem to think it obvious that my post was wrong and I should apologise. Very few people have bothered to explain exactly why. The nearest approach I have heard goes something like this.

I sarcastically compared Rebecca’s plight with that of women in Muslim countries or families dominated by Muslim men. Somebody made the worthwhile point (reiterated here by PZ) that it is no defence of something slightly bad to point to something worse. We should fight all bad things, the slightly bad as well as the very bad. Fair enough. But my point is that the ‘slightly bad thing’ suffered by Rebecca was not even slightly bad, it was zero bad. A man asked her back to his room for coffee. She said no. End of story.

But not everybody sees it as end of story. OK, let’s ask why not? The main reason seems to be that an elevator is a confined space from which there is no escape. This point has been made again and again in this thread, and the other one.

No escape? I am now really puzzled. Here’s how you escape from an elevator. You press any one of the buttons conveniently provided. The elevator will obligingly stop at a floor, the door will open and you will no longer be in a confined space but in a well-lit corridor in a crowded hotel in the centre of Dublin.

No, I obviously don’t get it. I will gladly apologise if somebody will calmly and politely, without using the word fuck in every sentence, explain to me what it is that I am not getting.

Richard

Dear Richard, even if Elevator Rape wasn’t an actual thing, it would still be wrong to proposition women in inappropriate locations, such as female you do not know at 4 am in an Elevator. And there is a reason why they are called “inappropriate”. Because by normalizing them, you treat women as sexual objects. As if people who can’t possibly have times where there’s no chance in FSM’s blue earth that they would accept. As if your own desires make their own desires – which common sense has made blatantly clear – irrelevant.

Inappropriate behaviour can be called out and enforced, so that people stop doing it. Because it’s bad, m’kay? Because normalizing the idea that a woman can be propositioned for sex without even taking the time to figure out if there is a chance for it, is degrading to women as it reduces them to sex dispensers. Because using rape culture and patriarchical conditioning to corner a female and implictly pressure her (even if you do not realize the pressure you exert) into sex is reinforcing those bad cultures.

Note that I would love to live in a free world where males and females are sexually liberated and they feel confident proposing no-strings-attached sex without taboo and faux shame. But that world would arrive within true equality, where rape and abuse of females is not the norm at the hands of controlling and horny males.Β  I get the feeling that some are outraged that what they perceive is a small step towards that world of sexual liberation, is being trounced by “those prude feminazis who get their panties up in a bunch about a harmless request for sex”. They fail to see the institutionalized oppression who cannot make this step valid, without further marginalizing females in every other context.

If you want sexual liberation, you need to fight first for female liberation and true equality. Then, and only then, will a sex positive culture occur.

And finally, PZ nails it once more

I’m taking one last stab at explaining this. Imagine that Richard Dawkins meets a particularly persistent fan who insists on standing uncomfortably close to him, and Richard asks him to stand back a little bit; when he continues, he says to the rest of the crowd that that is rather rude behavior, and could everyone give him a little breathing space? Which then leads to many members of the crowd loudly defending the rudeness by declaring that since the guy wasn’t assaulting him, he should be allowed to keep doing that, and hey, how dare Richard Dawkins accuse everyone present of trying to mug him!

I’ve also had enough of a discussion with Sean Prophet trying to explain to him in Facebook why Dawkins is not saying anything relevant and why feminists are not in the wrong to call out inappropriate behaviour. I’ll post it below for your perusal.

  • Sean Prophet
    Absolutely!!!! If agreeing with Dawkins makes me misogynist, then hate me and bring it on. The feminists have a right to their opinion, but this is totally subjective, and in fact goes pretty far toward the demonization of men by calling them “creepy.” All the feminist definition of “creepy” means in this case is “made an unwanted advance.”
    Men are at a distinct disadvantage in this game since they *always* have to deal with the high likelihood of rejection, something women have far less experience with. This is not a “moral” or “progressive” issue. This is an issue of *equality.* And that means women get to say “no” and as long as the guy is polite and leaves, he has done nothing wrong or anti-feminist. He may have been clumsy, or simply not attractive, but that should not be a crime. Nor even an offense.
    And this does call for the phrase “grow up.” If women want to be considered equals, then *act like it!*
    I think Skepchick just made a colossal fool of herself. And shame on the others like Blag Hag and PZ Myers who doubled down on the foolishness.
  • Gretchen Chadwick
    I consider myself a feminist and I agree with you 100%. Well said!
  • Gretchen Chadwick
    However, there’s a lot of degrading crap that goes on on a daily basis that isn’t polite, as you’re probably aware…or maybe not, since you don’t have to deal with it.
  • Sean Prophet
    I agree many men are creeps. Which is why when a guy just screws up and politely leaves, he should be applauded for *not* being a creep.
  • Gretchen Chadwick
    I liked what you said about men having to regularly face rejection and how difficult that is. Women need to understand that and cut men some slack, as long as men are being polite. Women also need to stop participating in their own exploitation and then playing the victim. I’d love to see more respect and healing between the sexes. This is a good discussion to be having. Thanks for bringing it up.
  • Sean Prophet
    Hey no problem. I’ve got a blog post coming, where I provide more links and details. πŸ˜‰
  • Divided By Zero
    What a bunch of nonsense from Dawkins. First of all, yes, he is making the argument that people should raise an issue with things happening to them because “children are starving in Africa” kind of thing and it’s obvious how ridiculously wrong that is. His reply to that is completely irrelevant. So it’s just words. Sure, and Rebecca replied with “just words”. What’s the problem again? Oh, is it because those words make you uncomfortable in propositioning unknown females you find in elevators? Are you for serious?
    Recebba has a right to point out bad behaviour, and privileged males like you don’t lose time in putting her in her place. It’s disgusting.
  • Gretchen Chadwick
    No, Dawkins has a good point. Feminism needs to set priorities. A guy asking a woman to have coffee with him is no big deal. I had a guy run down the street after me to invite me to dinner and I thought it was funny/sweet. I didn’t go because I didn’t know him, but, even if it had made me uncomfortable, he did nothing wrong. There are such bigger problems that feminism needs to tackle, not the least of which is how young women are being systematically trained through a variety of media to become perpetually youthful sex objects. Picking on men for asking to spend time with a woman just creates tension between the sexes and makes feminism seem stupid and frivolous. There are bigger fish to fry.
  • Divided By Zero
    You’re dismissing the very real concerns of why these women do not like this objectifying behaviour – and this has very little similarities to someone asking you out for coffee. The idea that there are other things to do is simply a derailing tactic used to silence and has no benefit to the discussion. People talk about their own experiences and the things that affect them on a daily basis. Just because some other people have other, more difficult situations to face, does not make those issues invalid.
  • Sean Prophet Db0 I addressed this in my blog post. As did Dawkins in his comment. This was a simple overreaction on the part of Skepchick, and now people are just doubling down to avoid offending feminatheists. Is there anywhere you would draw the line? Or do women just get to completely dictate every detail of men’s acceptable behavior?
  • Sean Prophet
    And I’m actually glad Dawkins has burst this little pustule of pompous powermongering entitlement. And it also smokes out the men who have absolutely surrendered and ceded all pretense of balance between the sexes. Certainly everyone has a right to their opinion, but I want nothing to do with women who act this way nor the obsequious men who follow them around. If I’m going to be that submissive, it’s going to be for a hot scene with a self-aware domme who has her shit together.
  • Sean Prophet
    Gretchen, I do think the media makes things worse, as you said. But youth and beauty are tied to fertility, so will always be desirable. Where I think there’s room for growth is broadening the range of what is considered beautiful. (As well as prolonging and preserving health.) Increasing the beauty in the world is really something we call all do with a simple shift in consciousness.
  • Divided By Zero
    They get to dictate behaviour when it affects them. This is not a contentious issue or something difficult to grasp. One is not “sumbissive” for recognising that women are not sexual objects you can proposition at any and all time.
    This ridiculous pompousy of yours is just absurd. Just bang your chest a bit more and declare you don’t care what those damn bitches want. Maybe you’ll feel manlier.
  • Sean Prophet
    Women *are* and always will be sexual objects. They are also a lot more than that. And there’s a whole other dimension to both sexes. But nothing can remove the fact that life is pretty much an endless stream of penises searching for vaginas.
  • Divided By Zero
    The problem is that such behavious treats them as *just* a vagina. Because you apparently do not see anything wrong when people treat women as if they’re there just for their enjoyment and they couldn’t possibly be some contexts were propositioning them is inappropriate.
  • Sean Prophet
    I don’t need to beat my chest (which is not all that large). I simply demand a balance of power between the sexes. My relationships with women have been the most important relationships in my life. I love and respect them, and they do the s…See more
  • Sean Prophet
    BTW I dislike overly submissive women (or men) just as much as the petty dominants. Self-aware people do not act out either extreme. They know unctuousness quickly turns to contempt. This kind of crap on either side is essentially two sides of the same developmentally-challenged coin.
  • Sean Prophet
    I agree elevator guy was inappropriate. Wrong time and place. But once he realized that, he quickly went home and left her alone. We can’t legislate (or even socially regulate) all the nuances of what goes on between people who are drinking late at night in hotels at conferences. There should be plenty of leeway so long as basic social norms e.g. consensuality, are being observed.
  • James Scott ‘Doc’ Mason
    My issue was with Skepchick’s characterization of the encounter as misogynistic. I agree with Sean that it was inappropriate, but only because she is a young, attractive woman. If he had said the same exact thing to a man, we wouldn’t have this conversation. Maybe I need a better understanding of misogyny, but from what she described it didn’t feel like he was hateful or sexualizing her. We simply do not have enough information to be objective about his intentions. Isn’t it possible that he found her interesting and simply wanted to continue the conversation in a quite setting? We’ll never know, because she did the right thing by politely saying no, and he did the right thing by accepting her refusal.
  • Divided By Zero
    Cheezus, you people are acting as if he asked her out for a coffee during work. Are you completely incapable of recognising the fact that propositioning is completely inappropriate at times and with particular styles? Do men get excused at all times as long as they accept the “No”? This is completely obtuse. Think about it for a second for crying out loud.
  • Sean Prophet
    Db0 did you not read where I said “elevator guy was inappropriate”
  • Divided By Zero
    And then you said “But once he realized that, he quickly went home and left her alone.”, which implies that all was OK. But all was NOT OK. You can’t proposition a woman at any time and method and act as if nothing was wrong as long as you accepted rejection. Some things need to be called out, and this is what Rebecca did in the first place.
  • Sean Prophet
    Rejection *is* the penalty. Nothing else is called for. Negotiation 101.
  • Divided By Zero
    Yes. There is. To give an example even you might understand: if someone comes to a woman an propositions her for money, simple rejection is not enough.
    Rejection, by itself, is not a penalty, except in the mind of midguided PUAs
  • Sean Prophet
    The guy was *not* a pua. He was simply inept. That is not a crime, or even an offense.
  • Divided By Zero
    Oh gawds…I didn’t say he was a PUA. I said “Rejection, by itself, is not a penalty, except in the mind of midguided PUAs”. And you haven’t countered my point that simple rejection is not enough.
  • Sean Prophet
    You haven’t supported the point. Shall there be a law passed to prosecute inappropriate speech? Public shaming? Ban from elevators? You’re going really overboard, just like Skepchick. And especially for an anarchist.
  • Divided By Zero
    I’m “going overboard” for the srawman suggestions you made? Are you for real?
  • Sean Prophet
    I still don’t understand the issue. He was shut down and went home. What more does anyone want??
  • Divided By Zero
    Have you see the video Rebecca posted about it?
  • Sean Prophet
    Yes, that was not a big deal. What was a big deal is that when Stef disagreed with her she called her out publicly and tried to turn the non-incident into some kind of feminist rallying cry. That was *way* out of line, and that’s what all the controversy is about.
  • Divided By Zero
    You’re not criticizing THAT though. You (and Dawkins) are criticizing her reaction to guy in the elevator. Whether she should have publicly made an example of her disagreement with Stef is up for debate. I’m with PZ Myers on that front http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/07/always_name_names.php
  • Sean Prophet
    It was still an overreaction no matter how anyone slices it.
  • Divided By Zero
    It’s an overreaction to point out that there are inappropriate times to proposition women and that women are not sexual objects?
  • Grace Feldmann
    NOT an overreaction and Thank you Divided By Zero!
    Grace Feldmann
    please see my note on this. And BTW I take the dare Sean. This IS in part about a blind spot around not just White, but male privilege and power. Absofuckinglutely.

 

And this is where the discussion stands at the moment.Hopefully, he starts to get it but I won’t get my hopes up.

However this whole Brouhaha does show how little connection there is between Atheists and their lack of common positive goal. Atheism is a negative cohesive point. It’s as unifying as the lack of hair and the more people that identify as atheists there are, the less cohesion the movement as a whole has, as it stops becoming novel (within a religious community) thus requiring support for others, and rather becomes the norm. But I digress. As I was saying, this just another example of how little one Atheist has with another.

You can’t demand that other Atheists are feminism or anti-racists because this is not a defining aspect of the irreligion. It’s precisely because you can have racist and sexist atheists that there is so much friction in the movement, and the secondary reason why I stopped wasting my time with it. The primary being the same for most others I presume: I live in a country where religious oppression does not exist anymore and therefore my irreligion is not used as a point of oppression.

 

A resource wiki just for the Atheosphere

Unveiling the Atheist Resources, a project which hopes to provide a valuable centralized resource to the Atheosphere. By Freethinkers, for Freethinkers.

AR logoWould you like to have a place where all information relevant to Atheist Blogging would be gathered and constantly updated for your benefit? Well for the last few months ((Well, more like days of actual work, as the whole thing stayed basically idle for most of its existence)) me and Larro have been working exactly on such project to provide some help for Atheists, especially the bloggers but not excluding those who take a more passive look.

I conceived the idea once I noticed the large number of resources, ideas and tips that existed and the many ways that bloggers had put them to user. For example, the simple concept of a blogroll had allowed the Atheist Blogroll to exist, from which many other stuff could be based on such as a search engine in atheist blogs or optimized reading lists. Furthermore, many atheists were blogging about ways to use the various tools online, such as Technorati, Reddit, Stumbleupon and the like.

But all this information was dispersed and difficult to find, especially for people who were just joinging the game. So it would be a great idea to have a centralized place where all such information would be gathered and through crowdsourcing improved over time to be as comprehensive as possible.

Thus, the Atheist Resources project was born.

At the moment, this project is still in very early infancy and up to now it’s been mostly me and Larro who’ve been adding to it. I’ve been concentrating on the Toolkit while Larro on the Blog Directory (and the site layout). The former is to allow people to discover useful stuff for their sites while the later is to add a bit of self-management to the Atheist Blogroll and easy updating.

The project is based on the excellent DocuWiki software with a theme that approximates the Wikipedia one (I guess to make the whole thing more familiar. The wiki format should allow us to easily add, remove and update information without fear of losing it and without having to go through a difficult approval process. Everyone is welcome to join.

Of course, this won’t go anywhere fast with only just 2 people on it, so I think it’s about time that I put out the word on the Atheosphere and invite y’all to join. Strangely I’m not the first to mention this as the Jewmanist somehow discovered its existence early and blogged about it already. Unfortunately this didn’t elicit much of a response.

So what is the current functionality? Well of course it’s a wiki so you’ll be able to quickly add and edit anything. I’ve also enabled pingback functionality which means that when the AR links to a blog, it will appear (if this functionality exists – yes, I’m looking at you Blogspot) and when a blog links tot he AR, this will appear on the site as well. This way if someone writes on a topic, say, Technorati, and links to the AR, theit entry will show on the Technorati page for people looking for this information to follow.

Then there’s tags, which is something I’m hoping might become useful for sites listed on the Blogroll. Through them, one should be able to see which Atheist Blogs write about a particular subject and visit them. Along with all the information that should be present on each Blog’s listing, this should enable people to find Atheist bloggers with similar interests easily.

And that’s just the begginging. I’m hoping that with all these brillliant Freethinkers out there, we can make this something unique and useful. So I hope to see you all there.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Meme Tagged: My first day as an Atheist

Here’a first, I’ve just been tagged by the Atheist Blogger with a new meme. I haven’t done any of these in the past (other than taking it upon myself that is). So let’s see…

Can You Remember The Day That You Officially Became An Atheist?

Well, Officially is a weird word that doesn’t apply very well since there’s no organised Atheist Religion. Nevertheless, I can’t really say that I remember the day I became an atheist. I know that I considered myself an Atheist for a while mostly because I could not consider myself a good Christian but I never expressed it. Truth be told, I wasn’t really an atheist but rather an agnostic at that point.

What I do distinctly remember is being in a church for a reason or other (I think because of Easter) with my aunt and for some reason I ended up telling a priest that I was an Atheist, which of course promted him to tell me that I’m just angry at God that I lost my mother. Highly presumtious of him I’d say.

Yes my memory is incedibly crappy.

In actuallity, I became a full-fledged Atheist in my current (and only correct) form only in recent years but it was a gradual process.

Do you remember the day you officially became an agnostic?

Again not really. I was really an agnostic while calling myself an atheist in my teens so I guess you could say that.

How about the last time you spoke or prayed to God with actual thought that someone was listening?

I remember occasionally, when in a difficult or sad situation, asking inside my head for help but I never explicitly prayed. Perhaps I was defending my self mentally or perhaps it was a leftover from school&church brainwashing.

I’ve since conditioned myself to stop doing this ridiculous mental trick and just get on with the problem at hand.

I never actually truly prayed, as in, “get down on my knees” kind of thing. I was seeing my classmates devoutly bending down their head and closing their eyes in the school’s morning mandatory prayer and I remember I tried it once (simply saying the ΠατΡρ Ξ—ΞΌΟŒΞ½ prayer internally) but I thought it was all too silly.

Did anger towards God or religion help cause you to be an atheist or agnostic?

Nah, although people were inclined to believe that because of my mother’s death, that wasn’t the case. I never really felt enough about them to feel anger. I am currently opposed to organised religion and their actions occasionally get me angry but this does not drive my irreligion.

Here is a good one: Were you agnostic towards ghosts, even after you became an atheist?

By the time I consider myself to have become a proper Atheist I had managed to achieve scepticism as well. By the time I first called myself an Atheist when I should have been saying agnostic or even agnostic Christian I still believed in various woo-woo like Energies, Auras, Magic etc

But fortunately not Ghosts. I think Holywood ruined it for me πŸ™‚

Do you want to be wrong?

I would not like to be wrong (I mean, who does?) as it would mean that I was living my life wrongly, based on false beliefs and knowledge. Having said that, If I did turn out to be wrong, I wouldn’t mind, unless the Christian God is, indeed such a bastard as the Old Testament makes him out to be, in which case I would summarily be going to hell anyway.

I would like to be wrong about other stuff however. I would very much love to be wrong about Global Warming, Aliens, Ghosts, Auras and the like. If those things existed, the world would be so much more interesting.

Unfortunately just because I’d like those to exist, I can’t bring myself to willful delusion.

So, that’s that. Time to spread the mind virus.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Oxymoronic Absurdities

One week to go for the the next CotG and I thought I’d remind you that we have a theme and the theme is: Impossibilities.

At the moment I have received 14 submissions which tells me that by the end of the week I may have quite a few of them. A few of them can even fit the theme but only unfortunately one was explicitly crafted for this carnival.

Come on people, we’re talking about religion here. There’s certainly enough ideas to go around. Haven’t you had enough about Politics? I know I’m sick and tired of reading about Palin in the Atheosphere. Yes she’s an incompetent Cretinist. We get i already.

But I digress.

So this post is basically a reminder for the theme of the 102nd CotG. Lets see how it turns out.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

So Youtube decided to start censoring Atheists? I say fuck 'em!

Comedian Pat Condell
Image via Wikipedia

First it was the Eucharist videos being pulled and now they’ve removed Pat Condell‘s latest video about Sharia law in the UK. Well this is getting ridiculous and I don’t like it one bit.

If there’s one thing that online services like this provide is a voice for all the people who’s opinions would never be presented in the traditional media. When those online services take our voices away because they just feel like it, I say that it’s time to move on. They already have a shaky relationship with Atheists but this should be the last straw for many of us.

Like so many things in life, they need us, we do not need them.

Without people using Youtube, it wouldn’t be the online power it is today. I can already foresee that many people will say that Youtube is what everyone is using and thus you don’t have a choice if you want audience. Well, like partisan politics, this is only in your head and it hurts you when you do not realise it. You do have a choice, you just have to use it.

At the moment, many users are protesting the latest ban by reposting the removed video. This is all well and good but, and I hope to be proved wrong, Google is too big, you made them too big. They don’t give a toss. Especially for a few dozen vocal atheists.

Do you want to protest? Take your ball and go home. Make a public statement and invite your subscribers to join you. If there’s anything Youtube is taking note, that is market share. If they were to lose 50k users overnight, they might stand up and take notice.

But where should one go? Well, there are of course dozens of youtube clones out there (many of them considerably better than) but that’s also a problem by itself, for who’s to say that tomorrow that service is not going to start banning your videos as well?

This is why I’m proposing you use something a bit different. Namely Vuze

Image representing Vuze as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

What is Vuze

Once upon a time, there was a BiTtorrent client called Azureus. It was the best of the bunch. Eventually they decided that P2P can also serve as a great way to serve content without having the immense costs associated with hosting everything on your own server.

They became Vuze

Now you have a service where the content is not held by them but rather by everyone who is using it. They only handle the portal/library and that’s about it. When you publish something to Vuze, you get to keep it as does anyone else who has seen it.

Yes, Vuze does retain the right to remove content from the portal as well but looking from where they started, I believe they will not be as trigger happy as Youtube, plus if things get out of hand.

Other than that, there are a few other very solid benefits to using Vuze.

  • You are not limited to posting Videos. You can post any kind of file you wish.
  • You can upload at any quality you wish, at any size you wish, at any length you wish. No need to split in 10 minute segments.
  • Did I mention that Vuze is a full fledged BitTorrent application? That means that you don’t have to use Vuze only but can use, say, The Pirate Bay as well πŸ˜‰
  • Friends and stuff but with quite a lot of extras. One of these extras is that you can share interesting torrents with your friends over a secure connection. I.e. torrents that you found in the aforementioned Pirate bay, or even your own homemade torrents for files you have on your disk.
  • It’s free software. This means that it’s more ethical and it gets very fast improvements. Plus whatever happens, it will never go away.

So there you have one proposal. I’m certain others will have other services that are good as well but I tend to always side with the ones who have Free Software roots. Better for everyone that way.

Youtube has dropped the ball on Atheist heads one too many times now and unless people take a definite action, they’ll just keep doing it, similar to politicians who get elected no matter what.

And that’s my two cents on this.

UPDATE: It seems youtube has reinstated the Video. Apparently it was organised muslim activists who flagged the video for removal. If that is indeed the case, then Youtube needs to, at the least, give a warning to the ones that flagged it and, my personal suggestion would be to dissalow flagging from those people in the future. They’ve already proved that they abuse the system for their own agendas.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Get ready for an Impossible Carnival of the Godless

So I am going to be your next host for the Carnival of the Godless and I am planning to make it a bit more interesting than simply having a list of links. I was a bit disappointed on how the 100th version turned out so I’d like to make something more memorable, something like the Pulp Edition. Of course I can’t really make such good art to go along with ((And I wouldn’t say no if anyone wanted toΒ  help with that)) it but I will at least try to make it as memorable.

So here’s what we’re going to do:

1. It’s going to be thematic

The theme in this carnival will be something a bit fitting to this blog’s name: Impossibilities.

Submissions dealing with Absurdities, Oxymorons, Inanities and even horrible facepalms are all going to be given the limelight in the version of the CotG. That does not mean that anything not dealing with these will be rejected but any post that belongs to the theme will be immediately pushed to the top and will have more care given to it’s presentation

So if you have something ready on this subject, go right along and send it. If not, well now is the time to spend some effort to make a better edition πŸ˜‰ If you site down for a bit and think about it, I’m certain you’ll have many ideas on this subject. But please, I know it’s tempting but don’t swamp me with Sarah Palin related submissions πŸ˜‰

2. It’s going to be storytold

I really want to avoid just posting a simple collection of links with a very short description as is what seems to be happening in almost all recent CotGs. That’s just boring. Thus, I’m going to attempt and weave an actual story out of the submissions sent. This is why it’s doubtly helpful to have sumbissions that fit the theme, as such will be easier to weave into the story.

I already have a rought concept of how it’s going to go but the actual story will be decided by the kind of submissions I have to work with. Stories that don’t fit the theme, I will try to use as well but I may end up just posting them as links at the end if I can’t see a way to include them.

I’ve already started getting submissions which is something I didn’t expect. I was hoping I had the time to write this post before people started sending. Due to this, feel free to send a replacement post if you have something more fitting to the theme but I would also ask you to spread the word a bit so that more people are aware of this.

Let’s hope this works out. Cheers for impossibilities.

Zemanta is getting better

In case you still haven’t jumped to the Zemanta bandwagon, this might make you reconsider: They just got an upgrade, including many cool new features.

  • My Friends & Feeds– ability to include your friends and custom feeds to your Zemanta account
  • My Flickr – we will now also find pictures in your Flickr account
  • Filter – you can filter recommendations to more fine grain the results to your content
  • Z-Blog, Sep 2008

The most interesting parts is the Feeds option which allows you to import your favorite feeds into zemanta and have it find posts available there, that are relevant to your content. By using the friends function and simply adding you twitter contacts (yet another reason why you should join the twitter atheists) you can simply select the ones you want to follow. Plus, mybloglog became more useful now πŸ˜€

With the huge amount of atheist blogs, this is certainly going to come in handly in facilitating interlinking to others in the Atheosphere (whereas before you just had to have something available). Now I can easily start writing something about ethics, and get some stuff from, say, the Atheist Ethicist to add.

The other one I like is that you can now filter you image results. This was sorely needed as you very often have an idea on what to put as a image but zemanta does not give you the option. This has finally become better than photodropper now since it is both faster, and you get previews and you get to see more sources than simply flickr. Plus, you can tell it to only grab your own stuff if you have a flickr account πŸ˜‰

Cool week for bloggers πŸ˜€

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Stumbleupon guide for Atheists and Agnostics

The Atheist Revolution has a great guide for using stumbleupon as a blogger. I was actually planning to write such a guide as an extension of my posts on reddit but he pretty much covered all the bases.

The only thing I want to add is that it’s also useful to stumble through your friends favorites and vote up the good ones. I also reiterate the advise that you don’t stumble onto your own blog if you can help it, or else they’l start punshing this.

Btw, does anyone else think that simply stumbling on a post of your blog, after someone else has reviewed it first does not help? I had the impression that each further vote brings more visitors, but every time I voted up one of my pages that was already stumbled, I didn’t see much of a difference. The number of visitors certainly has something to do with the number of votes however as one of my most popular posts got 1000 visitors in one day simply because it was voted up many times.

Perhaps this only counts if someone votes up after stumbling onto it randomly, instead of doing it deliberately. And this is where stubling on your friend’s favorites can be useful πŸ˜‰

You can find my profile here.

A chain reaction of popularity

It seems that someone noticed what I wrote about reddit:atheism and decided to submit all his posts to reddit [1. UPDATE: It seems he didn’t submit all of them after all. I just noticed he’s been mainly submitting his own posts on reddit for a while (that pop whore) and didn’t notice the dates. Just ignore the “all” πŸ˜‰ ] which led to one of them being resubmitted to digg which ended with their server going b0nkers.

It was at this point that one wonders “Where the hell is your supercache” :P. I could practically hear in my mind’s ear, Adrian going “Hooooooooly Shiii-“

Well, at least now you know how useful submitting your better posts to reddit can be πŸ˜‰

PS: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Goddamn pop-posts getting dugg and then getting as many hits in one hour as I get in one month. It’s not fair I tells ya! [/rant]