Housekeeping and change of blogging strategy for 2016

For several years I've compiled an occasional series of "Burnee links" on this blog, intended as an archive of various posts, articles and general bits and pieces that have caught my attention and might otherwise get submerged in the social-media noise. Most of these have comprised a link and a brief comment to remind me what the article or post was about, and recently these have come almost exclusively from Facebook.

This is going to change, but not much. Rather than copying links to posts that originate on Facebook, I shall be posting my comments and links here at Evil Burnee first. Blog-fu will ensure those links get automatically copied to Facebook and Twitter (though I may revise this to avoid undue duplication).

By such means I hope to make Evil Burnee the central platform for my skeptical commentary, with everything automatically in one place without my having to force it so.

We'll see how it goes.

My blog is a spiritual springboard?

If you're reading this on a decent-sized monitor you'll see at the top-left a search box and the words "Next Blog»". These are provided by Blogger (this is a Blogger blog). It's been a while since I clicked on the "Next Blog»" link, so today I gave it another go. Or rather, about a dozen goes. I was puzzled to find it linked each time to a blog of distinctly spiritual character — bible quotes, God-talk, prayers, Christianity, even a blog authored by a pastor.

After eight or so of these clicks I lost count, and was about to give up at nearly a dozen when I landed on a page with not a bible quote in sight. But scrolling down I found it was the blog of someone who gives Tarot readings. That, however, was a fluke — another click landed me in the goddy again and I gave up. I assume Blogger is (inappropriately) routing these links based on the content of this blog, and the preponderance of linky-Jesus isn't merely random coincidence.

The link is up there on the left — see if you get the same results.

On another matter, I've attempted a degree of consolidation here, importing some older posts from the blog I had before this one, along with any comments — which is why the Intense Debate sample on the right probably looks a bit haywire. It should settle down after a while, and then Evil Burnee will be super-spiffy and together, all set for 2014.

Back to blogging

Stuff. Lots of stuff. It's what I do. I've many interests, and too many ongoing projects — consequently some of them tend to get set aside. But despite my involvement with all the other stuff, at heart I consider myself a writer, and so the neglect of this blog has been an increasingly nagging discomfort.

I refuse, however, to be a hostage to my withdrawal symptoms. I knew I would get back to blogging on a more or less regular basis when I felt the time was right, and right now the time feels ... right.

So look out for some new — more frequent — bloggery in the coming months.

Question.Explore.Discover your media here

On Monday evening after returning from QED in Manchester I posted this tweet:

and received this response from Geoff Whelan:

Glad to see suggestions being considered. But you know what? I'm not going to wait. Think of this as a temporary repository for QED media. If you've posted images (photos, sketches, scans), video or audio, or blogged about QED, post links to your content in the comments below and I'll list everything on a special page, which the QED organisers can use or not as the fancy takes.

The page is here:

http://www.evilburnee.co.uk/p/qed-2012-media-links.html

I've put a few links in already, to kick things off.

Four little words to sort the wheat from the chaff

One question, central to the skeptical endeavour, is most likely to identify the real from the imaginary, the genuine from the fraudulent, and the merely deluded from the scam artist. Where claims are made, whether for the existence or power of deities, the efficacy of unusual medical treatments, or the reliability of money-making schemes, the one question that will provoke the most enlightening response is the question of evidence.

Suspicions will be initially aroused if claims lack substantiation. A request for substantiation is reasonable, but often the response is not. Unreasonable responses run the gamut from appeal to revelation (for deities) through conspiracy theory (for secret knowledge), pseudo-science (for nutritional supplements, young-earth creationism, infallible diets, the list goes on...), to legal action (for, amongst other things, alternative medicine).

"How do you know?" If we ask this question when presented with claims for, say, effective treatment for cancer, here are two possible responses (there may be others, but these are the important ones — the ones that tell us most about the motives of the responder).

Response 1: "We did tests. Here are the results. Judge for yourself."

Response 2: "Shut up, or we'll set the lawyers on you."

Time and again this four-word question — "How do you know?" — has separated genuine claims from those that are not. The latest example appears to be that of the Burzynski Clinic, offering a hugely expensive treatment for cancer with apparently no adequate scientific proof that it works — and this has been going on for over 30 years. A number of bloggers have raised doubts about Burzynski's treatment, questioning the evidence for its efficacy.

The Clinic's response: "Shut up, or we'll set the lawyers on you." It speaks volumes.

Euthyphro and 500

As my blogging activity declines (temporarily, I hope) I will now attempt to justify this as deliberate deceleration for the purposes of emphasising a milestone. This is my 500th Evil Burnee post, and to mark it I will do no more than post a recent take on religious morality:

http://youtu.be/pwf6QD-REMY


This is Plato's Euthyphro dilemma, as discussed with Matt Flannagan on the latest Skepticule Extra (number 13, to be posted shortly).

As for my semi-millenial blogposting and whether the number will increase at the same rate, it's not that I haven't anything to write about — over the past couple of weeks I built up a list of things I wanted (and still want) to cover — my problem is finding time to do the actual writing.

Watch this space.

Launching tomorrow — FreethoughtBlogs.com

This looks like an interesting development. P. Z. Myers has been dropping various hints and/or threats recently about leaving Science Blogs, and this appears to be where he's going. From the FreethoughtBlogs Facebook event page:

A new blog network is hitting the web on August 1. Led by two of the most prominent and widely read secular-minded blogs in the country – PZ Myers’ Pharyngula and Ed Brayton’s Dispatches from the Culture Wars – Freethoughtblogs.com will be THE central gathering place for atheists, humanists, skeptics and freethinkers in the blogosphere.
Freethoughtblogs will be more than just a place for people to read the opinions of their favorite bloggers. It will be a community of like-minded people exchanging ideas and joining forces to advocate for a more secular and rational world.

The network will launch Aug. 1 with a handful of blogs with many more to be added after the first three months of operation. Here are the five blogs that will lead the way:

Pharyngula. PZ Myers has built one of the most popular atheist blogs in the world. Never one to shy away from controversy, Myers has built an astonishing following over the last few years and has traveled around the world speaking to skeptical audiences. As a PhD biologist he is the scourge of creationists everywhere but he takes on a wide range of subjects in his blogging, including religious criticism, women’s rights and progressive politics.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Ed Brayton was raised by a Pentecostal and an atheist, sealing his fate forever as someone who is endlessly fascinated by how religion intersects with other subject, particularly science, law, history and politics. He is a popular speaker for secular organizations around the country, has appeared on the Rachel Maddow show and is pretty certain he’s the only person who has ever made fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

The Digital Cuttlefish. Cuttlefish are shy and elusive creatures; when necessary, they hide in their own ink. This particular cuttlefish has chosen as its habitat the comment threads of science, religion, and news sites, where it feeds on the opinions of those who are emboldened by the cloak of internet anonymity. Cuttlefish is an atheist, a skeptic, and is madly, passionately in love with science. The Digital Cuttlefish has, since October of 2007, been a repository of commentary and satire, usually (but not exclusively) in verse and now moves to Freethoughtblogs.

This Week in Christian Nationalism. Chris Rodda is the author of "Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History." Since the release of her book in 2006, Chris has been blogging at Talk2Action.org and Huffington Post about the use of historical revisionism in everything from education to legislation. Chris is now launching her own blog on Freethoughtblogs.com that will accompany her weekly podcast, This Week in Christian Nationalism.

Zingularity. Steven "DarkSyde" Andrew is a 40 something former stock and bond trader and one time moderate conservative. He grew up in the Southwest and has long been fascinated by science, particularly evolutionary biology, physics, and astronomy. He is a frequest contributor to the popular progressive website Daily Kos and now blogs at Zingularity, where legit science disappears forever down an event horizon of petty snark and cynicism.

If you would be so kind as to help us have a successful launch, please post the above information, or at least a link to the new network, on your Facebook pages, on your own blogs and in forums in which you participate that might be interested in it.

We want this to quickly become the most important gathering place for the skeptical community in the blogosphere.

The first three months' "settling in" period should give a good idea of how it will work, so watch this — that — space...

Pointful bloggery

My unannounced six-month experiment with one-blogpost-a-day has come to an end. At the beginning of the year I resolved to put up one blogpost for each day, and soon discovered that it wasn't always convenient to make that one blogpost on each day. I got over this inconvenience by catching up later and back-dating blogposts, which made the archive nice and neat, but was hampered by the necessity of maintaining a kind of fiction (by not posting about things which I would not have come across before the date of the post). During the last month I've become more relaxed about this self-imposed regimen and I'm now happy to let things slide as they sometimes must, but I've decided to maintain the schedule on the basis of an average: what I'm aiming for is at least one blog post for each day, but not necessarily on each day.

This should not be hard; with Burnee links taking up two days, that's five substantial (200 words or more) posts per week. When I was writing my novel (The Plitone Revisionist — available in audio format for free from Podiobooks.com, in case you were wondering), towards the end of 130,000 words I managed 1200 words per day, seven days a week for several months (and I have a day job).

I've already written about why I blog so I won't reiterate that here. Suffice to say I continue to enjoy it, so I'll continue to do it.

Enjoying the cut-and-thrust of online debate

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong blogs, but I've been struck recently by what I consider serious impediments to rational discourse. Unfortunately I can't (or rather won't) link to examples because doing so would entirely defeat the point of this post. What I've seen are discussions carried out in the most acrimonious terms. Ad hominems à gogo is how I would characterize these arguments, and if we're talking about the theist-atheist divide (and in these cases that is what I'm talking about), both sides are guilty.

Personally, when I engage in online debate (in my case this is mostly written debate — in blog-comments or forums) I try to do so in a polite manner. I will occasionally draft a reply of biting invective, but I will delete it or moderate it before posting. I know there are people on both sides who relish the cut-and-thrust of the well-honed verbal barb, but such flourishes are unlikely to sway the opposition. In fact the opposition is hardly ever going to be swayed by even well-judged argumentation — so what's the point? The point is that the opposition is not the only consumer of the exchange. There may be onlookers in the background — lurkers — who could possibly be swayed by a polite but cogent argument.

These lurkers, however, are unlikely to give serious consideration to arguments couched in uncharitable terms. Appropriate gentle mockery is another matter, and implied ridicule can be effective, but insults and name-calling are counter-productive.

So here's my message to those engaging in rambunctious exchanges: have fun, enjoy yourselves — but don't kid yourselves. You're doing this for entertainment, and that's fine, but you're not going to make a difference to anybody else.

My 400th blogpost

It's Friday the Thirteenth, a highly significant date.

(Actually it isn't. Friday. Or significant. Sharp-eyed readers of Notes from an Evil Burnee who look for my posts every day — do I have any of those? — may have noticed that the posting date accompanying each blogpost isn't necessarily the date it's actually posted. When I'm busy with other things I can't always post on my intended daily schedule, so I catch up later and back-date posts where necessary. And this was the week of the massive Blogger outage, so even if I'd had time I wouldn't have been able to post anyway.)

Friday the Thirteenth is not significant, other than it's the date when superstitious people believe that they are more likely to experience bad luck. Which is probably a self-fulfilling prophecy, so maybe they're right after all. (I read a Hansard report the other day — David Tredinnick claiming that surgeons won't operate when there's a full moon, because blood won't clot properly. It seems like he really believes this nonsense — but he also believes homeopathy works, and wants more research to prove it. Horse, please follow the cart.)

With this (rather self-indulgent) post — my 400th — I'm up to date again. It's been five four and a half months* of daily blogging, and I continue to enjoy it, to find it a useful outlet and a means of clarifying my thoughts on a range of concerns. So, for now, I think I'll keep doing it.

---

*Self-indulgent and innumerate.

Blogging every day — a success?

Due to QEDcon over last weekend I seem to have let the momentous occasion of my 300th Evil Burnee post go by without comment. I'll correct that omission with this brief, meandering rant about blogging in general, why I blog, and what it's been like blogging every day this year (so far).

This is actually (I think) the 307th post. I knew I was approaching 300 — and that I'd pass it soon — when I decided at the beginning of 2011 to post something every day for a month. Previously I posted when I felt like it. Sometimes an event in the news, an item on the radio, or something online would prompt me to ponder and urge me to write. That was fine, if I got around to actually writing about it. Sometimes there'd be a delay (life, you know?); sometimes I'd even have a few notes, but often the timeliness of the post in prospect would pass, and it perhaps didn't seem appropriate to post something retrospectively when there were other more pressing items of interest to blog about. If I got around to them.

So I resolved to experiment with (at least) one post per day, and for January 2011 it went well. Five original blogposts per week, plus two lists of Burnee links, kept the stream going. February has been a little different, with QED intervening (not that I stopped blogging during the weekend — operational netbook permitting), and other matters squeezing my blogging time. Nevertheless I'm keeping it up, albeit with a number of slightly backdated posts needing perforce to be retrofitted.

I blog to clarify my thoughts — sometimes I'm unsure what I really think until I write it down — and to let others know my position if they're interested. ("Others" could of course include my future self: Notes from an Evil Burnee provides a record of my position on a range of issues, as well as being a useful repository of links to online articles I've found interesting for one reason or another, at one time or another.)

And the discipline of blogging every day has been useful in encouraging engagement with the issues at hand. It's all very well hearing or reading something during the day and thinking, "Maybe I'll write something about that at the weekend, or next week, or...." Much more useful, productive and motivating to think, "I'll write about that tonight."

So the experiment has been successful, and will continue. Many more words to come.

Has blogging had its day? (repost from other blog)

In general agreement with what these people were saying on the Today Programme recently, I think the answer is no.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7685000/7685883.stm

It is not worth starting a blog, and if you already have one you should think about closing it down, an article on the technology website Wired says. Robin Hamman, of computing consultancy Headshift, and Guardian writer and blogger Kate Bevan discuss whether shorter forms of communication, such as Twitter, are taking over.

They go on about Twitter - a service I've never seen the point of, even if whole swathes of savvy internet users seem to swear by it (though perhaps not literally).

I blog because I'm a writer, and because I frequently don't know what I really think until I've written it down. Whether anyone else reads the thing isn't necessarily an issue (though discourse is, as always, welcome).

(And just in case anyone scoffs at the idea of a monthly post here at WitteringOn being classed as actual blogging, I would refer them to my other blog, Notes from an Evil Burnee.)

If the audio stream isn't working, download the mp3 from RapidShare here:

http://rapidshare.com/files/341863325/Today_BloggingHadItsDay_BBCR4i-20081023.mp3

(5'50"; 1.4 Mb)

The Atheist Blogroll

Back in 2005 when I came across the Skepticality podcast, I was delighted to find people who were actually talking about stuff that had been bothering me for some time (I said so on my own podcast The Rev Up Review, and Derek and Swoopy were kind enough to include a clip of it on a later show). It was a revelation to me that there were lots of like-minded individuals out there in the world, and that my doubts about religion and the paranormal were not just stubborn refusal to take things on trust.

Fast forward over three years and I have my own sceptical blog (you're reading it), and I'm far from alone. Notes from an Evil Burnee has been added to The Atheist Blogroll, which comprises hundreds of blogs. Look to the right of this page, scroll down and you'll find links to some of the recently updated ones there. The Atheist Blogroll is a community-building service provided free of charge to atheist bloggers from around the world. If you'd like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.

UPDATE: Ever since I posted this entry it has bugged me that I couldn't find the edition of Skepticality in which Derek & Swoopy played my clip. Extensive (!) research has revealed the reason. They didn't. It's funny how memory can play tricks, especially when tacitly reinforced by the very person who, I thought, played the clip (see Derek's comment to this post).

What actually happened is they posted a downloadable clip on the front page of the Skepticality website. Of course, it's no longer there, but through the wonders of the Wayback Machine you can still see the page, if not actually download the clip.

Time to stand up and be counted

Okay. I appreciate that some people don't care to read about politics and/or religion, especially if they're expecting some geeky tech-rant. So that's why I've split off my posts about belief, or the lack thereof. You can still find my opinions on technology and other stuff over at witteringon.blogspot.com, but anything to do with crazee fundees, creationism, secular humanism, scepticism (British English will pervade here, note) and rationality will appear on this new blog, to be known as Evil Burnee (because, you know, I'll surely roast in hell).

I shan't remove any of my previous posts on these subjects from witteringon, but I will repost them here.