U.S. Representative District 5 (Vote for 1)
Barb Davis White, DFL Party

X Keith Ellison, DFL Party

Gregg A. Iverson, DFL Party

Why: Fairly frequently, I run into people who try to tell me that all politicians are corrupt or inept. I tell them I’m represented by Keith Ellison and Al Franken and that perhaps they should fix their own situation. They shut up. Note also that this is not a safe race to skip in the voting. Barb Davis White is a Tea Party candidate who has realized she has no chance in the general election and is trying to sneak in through the primary. Don’t let that happen.

Governor and Lieutenant Governor (Vote for 1)
X Margaret Anderson Kelliher and John Gunyo, DFL Party

Peter Idusogie and Lady Jayne Fontain, DFL Party

Mark Dayton and Yvonne Prettner Solon, DFL Party

Matt Entenza and Robyne Robinson, DFL Party

Why: Dayton and Entenza both have plenty of experience, and I won’t cry if either of them wins the primary. However, there’s a lot of work required to reverse the damage Pawlenty (and others before him, but mostly him) have done. I really want a governor with experience getting the legislature to produce working bills. Kelliher did just that.

Secretary of State (Vote for 1)
X Mark Ritchie, DFL Party

Dick Franson, DFL Party

Why: Dick Franson is a perpetual candidate for any office. Ritchie is the only serious candidate.

Attorney General (Vote for 1)
Leo F. Meyer, DFL Party

X Lori Swanson, DFL Party

Why: “My brother was a highly decorated officer” is not a qualification for this office. Swanson is the only serious candidate.

Minneapolis School Board Director, District 3 (Vote for 1)
X Hussein Samatar

Why: There may be only one candidate in this race, but he’s well worth voting for.

Minneapolis School Board Director, At Large (Vote for 2)
Rebecca Gagnon

Chanda Smith Baker

Steven C Lasley

X T. Williams

James Everett

Mohamud Noor

Doug Mann

R.E. “Dick” Velner

X Richard Mammen

Shirlynn Lachapelle

Why: School board elections in Minneapolis are interesting. Almost everybody is saying the right things about what needs to be done, so it comes down largely to demonstrated competence. My two choices have the most board experience directly related to schools.

This is the phenomenon in which a (generally young) woman dismisses her behavior around a guy as “Oh, that’s just so-and-so. He’s safe.” It always sounds like it’s meant to be a compliment, but there’s very little like it to bring out the bitter in a guy even decades after the fact. It took explaining the concept of “safe” to the wife of one of these friends for me to really figure out why.

Safe is better than not safe, right?

Well, of course none of my guy friends want to threaten any women, so being very not safe is right out of the question. However, being this sort of safe is far beyond not being a rapist in potentia, far more than just what’s left when that worry is removed. This safe means out of the running for any kind of sexual consideration whatsoever. This is gay-best-friend safe without the gay or necessarily the best friend. There are more options to be found in the real world than just this kind of safe and not safe.

So no sex. But that’s okay, isn’t it?

No sex is okay. No sex is always okay, if sometimes frustrating. What isn’t okay is the complete denial of someone else’s sexuality.

None of the “safe” guys I’ve been talking to are asexual. None of them are even close. They are, in fact, all attractive guys with fairly strong libidos. I doubt they’d be as desirable as “safe” friends if they were anything else. And being declared safe is going beyond saying there will be no sex in the relationship. What it has done is put them in situations in which they were flirted with, snuggled up to, asked for advice on what is sexy and what is acceptable sexual behavior, regaled with details of sexual exploits and problems–all without any permission to respond in kind.

Is it bad that the women flirted without wanting more?

Absolutely not. Flirting in safe situations is learning without risk. It’s testing sexuality and figuring out what’s fun in a low-pressure environment. More people, men and women, should have the option of doing this without feeling that they’re making promises.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that the women are designating the men as safe without any input from the men. The men aren’t being asked whether they have any sexual interest and whether they’re okay with it being put on hold. They aren’t being asked where the limits of their comfort with the women’s behavior are. They don’t have an option to say, “No,” except by walking away from the situation. These guys might still choose to engage in flirtatious relationships for the fun, but the choice should be theirs every bit as much as it is the women’s. With the unilateral declaration of “safe”-hood, it isn’t.

It’s also a problem that the word “safe” is being used to deny men these options. Safe and convenient are very different things, and “safe” brings a level of emotional manipulation to the table (by contrast with “not safe”) that “convenient” doesn’t. We want women, in particular, to feel safe because we’re aware they often don’t. We have a right to an expectation of interpersonal safety. We don’t have the same right to an expectation of convenience, which is what these relationships boil down to.

One more problem was illuminated by the same woman with whom a modified version of the conversation above took place. Shortly after the conversation, she went shopping in a mixed group.

When XXX went with me to Victoria’s Secret, it was, well, a little awkward. It was only yesterday, however, that I started thinking about it enough to figure out why. I do not really think of XXX as “safe” (intimidating was actually the first word I would have ascribed to him), but I found myself in a situation where an attractive man who was not my husband was watching me pick out frilly panties. I found this awkward, again because those old taboos told me that you don’t show other men your panties, and “Oh, noes! I might induce him to have unclean thoughts about me.”

So what did my brain do? It tried to convince me of something along the lines of “It’s XXX. He wouldn’t be thinking those things” as a comforting strategy. The equivalent of “He’s safe,” even though I don’t actually think of him that way.

The problem here is that “safe” is (or would be, if my friend weren’t thoughtful and honest) being used to make a decision about privacy and sexuality not “count.” Every one of these decisions count. Every one of them affects someone, even if it’s only the woman making the decision. Of course, in cases of “safe” men, it’s not just the women.

Now, it may sound as though I’m adding to the chorus of voices telling women that they are responsible for the world’s sexual decision-making. No. Women are not responsible for men’s decisions, even those decisions made in response to women’s decisions, but neither does freeing women from that particular unfair responsibility free them from all responsibility. And that’s what declaring a man safe does; it abdicates a woman’s responsibility for her sexual choices with respect to that man. It says that her decisions and her behavior don’t matter. More than that, it says that they don’t matter because a particular quality of the man in question–his safeness.

Maybe that’s progress of a sort, but only if you consider flipping an unequal situation upside down to be progress. I don’t. Women don’t make progress by moving from not being allowed to make decisions to pretending there are no decisions to be made. We get where we want to go by accepting responsibility for the consequences of our actions and acting like the adults we’ve demanded we be allowed to be.

No wonder these guys are bitter. I would be too. A lot of time and attention has gone into teaching me from the time I was a small child that I have every right to have my sexual and romantic life decided by me. Shouldn’t we extend the same right to these guys?

The biggest and best thing to know about Skepchickcon (aside from the fact that I spent a long weekend surrounded by cool people I don’t see often enough and meeting many more) is that most of the sessions were full. Even those early in the morning had plenty of butts in seats, and those in the afternoons and evenings had people standing along the walls.

This was really good to see, but the popularity of the sessions also caused some audience frustration, I think. Panels that were meant for entry-level audiences (such as Skepticism 101) were frequently pulled into deeper waters by enthusiastic questions from more seasoned skeptics in the audience. It’s not anything impossible to fix, and I’ve already mentioned to Skepchick carr2d2 (aka Carrie Iwan) that I’m happy to help work on more specific panel descriptions next year to let audiences know better what to expect from any session.

The audiences were generally great, asking good questions and far more than we could get to in the hour each panel was given. The Physics or Fantasy panel in particular–to which we added Jim Kakalios (squee!) and Matt Lowry–generated a bunch of science fiction devices and technologies, which the rest of the panelists assessed for plausibility. Me? I moderated. I was completely outclassed in expertise, and my topics never came up. But I hope and suspect there will be more of these panels next year, where people can bring questions on various skeptical topics and let people answer them.

I had more to offer on my other panels. On several of them, particularly Science and the Internet (finding good information) and Science and the Media, I was the voice of non-academia, pushing resources for lay people that don’t require knowledge of how to read peer-reviewed papers. I was also the social media advocate, suggesting people use their current friend networks to gather information and to push out “cool” scientific findings and skeptical writing. I tried to encourage people to embrace their inner geek and use that enthusiasm to sell science and skepticism to others.

All in all, it was a great time and I think a fairly productive one. I’m not going to try to recap the panels individually, but I do want to thank my fellow panelists for being amazing. In particular, I want to thank Surly Amy and Debbie Goddard of CFI. Neither of them spoke nearly enough, but when they did, they always contributed something worth listening to.

I have no respect for people who want to loudly proclaim their beliefs, yet are unwilling to sign for them on the dotted line. I have even less respect for people who want to create an illusion of consensus through fraud to bolster those beliefs with.

Embarrassing.

The bad part of YNH is the way he handled getting caught. He had sock puppets. They became obvious. He attacked those who mentioned that he had sock puppets. His sock puppets attacked. The attacks were accusatory and mean.

I may not agree with the harsh language P Z often uses against religion in general, but you will never catch me using sockpuppets to misrepresent myself here or anywhere else. Just seeing others pull such childish stunts disturbs me. Lying is lying, and sockpuppetry is a form of lying, period.

I did a round of sockpuppetry before I knew what it was. Still feel bad about that. But it sure as flying spaghetti monster wasn’t on my own blog.

That’s a lot of vitriol with nothing to balance it. I haven’t seen a positive comment about sock puppetry in the reaction to the blog closing. Admittedly, some of that may have to do with the fact that most of the people commenting on the situation were none too happy with YNH to begin with.

That’s almost certainly not all of it, however. When it comes right down to it, we don’t like people who don’t play fair. We’ll take a hit to our own self-interest if it will let us punish a cheater. And sock puppets are cheaters.

There is an important distinction between pseudonymity and anonymity. When dealing with the anonymous online, we don’t have any idea who we’re relating to. Every social transaction is a mystery, Every time, we are forced to choose how much we risk without any history on which we can rely to make that decision. The anonymous poster hasn’t accrued a reputation, the social capital with which they can buy at least our temporary forbearance and trust.

As DrugMonkey has pointed out in prior discussions of online identity, the situation is different when dealing with a durable pseudonym. Over time, that pseudonym accretes history the same way any other name would online. It develops a reputation that follows it around. This reputation doesn’t generally attach itself to the person behind the pseudonym, but there are good, bad and indifferent reasons why that might be desirable. The pseudonymous themselves are generally approximately as mixed a bag of humanity as the rest of us, and we deal with them individually based on the reputation they built by their actions.

Those who engage in sock puppetry, however, are making a raid on reputation. They’re stealing it, either by exploiting the bandwagon fallacy to accrue unearned regard for their position or by disowning the negative effects that attacking someone else has on reputation, basically shoplifting a smackdown every now and again. YNH did both.

They wanted to have both this (mirrored since the original blog was locked):

No. You all seem to have discovered the convenience of just making things up to attack those you disagree with when you can’t do anything to attack what they’re actually saying. It would be pleasant to see some sanity from all of you and to see the wild finger ponting stop, especially since none of it to date has been true.

And this:

The continued attacks and accusations makes one wonder if it’s not all bitterness from OM about YNH getting him right.

Trolly trolly troll troll troll….

Both this:

OM was banned because he/she/it was posting as multiple sock puppets, using different names and emails but the same IP, to espouse opposing opinions in an attempt to sabotage threads. He was warned, he kept at it, and he was banned. It’s a dead issue.

And this:

As for sock puppetry: yes, I am responsible for several of the commenters (sock puppets) on this blog, namely “Patricia,” “Polly-O!,” and “Brandon”

Both this:

Remember: you do not have the right to not be offended. But if you are, you could always try sticking to reality-grounded, sensical criticism and dialogue, too.

And this:

Ophelia tries desperately hard to turn the use of the word “flustered” or “shrill” or the like into the equivalent of being a long-time victim of physical spousal abuse, overblowing it and taking it out of proportion and context as little more than a useless little cop-out from actually responding to others. It’s a fucking disgrace to women and a disgrace to those who are actually victims of sexism, not the preceived, feigned sexism victimization of a fragile little prat who lacks the guts and emotional intelligence to respond to criticism after she’s dished out a shit-load of it – often complete with the same marginally-sexist language – herself.

In other words, the blogger(s) called YNH were trying to accrue reputation for being on the side of honesty, openness and accountability, while the puppets claimed by YNH were accruing the benefits of dishonesty and baseless speculation in trashing the reputations of others. They were accounting with two sets of books. They’re cheaters.

And so, when YNH wants to claim victim status for someone apparently getting too close to their identity(ies), or when someone wants to suggest that YNH is being bullied by getting all this negative attention, remind them. This is punishing cheaters, which is what we do.

Now, there are some reasons I looked at robbery, including the one stated at the top of the post. Protecting the family from home invasion really is a classic, fear-and-testosterone-fueled fantasy scenario for gun nuts. The home is also where the most people have the most access to their guns. It makes some sense.

However, it is not the whole picture. So, using the same sources, and turning the assumptions all the way up in guns’ favor, here’s the best-case scenario for the protective power of guns in the U.S. in 2006.

• Violent crimes attempted (reported and unreported) = 3,808,000
• Percent of attempted violent crimes resisted with weapons = 2.0%
• Percent of weapons assumed to be firearms = 100%
• Assumed efficacy rate of resistance = 100%
• Violent crimes successfully resisted with firearms = 76,000
• Firearms deaths = 31,000
• Firearms suicides that would succeed by other methods = 4,000
• Remaining firearms deaths = 27,000
• Best-case protective ratio = 76,000 / 27,000 = 2.05

So, yes, by assuming all weapons used to resist violent crime are guns and that all instances of resistance are successful, we can achieve a scenario in which the violent crimes prevented greatly outweigh firearm-specific deaths. However, we’re still comparing crimes to deaths. If we take this back to injuries (28% of violent crimes), we have a ratio of 21,000 / 27,000.

Even in a best-case scenario, guns are responsible for more deaths than they prevent injuries.

You asked why you were brought into the conversation? Because you’ve said you are an ally. You have stated on your blog that you believe that gender equality in science is a good thing. Yet you rarely talk about some of the balancing issues or the parental issues. I have the link up that shows you think its important. Yet outside of that post originally done 2 years ago, you don’t talk about fatherhood or balancing fatherhood and partnerhood with science.

…

You need to write about balancing your life with your science as you said yourself the The father/PI who is seriously concerned about gender equity in science will go out of his way to exhibit his status.

She went on to clarify in the comments that she understands that he may have good reasons for not wanting to blog about his work/life balance, but that someone male (and preferably several someones) needs to do this and that he, having blogged about the issue in general before, would be a reasonable choice to help lead the way. I’m very happy for the clarification, because the last thing I want to do is argue with ScientistMother. In addition to liking her, it wouldn’t be fair.

The reason it wouldn’t be fair is that her exchange with DrugMonkey crystallized about two years worth of observations for me. ScientistMother doesn’t deserve to have all that pointed at her for what is just the latest in a very long line of posts I’ve seen that demonstrate that we in the blogosphere very rarely seem to understand what an ally is.

I’m not really sure how it happened. Allies in the culture wars aren’t appreciably different than military or political allies, but somehow, the meaning of the word has changed online. We’ve gone from “In everyday English usage, allies are people, groups, or nations that have joined together in an association for mutual benefit or to achieve some common purpose, whether or not explicit agreement has been worked out between them” to the assumption that the act of alliance comes with specific obligations and that people are “bad allies” or not allies at all if particular things are done or left undone.

This isn’t true, of course. There is nothing about an alliance that requires that one of the parties give up its sovereignty, or there would be many fewer alliances. Alliance is not allegiance. We do not set aside our own concerns and our own marginalization because we care about someone else’s. We don’t let someone else set the terms of our participation in the public sphere, simply because they call us allies, without going through the tricky act of negotiation. We don’t give up our autonomy as allies any more than we would, by giving aid that isn’t wanted or needed, usurp the autonomy of those we aim to help.

Student groups and others who are working to recruit allies understand this. They talk about the behavior of “ideal allies,” presenting aspirational goals and actions that can be adopted by allies. They recognize that learning will need to occur, and continue to occur, throughout the experience of being an ally, saying, “Ask lots of questions and talk honestly about what you do know, what you don’t know, and what you’d like to learn.” They don’t expect perfection, and they don’t demand monolithic behavior.

It’s quite possible the rest of us could learn something valuable from the pros on this one.

I still think of the family stories, however, whenever someone decides to proclaim that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. The usual arguments against the idea are that the Founding Fathers were, personally, largely deist and Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli. What is less often discussed is how, and why, bringing the colonies together into a single nation required that that nation be specifically non-Christian.

If given the opportunity, I like to take note of the fact that I’m just the latest in a long line of heretics. The English side of my family came to the colonies around the time when one’s status as a heretic–or not–was determined by who was queen and that status was likely to change at any moment. The Scottish side is said to have relocated first to Ireland, then to the colonies, after supporting the wrong king, at a time when that meant the same as being the wrong religion. (As opposed to my husband’s family, who are said to have left the auld sod “over a dispute over the ownership of a horse.”)

And then there’s the story about the U.S. westward migration being helped out by the family becoming unwelcome in one community for being the wrong sort of Quaker. Don’t ask me how that worked. I know Quakers, and I can’t imagine how you’d get them that riled up over differences of doctrine. All I can tell you is that my family may be special that way.

My favorite dead relatives, however, are the ones who were kicked out of the Colony of Massachusetts for being the wrong kind of Puritan, which means, as long as we’re clearing up matters of religious misconception, pure in matters of doctrine, not without sin. They’d come to the colonies, as many had, because they couldn’t practice their brand of religion in a land where the state was the head of the church. What they found (or perhaps helped to found, as the records aren’t very clear) was a colony where the church was the head of the state, just as many would like the situation to be today.

What they found was the colony that would eventually produce the Salem witch trials. Of course, they left before that happened. They left following Anne Hutchinson, who had some minor disagreements on theological matters with those in charge but seems to have been banned from the colony largely for being a successfully uppity woman. She was successful enough that my relatives weren’t the only people who left with her. (Mary Dyer, another of the uppity women banished at this point, later returned to the colony as a Quaker, becoming one of the Boston martyrs.)

The group was persuaded to move to the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations by Roger Williams, one of the founders of the Baptist church in America. The other founder of the American Baptist church was John Clarke, one of those relatives (assuming attribution of parentage is correct, my many, many times great-uncle) who had just been kicked out of Massachusetts.

Yes, the history of the Baptist church in America starts with a flight from religious intolerance. The church of the majority of those who want an American theocracy would never have made it to these shores had the laws of the Massachusetts Bay Colony been the law of all the land. And the other colonies of the time weren’t much different.

But…but not Baptist doesn’t mean not Christian, so the colonies were still Christian, right? Well, not exactly. Here is where the story of Rhode Island gets interesting. It was there that the “wall of separation” between state and church was born, and its father was none other than Roger Williams, co-founder of the American Baptists. He insisted on freedom of religious conscience and expression for the colony. Nor did he limit his tolerance to Christians. Rhode Island was one of the few colonies with a good track record of treating the indigenous peoples as people, rather than heathens who were clearly not part of God’s plan for this new world.

The colony was run on majority vote, but votes were only permitted on secular matters. This limitation was reaffirmed multiple times, and John Clarke had it incorporated in the colony’s charter, asking:

…it is much on their hearts (if they may be permitted) to hold forth a lively experiment, that a most flourishing civil state may stand and best be maintained, and that among our English subjects, with a full liberty in religious concernments…

The request was granted by Charles II:

…because some of the people and inhabitants of the same colony cannot, in their private opinions, conform to the public exercise of religion, according to the liturgy, forms and ceremonies of the Church of England, or take or subscribe the oaths and articles made and established in that behalf; and for that the same, by reason of the remote distances of those places, will (as we hope) be no breach of the unity and uniformity established in this nation: Have therefore thought fit, and do hereby publish, grant, ordain and declare, that our royal will and pleasure is, that no person within the said colony, at any time hereafter shall be any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinion in matters of religion, and do not actually disturb the civil peace of our said colony; but that all and every person and persons may, from time to time, and at all times hereafter, freely and fully have and enjoy his and their own judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concernments, throughout the tract of land hereafter mentioned…

No other colony matched Rhode Island’s stance on religious freedom. Pennsylvania came close, but the rights were only granted to monotheists. Maryland started as a place where Catholics could freely live and worship, but they ended up being persecuted there. Jews were allowed to settle in New York and New Jersey, but the history of their rights there is spotty. So how is it that the U.S. came to adopt Rhode Island’s incredibly liberal model of religious rights instead of some compromise?

The answer is that full religious freedom is the compromise between the competing rights of the followers of all the different sects that have fled to our land. Anything short of that is choosing sides, as the people of the time well knew, as the Baptists of the time well knew.

Our sentiments are uniformly on the side of religious liberty–that religion is at all times and places a matter between God and individuals–that no man ought to suffer in name, person, or effects on account of his religious opinions–that the legitimate power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbors; But, sir, our constitution of government is not specific. Our ancient charter together with the law made coincident therewith, were adopted as the basis of our government, at the time of our revolution; and such had been our laws and usages, and such still are; that religion is considered as the first object of legislation; and therefore what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the state) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights; and these favors we receive at the expense of such degrading acknowledgements as are inconsistent with the rights of freemen.

The “sir” in question was President Thomas Jefferson, and the Danbury Baptists wrote to him as a religious minority concerned that their country’s new Constitution and even its Bill of Rights did nothing to protect them from the persecution as long as their state was still free to impose religion from above (the idea that the states couldn’t infringe on the rights in the Bill came later).

Jefferson’s response to the Danbury Baptists is famous for the statements that “he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions” and invocation of the “wall of separation.” However, it is his response to yet more Baptists, these in Virginia, that most clearly draws the connection to Rhode Island’s charter.

We have solved, by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries.

And thus it is that, while many of the original colonies were founded as Christian colonies, not all of them were. More importantly, when the time came to model our country’s religious character on all of the colonial experiments that had taken place, we chose the experiment that had worked.

We chose to not become a Christian nation.

Yeah, that’s what I thought. But that doesn’t stop the makers of sites like You’re Not Helping from going flat-out negative, even when they’re offering “praise.” It doesn’t stop people from critiquing on Twitter, despite the sheer genius it would take to be both constructive and critical in 140 characters. (Note, not only are most of us not geniuses, but even those who may be geniuses are generally not the sort of genius required for effective short-form communication of difficult topics.) It doesn’t make bloggers reserve the shit-kicking boots for shit and not for imperfect allies.

Why? Oh, I don’t know. I’m not psychic. I have some theories, and if I were some pop psychologist trying to sell a book, I’d share them with you. I’m not. I’m just tired of seeing too many people and groups I care about waste their time and energy on hurting each other instead of defeating the common enemy.

Yes, I do mean waste. Destructive criticism breaks working relationships or makes them unlikely to form. It’s bad for the recipient, making them less effective and less ambitious. And it’s ineffective, leading to rejection of both the criticism and the person who delivered it. Unless your goal is mutually assured destruction, constructive criticism, when you must criticize, is the way to go.

So what does constructive criticism look like in the wild, particularly online? Essentially, it contains three elements: specificity, behavioral (rather than personal) orientation and positive recommendations for change. It sounds awfully simple for something that happens so rarely. Truth is, it is simple if you break it down far enough.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to work at breaking down constructive criticism in an online setting at Almost Diamonds. I will attempt to keep it all in the realm of positive recommendations. Feel free to suggest topics you think I should cover, either up front or as the series goes on. I hope to end up with a fairly comprehensive how to, and I hope you find it useful.

• Greatest decrease, prior year to current year: cigarette butts, down 30%
• Greatest decrease in item size: cigarette butts, 97% smoked fully

Either the recession and increased taxes are making cigarettes less appealing, or the winter weather, coldest it’s been in several years, is keeping smokers inside.

• Most frequent item: still cigarette butts (~30)
• Greatest increase: Styrofoam cups, up 50%
• Largest item, volume: FedEx envelope (1)

No clothes this year. That usually takes this category.

• Greatest overall volume: advertising newspapers (4), all sopping wet
• Greatest single dimension: unspooled cassette tape (4 feet)
• Most personally disgusting: cigar mouth pieces (2)
• Most generally disgusting: chewed gum with teeth prints (2)
• Most obsessive: bus transfer, torn into pieces 1 cm. by 1.5 cm.
• Saddest item: beads from a piece of kids jewelry with the shiny half worn off (2)
• Item most likely to make it into a story: broken 2008 Mickey Mouse Christmas ornament (1)
• Most impossible to gather: pieces of windshield glass from the car that hit the tree two feet inside our fence (100s)
• Nicest surprise: temperature (79F)
• Most welcome sight: active earthworms (2)
• Smallest ratio: energy to ambition (1 hour:infinite)
• Total volume: 1 medium shopping bag
• Percent complete: 33%

Back at it this weekend. Then I can trim the lilacs and dispose of the brush pile and pull grass and rearrange the ferns and the hardy geraniums and…whew! Yeah, I’ll be at this a while.

I will point out up front that I’m very lucky in my audiences. Some of this is work on my part, since I have no problem being fiercely critical of the hypercritical. A lot of it, though, is having largely other bloggers as readers of my blogs, other fiction authors as readers for my stories. There are few things more grand than to have work appreciated by those who understand what went into it.

How other bloggers cope sometimes is beyond me, though. The onslaught of commenters telling people what they should be writing about, how they should write it, what they can and cannot say about it, how what they left out is far more important…well, you get the idea. And the people saying, “Thank you, I enjoyed reading that,” or, “I’m so glad you brought that to my attention,” are rare indeed. All the more precious for that, but rare.

There’s a group of entertainers I’ve hung out with over the years. They make much of the money for their work by passing the hat, which means they have to engage their audience. Even among them, there’s a saying: “The cost of your ticket does not include a speaking role.” It isn’t entirely true there, any more than it is in blogging, but it’s worth remembering for anyone wanting to continue to be part of these audiences.

What is the point of writing anything if I’m brilliant only until I challenge you, when I become insane/dishonest/evil?

I wrote a little riff on this recently, but what the hell is up with all the people in the atheist/skeptic/rationalist blogosphere who suddenly think they can read minds? Doesn’t it make any of them suspicious that the only minds they can read are those of people who disagree with them, or that the mind-reading consistently reveals depths of depravity hitherto unsuspected?

Despite my continued interaction with the frustrations of social media, I’m truly unlikely to suddenly go around the bend. If you appreciated my ability to reason about topics on which we agreed, it might be worth a little work to follow along with an open mind when you think we don’t. If you appreciated my insight on topics you understood, it might be worth asking me questions to unpack the statements you don’t understand–and listening to the answers. If I have written things that have helped you in the past, is it not worth it to you to help me communicate with you now?

And if it isn’t, what is it worth for me to continue to keep you in mind as I write?

The best free entertainment/enlightenment comes from people who can do many things. Do you pay enough to keep them doing what you like?

Specialization keeps our industrialized world running, but it’s hard to beat a generalist for communication. Silos and jargon don’t make for good conversation. We can come across fifteen different analogies before finding the one that fits our experience well enough to make an explanation click. We can read the story set in fifteen different cultures, with fifteen different themes emphasized, before we find the one that resonates with us. We need and want these connections to be made.

Ironically, that means the person who is entertaining you today doesn’t need to be doing it again tomorrow. Sure, they probably have some kind of creative itch that needs scratching or social responsibility that needs appeasing, but they have options. I could go write one of the many books that would really like my attention. I could go apply my talents for the many nonprofits that share my values. I don’t need to blog. None of the people who write well-received blogs need to, so why should anyone keep it up?

I think this is one of the things we sometimes forget as we get comfortable with our free-content culture. We get entitled. Oh, do we get entitled. This content, this blog (this forum) is available to us, just like the things we’ve always paid for, so it must be ours.

Except we didn’t pay for it, and it isn’t ours. We’ve loaded a page and let a few words in. The price of that ticket doesn’t pay for a speaking role, and we should expect to be treated with little more respect than a heckler–or that person who wants you to work for nothing, just for them–if we act as though it does.

It isn’t as though bloggers are charging exorbitant rates. A full reading of the post, a second glance to make sure the thing that pissed you off was actually what was said, addressing the meat of the post before wandering down tangents, the occasional compliment or link sent to your friends who would appreciate it, the simple acknowledgment that the blogger has done some honest work. None of those are a high cost for what we’re being provided for free these days, and they’re the kind of pay that matters to someone who is already doing it for the love.