I don't have to run new rules by the Chalicesseurs, but I like to. In that spirit, please consider: "Discussion of the word verification is grounds for your response being immediately kicked."*
Because thinking out and writing a post takes real time and effort, and when people respond with "Tee hee! My word verification says DISCO" or the equivalent, it's really fucking rude to someone who has put a lot of work into entertaining you for free. (No, the fact that people have been rude to you in the past does not justify further rudeness here.)
Also, it gets other people talking about the word verification and not the post, thus further reducing the quality of the comments and people's desire to write posts in the first place. That last point is very important to me as there may come a time when the Chaliceblog will need to become a group effort or die and if my potential guest writers have decided that the Chalicesseurs don't actually give a shit about what is being written, my guess is that "die" will be the end result.
Discuss.
CC
who won't impose this rule ex post facto, and perhaps not at all, but wanted to talk about the idea.
*In the past, I have only kicked four kinds of comments:
1. Comments of my own that I rethought or wanted to fix a typo in
2. Comments that the author asked me to kick.
3. Spam
4. Comments that were not just insulting, not just pointless, but both, and I've been very sparing in kicking those.
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Monday, July 20, 2009
Monday, April 06, 2009
Monday, February 09, 2009
How many Southern Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb?
For a variety of reasons relating to a new thing that might be happening in my life*, I might be shutting down the Chaliceblog fairly soon. If I shut down the Chaliceblog, I'm going to disappear from the blogosphere for awhile because I think that's the only way I can deal and I don't want to hang around your blogs like the retired coworker whom nobody wants to eat lunch with. I will still be available over facebook and e-mail and would love to hear from you because like any retired coworker I know I will be lonely. I will probably go back to commenting when I've gotten some distance.
I tested my resolve on this tonight by deleting 20 posts (some that I very much liked and a couple that had taken hours to write) at the request of someone else because that person convinced me it was the right thing to do. It hurt like hell, but I did it. I now know I can do it again.
In reality, the Chaliceblog's days were numbered the day I got into law school.
Mary-who-dances, after having been fired by a prebyterian church because she is a lesbian, once said to me "Not every change is a fabulous new opportunity, some of them just suck"
This change would be both. It would have wonderful aspects, but I would certainly mourn this blog. And it may not work out and a few weeks from now, I may pull a Nirvana and say "Nevermind" and delete this and go on, but I really care about you guys and didn't want to just disappear with no warning. That said, if I decide to do this, I'm going to move quickly.
So there you go.
CC
who is going to take the opportunity to tell the UUA Washington Office that one of your number told somebody that the Chaliceblog drives y'all crazy and told that person not to tell me because it would give me too much satisfaction.
That person did tell me, and it was indeed immensely gratifying. Thinking about that makes a very sad person very happy.
* No, I'm not knocked up, and yes, theCSO and I are still very much married.
I tested my resolve on this tonight by deleting 20 posts (some that I very much liked and a couple that had taken hours to write) at the request of someone else because that person convinced me it was the right thing to do. It hurt like hell, but I did it. I now know I can do it again.
In reality, the Chaliceblog's days were numbered the day I got into law school.
Mary-who-dances, after having been fired by a prebyterian church because she is a lesbian, once said to me "Not every change is a fabulous new opportunity, some of them just suck"
This change would be both. It would have wonderful aspects, but I would certainly mourn this blog. And it may not work out and a few weeks from now, I may pull a Nirvana and say "Nevermind" and delete this and go on, but I really care about you guys and didn't want to just disappear with no warning. That said, if I decide to do this, I'm going to move quickly.
So there you go.
CC
who is going to take the opportunity to tell the UUA Washington Office that one of your number told somebody that the Chaliceblog drives y'all crazy and told that person not to tell me because it would give me too much satisfaction.
That person did tell me, and it was indeed immensely gratifying. Thinking about that makes a very sad person very happy.
* No, I'm not knocked up, and yes, theCSO and I are still very much married.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Sigh.
The first time I responded to a certain lie about me with a careful explanation of how what I said was not at all what the liar said I said*, Peacebang said that it was big of me to put together a long and detailed response to a "ridiculous interpretation of your comment."
While I appreciate the compliment, I didn't do it to be nice, I did it because I know that once a dead cat gets under the porch, the stench tends to linger and that lies work the same way.
I got another waft of that particular dead cat today on someone else's blog.
So, if you've recently heard about a shocking thing that somebody says I said that doesn't really sound like something any reasonable person, particularly a UU, would say, please click here.
CC
*Or what the not-terribly-bright person thinks I said, if you want to be charitable.
While I appreciate the compliment, I didn't do it to be nice, I did it because I know that once a dead cat gets under the porch, the stench tends to linger and that lies work the same way.
I got another waft of that particular dead cat today on someone else's blog.
So, if you've recently heard about a shocking thing that somebody says I said that doesn't really sound like something any reasonable person, particularly a UU, would say, please click here.
CC
*Or what the not-terribly-bright person thinks I said, if you want to be charitable.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Connective Tubes
Hey y'all,
I'm working on a lay service on technology. The specific topic I'm going to be speaking on is the ways technology brings us together and connects us. Yes, I know some people isolate themselves with technology*. I plan to sort of address that, yet I have been repeatedly struck by how the computer and the cell phone have been two of the most revolutionary technologies in recent memory and they are both fundamentally about bringing people together.
When I was a kid, the Chalicemom casually mentioned that once you got out of high school, you pretty much never saw your high school friends again. The inconvenience of mail and the cost of long distance made that simply the way things were when she was a young adult. By the time I was in high school, everybody had e-mail and I did keep in touch with a fair number of people. Now Facebook has brought me back in touch with even more of them. And calling plans abound where you pay a flat amount per month and can use all the long distance you want. How has it changed us that losing people when we move is now a choice we make rather than a reality we are forced to face?
A good friend of mine is in contact with his Mom every single day on Yahoo messenger. He keeps it on pretty much all day and she can message him, one assumes, anytime she needs something or even if she's just lonely. (Though I'm sure he says "can't chat now Mom, gotta work" if she messages at a bad time.) He genuinely thinks it's great to be in such constant contact with his mother. That said, not all of us would be unreservedly delighted to be in that situation.
How about being able to find people who believe or enjoy the same things you do with a few keystrokes on google? How about being able to blog and kick ideas around just as I'm doing here? What's the personal and spiritual upshot of all of this connection?
Mostly, I think it's all about having more choices and I think it's great.
But I'm still thinking through this stuff and fleshing it out.
Any ideas? Any questions for me on these topics? Any thoughts on the spiritual dimension of these connections?
Thanks,
CC
*I tend to think those folks would isolate themselves anyway, just another way, though. The world didn't lack for isolated people before technology, after all. If anything, it's better for isolated folks to be having suboptimal contact on the internet than to be reading books or working on model trains or something all day and have none at all.
I'm working on a lay service on technology. The specific topic I'm going to be speaking on is the ways technology brings us together and connects us. Yes, I know some people isolate themselves with technology*. I plan to sort of address that, yet I have been repeatedly struck by how the computer and the cell phone have been two of the most revolutionary technologies in recent memory and they are both fundamentally about bringing people together.
When I was a kid, the Chalicemom casually mentioned that once you got out of high school, you pretty much never saw your high school friends again. The inconvenience of mail and the cost of long distance made that simply the way things were when she was a young adult. By the time I was in high school, everybody had e-mail and I did keep in touch with a fair number of people. Now Facebook has brought me back in touch with even more of them. And calling plans abound where you pay a flat amount per month and can use all the long distance you want. How has it changed us that losing people when we move is now a choice we make rather than a reality we are forced to face?
A good friend of mine is in contact with his Mom every single day on Yahoo messenger. He keeps it on pretty much all day and she can message him, one assumes, anytime she needs something or even if she's just lonely. (Though I'm sure he says "can't chat now Mom, gotta work" if she messages at a bad time.) He genuinely thinks it's great to be in such constant contact with his mother. That said, not all of us would be unreservedly delighted to be in that situation.
How about being able to find people who believe or enjoy the same things you do with a few keystrokes on google? How about being able to blog and kick ideas around just as I'm doing here? What's the personal and spiritual upshot of all of this connection?
Mostly, I think it's all about having more choices and I think it's great.
But I'm still thinking through this stuff and fleshing it out.
Any ideas? Any questions for me on these topics? Any thoughts on the spiritual dimension of these connections?
Thanks,
CC
*I tend to think those folks would isolate themselves anyway, just another way, though. The world didn't lack for isolated people before technology, after all. If anything, it's better for isolated folks to be having suboptimal contact on the internet than to be reading books or working on model trains or something all day and have none at all.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
If you're thinking of starting a UU blog...
you've been advised to answer the following questions.
I'm going to answer them with the Chaliceblog in mind. Bear with me. I'm making a point.
Purpose
What is the purpose of your blog?
I've written something nearly every day of my adult life and my husband suggested I find a central place to put it all.
Who is your intended audience?
Whoever cares. My stats inform me that hundreds of people I've never met read it every day. My own mother rarely bothers, even when she knows I've written about her. If a certain kind of post gets lots of comments, I'm likely to write more posts like it, but I mostly write to please myself and perhaps an inner circle of half a dozen people, most of whom never comment.
Who will own your blog?
I do in a general sense, but I grant posting rights to anybody I feel like, sometimes on a whim. And far from everyone I've offered posting rights to has taken me up on it. I've been working on Katy-the-Wise for years. Jana-who-creates, too.
I own chalicechick.com and several variants, along with Unitarian-Universalists.com and Unitarian-Universalists.org. If I ever need to, I will move the Chaliceblog off of blogger, but blogger seems easier for most people to deal with.
Frequency of Posting
How often will you post to your blog?
Whenever I have something to say. When I don't post for more than a week, I get mail, when I post many times a day people have trouble keeping up and the quality of the comments suffers.
But I've done both and everywhere in between.
Tone and Impact
What tone will your blog have and how will that make readers feel?
Well, for the first year and a half The Chaliceblog was bright red and had a cartoon of Death on it that apparently only I liked, but nobody told me this until I got rid of it. The gratitude just poured in when I made it more readable, though, and I will admit that my readership quickly doubled.
The style I write my blog in is pretty much exactly the one I talk in, and I talk different tones about different subjects. I don't have a consistent tone or feeling I'm looking for and don't want one. When I write something sad, I'd like people to feel sad. When I write something funny, I'd like it if people laughed. I'm often sarcastic about things, but my more on-the-ball readers get that I'm a complicated person and that there's a pretty thoughtful and sensitive nature beneath the snark.
And the on-the-ball readers are the only ones I honestly care about.
To answer the question about how I make people feel directly, I've been told I made someone laugh hundreds of times, moved someone to write me a nasty email in the low dozens of times, been told I made someone cry a few times and two different people have reported that posts I wrote made them throw up.
Not bad for almost two thousand posts.
I've been called a "bleeding heart elitist" before and that's the closest thing to a consistent tone I have. But I could point you to plenty of posts that don't remotely meet that description.
That said, the worst posting statistics I've ever had were the time I gave up Snark for Lent, so it is fair to say that snark is an important part of what I do here.
Safety
How will you make sure your blog is a safe space for you and for participants?
For years, my policy was "It's the Goddamn internet. You can't promote volunteerism without somebody insulting you. Get over it."
But a few factors, not the least of which observing how quickly a few bitchy people can kill a good discussion in Salon.com's comments, had me relent a couple of years ago. Now I won't kick a post for being pointless and I won't usually kick a post for being over-the-top insulting, but I occasionally kick posts for being both. By "occaisionally," I mean I've done it maybe half a dozen times, usually on another commenter's request.
BY FAR the majority of posts I kick are posts where the author emails me and says he/she has changed his/her mind on what he/she wrote and doesn't know how to remove it himself/herself.
What kinds of information about yourself and about others will you need to keep confidential?
I generally keep real names and anything I know to be a secret out off the Chaliceblog. I don't say anything about anyone that I wouldn't loudly say in a bar. I don't make my workplaces recognizable and I almost never write about co-workers. I write all the time about belonging to a large church near Washington DC, though I tend to be a little coy about which one of the half-dozen or so local 500+ member churches I belong to. Doing so gives me the freedom to VERY OCCASIONALLY write about something that has happened in church.
That said, having Chalicechick in your congregation was not in the job description of any of my ministers and they shouldn't have to be worried that if they say something I disagree with in church they will get trashed on the internet. (I doubt this would keep them up nights anyway, but still...)
I do my best to never let my YRUUs be identifiable at all, ideally not even to people within the group. But I don't write about them often, so that's easy.
My policy on my own name, as people have noted in the comments, is considerably more lax. Most people, even some people who like to mess with my head, know my name. I tend to assume if you don't know my name, it's because you don't care. I always kind of liked that just about everyone knew Wonkette's real name, yet she kept her blogging persona separate. I like the same thing in the guy who writes Waiter Rant, whose name is also public information. Like with Wonkette and The Waiter, however, a quick google will give you plenty of information about me, also my real name is doubly obvious to Facebook members.
If anybody doubts that I'm just as tough on John Edwards and/or anyone I'm arguing with in person when they know my name, they have my invitation to ask theCSO about that one. I find the idea that I would be less confrontational if people knew my name a little strange. If I backed down from controversy in person, law would not be the career for me, and indeed, in my current job I deal with people who hate my firm and everything we stand for all the time.
Honestly, CC differs from the woman who writes her the most in that CC is less afraid to be vulnerable when she writes about sad things. As a kid, I wasn't encouraged to express emotions even though I was unhappy a lot of the time. I find it easier to do so in writing and most of my posts about my family are me working on how I feel about the situation. (Which probably makes it terribly hypocritical of me to make fun of livejournalers. Ah well...)
At the same time, I know from experience that if I'm too depressing, I don't get comments, so I try to keep sad posts few and far between. Also, my readers don't like it when I write about sex and don't comment. It's possible you think I'm funny looking, but I prefer to imagine you are safegaurding my employment prospects by encouraging me to be more dignified.
I said I had a point, and I do. After years of blogging, I can answer all of these questions. But the answers aren't what they would have been a few years ago and in some cases are answers I could not have articulated before I set down to answer the questions half an hour ago and really thought about them.
I started a blog because I wrote a lot and because I felt like it and I have hundreds of readers a day and have been no slouch at the UU blog awards. I've made amazing friends and have awesome commenters and as far as I can tell no small amount of whuffle in the UU blogger community.
Blogging is an art, not a science, yo. If you have something to say, don't let "Oh, but I haven't developed a commenter policy" or "But I hear video blogging is the next hot thing and I would have to have a free written blog that I update from the public library" stand in your way.
Here's my advice for starting a UU blog.
1. Read lots of blogs. Respond to what people say. If you have been commenting at the Chaliceblog and I think you're good, I will pimp posts of yours I like and your blog in general if I realize you've started one because I want thoughtful, cool, voices to be heard. Commenting on other people's blogs is I believe the only marketing I've ever done for the Chaliceblog, though of course that various aggregators list me helps, too.
2. Write about what you care about. Make us care about it too. If you write with thoughtfulness and passion, we will. Subject matter is WAY less important than you think it is. As far as I'm concerned, the greatest novel of the 20th century was written about an incompetent hot dog vendor who also couldn't make it as a file clerk at a pants factory. (If you had to click, you owe it to yourself to buy the book. CC cried buckets and laughed some, too, and in reading it came to some serious insights about the world.)
3. Write about what you think and feel about things in balance. Too much think is boring, too much feel is Livejournal.
4. Don't be afraid to be wrong. My "being wrong" policy is "If I'm wrong and you can convince me of it, I will apologize and either correct the post obviously or write a whole new post. If I'm wrong in the comments, I will correct it in the commnets" I've done it plenty of times. Most of us are wrong a lot. The people who you have to watch out for are the people who never admit it. Either they don't say anything much, they are dishonest, or they can't see their own wrongness.
5. Go to blogger.com*. Sign up. Write. It really is that simple. If you need to, make yourself write every day in the beginning until having an interesting thought and thinking "Hey, I could blog this" is second nature.
CC
*Yes, there are lots of different places one can start a blog. But blogger is very easy for a beginner and you can always move your blog later.
I'm going to answer them with the Chaliceblog in mind. Bear with me. I'm making a point.
Purpose
What is the purpose of your blog?
I've written something nearly every day of my adult life and my husband suggested I find a central place to put it all.
Who is your intended audience?
Whoever cares. My stats inform me that hundreds of people I've never met read it every day. My own mother rarely bothers, even when she knows I've written about her. If a certain kind of post gets lots of comments, I'm likely to write more posts like it, but I mostly write to please myself and perhaps an inner circle of half a dozen people, most of whom never comment.
Who will own your blog?
I do in a general sense, but I grant posting rights to anybody I feel like, sometimes on a whim. And far from everyone I've offered posting rights to has taken me up on it. I've been working on Katy-the-Wise for years. Jana-who-creates, too.
I own chalicechick.com and several variants, along with Unitarian-Universalists.com and Unitarian-Universalists.org. If I ever need to, I will move the Chaliceblog off of blogger, but blogger seems easier for most people to deal with.
Frequency of Posting
How often will you post to your blog?
Whenever I have something to say. When I don't post for more than a week, I get mail, when I post many times a day people have trouble keeping up and the quality of the comments suffers.
But I've done both and everywhere in between.
Tone and Impact
What tone will your blog have and how will that make readers feel?
Well, for the first year and a half The Chaliceblog was bright red and had a cartoon of Death on it that apparently only I liked, but nobody told me this until I got rid of it. The gratitude just poured in when I made it more readable, though, and I will admit that my readership quickly doubled.
The style I write my blog in is pretty much exactly the one I talk in, and I talk different tones about different subjects. I don't have a consistent tone or feeling I'm looking for and don't want one. When I write something sad, I'd like people to feel sad. When I write something funny, I'd like it if people laughed. I'm often sarcastic about things, but my more on-the-ball readers get that I'm a complicated person and that there's a pretty thoughtful and sensitive nature beneath the snark.
And the on-the-ball readers are the only ones I honestly care about.
To answer the question about how I make people feel directly, I've been told I made someone laugh hundreds of times, moved someone to write me a nasty email in the low dozens of times, been told I made someone cry a few times and two different people have reported that posts I wrote made them throw up.
Not bad for almost two thousand posts.
I've been called a "bleeding heart elitist" before and that's the closest thing to a consistent tone I have. But I could point you to plenty of posts that don't remotely meet that description.
That said, the worst posting statistics I've ever had were the time I gave up Snark for Lent, so it is fair to say that snark is an important part of what I do here.
Safety
How will you make sure your blog is a safe space for you and for participants?
For years, my policy was "It's the Goddamn internet. You can't promote volunteerism without somebody insulting you. Get over it."
But a few factors, not the least of which observing how quickly a few bitchy people can kill a good discussion in Salon.com's comments, had me relent a couple of years ago. Now I won't kick a post for being pointless and I won't usually kick a post for being over-the-top insulting, but I occasionally kick posts for being both. By "occaisionally," I mean I've done it maybe half a dozen times, usually on another commenter's request.
BY FAR the majority of posts I kick are posts where the author emails me and says he/she has changed his/her mind on what he/she wrote and doesn't know how to remove it himself/herself.
What kinds of information about yourself and about others will you need to keep confidential?
I generally keep real names and anything I know to be a secret out off the Chaliceblog. I don't say anything about anyone that I wouldn't loudly say in a bar. I don't make my workplaces recognizable and I almost never write about co-workers. I write all the time about belonging to a large church near Washington DC, though I tend to be a little coy about which one of the half-dozen or so local 500+ member churches I belong to. Doing so gives me the freedom to VERY OCCASIONALLY write about something that has happened in church.
That said, having Chalicechick in your congregation was not in the job description of any of my ministers and they shouldn't have to be worried that if they say something I disagree with in church they will get trashed on the internet. (I doubt this would keep them up nights anyway, but still...)
I do my best to never let my YRUUs be identifiable at all, ideally not even to people within the group. But I don't write about them often, so that's easy.
My policy on my own name, as people have noted in the comments, is considerably more lax. Most people, even some people who like to mess with my head, know my name. I tend to assume if you don't know my name, it's because you don't care. I always kind of liked that just about everyone knew Wonkette's real name, yet she kept her blogging persona separate. I like the same thing in the guy who writes Waiter Rant, whose name is also public information. Like with Wonkette and The Waiter, however, a quick google will give you plenty of information about me, also my real name is doubly obvious to Facebook members.
If anybody doubts that I'm just as tough on John Edwards and/or anyone I'm arguing with in person when they know my name, they have my invitation to ask theCSO about that one. I find the idea that I would be less confrontational if people knew my name a little strange. If I backed down from controversy in person, law would not be the career for me, and indeed, in my current job I deal with people who hate my firm and everything we stand for all the time.
Honestly, CC differs from the woman who writes her the most in that CC is less afraid to be vulnerable when she writes about sad things. As a kid, I wasn't encouraged to express emotions even though I was unhappy a lot of the time. I find it easier to do so in writing and most of my posts about my family are me working on how I feel about the situation. (Which probably makes it terribly hypocritical of me to make fun of livejournalers. Ah well...)
At the same time, I know from experience that if I'm too depressing, I don't get comments, so I try to keep sad posts few and far between. Also, my readers don't like it when I write about sex and don't comment. It's possible you think I'm funny looking, but I prefer to imagine you are safegaurding my employment prospects by encouraging me to be more dignified.
I said I had a point, and I do. After years of blogging, I can answer all of these questions. But the answers aren't what they would have been a few years ago and in some cases are answers I could not have articulated before I set down to answer the questions half an hour ago and really thought about them.
I started a blog because I wrote a lot and because I felt like it and I have hundreds of readers a day and have been no slouch at the UU blog awards. I've made amazing friends and have awesome commenters and as far as I can tell no small amount of whuffle in the UU blogger community.
Blogging is an art, not a science, yo. If you have something to say, don't let "Oh, but I haven't developed a commenter policy" or "But I hear video blogging is the next hot thing and I would have to have a free written blog that I update from the public library" stand in your way.
Here's my advice for starting a UU blog.
1. Read lots of blogs. Respond to what people say. If you have been commenting at the Chaliceblog and I think you're good, I will pimp posts of yours I like and your blog in general if I realize you've started one because I want thoughtful, cool, voices to be heard. Commenting on other people's blogs is I believe the only marketing I've ever done for the Chaliceblog, though of course that various aggregators list me helps, too.
2. Write about what you care about. Make us care about it too. If you write with thoughtfulness and passion, we will. Subject matter is WAY less important than you think it is. As far as I'm concerned, the greatest novel of the 20th century was written about an incompetent hot dog vendor who also couldn't make it as a file clerk at a pants factory. (If you had to click, you owe it to yourself to buy the book. CC cried buckets and laughed some, too, and in reading it came to some serious insights about the world.)
3. Write about what you think and feel about things in balance. Too much think is boring, too much feel is Livejournal.
4. Don't be afraid to be wrong. My "being wrong" policy is "If I'm wrong and you can convince me of it, I will apologize and either correct the post obviously or write a whole new post. If I'm wrong in the comments, I will correct it in the commnets" I've done it plenty of times. Most of us are wrong a lot. The people who you have to watch out for are the people who never admit it. Either they don't say anything much, they are dishonest, or they can't see their own wrongness.
5. Go to blogger.com*. Sign up. Write. It really is that simple. If you need to, make yourself write every day in the beginning until having an interesting thought and thinking "Hey, I could blog this" is second nature.
CC
*Yes, there are lots of different places one can start a blog. But blogger is very easy for a beginner and you can always move your blog later.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
CC's turn to state what she thinks is the obvious
Longtime commenter Kim C., who almost never completely agrees with me but has been reading this blog since I've been writing it, likes to mention that logic courses should really be tought in the public schools. I'm seeing the need for that this morning.
It's come to my attention that in a thread on Radical Hapa that I wasn't reading because I thought nobody was posting to it anymore, somebody has taken my statement:
“Or to put it another way, if he was going to shoot up a symbol of liberalism, the local offices of the Obama campaign would have made more sense. My guess is he wanted to shoot up someplace where his ex-wife had been happy and found support, and scrawled some concerns about politics to give his actions greater meaning. ”
to be an actual endorsement of shooting up the Obama campaign office.
Put in symbolic logic terms, this looks like
"If L, then O" is being taken as an endorsement of the "If L, then O" course of action. This is a fallacy. I'm not recalling if is has a name, and if it does, I'm not sure what that name is.*
But let's look at some equivilent examples:
"If you're going to let your seven-year-old play with that grenade, don't let her pull the pin" is not an endorsement of letting your seven year old play with the grenade.
"If you're going to have sex with Charlie Sheen, at least wear a condem" is not an endorsement of having sex with Charlie Sheen.
Now what I actually wrote was a little more complicated, in that I was using the fact that he chose to shoot up a church rather than a campaign office to speculate on his motives in what I think was a pretty clear "Goodness knows I don't know what this guy was thinking, but this makes sense to me" frame of mind.**
Equivilent examples:
-If the PETA activist had intended to murder Anna Wintour, he probably would have thrown something more deadly than a pie. My guess is that his motivation was not to murder her, but to embarass her in front of the press.
-If she had intended to commit check fraud and steal money, she probably would have written her check for more than five dollars. My guess is that her bouncing that check was just an accident.
Now, just so we are completely clear, in making those statements, I have neither endorsed murdering Anna Wintour nor committing check fraud.
This is interesting to me because this particular type of fallacy comes up a lot in politics where, for example, a common argument against comprehensive sex education is "Telling the kids to use condoms if they are going to have sex encourages them to have sex."
CC
who is probably going to get seriously nitpicked on the logic parts of this post, but thinks she's substantially correct.
*CC's last logic course was about ten years ago. But she did get an A.
**Item: Had I phrased this as a declaration of a definitive truth, that would have been me making a fallacy of my own, sort of a contrapositive affirming of the consequent. But it was clearly phrased as speculation and what made sense to me.
(Oh, and hat tip to Steve Caldwell for linking to the thread and reminding me it was there.)
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
On proper use of the word "Zen"
James takes me to task, and justly so, in the comments on my previous post.
He writes: I realize this is an exercise in futility, particularly against the cultural weight of the Daily Show's "moment of Zen," but I am saddened to see my religious tradition trivialized by this precious term being reduced to mean non-sequitur...
Or not...
My intention with using the word "Zen," was to nudge at how the game was pointing at a simple kind of self-exploration and examination of what one desires (and in my case that all I really know about Alan Rickman is that he's a nice looking actor with a rich and sexy voice, and anything else I might crave in him is something I put there with my own perceptions,) with the "or not" as a reminder that this was, after all, a Honda website I was looking at and a game at that.
At the same time, it was still trivializing and I've used it even less correctly before as my circle of friends tends to use "I'm pretty zen about not getting the promotion" to mean "I have dealt with the inherent badness of not getting the promotion and have attained a sort of balance and mental peace with the idea that I'm not getting promoted."
But that's still misusing and trivializing and I will try not to use it badly again.
Sorry about that.
CC
He writes: I realize this is an exercise in futility, particularly against the cultural weight of the Daily Show's "moment of Zen," but I am saddened to see my religious tradition trivialized by this precious term being reduced to mean non-sequitur...
Or not...
My intention with using the word "Zen," was to nudge at how the game was pointing at a simple kind of self-exploration and examination of what one desires (and in my case that all I really know about Alan Rickman is that he's a nice looking actor with a rich and sexy voice, and anything else I might crave in him is something I put there with my own perceptions,) with the "or not" as a reminder that this was, after all, a Honda website I was looking at and a game at that.
At the same time, it was still trivializing and I've used it even less correctly before as my circle of friends tends to use "I'm pretty zen about not getting the promotion" to mean "I have dealt with the inherent badness of not getting the promotion and have attained a sort of balance and mental peace with the idea that I'm not getting promoted."
But that's still misusing and trivializing and I will try not to use it badly again.
Sorry about that.
CC
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Sweet mother of all that's swell, my tags are caught up!
I devoted a lunch hour to catching up my tags.
As always, I've only tagged posts that I thought were worth tagging. If my post was only a link or a photo or I just decided I didn't like it very much, I didn't bother.
I added some new categories, too and will at some point go back through and update some of the old posts to add new tags.
As always "Livejournal-Esque" is my narrative tag and tracks my more narrative posts.
"Padawans enlightened" is about YRUU.
I think the rest are pretty self-explanatory.
CC
As always, I've only tagged posts that I thought were worth tagging. If my post was only a link or a photo or I just decided I didn't like it very much, I didn't bother.
I added some new categories, too and will at some point go back through and update some of the old posts to add new tags.
As always "Livejournal-Esque" is my narrative tag and tracks my more narrative posts.
"Padawans enlightened" is about YRUU.
I think the rest are pretty self-explanatory.
CC
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
I have always had a low opinion
of people who say "Now how would you feel if someone did that to you?"
I've written on this topic before because I've had several friends in the past who liked to recite my minor sins back to me, always ending with that dumbass question. I've heard it applied to, among other sins, "kissing your ex at a party," "needing to work on the college newspaper when you have yet another boyfriend drama" and "poorly disgusing that I didn't like the romantic surprise you painstakingly prepared for me because you didn't know me very well and assumed I would love something I actually found mildly traumatic.*"
I always feel like responding "I would feel like a melodramatic, self-important idiot if I made a fuss about it." (Ok, I genuinely felt really bad about the romantic surprise at the time, though in retrospect, I don't have a lot of sympathy for planning romantic surprises for people one doesn't know very well.)
Anwyay, I'm sure with "how would YOU feel if..." the idea is that I will have a sudden, shocking revelation:
"Oh my gosh! If I had plans with a friend and they had to cancel a few days before because of a work crisis, I would feel...bad! How horribly I must have wounded you!"
(Cue dramatic, un-CC-like sobbing, wailing, moaning and begging of forgiveness,)
I think I've written before that my total disgust for anybody who uses this phrase dates back to a clingy, in retrospect completely mental college friend who used it constantly. Since, then, I've regarded it as a red flag that the person I'm dealing with might be a self-important pain-in-the-ass.
I'm fairly certain that for most of us, considering the "how would *I* feel" point is pretty much a reflex when we're about to do something that someone else will likely find unpleasant. For me it is always factored in to the cost benefit analysis I go through when making a choice about whether to, say, report someone who is giving me bad customer service, to say nothing of when I'm about to do something than might annoy a friend. So to me, there's something inherently quite insulting about asking someone to consider how they would feel in the same situation.
Anway, I've written all that before, though it has been a couple of years. Yet I find myself revisiting the idea today, because I've several times recently encoutered people who can't deal with having their own logic applied to themselves and actually haven't considered this point, and are in some cases in total denial. (Well, yeah, when you do the same thing I did, it's much worse, because of these minor distinctions that don't make much sense...)
And I am totally flummoxed by the mere existance of these people.
I've discussed this and similar issues with an admittedly snotty close friend who says that if you're going to argue with stupid people, you need to prepare yourself with the sort of logic that appeals to stupid people. This logic includes several variations on Pascal's wager, any political logic that fits on a bumper sticker, and yes, my least favorite question. But that's for winning an argument.
Usually I don't even bother to try to show stupid people they've wronged me and get an apology. It's always more work than it is worth.
So that's what I'm thinking about today. Suggestions?
CC
*This was not theCSO. TheCSO would never ask me that question. He's way too smart and way to aware that he and I think differently.
I've written on this topic before because I've had several friends in the past who liked to recite my minor sins back to me, always ending with that dumbass question. I've heard it applied to, among other sins, "kissing your ex at a party," "needing to work on the college newspaper when you have yet another boyfriend drama" and "poorly disgusing that I didn't like the romantic surprise you painstakingly prepared for me because you didn't know me very well and assumed I would love something I actually found mildly traumatic.*"
I always feel like responding "I would feel like a melodramatic, self-important idiot if I made a fuss about it." (Ok, I genuinely felt really bad about the romantic surprise at the time, though in retrospect, I don't have a lot of sympathy for planning romantic surprises for people one doesn't know very well.)
Anwyay, I'm sure with "how would YOU feel if..." the idea is that I will have a sudden, shocking revelation:
"Oh my gosh! If I had plans with a friend and they had to cancel a few days before because of a work crisis, I would feel...bad! How horribly I must have wounded you!"
(Cue dramatic, un-CC-like sobbing, wailing, moaning and begging of forgiveness,)
I think I've written before that my total disgust for anybody who uses this phrase dates back to a clingy, in retrospect completely mental college friend who used it constantly. Since, then, I've regarded it as a red flag that the person I'm dealing with might be a self-important pain-in-the-ass.
I'm fairly certain that for most of us, considering the "how would *I* feel" point is pretty much a reflex when we're about to do something that someone else will likely find unpleasant. For me it is always factored in to the cost benefit analysis I go through when making a choice about whether to, say, report someone who is giving me bad customer service, to say nothing of when I'm about to do something than might annoy a friend. So to me, there's something inherently quite insulting about asking someone to consider how they would feel in the same situation.
Anway, I've written all that before, though it has been a couple of years. Yet I find myself revisiting the idea today, because I've several times recently encoutered people who can't deal with having their own logic applied to themselves and actually haven't considered this point, and are in some cases in total denial. (Well, yeah, when you do the same thing I did, it's much worse, because of these minor distinctions that don't make much sense...)
And I am totally flummoxed by the mere existance of these people.
I've discussed this and similar issues with an admittedly snotty close friend who says that if you're going to argue with stupid people, you need to prepare yourself with the sort of logic that appeals to stupid people. This logic includes several variations on Pascal's wager, any political logic that fits on a bumper sticker, and yes, my least favorite question. But that's for winning an argument.
Usually I don't even bother to try to show stupid people they've wronged me and get an apology. It's always more work than it is worth.
So that's what I'm thinking about today. Suggestions?
CC
*This was not theCSO. TheCSO would never ask me that question. He's way too smart and way to aware that he and I think differently.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Forewarned
Because I want my Chalicesseurs to be wise in the ways of the internet, I'm letting you know that:
1. The customary blogger response to a functional cease and desist letter from someone who has no legal leg to stand on is to post the letter and make fun of it.
2. If you create something, especially in your professional capacity, and put your name on it, and I make fun of that thing and by-extension you, your name is public domain for the purposes of that fun-making, nothing in that situation is actionable from a privacy standpoint. If you don't believe me, look it up.
3. If I haven't said anything untrue about you, nothing I've done is defamation.
4. I'm a pretty benign person offline and actually have respected polite requests to remove someone's name before. But being a snotty bitch to me in your email is not the way to get me to behave benignly. If I do take your name off, particularly if you are a professional who should have known better, I am doing you a favor. The world doesn't owe you a free pass when you do a shitty job at something you're paid to be good at and rudeness is not the way to earn that pass.
5. At least for the moment, I'm not attaching a name or a post to this.
CC
1. The customary blogger response to a functional cease and desist letter from someone who has no legal leg to stand on is to post the letter and make fun of it.
2. If you create something, especially in your professional capacity, and put your name on it, and I make fun of that thing and by-extension you, your name is public domain for the purposes of that fun-making, nothing in that situation is actionable from a privacy standpoint. If you don't believe me, look it up.
3. If I haven't said anything untrue about you, nothing I've done is defamation.
4. I'm a pretty benign person offline and actually have respected polite requests to remove someone's name before. But being a snotty bitch to me in your email is not the way to get me to behave benignly. If I do take your name off, particularly if you are a professional who should have known better, I am doing you a favor. The world doesn't owe you a free pass when you do a shitty job at something you're paid to be good at and rudeness is not the way to earn that pass.
5. At least for the moment, I'm not attaching a name or a post to this.
CC
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
RIP CrapOnSundays
When the CRAPonSundays blog began, I was torn between being pleased to see a conservative UU voice and feeling that somebody was stealing my schtick by starting a blog on one of the major themes I wrote about here. (And I've noticed that I wrote about that theme less when CRAPonSundays was writing about it.)
Now that Will has decided that he just can't take the UUA speaking for him on political issues and hearing about the evils of President Bush from the pulpit, I am torn again. Torn because I understand his frustration, but I also have noted that in the time he's been blogging anonymously, he's never mentioned that he actually talked to anybody at his church about his concerns.
It's not easy to do that, I know. I've only done it three times in the last couple of years, but then I usually do not attend political sermons because I don't feel like getting cheesed off.
Though sometimes the person preaching or leading the lay service will preach about politics knowing that what they are saying is annoying and alienating people, I have found that 90 percent of the time I've said "Hey, there's another side to that story. Demonizing people who don't see the world the way you do isn't cool, and besides, your facts are wrong here and here. Let's talk about ways we could be more welcoming to conservatives," the person I've talked to about it felt really bad and there was seeming improvement.
I don't know. I will admit a bias against people who leave UUism rather than staying and helping her fix her problems. But that's me the institutional thinker, and I shouldn't assume that anyone else shares that approach.
CC
Now that Will has decided that he just can't take the UUA speaking for him on political issues and hearing about the evils of President Bush from the pulpit, I am torn again. Torn because I understand his frustration, but I also have noted that in the time he's been blogging anonymously, he's never mentioned that he actually talked to anybody at his church about his concerns.
It's not easy to do that, I know. I've only done it three times in the last couple of years, but then I usually do not attend political sermons because I don't feel like getting cheesed off.
Though sometimes the person preaching or leading the lay service will preach about politics knowing that what they are saying is annoying and alienating people, I have found that 90 percent of the time I've said "Hey, there's another side to that story. Demonizing people who don't see the world the way you do isn't cool, and besides, your facts are wrong here and here. Let's talk about ways we could be more welcoming to conservatives," the person I've talked to about it felt really bad and there was seeming improvement.
I don't know. I will admit a bias against people who leave UUism rather than staying and helping her fix her problems. But that's me the institutional thinker, and I shouldn't assume that anyone else shares that approach.
CC
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Busy but tired CC
I've had a crazy weekend, culminating with six people coming over for Sunday dinner. We're having fajitas and everything is FINALLY chopped and marinating.
Yesterday, I woke up at five and did homework, then we spent much of the day at the renaissance festival, the only place I ever get sunburned on the tops of my breasts. I thought last night I'd escaped it, but I woke up this morning slightly red.
Then last night, theCSO and I met Joel Monka and his wife for dinner in the city. We had a wonderful, many hour conversation. Joel and Ginger are hilarious and lots of fun. I highly recommend having dinner with them if you get the chance. Usually when I meet a UU blogger and spouse, the blogger and I mostly talk about other bloggers and blog stuff while both our spouses watch, eyes glazed.
Last night wasn't like that. I couldn't begin to list the things we talked about and theCSO and Ginger were full participants in the conversation. It was awesome. I think they should come back to DC as soon as possible and will be exerting all possible peer pressure to get them to come to GA.
OK, I'm going to do a bit more homework before my dinner guests arrive.
CC
Yesterday, I woke up at five and did homework, then we spent much of the day at the renaissance festival, the only place I ever get sunburned on the tops of my breasts. I thought last night I'd escaped it, but I woke up this morning slightly red.
Then last night, theCSO and I met Joel Monka and his wife for dinner in the city. We had a wonderful, many hour conversation. Joel and Ginger are hilarious and lots of fun. I highly recommend having dinner with them if you get the chance. Usually when I meet a UU blogger and spouse, the blogger and I mostly talk about other bloggers and blog stuff while both our spouses watch, eyes glazed.
Last night wasn't like that. I couldn't begin to list the things we talked about and theCSO and Ginger were full participants in the conversation. It was awesome. I think they should come back to DC as soon as possible and will be exerting all possible peer pressure to get them to come to GA.
OK, I'm going to do a bit more homework before my dinner guests arrive.
CC
Saturday, December 23, 2006
FWIW
I've put all the posts from this year into categories, though I'm going to go back and add at least two more categories for "blogging" and "Little CC" (since people like stories about me as a kid so I've posted enough of them for a separate category.) I'll do last year over the next few days.
But for now, the categories we have are at right. "Livejournal-esque" is posts about my adventures in general and my personal life, "padawans enlightened" is about teaching YRUU, "general snark" are my humor columns. LF's and TheCSO's categories are for posts written by them, not written by me about them. I think the rest of the categories are pretty self-explanatory.
If there are any other categories you think I need, tell me.
CC
But for now, the categories we have are at right. "Livejournal-esque" is posts about my adventures in general and my personal life, "padawans enlightened" is about teaching YRUU, "general snark" are my humor columns. LF's and TheCSO's categories are for posts written by them, not written by me about them. I think the rest of the categories are pretty self-explanatory.
If there are any other categories you think I need, tell me.
CC
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Questions on the nature of blogging
I've had two questions in the comments that have really made me think. I hadn't substantively responded to either yet because they both connect to the same larger issue and I was thinking about how I would like to address that issue.
The first was UU-Mom commenting on my proposed DC blogger get-together:
"You know blogging, and especially blog reading, can be almost full-time and most of us do other things. When would we have time for this get-together? And traveling to Boston on top of it"
That one knocked the wind out of me for a minute. I had not even considered not making time for a DC blog get together, and I will likely go to Boston again.
To clarify, I do other things. I have a day job and I teach test preparation some nights. I am a YRUU leader and active volunteer for my church, I have family obligations and as theCSO keeps reminding me, we're supposed to be remodeling the house. My marriage is very important to me and my husband and I spent a lot of time together. Few political or intellectual ideas show up here that I haven't first talked out with him. I have a bunch of long distance friendships and I spend lots of time on the phone and visiting people or having guests and I also go out with friends and theCSO's friends here. And I read a lot. And I finished my first novel a couple of months ago.
But that question and my own reaction did point out very clearly how important blogging is to me.
I've been blogging in some senses for years and years. I've had a website of one type or another for over ten years and I have written *something* almost every day of my adult life. I really have to have things in front of my before I can process them. Before beliefnet, it was keeping up with my closest friends through near-daily emails. When I was on Beliefnet, theCSO would frequently complain that I should be collecting my writing in some way and I frequently wished I could edit my posts. Blogging lets me do both.
I have, and have always had, this urge to get my thoughts out on paper and provide some proof of my own existance. I'm aware that at this point, like the Diaries of Anais Nin if I may flatter myself with the comparision, my blog is probably less interesting for the writing quality or newness of ideas and more so for the overall picture it paints of a developing intellectual consciousness. I'd rather be read for writing like a master swordsman and ideas of deep profundity, but my blog is what it is, and it's hard to write well in the immediacy of some moments.
So in this sense, I do regard my frequent commenters (you know who you are) as a sort of intellectual family. One of my bigger regrets about last year was that I was in Northern California for five days and never made it over to see Kim. Psyton is TheCSO's childhood best friend and I substantively keep in contact with him through theChaliceblog. (Though we have a standing tradition of spending Christmas eve together.)
I go through trends of writing about different things because different things interest me at different times. I write about politics, religion and my personal life as the mood strikes. Expect to see a bit more on my family and my spiritual development in the coming month or so as I am reading a book on spiritual memoir. That said, I'm not going to be getting all gushy. Every now and again, I get a breathless email informing me that my experiences with my criminal brothers have shaped my political views or that the closeness of my friendship with LinguistFriend (who is much older than I am) has its roots in my rather complicated relationship with my parents. Lest anyone should be concerned, I have thought of these things and there is of course truth to each of those insights. I tend to think such things work better as subtext, though.
And yes, it is well worth it for me to set aside a Saturday afternoon or even a weekend to go hang out with my fellow bloggers and swap ideas and actually look at the faces of the people whose words I read sometimes every day.
Probably another root of UU-Mom's and my differing feelings on this issue is that UU-mom is presumably a mom. Given the time that children can take up, it doesn't surprise me that there are fewer bloggers with young children.
OK, other question:
LRC asked why I sometimes write in the third person. The short answer is "I don't know, it just feels natural to do so sometimes."
That I'm a big fan of Miss Manners is probaly a part of it, as Psyton notes. I think another part of it is that the person who writes the Chaliceblog and Chalicechick are not 100 percent the same. Sometimes Chalicechick can say something that the person who writes her is still working out in her own head and the third person say be just an attempt to get a little distance.
I consciously call my family and husband by nicknames including Chalice (e.g. the Chalicemom) as a subtle reminder to both readers and myself that any charictarization of them is very much from my own perspective. I don't intend to do a hatchet job on anyone and I have even considered renaming The Sabina Fallacy, particularly since I read an article someplace about the kind way Jackie O treated Marilyn Monroe. The analogy between those two and Sabina and myself isn't direct, but the article did remind me that even people who behave badly deserve to be treated well, at least in the public sphere.
LRC is not the first person I respect to bring up that the writing about myself in the third person sounds a little odd. Another friend has made the point that it makes my writing less clear. I do pay attention to such concerns and seem to be doing it less than I used to.
But my blog posts are largely stream of consciousness and only barely edited. Sometimes, things come out of my brain in the third person and I'm inclined to leave them that way.
For now.
CC
The first was UU-Mom commenting on my proposed DC blogger get-together:
"You know blogging, and especially blog reading, can be almost full-time and most of us do other things. When would we have time for this get-together? And traveling to Boston on top of it"
That one knocked the wind out of me for a minute. I had not even considered not making time for a DC blog get together, and I will likely go to Boston again.
To clarify, I do other things. I have a day job and I teach test preparation some nights. I am a YRUU leader and active volunteer for my church, I have family obligations and as theCSO keeps reminding me, we're supposed to be remodeling the house. My marriage is very important to me and my husband and I spent a lot of time together. Few political or intellectual ideas show up here that I haven't first talked out with him. I have a bunch of long distance friendships and I spend lots of time on the phone and visiting people or having guests and I also go out with friends and theCSO's friends here. And I read a lot. And I finished my first novel a couple of months ago.
But that question and my own reaction did point out very clearly how important blogging is to me.
I've been blogging in some senses for years and years. I've had a website of one type or another for over ten years and I have written *something* almost every day of my adult life. I really have to have things in front of my before I can process them. Before beliefnet, it was keeping up with my closest friends through near-daily emails. When I was on Beliefnet, theCSO would frequently complain that I should be collecting my writing in some way and I frequently wished I could edit my posts. Blogging lets me do both.
I have, and have always had, this urge to get my thoughts out on paper and provide some proof of my own existance. I'm aware that at this point, like the Diaries of Anais Nin if I may flatter myself with the comparision, my blog is probably less interesting for the writing quality or newness of ideas and more so for the overall picture it paints of a developing intellectual consciousness. I'd rather be read for writing like a master swordsman and ideas of deep profundity, but my blog is what it is, and it's hard to write well in the immediacy of some moments.
So in this sense, I do regard my frequent commenters (you know who you are) as a sort of intellectual family. One of my bigger regrets about last year was that I was in Northern California for five days and never made it over to see Kim. Psyton is TheCSO's childhood best friend and I substantively keep in contact with him through theChaliceblog. (Though we have a standing tradition of spending Christmas eve together.)
I go through trends of writing about different things because different things interest me at different times. I write about politics, religion and my personal life as the mood strikes. Expect to see a bit more on my family and my spiritual development in the coming month or so as I am reading a book on spiritual memoir. That said, I'm not going to be getting all gushy. Every now and again, I get a breathless email informing me that my experiences with my criminal brothers have shaped my political views or that the closeness of my friendship with LinguistFriend (who is much older than I am) has its roots in my rather complicated relationship with my parents. Lest anyone should be concerned, I have thought of these things and there is of course truth to each of those insights. I tend to think such things work better as subtext, though.
And yes, it is well worth it for me to set aside a Saturday afternoon or even a weekend to go hang out with my fellow bloggers and swap ideas and actually look at the faces of the people whose words I read sometimes every day.
Probably another root of UU-Mom's and my differing feelings on this issue is that UU-mom is presumably a mom. Given the time that children can take up, it doesn't surprise me that there are fewer bloggers with young children.
OK, other question:
LRC asked why I sometimes write in the third person. The short answer is "I don't know, it just feels natural to do so sometimes."
That I'm a big fan of Miss Manners is probaly a part of it, as Psyton notes. I think another part of it is that the person who writes the Chaliceblog and Chalicechick are not 100 percent the same. Sometimes Chalicechick can say something that the person who writes her is still working out in her own head and the third person say be just an attempt to get a little distance.
I consciously call my family and husband by nicknames including Chalice (e.g. the Chalicemom) as a subtle reminder to both readers and myself that any charictarization of them is very much from my own perspective. I don't intend to do a hatchet job on anyone and I have even considered renaming The Sabina Fallacy, particularly since I read an article someplace about the kind way Jackie O treated Marilyn Monroe. The analogy between those two and Sabina and myself isn't direct, but the article did remind me that even people who behave badly deserve to be treated well, at least in the public sphere.
LRC is not the first person I respect to bring up that the writing about myself in the third person sounds a little odd. Another friend has made the point that it makes my writing less clear. I do pay attention to such concerns and seem to be doing it less than I used to.
But my blog posts are largely stream of consciousness and only barely edited. Sometimes, things come out of my brain in the third person and I'm inclined to leave them that way.
For now.
CC
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