Category: Blogmeta

7 So here’s what’s happening

May 17, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · Blogmeta · personal

Tomorrow afternoon I am going to be heading to Kamloops, BC for the Imagine No Religion 2 conference. I am looking forward to getting a chance to meet some of my fellow FTBorg, as well as soak in some godless goodness up in the mountains. This is pretty much the perfect time of year to go to Kamloops, because it will be sunny and pleasant.

On Sunday I am flying to Toronto for work, and will be shortly thereafter heading to Montreal. I’m there for another conference, and also because it’s Montreal and Montreal is amazing. I will be returning from my work/vacation on the 29th.

What this means for y’all is that I will be in vacation mode – fewer posts and shorter posts. Less activity on Twitter, and the comment moderation is going to be super-slow for those of you who are first-timers (or use a lot of links). I’d apologize, but I’m not sorry – between working full-time, blogging part-time, and trying to manage a rock band (on top of, y’know, having a social life), I feel like a couple of weeks of relative down time is not too much to ask.

It usually takes me a few days to bounce back following a trip like this, so expect normal functioning to resume starting at the beginning of June.

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2 Kiva project update: May 2012

May 16, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · Kiva project

I’ve been slacking again, but I took the opportunity today to update our Kiva project.

Mwanamisi is a married woman with 3 children, all of whom attend school. She owns a house that neither has electricity nor piped water. Her greatest monthly expenses are food and school fees. For the past five years, she has operated a weaving business. She uses coconut fronds to make roofing materials to sell from her home to her customers. She faces a major challenge of high transport expenses and seasonality. She dreams of starting a shop. With the Kshs. 40,000 she wants to purchase additional coconut fronds and increase her products. She decided to join Yehu to access loans to uplift her living standards.

Mohammad is 20 years old and lives in Gaza with his parents, who depend on him financially. He started work on his own farm recently; he raises and sells sheep and sheep products. His dream is to enlarge his business. He needs this youth loan to cover costs, so he asked Ryada for funds to build an additional enclosure for his sheep. He will be able to gain income and ensure economic stability for his family.

Grace is a 34-year-old married woman with three children living in Kagadi, Uganda. She operates a stationary business in Kagadi, which she has run for a period of five years. She got start-up capital from savings, as she first worked in a hotel as a waitress. Inadequate capital and price fluctuations are challenging factors affecting her business. She would like to educate her children and hire employees to help her expand her business. Grace wants a loan to buy books, pens, and reams of paper to sell.

This client, Masika, is the president of the loan association Espoir. A brave and tireless woman and an entrepreneur, she is 60 years old, divorced, and the mother of seven children. Among the births, there are twins. All of the children have their own homes already. Masika sells “mandale”, a local beverage. She started her business with her own funds from her husband before they divorced. Then she benefited from an initial loan as additional funding around 2008 from the microfinance institution Hekima. She says that this business has brought up her children, that is, the profits from her business went toward savings, food, and schooling costs. Masika makes her sales out of her home. However, she just obtained her 12th loan. This client decided to reduce the loan amount because a financial crisis is looming. This new loan must serve to supply her with the ingredients for making “mandale” drink (2 sacks of corn, sorghum, etc.) In addition, her ambition is to buy more plots of land for her children. This client thanks Hekima and her partners for their actions helping poor women with low incomes to become autonomous.

Sammy is a prospective student applying for a loan to start work on a Bachelor’s degree in Telecommunications at Strathmore University.

So there it is. I will try to remember to bug you to help me pick loans (as my usual thing is just to pick African women) when our money comes in at the beginning of June.

For the month of October, we made $46.38, and loaned $50.
For the month of November, we made $65.81, and loaned $50.
For the month of December, we made $44.76, and loaned $50.
For the month of January, we made $58.59.
For the month of February, we made $57.33 and loaned $125.

Total amount loaned so far: $275
Total loan funds repaid: $33.07
Fund balance: $23.47

11 Help a sistah out

April 25, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · Blogmeta · critical thinking · religion · science · skeptivism

Long-time Cromrade Autumn is proposing an interesting experiment:

I hear all the time from Christians that they feel discriminated against in day to day life. I find myself skeptical. I pretended to be Christian for years to avoid discrimination and harassment. This lead me to an idea. I’m uncertain about it so I thought I would put it up here, while I was thinking about it. I propose to dress in a manner that visually links me to a particular faith (and/or denomination) and record how I am being treated. At the end of the experiment, I will compare my notes to see if there was any difference, and if so, what- in the way I was treated.

This would mean dressing with a devotional scapular and a crucifix to be “Catholic” or underclothes to mimic the look of the undergarments and a CTR ring or jewelry when being “LDS,” etc. An atheist t-shirt would be my atheist “test” and no visible signs of any religion would be my control.

She is looking for some feedback on both the research question and the ethics of deception. Go read over her proposal and see what you think. Feel free to cross-post your comments here as well. My own thoughts below the fold:

10 Learned helplessness

April 23, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · Blogmeta · crommunism · privilege · secularism · skepticism

I got hit by a ‘double whammy’ this weekend. First, I watched The Trotsky on the plane to Kelowna (well, part of it – it’s a 30-minute flight). The premise of the movie seems a bit silly – a teenager who believes that he is the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky stages a coup in his high school in an attempt to organize the students into a union. It’s ostensibly a comedy, and is definitely a really funny film – the scenes where he woos a lawyer 10 years older than he are absolutely priceless. At the same time, the climactic scene (where the students charge up to the school with protest signs and righteous fury) fucks me every time I watch it, and my eyes start welling up like I’m a 6 year-old with a skinned knee.

Add to that a long conversation I had with Edwin Hodge about the heights of ridiculousness of post-modern thought (I more or less took Natalie Reed’s position – that post-modern thought can function alongside skepticism to help us critique the ways in which our own experiences and perspective affect truth claims), and whether or not political movements were undermined by the way in which postmodern perspectives can splinter populations that, from the outside, should share a single goal. The point I made to Edwin was that one doesn’t blame a CT scan for discovering problems we weren’t looking for. Postmodern ‘splintering’ is oftentimes simply the exposition of real divisions that exist, and provides a method by which groups who are not commonly represented in the majority group’s interests can keep their needs from being overlooked.

The problem of course is that the infighting that seems to happen – feminist atheists against anti-feminist; anti-racists against those who wish to ignore racism; trans skeptics against gender essentialists – all stem from a common route: the idea that the issues of the minority are not the real problem. Again, this is certainly an idea with easy appeal. After all, if we are a movement of atheists (for example), then our fight is with religion, not an esoteric crusade against systemic misogyny. The problem of course is that one cannot examine problems in isolation, and some issues cannot be extricated from larger, more diffuse problems. What ends up happening is that once the movement solves the “real” problem, the minority goes back to being ignored, having lost those who were allies of convenience. … Continue Reading

2 Rapidly approaching adventures in meatspace

April 16, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · Blogmeta · CFI Vancouver

This is a reminder that I will be traveling to Kelowna, BC this weekend to participate in a vaccine education event hosting by CFI Okanagan:

I’m looking forward to returning to my childhood stomping grounds and finally getting to meet some of the friendly skeptics out Kelownie way.

I’ll be back in the interior next month for the Imagine No Religion 2 conference. Also in attendance will be FTB’s own Maryam Namazie, PZ Myers, and Matt Dillahunty, as well as many other fine speakers. So for any of you in the BC interior who have an itching desire to meet me in person, you have two chances this spring. Hope to see some of you there!

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3 Oh, I almost forgot…

April 12, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · Blogmeta · funny

: Click for explanation

11 A quiet milestone

April 12, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · Blogmeta

Today this blog celebrates its 2-year anniversary. While technically the “official” birthday for the Crommunist Manifesto was the 4th of February, I started regular posting in April, so that’s when I start counting. Given that most readers here started when I was brought into the FTB fold, I have decided to have the actual celebration in October. For me, though, it’s been a great 2 years.

When I first began the Manifesto, it was really just a place to organize some of my scattered thoughts on race, religion, and politics. Call it a sort of written talk therapy. I find that my own grasp of issues improves a great deal when I force myself to move them from the kind of diffuse, scattered form where they reside in my head into sensical, written English. While I wrote as though I had an audience, I never wrote for an audience. In those initial months, I was surprised and pleased to have anyone reading my writing – after all, who was I?

In my first year I gathered nearly 50,000 hits – a staggering amount for me, especially considering that I’d done little by way of promotion. Thanks to some well-placed links from friends and passers-by (and some shameless attempts at promotion via Pharyngula), I had built a small cadre of regular readers, some of whom were strangers to me outside the confines of the blog. I had achieved some small amount of recognition outside my own personal circle of friends, which was a really neat feeling (albeit intimidating at times).

When I talk to people who mention that they’d like to start their own blog, I tell them more about what I did then than what I do now. Having this platform (and being able to share it with more capable writers) gives me a lot more freedom to slack off, which you saw this past week. Back then, I had to scrabble and scrape for every post for fear of alienating readers who were expecting a new post every day. The writing didn’t come nearly as easily then as it does now, and I was writing posts 2 weeks in advance just to make sure that I didn’t get ‘caught’ without something to post the next day.

Managing this blog still comes with its challenges today, but little by little those challenges are being overwhelmed by the rewards. I’ll be going into this in some greater detail come October, but for now I just wanted to mark this little celebration myself and share it with you.

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16 Holy shit

April 9, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · Blogmeta · crommunism · personal · religion

Most of you may not be aware that in my wild younger days I was deeply involved in the Catholic church. It started innocently enough, playing violin in the choir on Sundays, an occasional youth group meeting. However, as the years passed, my problems got worse and worse. I began flirting with the idea of becoming a priest, ostensibly with the noble goal of reforming the organization from the inside (ah, the naiveté of youth). At my lowest point I found myself teaching a Sunday school class. It was an ugly period in my life that I’m not proud of.

At some point during my whole ‘experimenting with Jesus’ phase, I got myself appointed to read from the lectern during Sunday masses. Owing to my relatively young age and the fact that I had passable public speaking skills, I was asked to be one of the readers during the Good Friday Passion service. Unlike usual masses where the priest reads the gospel passages in their entirety, the Passion service has three readers: the priest who reads the words spoken by Jesus, another reader who reads the words spoken by anyone else, and a third who acts as narrator.

As I was standing at the lectern, reading the narrative bits as clearly and distinctly as I could, I remember being overcome with a deep feeling of dissatisfaction at the story. Where I had previously felt awed and humbled in the face of the story of ultimate selfless sacrifice, I instead was left with a familiar and unpleasant taste in my mouth. The more of the words I spoke, the stronger that taste became. No matter how I tried to find the beauty and majesty I had previously found abundant in the tale of a god humbling itself before its own creation in order to build a path to salvation, for some reason I just couldn’t conjure that feeling of sorrow and gratitude. … Continue Reading

13 Kiva project: fourth loan – who to pick?

April 2, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · Kiva project

Hello Cromrades,

Once again, the windfall of cash from your traffic has come in, so it’s time for you to help me spend our money on a Kiva microloan (or two). Go to Kiva.org and pick out your favourite project. Leave a link in the comments, and at week’s end I’ll sift through them and pick the best two.

For the month of October, we made $46.38, and loaned $50.
For the month of November, we made $65.81, and loaned $50.
For the month of December, we made $44.76, and loaned $50.
For the month of January, we made $58.59.

Total amount loaned so far: $150
Total loan funds repaid: $5.00
Fund balance: $66.66

11 Sad news – farewell to the Lousy Canuck

April 1, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · Blogmeta

It pains me deeply to announce that, after nearly a year with Freethought Blogs, Jason Thibeault (a.k.a. The Lousy Canuck) will be leaving the site for greener pastures at the beginning of next week. Over the course of a long and protracted discussion in the back channel, Jason has expressed his feeling that his voice has been ‘crowded out’ by the addition of myself and Natalie Reed. Despite our repeated assurances that Jason’s voice was a vital and welcome contribution to the conversation here at FTB, he feels that we’re saturated the market for Canadian content, and that he’d rather put his efforts into speaking to a new audience.

Obviously we will miss Jason, but we also respect his decision to leave and pursue his own work.

Go get his take on his departure here. More below the fold. … Continue Reading

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