If those bloggers and writers want their blogs to service the percentage of atheists who are loud mouthed, religion hating bigots, they willingly give up the large majority of people who will either be driven out by the people they host or who won't chose to return even once, that's their choice. Unfortunately, as I have said before, it is the same stupid choice made in far too much of the left starting in the late 1960s, the period which began the long exile of the left from political success.
The percentage of the population they choose to appeal to is the tiny percentage of atheists, agnostics and associated haters who are not conservatives (a considerable number of all three -groups are, actually conservatives), who are not indifferent to politics or who are not turned off by such counter-productive, politically suicidal discourse. As critical as I am of atheists, I would guess that there are quite a number of atheists who aren't bigoted jerks who would take delight in a steady diet of bigotry, most of those I know aren't.
Once you start subtracting the conservatives, the indifferent and those who don't share the pleasure such folks take in marinating in self-congratulatory hate from the less than 6% of atheists and agnostics, you can see how such a strategy was bound to produce political failure. There is a reason that no atheist, anti-religious government has ever taken power democratically or ruled democratically.
Once you start subtracting the conservatives, the indifferent and those who don't share the pleasure such folks take in marinating in self-congratulatory hate from the less than 6% of atheists and agnostics, you can see how such a strategy was bound to produce political failure. There is a reason that no atheist, anti-religious government has ever taken power democratically or ruled democratically.
If the number of those serviced by such blogs is even 1% of the general population, I'd be surprised. I think anyone who would estimate them as more than 3% is probably delusional. They could never swing an election or have more than a destructive effect in politics. Anyone who sacrifices the possible support of far larger numbers of far less unreasonable people to please them is a liability in democratic politics.
Once you do the calculations, even straining reality with the most generous of estimates, those blogs are safely ignored because they will never amount to anything in real life, no matter how much attention they get from the tiny numbers paying attention to them in the scribbling class.
RMJ has similar thoughts.
Update: Oh, I don't care how much he lies about me there because no one goes there anymore except a rump which they didn't Heather out of the place. I suspect the Phelps cult is far bigger.
Update 2: The end of January I counted up how many comments he got per day over the period of several days. I remember back when he used to get more comments on one comment thread than he gets all day now. And when I counted the number of commentators on two or three, it was fewer than the c. 40 members of the Phelps cult. That's as far as I took it, part of what made me think that taking notice was not only not mandatory or even worth while but was far more in the category "waste of time". I heard a kind of mean joke once about the paucity of last names in one of our states on his blog. Looks like they've become a similar phenomenon.
Update: Oh, I don't care how much he lies about me there because no one goes there anymore except a rump which they didn't Heather out of the place. I suspect the Phelps cult is far bigger.
Update 2: The end of January I counted up how many comments he got per day over the period of several days. I remember back when he used to get more comments on one comment thread than he gets all day now. And when I counted the number of commentators on two or three, it was fewer than the c. 40 members of the Phelps cult. That's as far as I took it, part of what made me think that taking notice was not only not mandatory or even worth while but was far more in the category "waste of time". I heard a kind of mean joke once about the paucity of last names in one of our states on his blog. Looks like they've become a similar phenomenon.
This morning Marcotte had discovered not all Americans are Cruz/Huckabee fundies, which means we're all atheists and just don't know it yet.
ReplyDeleteShe still can't find her ass with both hands and a flashlight.
And Jeffrey Tayler has found to new leaders of wisdom and reason: Bill Maher and Isaac Asimov. A comedian and a dead science fiction author most famous for his ludicrous "Three Laws of Robotics," which are so vague and general as to not even be "laws" within their own fictional universe.
I'm not a Cruz/Huckabee fundy because I have read the Prophets and the Gospel and I believe what Jesus said was true.
ReplyDeleteIsaac Asimov. Really. Isaac Asimov. I have long suspected that neo-atheism was a symptom of post-literacy and the education of young people being put into the hands of Hollywood and cabloid producers and directors. The first clue I had that Bill Clinton was not going to go down as a great president was when he asked those people to help him build the American culture.