Why Blog?

Seems I got double-tagged with this meme by The Brummel and Reverend BigDumbChimp.

I've got a fair number of reasons for blogging and I suppose I'll try to elaborate on the big ones.

1. Science can save the world! Okay, so I'm a little on the naive Star Trek bent. I do think that science is the greatest tool we have towards improving the world: Knowing about something is the first step towards figuring out how to improve it. For the most part, I think it's a bit late to regress to ecologically safe hunter-gatherers, though bear in mind our ancestors weren't pure and innocent: There's probably a decent list of things that got hunted/gathered to extinction. Since that option isn't available through ethical means, we have to figure out how to minimize our impact, and I don't think cleansing ley lines and such will accomplish that. The same goes for the medical field: There are lives as well as the quality of those lives at stake. If we're going to treat them, we have to be confident that our treatments will be meaningful. I could go on. One of the problems inhibiting all this is an overabundance of people who can't think critically. They employ double-standards for finding the truth, treat labels as more important than reality, and endorse inaction on critical issues. I'm doing my part to stop that.

2. Stroke my ego, darn it! Okay, so this isn't the most noble of motives, but I'm sure everyone who posts something publicly available experiences at least some of it. At least I try to make what I type worthy of the praise I manage to get: That way, I'm at least doing something meaningful for my kicks.

3. Community. I'm used to being the village atheist down here in Texas. Blogging gets me involved with lots of people who share similar views and help me know that I'm not alone in the madness of this world. Many of them also share similar non-skepticism interests, so we can get involved in massive geekery.

4. It's frikkin' fun. I often enjoy tearing apart trolls who make jaw-droppingly stupid arguments. I liked it on the JREF forums, in the comments on other blogs, and so forth. Here, I've got full control, though I seldom need to exercise it: Everyone's favorite local troll, Wo is MI (though Ryan has his dirtier nickname for him), was "banned" by me, and I would have deleted his posts... except that he kept making himself look worse and worse, as well as being an apparent source for amusement for visitors as well. About the only posts of his I deleted/blocked were the boring, repetitive ones, along with the spam. (Oh, and don't you hate it when you come up with a retort much, much later than would be funny. "Good thing evolution didn't come up with copy/paste!" "Actually it already has. It's called a duplication 'error', and it's one step that can lead to IC structures.")

Think I'll tag my bro, Prometheus, Bing, Skeptico (who's probably been tagged a lot, but I don't see a post), and the Two Percent Company.