Update: more links have been added since this post was first published
Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed-reader.What did I miss? Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.
- Review Of Daniel Keogh’s ‘The Stupid Species’ – #ScienceWeek In Perth
- What’s More Important: Your Beliefs or Your Follower Count?
- Some men on high incomes and low incomes cheat
- Five days, done and dusted. Reflections on a 93p/day diet.
- On the backs of other women
- When Science is Subjective
- The Mosque Again
- Atheist Meme of the Day: Pascal's Wager Makes No Sense
– Catch it this week if you can – Thursday in Canberra, Friday in Sydney, Saturday Brisbane
– “Should Your Social Networking Activities be a Lie?
So that brings up the more serious ramifications of my Twitter friend’s tweet: changing what he tweets to preserve follower count. Even though he reads radical atheist content and obviously feels strongly about it — strong enough to share it, anyway — he stopped sharing it because he doesn’t want to lose followers.
“…a good reason for not posting politics or religious views online…” are his exact words. But I’ll argue this: if your political or religious views are important to you, why should you hide them? They are part of your personal makeup — they’re what make you who you are. To pretend that they’re not is akin to lying about who you are.
To omit them from your social networking activities will prevent you from finding other people who share the same views you have. And isn’t that why we participate in social networks? To meet and interact with people who share similar views?”
– “The article then goes on to say that men who earn more money than their partner are also more likely to cheat. So, might it be, perhaps, that the amount of money a man earns has little to do with whether he cheats on his relationship?”
– “I’ve just finished doing Live Below The Line, a joint initiative of the Global Poverty Project and the Oaktree Foundation, which challenged Australians to spend just $2 a day on their total food budget for a period of five days – the equivalent of the US$1.25 per day that the World Bank defines as the Extreme Poverty Line. Having recently moved to London, I was living off 93p per day. 1.4 billion people around the globe do it every day.”
– “Discounting the teachers at the Montessori preschool and the kids’ father, it takes the efforts of five other people caring for our two children to allow me to be at work three days a week. Pick-ups and drop-offs and naps and cuddles and dinners and baths. Only one of those five are paid for it, and all of them are women.”
– “One of the first lessons you learn as a criminal defense attorney, particularly an attorney working on innocence cases, is that nothing is as it seems. Those stories you thought were too crazy to be true? Totally happened. And all that stuff you thought was fact? It’s not. This is particularly true for pretty much everything you think you know about forensic “science,” where the truth is, with the exception of DNA testing, there is very little actual “science” involved.”
– “Ok, I asked myself, why was I so outraged at the Carmelite’s cross and why am I now so sympathetic to the Muslim Community Center. Why do I believe the motives of those who wish to build the community center and why did I disbelieve the nuns.”
– Interesting concept – check out the rest of her daily memes
Categories: linkfest
The 109th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
The 105th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
Hoyden About Town 
While I appreciate the link love, I don’t appreciate my feed being scraped to pull out random material to populate your blog. What do you say about limiting content theft to a paragraph with a link like the less obvious feed scrapers do?
My apologies, Maria – my intent was only to provide an adequate sample of the thesis of your [long] post.
If you rather I avoid that in future, I will do so.
Maria, while I still intend to abide by your wishes, I wish to note that by your own copyright rules the quoted content from your blog post above is well within the 200-word count you specify as the allowable quoted limit on your Copyright page. That’s a relief to me, I must admit, as my intent was certainly to abide by fair use, and I’m glad to see that even though I didn’t know about your word limit, I nonetheless abided by it.
As to your other requirement of linking directly back to your blog, the only reason that it didn’t in the post was because I was using your advertised Feedburner RSS feed as my Google Reader subscription, so the link back to your blog was going via google-proxy rather than directly back to your site. Since linking directly is important to you, I have now reconfigured my subscription to take a feed from the native WordPress feed instead, and now when my Shared Items plugin links back to your site it will link directly to the article.
My intent with these Reader posts is definitely not to be just a content-scraper – it is to direct people to new blogs that they might find interesting to read. If I was doing it to nefariously increase hits to this site via search engines as your copyright page denounces, then surely I would have some ads here, don’t you think?
I ask you to think about what I’ve written above. If after you have done so it is your preference that I never again include your posts in one of these Readers, then I am perfectly willing to abide by your wishes.