Thinking Unenslaved

I’ve spent the past several days listening to various skeptic, atheist, and agnostic audio podcasts. A few of them were quite entertaining (Brian Dunning is excellent, for example), while (what was to me) a surprising amount appeared to consist largely of insider information to small, specific sub-communities of individuals. In a tweet I posted in the middle of that research, I bemoaned our lack of an appreciable foothold in that medium. Indeed, I was rather disappointed about this at first, until I remembered what a great group of skeptics, atheists, and agnostics we have on YouTube, and whose reach is literally millions.

Now, as much as I love people like Thuderf00t, AntitheistAngie, ZOMGitsCriss, Zinnia Jones, The Thinking Atheist, and many others, the problem I have with YouTube is the reliance on visual cues, overlays, and the like, to communicate ideas. There’s nothing wrong with this at all (in fact, as a photographer, I naturally LOVE it), but what about the viewer or listener with too much to do to sit around watching videos? What about the person who’d like to put a podcast on while doing chores, or driving around town? To be explicit, what about the kind of person who could listen attentively, but not watch? Communications that rely on visual content to convey meaning either miss this type of listener, or the listener fails to completely benefit from the medium.

I’ve struggled with this for a long time, actually. Very early on, when I started becoming involved in the ThinkAtheist Radio Show (formerly on TalkShoe and BlogTalkRadio), I contemplated switching it to a video-format, YouTube-based show. Several things stood in the way of that (not the least of which was the lack of time), and ultimately, I was rather fond of the general format of our show: free-form, unscripted live talk. Obviously, I chose not to vary from that format.

As I said, there are a few audio podcasts that I really like: Skepchick, Skeptoid, Freethought Radio, The Atheist Experience, and others, but these also have their quirks. Freethought Radio in particular rather disappoints me: These are good, intelligent people, but the format is over-commercialized, and the participants, at least in the few shows I’ve listened to, appear to be so committed to “staying on time” and “sticking to the point” that their interviews can be stilted, one-sided, interruptive, and often have an annoying tendency to sound far more patronizing to the interviewee than informative or instructive to the audience.

To be clear, I must point out that Skepchick and Skeptoid don’t fall into the description I just gave (that was for Freethought Radio alone). I love their shows, and just wanted to make sure I linked to them.

To refrain from picking on shows from organizations that I otherwise admire, suffice it to say that I find myself in that position where I listen to something (even several somethings) and I realize the opportunities missed, the messages not delivered, the discourse left behind, and it reminds me that the emotions engendered by sitting around and noticing that could be better served by my getting off my ass and doing something about it. Not that I believe I would consistently do better, but I’d certainly try. And I’ve had much encouragement of late to do so.

As well, our guests on the old ThinkAtheist Radio Show had this interesting tendency to ask us if they could come back on for another interview, and this held true for the very short run I did with my own show. Our shows were dynamic, and a modicum of topic-wandering was not only welcome, but expected. There was no agenda for us as interviewers to keep in context: I’d have been just as happy (from a show perspective) if one of our participants suddenly announced his or her undying fealty to Jebus as I would if we had spent 60 minutes talking about his or her escape from organized religion. But the bottom line for me is that my guests enjoyed what I did well enough to ask to come back. I was obviously doing something right.

I halted my own show largely for a reason that has now resolved itself. That reason essentially boiled down to time. When I stopped the show, I was doing 12-16 hours/week at our TaeKwonDo academy, 10-18 hours/week on the soccer fields, and whatever time I could get with my children, atop a typical 40-50 hour work-week. For other health reasons, I’ve had to stop doing TaeKwonDo, and now that we’re in the winter months, soccer is only 2-8 hours/week, and I’ve already let the various administrations know that I can do as many games in the future as I’ve done in the past. I’m kind of enjoying having time to myself, and to date, and those kinds of things.

And I’ve discovered that I miss doing the show. Which is funny, because for a while there, I wasn’t missing it at all. Time works wonders, I guess.

So, at the repeated prompting of a few friends, and a general round of acceptance from the community at large, I’m reviving Synthaetic Synapse as Think Unenslaved. I’m waiting on some new equipment, and I’m setting up some intro and interstitial music, and even some commercial plugs for communities of which I’m a member and national organizations of whom I’m fond. I’m lining up some occasional co-hosts and guests, and putting a bit more organization around the show as a whole. I’ll consider reopening communications with ThinkAtheist (I re-subscribed to the site last week) and seeing if they’d like to “sponsor” the show (without pay), but I will retain my independence regardless. The show format will be very much as it always was: which means that there will be three major classifications of shows.

1. Co-hosted show: Myself and a co-host would cover international, national, and local news related to the atheist/agnostic/freethought community as a whole. The topics selected will lead to discussion between the two hosts. We’ll limit that segment to approximately one hour, and have similar material prepared for the second hour should callers not fill up the second segment.

2. Solo show: This is where I diatribe on one subject or another for a while (this may either be live or in a pre-recorded/edited/prepared format and replayed). Related to that subject, I’ll have a live guest or two with subject-matter expertise on that and related topics. This segment will last 60-90 minutes, with an open-phones segment at the end.

3. Round-table show: This is a pure round-table format, possibly with a co-host/moderator, and with multiple (3-4) guests on hot-button topics of interest. The round table will spend 15-20 minutes per topic on up to six topics, taking callers for one or two questions during each segment, and solving all the world’s problems in a single two-hour show.

I anticipate kicking off the new show over the first weekend of December, 2010. Check back on this site for updates over the next few weeks, and be sure to follow my Twitter and Facebook posts for show times and additional information. I’ll continue to run the show from it’s current location at Blog Talk Radio, but un:enslaved will serve up supplemental information, associated content, the show archive, and those types of things too.

i got rather lost in the flux, lately. i’d offer some sort of humorous observation on the eccentricities of life and time, but yeah, that means very little. my on-again, off-again relationship with giving a shit about things outside of my control has fed into this as well. i’m trying to keep it more to off-again, but that requires a type of mental discipline for which i seem to have so little time.

i haven’t done a broadcast in a while, now. no one seems to miss it, and i’m not sure i do, either. i haven’t found anything insightful to say, nor have i found anything of seeming importance to promote. i haven’t been looking incredibly hard, either, though. i’ve been distracted.

i retreated into the online world years ago, completely by my own choice, and with specific intent, because up here, the inherent overlayment of impermanence and superficiality is transparently obvious, unlike the “real” world, where it all gets skewed and twisted somewhere out of sight before you ever get to see it coming, let alone recognize it for what it is. i can handle the bullshit up here because the bullshit is immediate, obvious, and usually very direct. real life is usually something different, or at least it has been.

but now, all of the sudden, life in my real world has become something both more and less than what it was for me, for so many years. the simple expedient of having someone interested in me–even demandingly so, sometimes–has changed everything. i’m actually having to think about how to better use my time, how to take care of myself for more than just the obvious reasons, how to learn to love again. it’s not something i ever really expected, even when i ended a marriage for lack of anything resembling mutual, interpersonal concern.

it’s different at this age, the falling in love thing, but yes, she’s keeping me away from you, my friends, and while i miss you, there’s just no contest there. i’m not so needful of attention that i couldn’t survive without her and her impact on my life, but by the same token, she’s here, she wants to share my time, and i want to give it to her. so, i wonder how many of you are like me, spending so much time on the internet, waiting/hoping/searching for something better to come along. yes, my prolific tweeting and occasional blogging have largely been escape mechanisms, i’ll admit it.

underneath all that, there has been some discussion of late about my morality. this is a laughable thing to me because of how little anyone online actually knows me, what i do in life, the communities i serve, and the people with whom i’m interconnected. somehow, it was deemed inappropriate of me to look for a relationship after i had ended a marriage that had been loveless for over a decade. somehow, for me, it was wrong to pursue those relationships via twitter while also using twitter to simply interact with people and learn more about the world around me and the people in it. somehow, i became anathema for actually taking the time, trouble, and expense to meet some of those potential relationship partners and deciding after some consideration that we weren’t compatible that way. in fact, i am apparently morally bankrupt for having done such things, despite the fact that i maintain good relations with those people, except for the one who bailed out of meeting me after i’d driven for 16 hours to meet her.

yeah, people’s definition of “morality” is pretty whack, and that’s true even amongst us freethinkers. i must have been the only person in the world drawn to other people via our interactions on twitter.

puh-lease.

then, i had to go make things worse and take loud, public exception to what i perceived to be the desire for the touchy-feely version of humanism to operate as a trump-card to all other forms of interaction freethinkers may have with the deluded. i handled the situation immaturely, apologized for it several times in several different media, and still, i’m the bad guy not just because i temporarily lost my head in an argument, but because i disagreed with someone who has more twitter followers than i do. funny thing is, that person and i were able to see through it and past it, and carry on being friends. it’s just some of her followers who seem compelled to continue “protecting” her on her unasked behalf, or who make entertaining, loud noises as they unfollow me.

which brings me to the last thing i wanted to say today. for all the shit i’ve been going through in the past year, it continues to amaze me to near speechlessness, the amount of willfully ignorant fools we have in our “ranks” as atheists and freethinkers: people who have really only effectively traded one adamant belief system for another. i received more rude, threatening and demonstrably unthinking tirades from fellow “freethinkers” due to the altercation i mentioned in the paragraph above than i have ever received from theists responding to something provocative i’ve posted in the past. these people (and you probably know who you are) serve to remind me that it is the simple human condition which is the overriding factor to everything we do, and within that human condition, intelligence has by no means been necessary, let alone an exclusive requisite, to the survival of this species or any of its individuals.

but yes, my friends, some wear the label of “freethinker” inappropriately: embarrassingly, ruefully, depressingly inappropriately.

ugh.

of course, aside from the accidental duplicity, there’s really nothing wrong with that. it’s part of what being human is about. perhaps “freethinker” can be a label that some people wear as an aspiration: something to work towards. a silver lining on the clouds of a bullshit reality which they may, indeed, someday take hold of to reshape themselves.

was that touchy-feely enough for you? probably not. o well.

at any rate, as with every autumn, my real-world life takes me away from here. and this woman with whom i’m falling in love is an additional, highly welcome distraction in whom i already find comfort and release (and that’s….refreshingly scary). i miss my frequent interactions with you, my friends, but there is no contest in the consideration of whether or not this is right for me. we’re two fiercely independent people who somehow manage to complete each other in all the right ways despite our insistence on our respective independence. there’s no way for me to describe how attractive that is to me, and so far, it’s working out beyond any expectation i might have been inclined to have.

if my past is any valid comparison, i expect what you’ll see is a bit more focused input from me in the future weeks and months. i’ll be using this internet thing a little more responsibly, which is to say, not as much, because i’m actually not trying to evade my reality any more.

and that, my friends, is a very, very good thing.

peace.

Some of you know there was a bit of an incident a couple of nights ago between myself and another outspoken Atheist, who also promotes herself as a Humanist. This happened on Twitter, in the public stream. It was highly unproductive, and rather unfortunate. But it was the proverbial “last straw” for me in terms of accepting as “directive” what I feel to be a highly destructive approach to ourselves as Atheists when interacting with Theists, and if my inability to let that subject go makes me immature and/or intolerant in some people’s eyes, then more people than the handful who unfollowed me due to that event need to unfollow me.

The situation with that person goes far deeper than what was exemplified on Twitter, and it has thus been difficult for me to let it go on that level as well. I’m not going to bring that in the discussion tonight, but since that little confluence of actions has led to a minor separation between some of us on Twitter, I think that ideological separation is a valid subject to broach here.

Luckily, I’d already invited Kile Jones on tonight’s show. I can’t think of a better, more thoughtful and considerate person with whom to discuss these matters. So, following on a little bit from last week’s show on Humanism, Secularism, and Atheism, Kile and I will be discussing the potential dangers in all three of those philosophical approaches, and hopefully, we’ll talk about some strategies for those of us with different approaches to our interactions with Theists and Religionists. My discussions with Kile are always insightful, and I dare say even inspirational. I’ve managed to swing all the way from being a bit reticent to do a show tonight, to being completely stoked. I look forward to a great time with Kile, and those of you who choose to dial in!

Please join me tonight at 11PM EDT/10 CDT/8 PDT for “Thinking Freely: Overrated By Some” with Kile Jones.

from the show intro: “Synthaetica is back after a a brief hiatus. Some hardware problems had to be tackled, along with some scheduling issues. Tonight, we’ll talk about the Texas Board of Education and the general dumbing-down of the American education system: something which should be of importance to us since it stems from fundamentalist religious roots. We’ll also cover some recent events, not the least of which is the creation of self-replicating synthetic cellular life, the Westboro Baptist picketing of the Dio funeral, and other “fun stuff”. We look forward to your participation and have high hopes for some diverse participation tonight. The education issue alone should be of grave interest to persons of all (non)religious persuasion. I’ll explain why tonight.”

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