The Westboro Baptist Church are real world trolls: their actions are meant to anger rather than inform or generated any other kind of positive reaction.  How do sane people deal with this?  Some people have done serious counter-protests, protesting the hate.  As with online trolls, this just gets them fired up and tends to give them the attention they crave.

A new, and more effective, tactic being employed is mock-protests.  When the WBC protested Comic-Con last week, the geeks struck back, and the WBC actually left early.

Success seems to come from outright mockery rather than direct conflict.  Ridiculous signs do two things: they grab the attention of passer-bys, distracting them from the WBC, and it makes the audience laugh rather than be angry.  This time, the joke signs contained a lot of straight up geek references, such as "God hates Jedi" (held by a Trekkie), "The Cake is a Lie," and "Kill all humans" (being held by the robotic Bender from Futurama).  Others are pop culture references such as "Magnets, how the @?*! do they work?" and some are just random silliness.

Fore even more sign silliness, you can check out WBC's protest of Twitter back in January, which brought out counter-protest signs such as "I have a sign," "Build Prisons on the Moon" and "I was promised donuts."  Watch the video and see how the counter-protest turned the entire affair into giggles and photo-ops.

There's lots of ways you can get information about this site such as facebook, twitter and this blog. There's a lot of duplication between those sources, and I'm trying to judge where I might want to focus my energies.

If you choose "other," it would be helpful if you clarified in a comment. Thanks! =)

I got caught up in a discussion about book burning this week.  It's a practice that is primarily religiously motivated, although sometimes it's motivated by non-religious ideologies.  I've always been against it, but this discussion gave me the chance to explore the specific reasons why I object to it.

First, knowledge is never bad, only what one does with it. We study even the most horrible of things for a reason: to learn from it.

Second, and more importantly, however, is that fact that book burning is outdated and pointless at this time in history.   In previous centuries, the burning of a few books might indeed obliterate the knowledge within them, because books were so costly and time consuming to create. Thus, burnings had a practical purpose, making "dangerous" knowledge less available or unavailable to others who might be harmed by it.

But books are commonly mass produced now.  Obliterating dozens or even hundreds or even thousands of copies of a book does nothing to affect it's rarity.  Heck, some people become interested in a book specifically because a group is burning copies.

Thus, book burning today is little more than an attention-seeking tantrum.  And of course they always see themselves as taking the moral highroad.  Look at us rejecting this filth. See how superior we are. Of course, they are just as effectively rejecting an idea or book by not reading it, not teaching it, and even teaching contrary arguments to it.  What really does a burning contribute, other than a very public display?

Related article: Florida Church Will Mark 9/11 With Burning of Qurans

Ever seen the advertisement in which a man's computer screen reads "You have reached the end of the Internet?" That's sort of how I feel tonight. At least, I've hit the end of the Internet that's worth reading.

I could go on about the recent antics of the Westboro Baptist Church, or the fact that I can remain relatively unbiased about darn near everyone but them.

I could report on soldiers who have been informed that they cannot be conscientious objectors because they don't want to serve with homosexuals.

I could lament on the the 50th time I've seen someone claim that Satanism is the world's largest religion because all non-Christians are Satanists.

But what I would really like to do is write about something positive. Something new. Something that hasn't annoyed me for the umpteenth time.

BTW, my spell checker accepts umpteenth as a real word. I guess that's my positive contribution for today!