Continued: (Ed) Atheism Plus/Free Thought Blogs (FTB)

jeremyp said:
What we are seeing here is exactly like religion. The Horde seems to have the same dynamic as a fanatical religious sect. The only thing that stops them from tearing each other apart is the charisma of their leader. Unfortunately, their leader is not Jesus, it's PZ Myers.
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IIRC the view that this is a cult with Peezus at its head has been around for a while now.
 
jeremyp said:
The best case scenario(from the point of view of those of us with popcorn and beer to consume) is that A+ is split on the subject and a further schism occurs.
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To very slightly misquote the intellectual artillery (Carrier) of Atheism Plus:

There is a new atheism brewing, and it’s the rift we need, to cut free the dead weight so we can kick the C.H.U.D.’s back into the sewers and finally disown them, once and for all (I mean people like transmisogynists). I was already mulling a way to do this back in June...
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Perhaps they can call the new movement Atheism Plus Plus?

jeremyp said:
By the way, it's worth reading the last few posts on Butterflies and Wheels. Ophelia is documenting the hate against her and it's quite illuminating, especially the comments. As far as I can tell, Ophelia is guilty of nothing more than answering the question "are trans women actually women" with "I don't know, the issues are complicated". People have leapt on that and twisted it into "Ophelia hates trans women".
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People seem to hear that question very differently. Atheism+ folks like MAMelby believe the question is essentially asking whether you believe trans women deserve equal treatment to cis women. Second wave feminists hear a different question altogether, something like "What is the ontological status of womanhood which is shared by trans and cis women?"

The first question is about one's own subjective values, the second one is much harder to wrap one's head around.
 
Breaking: Ed Brayton has resigned from FTB and moved to Patheos.

So why am I leaving? Also omnipresent since the start of FTB, as I’m sure you well know, has been controversy. The bloggers here have often gone on crusades and launched battles, most of them necessary and justified. But along with that has come a great deal of drama and stress. I’ve endured several threats of lawsuits against me as the owner of the network over the words and actions of others. I’ve had continual demands that I do something about this or that blogger, that I throw them off the network or censor them. I’ve been caught in the crossfire of a great many fights, continually taking shrapnel in battles that I wasn’t even involved in...

Let me also make absolutely clear what this is not about. For the denizens of the slymepit and the far too numerous anti-feminists that are unfortunately part of the broader atheist community, do not think for one second that this is any kind of victory for you and your vile ilk. Do not think for one second that this has anything to do with me moving away from important fights for social justice. I remain absolutely committed to fighting for equality and justice for women, for the LGBT community, for the black community, and anyone else who finds themselves targeted by bigotry wedded to power. Social justice is what animates me, what drives me, and that is not going to change. So if you have any plans to crow about this, I urge you instead to, quite frankly, go **** yourself.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2015/08/06/why-im-leaving-the-network-i-created/
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They've learned nothing from previous fascist groups. Eventually they all implode over matters of idealogical purity. The #FTBullies did at least last a year or two; A+ imploded within weeks.
 
d4m10n said:
Ms. Benson will be next, probably.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/08/21140/
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It reminds me of Michael Shermer's post about Ophelia Benson and witch-hunts within atheism:
http://beliefblower.com/shermers-response-to-ophelia

Let me provide another example of moral progress that at first will seem counterintuitive. It involves a McCarthy-like witch hunt within secular communities to root out the last vestiges of sexism, racism, and bigotry of any kind, real or imagined. Although this unfortunate trend has produced a backlash against itself by purging from its ranks the likes of such prominent advocates as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, I contend that this is in fact a sign of moral progress. Less than a century ago, women were not even allowed to vote. Less than half a century ago, women were blatantly discriminated against in the workplace. As I mentioned, a quarter-century ago, the secular, atheist, and skeptical movements scarcely included any women...

To date, I have stayed out of this witch hunt against our most prominent leaders, thinking that “this too shall pass.” Perhaps I should have said something earlier. As Martin Niemöller famously warned about the inactivity of German intellectuals during the rise of the Nazi party, “first they came for ...” but “I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a....”
When self-proclaimed secular feminists attacked Richard Dawkins for a seemingly innocent response to an equally innocent admonishment to guys by Rebecca Watson (the founder of Skepchicks) that it isn’t cool to hit on women in elevators, this erupted into what came to be known as “Elevatorgate.” I didn’t speak out because I figured that an intellect as formidable as Richard Dawkins’s did not need my comparatively modest brainpower in support.

When these same self-described secular feminists went after Sam Harris for a commentary supporting racial profiling in the search for terrorists, again I didn’t speak out. When Harris wrote, “If my daughter one day reads in my obituary that her father ‘was persistently dogged by charges of racism and bigotry,’ unscrupulous people like P.Z. Myers will be to blame,” I thought to myself: “Don’t worry about it, Sam. Your work is for the ages. PZ Myers’s work is for the minutes—the half-life measure of blogs relative to books.”

But perhaps I should have spoken out, because now the inquisition has been turned on me, by none other than one of the leading self-proclaimed secular feminists whose work has heretofore been important in the moral progress of our movement.​
And now they have come for Ophelia Benson.

Near the end of the article, Shermer writes:
I shall close with a warning about the propensity for social movements to turn on themselves in purges that distract from the original goals and destroy the movement from within. (I wrote about this effect in my book Why People Believe Weird Things, most notably with regards to Ayn Rand’s Objectivist movement, in which members were judged—and subsequently purged—for such trivial matters as liking the wrong music; in the end the movement was reduced to Rand and a handful of sycophants alone in her New York apartment.) As the aforementioned Harriet Hall e-mailed me, she “was vilified on Ophelia’s blog for not following a certain kind of feminist party line of how a feminist should act and think. And I was attacked there in a disturbingly irrational, nonskeptical way.” I asked her why she didn’t defend herself: “I did not dare try to explain my thinking on Ophelia’s blog, because it was apparent from the tone of the comments that anything I might say would be misinterpreted and twisted to use against me. I have always been a feminist but I have my own style of feminism. And I have felt more oppressed by these sort of feminists than by men, and far less welcome in that strain of feminism than in the atheist or skeptical communities.”​
What went around has now, inevitably, come around. In a blog post she published two days ago, Ophelia wrote: http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/08/imagine-for-a-second/

Imagine for a second what it would be like to have total strangers cross-examining every trivial remark you’ve ever made in an effort to find things you said that could be seen as politically suspect in some way.​
And, in another post from around the same time: http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/08/a-horribly-effective-silencer/
I have on occasion made a joke in that group. The people on PZ’s post are brandishing a couple of those jokes as evidence of my thoughtcriminality. This is how low we’ve sunk – or maybe it’s how low we’ve always been, I don’t even know at this point.

I make jokes about things all the time. I say flippant things. I try not to do it on sensitive subjects, but sometimes I get that wrong.

Well obviously someone like that doesn’t belong on Freethought Blogs. The horror!​
I thought that for a moment she was going to be self-reflective on her own crusades against Dawkins and Shermer. A thought that "hey, maybe I was like that too." But no. :(

I love one of the responses to Ophelia Benson's post about "Imagine for a second..." above. The poster, called Lordxor, writes:

Well, I would say this is a case of the shoe being on the other foot now. Now you know what it is like to be on the receiving end of the kind of behavior this blog community and its allies condone and encourage. Now you know how it feels to be someone such as Dr. Tim Hunt. How does it feel to be labeled and vilified by a group of people unjustly just because you do not tow the party line? How does it feel to have your intent misrepresented? Sucks, doesn’t it?

Maybe now you will do less attacking and criticizing of people you disagree with and find more productive and positive ways to achieve your goals. If not, you will just continue to reap what you sow.

Maybe instead of cowardly writing a nasty blog post about someone, do the upright thing; contact them directly and get their side of things. Once you have their side, you can see if what they say messes with reality. The truth has three side – your side, their side, and reality. Sometimes one side is closer to reality than others. Being a good human means accepting you might be in the wrong.​
He/she was of course labelled a "troll".
 
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Looks like that Freethought Blogs favorite, Richard Dawkins, is at it again!

PZ Myers reports on the latest kerfuffle involving Dawkins' tweets on Ahmed Mohamed, the 14 year-old who brought a clock he'd worked on to school, causing police to be called in case the clock was a bomb.

Myers writes: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/09/20/hoax-fraud-fooled/

After that last post (and now that I’m home from Winnipeg), I discover that Richard Dawkins has joined in the chorus of right-wing loons, like Sarah Palin, accusing Ahmed Mohamed of some kind of nefarious scheme. Dawkins claims that the kid was lying and committing fraud and exaggerating his accomplishment…when last I heard, Mohamed had only said he put together some circuit boards in 20 minutes before school. What did Dawkins imagine, that he’d built his transistors from scratch, etched the circuit boards, and invented The Clock?

That this was some wild Wile E. Coyote scheme, where he’d ordered parts from Acme in a brilliantly convoluted plan to get invited to the White House?

This is nuts.

People are noticing that self-proclaimed leaders of atheism are targeting a 14 year old boy — for being enthusiastic about electronics?​
Dawkins does state that he believes Ahmed should not have been arrested.
 
Did Dawkins say anything remotely like that? I saw a tweet from him, which was referencing an article that was just complaining about the use of the word 'invent' for what Ahmed did (and I don't recall if that was aimed at Ahmed; I suspect it was aimed at the media for sloppy word choice).
 
zooterkin said:
Did Dawkins say anything remotely like that? I saw a tweet from him, which was referencing an article that was just complaining about the use of the word 'invent' for what Ahmed did (and I don't recall if that was aimed at Ahmed; I suspect it was aimed at the media for sloppy word choice).
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No.

By now, we should realize the Warriors don't actually read anything. They just wind up the rage machine and accumulate clicks from the gullible.
 
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