Why the A+ forum is
not a safe space:
It's publicly viewed. The analogy with group therapy is good except it's like group therapy sessions piped live to a Jumbotron
WP outside their mental health clinic. What the public sees on the giant screen attracts mobs with pitchforks. With only a few minutes of googling, for example, I stumbled upon their chief moderator ogre's phone number and a map to her home. I wasn't even looking for it.
That argument doesn't really follow. A "safe space" is defined as an area where there are rules that forbid various forms of bigotry and discrimination. What part of being public or being easily accessible makes it impossible to enforce rules that ban various forms of bigotry?
Why would you have to understand what it is like to be black in order to have an opinion or a perspective or a thought that is not summarily dismissed because you're not black? I'm speaking specifically to discussions that are not about any particular individual that is an apparent effort to discount their experiences. That's dumb for anyone to do to anyone especially over the internet. I'm talking about discussions of broader scope. Why should my opinion on any given social issue be valuated by my gender, orientation or ethnicity? (Where it can be otherwise evaluated on its own merits or lack thereof.)
There isn't a problem with suggesting that you have some idea of what someone is going through when they suffer from discrimination if you have suffered from discrimination yourself, the problems come when people try to argue that their perspective on a minority issue because they are a minority in some other way.
An opinion on a social issue is "valuated" only in the sense that people who try to direct or inform experiences which they have not had are presenting a problematic perspective. If the topic is affirmative action, for example, and you say that you don't personally know what it's like to be black and trying to find a job but you have dealt with understanding discrimination as a child, then your opinion on how blacks should handle or feel about the affirmative action situation will be quickly, and correctly, dismissed.
The point is that the viewpoints are evaluated on their own merits. They aren't rejected because you're white (or whatever, depending on the situation). Rather it's because you're white (or whatever, again) that your experiences lead you to a viewpoint that lacks merit. I think this is a fundamental problem a lot of people have trying to understanding social justice ideas; the belief that their idea is being rejected because they're part of a privileged group, rather than recognising that their idea is rejected because it lacks merit as a result of it being formed by a history of privilege.
In other words, ideas may seem like they have merit to you because of your experiences and how you view the world. But often they won't because privilege blindness makes it difficult/impossible to see how much of the picture you're actually missing.
What movement is there outside of the A+ forum?
The people on the A+ forum are only a small part of the movement as a whole, and atheism+ has always been about the greater movement (organising and taking part in various forms of activism, consciousness raising, etc). The A+ forum is to atheism+ what the Richard Dawkins forum is to atheism.
The stated aims of A+ were pretty much identical to those of the already existing (secular) humanism. As was pointed out at the time. The problem is that what the forum seems to be mainly about is (a particular sort of) feminism and social justice.
I'm not sure the claims that atheism+ is humanism really stand up to scrutiny. Even when we specify that we're talking about Secular Humanism (so we avoid the brands of humanism which advocate replacing religious rituals with alternatives, etc) we still get to the point where: a) humanism rejects the atheism label, and b) human does not adopt any particular ethical stance. Since one of the fundamental points of atheism+ is that we need an offshoot of atheism that actually takes a moral position, they are necessarily different positions.
There are certainly similarities and overlaps, but they are more than distinct enough to justify different labels, in my opinion.
I think it is a minor thing, but minor things count, because lots of minor things add up to a big thing.
It is not a minor thing when we consider the context: a safe space where minorities have gathered to avoid facing the discrimination they have to deal with in their daily lives. To ruin someone's safe space by just having to make a stupid joke is pretty serious. Yes, nobody was physically beaten, nobody burnt alive, no personal rights taken away, etc, but there are so few places in this world where a minority can take a moment to relax and not have to put up with the world treating them as sub-human, and to do that to them, for the sake of a joke that wasn't even very funny, is pretty bad.
However, this is not to say that I think it's inherently wrong to laugh at others' names. I think it depends on what the actual joke of it is. Is it any worse to find Nina Nanar's name funny because she sounds like a fire engine than it is to find Edward Woodward's name funny because he sounds like a fart in the bath, just because Nina Nanar is Asian? I don't find her name funny because it's an Asian name (or, in fact, half-Asian), I find it funny because it sounds like a fire engine. I'm sure she was the inspiration for Broken News' Allison Ellison, Amanda Panda, Mellanie Bellamy, etc.
Two important points:
1) there is a fundamental difference between making fun of someone's name when they are privileged, and making fun of someone's name when they are a minority. Both can hurt feelings and should arguably be avoided on that basis, but only one is a form of discirmination that actively hurts a group of people. (You can see this principle as applied in findings like stereotype threat, or prejudiced norm theory, where the harm caused by innocuous statements only manifests itself when directed at minorities. This is because the history of the two groups are substantially different, in the same way that insulting a multimillionaire who has no problems in the world will have a different effect than insulting a severely depressed person who is on the verge of wanting to kill themselves).
2) Nobody would (I hope) suggest that it is inherently wrong to make fun of someone's name. It is wrong on the basis that it produces a demonstrable harm not only on that individual, but on to society as a whole.
Yeah, that was really off-colour. Every time an apology was requested, the reply came "oh I've had such a hard day and I'm crabby". So what?
Yeah it was incredibly bad form and it's an example of what I was saying about the wrong people reaching that level of "trust" that's needed in a safe space. If anyone else with Setar's history had made the same comment, backed it up by the same excuses and comments that made it worse, they would have faced stern mod action and possibly temporary or permanent bannings.
So long as the A+ forum is the top hit on google then that forum is the movement, in my opinion. They can claim it isn't the movement (yet pounced on the guy that mentioned he started a FB A+ group) but so long as the most popular search engine points to that forum as "atheism plus" then it effective is the movement, right?
Does that really follow?
When I type in "Skepticism", I get a wiki link and then a link to the "Skeptic Society". Would I be justified in claiming that the skeptic movement consists of people who edit wikipedia and people taking part on the Skeptic Society forum?
The A+ forum is just one of the many online A+ communities, all with varying rules and moderating styles, that provide a discussion space for people who take part in the broader movement of atheism+. I know a number of people who are a part of the A+ movement who aren't part of any online forums or communities, so I can't agree that it's accurate to conflate the movement of A+ with one particular atheism+ forum (even if google suggests that it's the most popular online community).
