Atheism Plus/Free Thought Blogs (FTB)

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Recovering Agnostic said:
It looks as if the last two pages have been taken up with atheists/skeptics ridiculously bickering over the precise timeline and causation of a different round of ridiculous atheist/skeptic bickering. Is that a fair summary?
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I think that's fair. Lots of bandwidth wasted on chest beating and face saving.

Does anyone here disagree with the observation, articulated by Thunderf00t, that Atheism Plus is dripping poison into the atheist movement?

...or that writing conference rules redundant to local criminal laws is unnecessary and suggests that conferences are rampant criminal activity? Doesn't that needlessly give comfort to their enemies?

Suppose we say in atheist conference rules that throwing knives at speakers we disagree with is strictly forbidden. To argue that keeping in the rule only hurts those that want to throw knives, is magical, not critical thinking.
 
Mr. Scott said:
Does anyone here disagree with the observation, articulated by Thunderf00t, that Atheism Plus is dripping poison into the atheist movement?

...or that writing conference rules redundant to local criminal laws is unnecessary and suggests that conferences are rampant criminal activity? Doesn't that needlessly give comfort to their enemies?

Suppose we say in atheist conference rules that throwing knives at speakers we disagree with is strictly forbidden. To argue that keeping in the rule only hurts those that want to throw knives, is magical, not critical thinking.
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I don't disagree with the dripping poison sentiment, in fact were I someone deciding to get off the agnostic fence and landed on A+ while I was researching atheism, I'd be looking through the yellow pages for a church.

Is A+ really anything more than an internet forum and a few blogs ?
 
Recovering Agnostic said:
It looks as if the last two pages have been taken up with atheists/skeptics ridiculously bickering over the precise timeline and causation of a different round of ridiculous atheist/skeptic bickering. Is that a fair summary?
Click to expand...

I guess it depends whether you're interested in establishing facts, and accepting that things may be complicated, or if you're happy to let incorrect and/or over-simplified statements stand. There is a solipsistic tendency for people to assume that the first time they became aware of something was the significant moment. Elevatorgate certainly got a lot of publicity, both inside and outside of the skeptical and atheist communities. However, the issues that led to A+ were live well before EG, and the groupings (FtB/Skepchick) were also in place.
 
Stout said:
I don't disagree with the dripping poison sentiment, in fact were I someone deciding to get off the agnostic fence and landed on A+ while I was researching atheism, I'd be looking through the yellow pages for a church.

Is A+ really anything more than an internet forum and a few blogs ?
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I think they've been harassing people who don't support them, leading to some resignations from official positions. Are they incorporated legally in some form? I don't think so. As far as I can tell, they are comparable to a bunch of neighborhood kids who formed a clubhouse out of spare lumber and share scary stories of rich old white boogeymen who made them uncomfortable.
 
zooterkin said:
I guess it depends whether you're interested in establishing facts, and accepting that things may be complicated, or if you're happy to let incorrect and/or over-simplified statements stand. There is a solipsistic tendency for people to assume that the first time they became aware of something was the significant moment. Elevatorgate certainly got a lot of publicity, both inside and outside of the skeptical and atheist communities. However, the issues that led to A+ were live well before EG, and the groupings (FtB/Skepchick) were also in place.
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Y'see, this is the problem. Everyone thinks they're standing up for facts, or liberty, or justice, or some other worthy cause, and it's "the other lot" who are being obstructive, argumentative, and generally escalating a minor disagreement into a massive spat. Presumably, someone is actually right in this case, or possibly everyone's half-right and the battle-lines are too well set to just talk reasonably. But the net effect's the same regardless.

As a more or less disinterested observer (in that I wasn't really following the events at the time and still don't have much interest in the minute detail of the ongoing soap opera), and without taking sides, I have sympathy with what you're saying, but reading the last few pages in one sitting just made me shake my head, because it seemed to be the whole Atheism Plus mess in microcosm. (If anyone's offended by this, I'm happy to say that I think whichever side(s) you're on are the good guys. It might even be true.)

The point isn't that one side's right and the other wrong, but to observe how quickly small differences of opinion become pistols at dawn.
 
Harassing people? Yea I could see that.

I was wondering whether they were planning on offering an alternative to the "mainstream" atheist culture by,say, hosting their own conferences where they have all the special rules they demand of the other ones.

I see no evidence of it but then I don't frequent the blogosphere very often.
 
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Stout said:
I was wondering whether they were planning on offering an alternative to the "mainstream" atheist culture by,say, hosting their own conferences where they have all the special rules they demand of the other ones.
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Now I'm picturing the Del Mar lounge, but with an A+ conference instead of TAM. It's . . . surreal.
 
Recovering Agnostic said:
Y'see, this is the problem. Everyone thinks they're standing up for facts, or liberty, or justice, or some other worthy cause, and it's "the other lot" who are being obstructive, argumentative, and generally escalating a minor disagreement into a massive spat. Presumably, someone is actually right in this case, or possibly everyone's half-right and the battle-lines are too well set to just talk reasonably. But the net effect's the same regardless.

As a more or less disinterested observer (in that I wasn't really following the events at the time and still don't have much interest in the minute detail of the ongoing soap opera), and without taking sides, I have sympathy with what you're saying, but reading the last few pages in one sitting just made me shake my head, because it seemed to be the whole Atheism Plus mess in microcosm. (If anyone's offended by this, I'm happy to say that I think whichever side(s) you're on are the good guys. It might even be true.)

The point isn't that one side's right and the other wrong, but to observe how quickly small differences of opinion become pistols at dawn.
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Agreed.
 
Recovering Agnostic said:
Y'see, this is the problem. Everyone thinks they're standing up for facts, or liberty, or justice, or some other worthy cause, and it's "the other lot" who are being obstructive, argumentative, and generally escalating a minor disagreement into a massive spat. Presumably, someone is actually right in this case, or possibly everyone's half-right and the battle-lines are too well set to just talk reasonably. But the net effect's the same regardless.

As a more or less disinterested observer (in that I wasn't really following the events at the time and still don't have much interest in the minute detail of the ongoing soap opera), and without taking sides, I have sympathy with what you're saying, but reading the last few pages in one sitting just made me shake my head, because it seemed to be the whole Atheism Plus mess in microcosm. (If anyone's offended by this, I'm happy to say that I think whichever side(s) you're on are the good guys. It might even be true.)

The point isn't that one side's right and the other wrong, but to observe how quickly small differences of opinion become pistols at dawn.
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thats what matt dillahunty thinks. in his car again!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqbp3MNhnCc
 
Once more with the unclear on the concept, a clueless ATHEIST posting on a site called ATHEISM+ has deemed it. ugh, anti-racist or something to put up a STOP ISLAMOPHOBIA banner in hir, xie's, zir sig. line.

Link

Where's that laughing dog ?
 
Mr. Scott said:
Does anyone here disagree with the observation, articulated by Thunderf00t, that Atheism Plus is dripping poison into the atheist movement?
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Yes. More or less. I see a bunch of self-obsessed humorless buffoons pointlessly arguing against a different bunch of self-obsessed humorless buffoons. They aren't really "poison" so much as they are irrelevant.

Mr. Scott said:
...or that writing conference rules redundant to local criminal laws is unnecessary and suggests that conferences are rampant criminal activity? Doesn't that needlessly give comfort to their enemies?

Suppose we say in atheist conference rules that throwing knives at speakers we disagree with is strictly forbidden. To argue that keeping in the rule only hurts those that want to throw knives, is magical, not critical thinking.
Click to expand...
By that same logic, conferences should not post the location of fire exits because the fire department already exists and it just serves to make people scared and needlessly gives comfort to pyromaniacs.
 
Irony said:
By that same logic, conferences should not post the location of fire exits because the fire department already exists and it just serves to make people scared and needlessly gives comfort to pyromaniacs.
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No. It's so obvious the comparison is invalid I'm not going to explain how because you'll just dig in. Figure it out for yourself.
 
Recovering Agnostic said:
It looks as if the last two pages have been taken up with atheists/skeptics ridiculously bickering over the precise timeline and causation of a different round of ridiculous atheist/skeptic bickering. Is that a fair summary?
Click to expand...

Seems as though an A- movement has grown up in opposition to the A+ movement though an observer sometimes has a hard time telling them apart.
 
Irony said:
By that same logic, conferences should not post the location of fire exits because the fire department already exists and it just serves to make people scared and needlessly gives comfort to pyromaniacs.
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The policies of Skepticon don't include advice on how to act in case of a fire. There's a harassment policy though which was added as a reaction on the FTB crowd's lamenting, and just that. It's not a policy just like any other. Because there is no other.

The JREF, particularly DJ Grothe, was excessively bashed by the FTB bunch even though TAM 2011 already had a code of conduct which included sexual comments and other unwanted behavior, printed in the front of the conference program.
But the anti-harassment activists wanted the JREF to make the sexual harassment policy a big deal on the JREF website, like Skepticon did. Again, this doesn't appear to be a policy just like any other, does it?

What is making this policy special is that there are people who want to rub it in the faces of conference attendees as hard as possible. And a large part of potential concference attendess opposes that. That's something hard to miss even if you chose to ignore the context, as Matt "Life has rules" Dillahunty has just done. Yes, life has rules. So does TAM. TAM also has rules against sexual harassement. They just haven't been presented as in-your-face as the FTB bunch demanded.

Get used to the fact that most attendees of secular conferences want to be viewn first and formost as skeptics, atheists, whatever the conference is about.

They don't want to be viewn first and formost as potential sex offenders just because they are male.

They don't want to be viewn as "skepchicks", as uninterested in alleged "male" subjects (which are these anyway?) yet interested in workshops on felt-vagina-handcrafting just because they are female.

They don't want to be viewn as being interested only in "drug laws and incarceration rates" just because they are black (sic, Jen McCreight suggested that just recently).
 
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