This was too long to fit on Twitter and I didn’t want to take to your comments section.
I recognize that you don’t owe me a response, and I feel like you are almost certainly working on one, but I would like to discuss the fact that you saw fit to respond to Richard Carrier before you responded to the “more considered posts” by me, M. A. Melby, or Secular Woman. It’s worth pointing out that you haven’t entirely ignored M. A. Melby’s post because of “having” to respond to Richard Carrier, just the “quite reasonable,” as you put it, part of it. I would like to highlight the not unreasonable conclusion that one could draw, that indeed we were already discussing: You prioritize getting into petty internet fights about tone over everything else. In this case, you prioritize getting into petty internet fights about tone over serious-minded discussion about an accused rapist in the movement.
You’ve sat with our discussion for over a week now. There are nearly 1000 comments between the two blog posts on my site about this topic. Two other women have chosen to write about this. And done so in a tone that is much more to your preference than the tone of Mr. Carrier. And yet you choose to write a blog not in response to the women who are trying to have a discussion with you about something that they are deeply concerned about, who are writing in what you consider an appropriate tone. You choose instead to respond to a blog post written by a man relying heavily on the posts written by those women — indeed over half his post is dedicated to linking to the other sources on which he’s based his post. You choose to prove the point that if one writes in an aggressive tone, one will get attention and responses, while if one writes in a reasonable tone, one will be put on hold. I now wonder if I might have gotten a faster blog response if I’d written in a less reasonable tone myself.
And I get it, that’s an easy 3000 words to write, just like it’s easier to write 3000 angry words calling someone a fuckhead than it is to write something nuanced. But I think in choosing to respond to the angry tone instead of the nuanced tone you’re guilty of promoting the same thing you’re saying you’re against.
Mr. Nugent, you also state at the beginning of the article that you “have to” respond because of how Mr. Carrier has portrayed you and Atheist Ireland. You really didn’t. You chose to. There are always going to be people misrepresenting you on the internet. There are always going to be people whose tone you’re going to want to correct. There’s always some new fight to be had if you’re itching to write 3000 words about how someone is wrong on the internet. And, to be clear, you chose to respond to that one. And that’s fine, but I want you to understand the message that all of this sends, because it’s the same message you were already sending: Michael Nugent cares more about tone than he does about women.
I don’t think that’s the message you want to be sending, based on the mission of Atheist Ireland, I know it’s not.
ETA from comment below: The point of this, like the previous posts, is not that Michael Nugent is a bad guy. It’s that he keeps doing things online that make him look like a bad guy and he’s either unaware of them, in which case hopefully writing them out calmly in a blog post and explaining why they look how they look will help him understand why people see them the way they do, or he doesn’t care about the people who are interpreting his actions that way and he’d just as soon write them off as engage with them, in which case I think his tone arguments are hypocritical. Either way, I don’t see a course of action for myself that is more rational than to call his attention to the interpretations and see what he makes of them.