A new level of motive-attribution

dam

Damion Reinhardt:

Originally Posted by Brive1987
The current tag team efforts against DJ, with no real objective other than to get him fired or grind him into resigning sums up why I loathe the SJ brigade.
Agreed! They really seem to hate his guts, for some reason. Elyse even took a poll of whom they hate the most and he was right up there with Professor “Dear Muslima” himself.

Originally Posted by Brive1987 
Only consolation is that both the CFI and JREF Boards must have become inured to the relentless calls for the sacking and discipline of their CEOs.
It does seem to be a constant refrain. I’d go so far as to wager that Women in Secularism has become an annual sacrificial atonement at this point, an offering of flights and hotels and booze to appease the pantheon of wrathful bloggesses.

Yes it’s all for the free booze, or it would all be for the free booze if there were any free booze, which there isn’t. Or it it would all be for the free booze if there were any free booze and I loved inhaling large quantities of booze, which I don’t. Or it it would all be for the free booze if there were any free booze and I loved inhaling large quantities of booze so much that I was willing to travel 11 hours eastbound and 14 hours westbound for a total of 25 hours within 4 days just to get it.

25 hours. To get…what? Maybe $15 worth of free booze (which wasn’t on offer at all, don’t forget)? I don’t think I can drink more than that over three evenings. 25 hours of acutely uncomfortable travel for $15 worth of free booze which actually wasn’t provided anyway?

I did get some nice hotel lotion. They had nice lotion, the Alexandria Westin. But they’re just those tiny little tubes. I wouldn’t have spent 25 hours of travel time to get them.

Also? I’m not a “blogess.” Blogging isn’t more of a guy thing. I’m every bit as much allowed to blog as Damion Reinhardt is (and I’m better at it, too). I don’t need a special feminized ess word to name what I do as opposed to what normal, male people do.

Also? That’s so fucking insulting to women such as Taslima Nasreen, Barbara Ehrenreich,  Katha Pollitt, Rebecca Goldstein, Susan Jacoby, Soraya Chemaly, Lindsay Beyerstein, to name only a few of the brilliant women who were speakers at that conference.

It’s also fucking insulting to CFI.

Other than that, good call.

A major public face of the secular movement

Oh gee, the things you find when you glance at the site stats, which show links from other sites. Like this time a bunch from the JREF forum, which surprised me enough that I went to see why. The why? It’s Damion Reinhardt gloating over the fact that Michael Shermer is still popular in skepto-atheo land.

I know that we mostly talk about the accusations levelled against Radford (so much publicly available data to comb through!) but I’d like to pause to consider a hypothesis about the accusations levelled at Shermer.

Ho: Anonymously accusing someone of serious sex crimes (at a rageblog website) will make it difficult for the accused to continue as a major public face of the secular movement, in the company of high profile luminaries such as Dawkins, Tavris, Harris, Goldstein, Pinker, etc.

Ha: Such accusations, in the absence of some corroboration and investigation, carry little weight outside of the social justice wing of the secularist movement.

I’m going to say that there seems to be some preliminary evidence in favour of rejecting the null hypothesis: http://www.secularcouncil.org/team/

https://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/files/2014/05/global.png

Naturally, some of the folks over at FtB are rage vomiting about their collective inability to take Michael Shermer down for good.

[Read more…]

A place where the writers call themselves “free thinkers”

Missing the point. Damion Reinhardt at Skeptic Ink.

Freezing Peaches at AACON

If you were to Google for “removing the objectionable paintings” as a phrase, it will lead you to (as of this printing) exactly one place on the World Wide Web,  a place where the writers call themselves “free thinkers” and are presently discussing removing three paintings from an art show because said paintings depict women in various states of undress: [Read more…]

Sisters contact

Damion Thompson reports at the Telegraph (yes, I know – the Telegraph) that the University of East London said No to gender segregation at an event on its campus.

I blogged yesterday about this “segregated” Muslim event organised by the Islamic Society of the University of East London, due to happen tonight at UEL’s main lecture theatre on its Docklands campus.

Much to my surprise, UEL immediately banned it from their campus. See the reaction below by Peter Tatchell, who brought this to public attention:

Check out the poster for the event.

[Read more…]

Cheap

Just a small side thing, about reading and disagreeing with an opponent fairly.

A reader pointed out to me a post by Damion Reinhardt at Skeptic Ink about a post of mine. Here’s how he paraphrases my post:

Her argument seems to be something like this:

  1. Skeptics assent unquestioningly to moral propositions of the form “You must not [commit atrocities against humans]” without stopping to ask for further evidence.
  2. Checkmate, skeptics!

I may have missed out a step there, but that seems to pretty much cover it. My answer to this is twofold.

Here’s what I actually wrote:

One of the things that proud or “movement” skeptics like to say is “you have to be skeptical of everything.” No sacred cows!

But I don’t think even proud or “movement” skeptics really believe that, apart from a few psychopaths. I can think of lots of things I think no one should be skeptical of, and I’d be surprised to get much disagreement. [Read more…]

Meet the neighbors

The greetings committee has certainly wasted no time making our new colleague Yemi welcome. She wrote a post on What are Anti-Atheists+ afraid of? and along came Damion Reinhardt and “pitchguest” and john greg to respond.

john greg is as shy and sweet as ever.

Yemisi, you are indeed a perfect fit with FfTB. Dogmatic; poor English skills; poor reading comprehension; vigourous defensive posture; misrepresentation of commentor’s comments.

Yes, you will do well on this dying network of mad ideologues.

Thank you so much, and do you want the casserole dish back?