Ron Lindsay apologized to Rebecca Watson

For comparing her speech to a press release from North Korea. That’s it. Quoted:

In my blog post of May 18, I complained about Ms. Rebecca Watson’s characterization of my May 17 talk. In doing so, I expressed my points in intemperate language, e.g., the comparison of her blog post to a press communication from North Korea, and for that I unqualifiedly apologize. This apology has been conveyed to Ms. Watson.

He steadfastly maintains that she “mischaracterized” him, and leaves it to the CFI board to determine whether his talk was “contemptuous of women” among other options.

I’d have to go reread a number of things to be sure, but I don’t recall anyone alleging he was contemptuous of women. Patronizing, ill-informed, and with an unbelievable lack of self-awareness (not to mention timing!), yes. Where is he getting that canard?

Team Pit wants to keep dumping shit wherever and whenever they feel the urge, because it feels good, and besides they’ve always had invisible hazmat gear so the stinking mess doesn’t bother them. Then they laugh at the people whose parents were never on the mailing list for the memo on where to pick up the invisible hazmat gear for their kids, because watching those Others wade awkwardly through stinking shit while holding their nose, just so that they can join the common activities is totes hilarious, especially when the stinking shit means that the Others are constantly distracted by concerns for their health and safety so that their objections are easy to sweep aside with more sprays of shit .

Team Fence-Sitter wants to sit there in their own invisible hazmat gear sanctimoniously pointing with one hand to their own non-shit-dumping, while giving a great big thumbs-up with their other hand to the shit-dumpers sculpting shit-portraits of Team A+ on top of the walls of shit they’ve built around their favourite parts of the common room, surrounded by shit-moats guarded by shit-flinging trolls.

Then when Team A+ says that they want a non-shitty common room or they won’t be coming there at all anymore, and they’ll go and build their own common room where shit will not be allowed and nobody gets to wear hazmat gear in the common area because even if there’s enough hazmat gear for everybody some hazmat gear is still comfier and better at blocking harmful shit than other hazmat gear, so it’s better if hazmat gear is just not needed at all?

Then Team Pit goes totally apeshit, dumping their shit in letterboxes and throwing it at the windows of the A+ common room, and then complaining when Team A+ hoses it off and flushes it down the drain to clear the space for those with no hazmat gear, because Pit shit is made from precious preciousssss Freeze Peaches and anybody who doesn’t let that shit sit there to fester for all to wade through is a censoring bully who can’t defend their arguments against theTruthy Truth™ contained in massive piles of shit.

Meanwhile Team Fence-Sitter continues to wag their finger at Team A+ for wanting to build a space free of shitpiles at all, because wading through shit never did them any harm, and complaining about piles of shit is just so divisive.

Ron Lindsay apologized to Rebecca Watson

…and disabled the commenting.

I swear to fucking god, on average, big name professional skeptics are some of the worst examples of human beings I’ve ever seen.

They’re about on par with politicians, but minus the integrity, honesty and bravery.

He asked how we know the people doing the nutty harassment it were skeptics.

Who else knows who the relevant players are? It’s not like Rebecca Watson, say, is a household name.

The only people who know the story and know who the women being harassed even are, are skeptics/atheists. (And maybe a few MRAs–and whose fault is that?)

And that’s the problem. He sees this stuff and worse all the time, even within his own mentions from supporters of his, and condones them by pretending they don’t exist or giving less obvious support. Then he will GO OUT OF HIS WAY to find people he doesn’t like and harass them while pretending he has good intentions.

The man is dishonest to the core. People have already explained why he is wrong on multiple topics, at length, and nothing has gotten through to him. Because he doesn’t really care.

I’d call him dogmatic – his favorite tool for derailing conversations – but he isn’t. He’s a fraud.

I had chimed in on the exchange yesterday after seeing it retweeted, and one thing he said bugged me. He asked how we know the people doing the nutty harassment it were skeptics. It’s a bit of a no true scotsman problem. He seems to define skeptics to exclude sexists, and then to conclude that the movement as a whole doesn’t have a sexism problem. Because apparently it can’t definitionally.

That idiocy aside, I got this allegory in my head. I imagine some racially edgy comic, say Chris Rock. He’s outing, doing his thing. His audience is filled with people that can handle and understand the way in which he’s using language, so there’s no real misunderstanding. But lets say that some clip of his show managed to be edited out of the set, and began to be passed around on white supremacist boards.

Time goes by, and now – occasionally – some of these white-power people show up at the concert and make Chris Rocks audience uneasy. Maybe there’s a verbal altercation. His fans start to tell him about these people. I can imagine him being incredulous. Surely no one could misunderstand me to the point at which they would think I would ENDORSE racism. I could see him being initially dismissive.

As the problem got worse, though, I can’t really imagine him saying something along the lines of, “well, my audience aren’t racists, so those white power people just aren’t my fans”. He wouldn’t be dismissive of the complaints. He’d probably go on some explicative rant on stage intentionally trying to alienate the plague that’s arrived.

Vacula want’s to know how we know they are skeptics. Maybe pedantically we don’t, but I do know that they are increasingly his audience. They are, increasingly, the people listening to him. Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he means well, something he’s saying is attacking them – and if it’s all a big misunderstanding, I’d expect a loud and possibly filthy comment from him that would make it clear that they were not welcome.

He wants to know why he should denounce them. Here’s why: THEY ARE LISTENING TO YOU.

Because the way I read it, DS said: ‘stop talking shit’,
JV said: [a ton of shit] followed by ‘hey, how about coming on my show?’
DS said: ‘stop talking shit, or at least denounce the horrible shit other people are talking and I’ll consider it’
JV said: [massively qualified and diluted 'denouncement' post]
DS said: ‘ok, it’s a start. I’ll come on’.

So if being asked to denounce haters as a condition of starting a dialogue is so ridiculous, how come JV isn’t being ridiculed for caving into this demand? It’s almost as if JV is (What’s the word I’m looking for? “pandering”? No, that’s not it) capitulating *insincerely* to DS’s demand just so he can have a high profile guest on his radio show, and meanwhile he’s laughing behind the scenes with his troll #bravehero friends about it all.

Could it be? Nahhhh. The irrational feminazi paranoia machine in my head must be working overtime.

(They could really use a Brownian or a Louis or a Spokes Gay or a modusoperandi or a hyperdeath or a…, couldn’t they?)

I think we found next year’s WiS sponsor…

Stalin murdered wholesale and often at random and impulse, but not in the name of ‘democracy’ per se. He always discriminated between ‘bourgeois democracy’, which he and Lenin both despised, and ‘proletarian democracy’, of which they approved. The latter was construed as ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, which both Stalin and Lenin thought of as the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party. The party was shortly substituted for the proletariat and the dictator in turn for the party. The rest is history.

Democracy and liberalism are the bedrock of any future worth having, and are inimical to authoritarian cultures. Fascism, Stalinism, Catholicism and Islam were and are universalist proselytising creeds intent on world domination. They have innocent and often gullible adherents for whom the attraction is often little more just the finding of a tribal identity. Believing is their gateway to belonging.

Catholicism and Islam are the oldest forms of fascism on the planet, with Catholicism currently in a quiescent, defensive phase in most parts of the world, but ever-ready to flare up again most viciously, as it has done recently in Latin America.

Islam shows its true nature across southern Asia, the ME and north Africa with monotonous regularity.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance: against the lot of them.

(NYC)

Well. I guess I mean I didn’t expect his over-the-top response to criticism. I really gave him the benefit of the doubt, initially, because everyone says stupid shit, especially when first engaging in supportive or ally work with a community you lack familiarity with. (I’d mention privilege, here, but apparently that’s Off Limits for discussion, now.)

What amuses me is that where Lindsay links to 3 examples of “shut up and listen”, the example from John Scalzi’s blog has some really good text explaining the process of everyone saying stupid shit, and then if they talk less and listen more, they learn to say less stupid stuff. (And the other two links, to Myers and a DailyKos blogger, also have good content. People who hate the word ‘privilege’ would benefit from carefully reading the links that Lindsay gave.)

I agree with that, but I don’t think Islam is the place to look for the motivating ideology here. If these men were not Muslims, do we imagine they would not be violent or murderous?

But I am not sure they have claimed a religious motivation, not directly anyway. There was lots of ‘Allah akbar-ing’ going on, but on the TV clip we all saw, he claimed that he was acting in revenge for the Muslims killed by US and UK military adventures abroad. In other words, he was motivated by anti-war, or anti-imperialist urges by his own account. I am also anti-war and anti-imperialist but I completely disagree with what he did and I don’t think that his actions impugn anti-imperialism or pacificism in any way.

Fanatics do murderous things in the name of all sorts of things.

Well, many sorts of things, but not all. Not in the name of human rights, for instance.

Some ideologies have more of a tendency to inspire fanaticism than others. We need to be able to say which ones those are. It’s also necessary to do it without demonizing particular people or sets of people. That can be hard to do. It’s still absurd to pretend a motivating ideology was not a motivating ideology.

Yeah, that’s true. I guess I hadn’t associated Ron Lindsay with the Libertarian wing of the community. The few things I’ve read from him in the past have seemed pretty reasonable. I really didn’t expect this from him, which makes it more disappointing.

Well. I guess I mean I didn’t expect his over-the-top response to criticism. I really gave him the benefit of the doubt, initially, because everyone says stupid shit, especially when first engaging in supportive or ally work with a community you lack familiarity with. (I’d mention privilege, here, but apparently that’s Off Limits for discussion, now.) Lord knows I’ve said stupid and hurtful things, and as much as I’d like to think I’ll never make that mistake again, I probably will in the future. It’s how you deal with it that’s the important thing, and Lindsay seriously failed that test of character.

Please just write normally.

Note too that the US government didn’t intern Germans and German Americans, a number of them were against the War. There were just too many of them. Same thing for the Italians.

I may not like or approve of the tenets of Islam, nor their mistreatment of women, etc. etc. but I don’t want to see a rise in hateful rhetoric. Check out Eboo Patel’s Sacred Ground: Pluralism, prejudice, and the Promise of America.

I’ll never understand why some people, especially atheists, who I presume are libertarian as well without a sense of irony, leap to the Orwellian tactic of confining those who commit thought-crime, or are on the verge of committing it due to their religious leanings.

“To be clear, I still firmly believe Ms. Watson’s blog post mischaracterizes my talk…”

Literally the next paragraph:

“As to my May 17 talk, I have nothing to say.”

Pick one, Ron.

“The CFI board will decide whether my talk was contemptuous of women, as some have alleged,”

So the organization that Ron Lindsay heads will ‘decide’ (his word) whether his talk was contemptuous of women. The CFI decides; everyone else alleges.

Presumably allowing the remaining 6-and-a-bit billion people on the planet some mental autonomy is mission creep.

We once made a suggestion not all that long
ago that their identities should now be known
Atheism Plus was not overtly happy about this
To be fair we were thinking of those in charge
But we were surprised and in deed still are at
Atheism Plus as they are quite hard to please

We some times wonder why we condemn the
misogyny of others as it carries on regardless
We are tired of it and we are not even targeted
We wish it would all stop but it will not so what
can one do about that that can not be stopped
That was or is a rhetorical question by the way
so any attempt to answer it is purely academic

Maybe future generations will be able to stop it
because despite the best efforts of quite a few
this one does not appear to be that successful

We are lucky for we are old and therefore have
made our peace with death so are not worried
about what ground apes think of each other all
that much but it would be nice if there was love

We are not expecting anyone to be perfect or to
be a paragon of virtue or anything at all like that
But to treat their fellow human beings as being
someone that should be respected regardless

We do not agree with all feminism although we
draw the line at de humanising any one though
We cannot stop this and fighting it is best left to
those what possess greater energy than we do
We hope one day that it may stop but we do not
think it is going be in our own life time how ever
Do not let those who hate you be the reason for
you to hate them since then you shall have lost

Podcast was amazing.

Good. I’m glad someone in a position of responsibility is speaking up on this. AA now has another new member (albeit I chose the cheapo option

Meanwhile, over at Mount Blowhard, Ron Lindsay has rowed halfway back to the boathouse:

http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/statement_re_my_may_18_blog_post/

I had the same thought. I read “We Have Always Fought” after PZ suggested it and then today noticed Daniel Dennett using a quote by “the daughter of a good friend of mine, a computer scientist” and thought it was strange that he noted the profession of the father of the person who originated the quote. This is a rather subtle point but/and it’s awesome to see Muscato’s sensitivity to it.

(And not really intended as a criticism of Dennett since it is a subtle issue.)