What is that hilarious hashtag? #vaculamustdenounce
Geddit? It’s a hilarious joke about Dave Silverman’s effort to get Vacula to say that harassment is bad. Yeah what could be funnier than that?
That’s only a sample of what was posted over the space of an hour or so. Busy!
Update to add a few more, because they’re so funny.
The one about American Atheists is especially weird. Woooooo; welcome to another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind.
Sorry they’re so tiny and horrible. Clicking enlarges them some.
“Tiny and horrible” is the best way for them to be.
Do you think those people could actually be a bit more disgusting if they tried?
“Tiny and horrible” works on so many levels here.
I’m sure its all helping improve his image with Dave Silverman. Also he actually hasn’t denounced anything specific so unintentionally they make a good point. We are waiting Justin…!
Ah, well. Never mind the implicit endorsement of Vacula’s disingenuousness. The important thing is, they’re trying to be witty without photoshopping people’s heads onto goats and porn models, and that’s hard. We should encourage and not make fun.
(They could really use a Brownian or a Louis or a Spokes Gay or a modusoperandi or a hyperdeath or a…, couldn’t they?)
Wait, is the insinuation here that JV was some how (What’s the word? Oh, I know) BULLIED into denouncing haters?
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.
This isn’t directly on topic, but I wasn’t sure where to say this and I wanted to see if I could express my thoughts on Vacula in some coherent way.
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.
Vacula was favoriting tweets from an account that was created entirely to harass Rebecca Watson just the other day (the account has since been suspended, since it was only created to circumvent Watson blocking him before). Nobody included him in this harassers tweets, yet Vacula sought them out and then supported them.
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.
@besomyka, that’s a good point. Another one, in answer to:
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?)
Whatever happened to Steve Zara? – He used to be a nice guy if somewhat pompous from what I remember from old RDF
It’s almost as if his blog post was disingenuous. I’m shocked!. Shocked, I tell you.
All Team A+ wants is for arseholes to stop dumping shit all over the common areas, because shit stinks up the joint for everybody and makes some parts of the common areas impossible to reach without hazmat gear.
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.
Yeah, given he has experienced the nasty side of privilege being a gay man, I’ve found his hitching himself up to the haters wagon odd….
The days of the old RDF are gone for ever.
Ben Radford is at it too. I keep trying to give the benefit of the doubt to those guys, but they’re working so hard at trying to look like oblivious assholes. Did they really not understand what Silverman said? It seemed pretty easy to grasp to me, but I guess not.
Also, let’s not forget how Justin Vacula compounds his Severe Assholery through his ties to AVfM.
Maudell:
I’m curious, given the actions of these people, what benefit is there in giving them benefit of the doubt?
Unclever, unfunny, unoriginal. And, as people have noted, counterproductive to their shameful cause.
It’s difficult. There were people I had doubts about in some areas but whose work I respected in others (some I considered online friends). At every turn, I thought, “Now, surely, they’re going to be horrified by this and disown or at least move away from these people.” There were literally about a dozen “Now, surely…”s. It’s always been striking that Ophelia is a target – she’s probably the most conciliatory (and I mean that as a compliment) person I’ve ever known. Long after I’d given up on some people, she encouraged me to consider the possibility that they might still be reachable on some level.
What’s sad is that they’re reasonable enough to have gone in a different direction, and chose not to. That will be their legacy.
I don’t know. It’s easier to think someone’s betrayed their values than to accept that those weren’t their values.
I’m sure that is exactly how it will be spun. Even by Vacuous Vacula himself… just as soon as Dave finishes doing his show.
Zara’s found a way to place himself amongst the bullies rather than the bullied, and he’s got a taste for it – since sometimes all it takes to shift the bullied to the bully is the realisation there’s someone lower down on the hierarchy than them. Think of kids who get abused as kids and then go on to be abusers themselves.
Silverman should* establish as a precondition Vacula’s clear, unambiguous, public statement about what he’s renounced, with concrete examples.
*on the assumption that there’s any basis for his appearing on the show, which I don’t believe there is
other than dave saying he would appear on Justin’s show?
Did he change his mind today?
TigTog @13-
I found that entertaining and illustrative. Especially because I’ve been annoyed by team fence-sitter, but haven’t quite verbalized what bothered me so much about them. Gracias.
I would really regret it should Silverman decide to appear on that “show”, and all my newfound mild enthusiasm about him will evaporate. It’s like debates with creationists, you just don’t do it. All it does is make it appear that there are two equally valid positions here. Which there ar not.
That is my interpretation as well.
My “basis for his appearing on the show” meant “reason for him to appear on the show,” not “basis for believing he’ll appear on the show.” Jesus, you’re tiresome.
There’s a resonance in my life of this statement. Family have let me down. I don’t matter, the boat can’t be rocked. I still choose to believe they’ve betrayed their values, because they follow those same values when it isn’t expensive…. C’est la vie et la vie c’est merde parfois.
Although, on the plus side, having been treated as a second class citizen, and especially watching my family treat my wife even worse, and having seen her family treat her the same, has allowed me to at least grasp the concept of privilege. Something I didn’t grok, when I was one of the ‘normal’ folk. It was only when circumstances changed and I had ‘skin in the game’ that I found out, that no, things aren’t flexible. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent trying to make my reasonable bretheren (sisteren?) understand why I’m no longer part of the family, and the most I can get back is it’s a personality clash (that never existed for the first 30 something years of my life) or that it’s really not a big deal.
I feel a lot of shame now, looking back, in how I’ve treated women and others who didn’t have the decked stacked in their favor like I do…..The blindness, indifference to the suffering of others. I wasn’t an evil person, just blind and indifferent.
besomyka,
Speaking of Chris Rock… from the Wikipedia page that would probably trip the mod filter:
Of course, Chris Rock isn’t a brave hero or self-proclaimed movement leader.
SC @ 19 – aww. Thanks.
@8: It’s like I said on the Pharyngula thread: If I (or say, more relevantly, Ophelia) were blogging against Islamism, and found myself being followed approvingly by a bunch of racist asshats, it wouldn’t be nearly enough to say “Oh I don’t support that”. Recognizing that whatever valid point I’m making (not that I’m granting Vacula has even that much, but he thinks so) I’m making can be and is being hijacked by sociopaths, calls for some firm repudiation, not a milquetoast “What? Nuttin’ to do with me!”
And of course, given @9, he’s going in exactly the wrong direction.
Re Zara: I’m very much a naive outsider on this, but I’ve got the impression that there’s been bad blood from time to time among feminists, LGB and trans* (eg. the RadFem anti-trans crap). It seems that, depending on how various strands of the respective movements conceive of themselves, or which strategies they prefer, they don’t necessarily see each other as allies.
Yes, yes they are.
Oh. You mean the caps.
(/Well, those too. I guess.)
tigtog, I love the whole analogy you made. It deserves to be quoted a lot.
What Eamon said – with an addition: if I were blogging against Islamism, and found myself being followed approvingly by a bunch of racist assholes, I WOULD NOT THEN GO JOIN THEIR FORUM and post there regularly and laugh at their jokes and RT their tweets and photoshops.
Surely, “preach faeces”?
@ 18 – Tony
I know. I was referring specifically to Ben Radford et al., not pitters and clear harassers (Vacula is included in the latter). When Radford did his evo psych girls like pink thing and he got mad at his critics, I thought it could be framed as just an ego thing. I think the benefit of the doubt should be cast on someone just saying something stupid, like believing in an evolutionary reason why girls are so weird (I think we all have sexist assumptions about something, no matter how feminist we may be). But he’s gone way down the deep end now, bonding with harassers. It always disappoint me and disgusts me to see people with a strong voice in atheism, in this case within CFI, playing these schoolyard games to undermine the personal and professional reputation of other atheists.
Yeah, given he has experienced the nasty side of privilege being a gay man, I’ve found his hitching himself up to the haters wagon odd….
And a non believer too.
I also find it odd that people who supported the view that moderate religious people needed to do more(denounce extremism, be more visible while doing it, dont make excuses for fundamentalism) and the view that moderate and liberal religion “enable” fundamentalists now seem to have a problem with someone being asked to denounce stupid acts – especially when the person being asked to do so isnt an innocent bystander.