PZ has a post pointing out that Dave Silverman has been telling off Vacula and co on Twitter. David Silverman, a principled atheist, is the title. Commenters who don’t do Twitter found the discussion hard to follow and I just happen to have grabbed some screen shots, so I thought I might as well make them available.
Yeah.
I think the complaints of the people unable to follow the discussion come from not knowing how to find the contributions of others besides Silverman or how to connect their tweets with what Silverman was saying.
What @1 said. I spent a fair bit of time last night trawling backwards through #wiscfi, and it really is confusing if you’re not accustomed to Twitter (which I’m not).
Fegh. I keep wishing for the old days of Usenet, on which you could follow a conversation (as well as, in many readers, having awesome filtering capabilities to eliminate trolls from one’s online life). We’ve gone backwards!
Oh, b-but the assholes are “just trolls” and are probably not REALTRUATHEISTS™ anyway and are mythical creatures existing only on the internet which isn’t real so it doesn’t really happen and it doesn’t affect me and you can’t prove I did it….
Seriously, Vacula can’t even bring himself to say that a cartoon of a named woman being raped might be a little bit un-good.
Nice to see someone with Silverman’s clout going after the little shit for once.
I caught more of the back and forth here.
Dear lord. It takes some skill (or malice, or something) to be so wilfully oblivious. An endless litany of “yes but” – I can’t take it (namely, Vacula) seriously, sorry.
Yay for Dave Silverman!
For the sake of accuracy, he eventually said:
Though it took a heck of a long time and several attempted derailments to squeeze that out of him. It’s not exactly full-throated condemnation.
leebrimmicombe-wood (#8)
It undermines his supposed condemnation further when he keeps trying to deny pics like that come from atheists/skeptics.
And apparently the Slymepit is a ‘fun place’ and we should all hang out there!
Vacula bothers me pretty badly, but at this point I’m far more disturbed by the blithe indifference or tacit support for evil from people like Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, now Lindsay, etc etc. It’s that stuff that makes me feel like organized atheism doesn’t care about the oppressed, disadvantaged, and so on. It’s that kind of crap that tells me all their talk about women in Afghanistan suffering under Islam is precisely equivalent to a xtian going on about African babies while starving American blacks with gutted social programs and anti-tax policies.
Yeah, one time I fell victim to the “We’re not as bad as they say we are” meme they bandy about and decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and read their message board.
Holy crap on a stick, the hypocrisy, hand-waving, and blatant misogyny made me so angry, I was shaking. Those guys NEVER get the benefit of my doubt again.
Though these postings were noted by me via the Daily Kos, I thought it might be apropos to the ongoing discussion:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/22/tone-policing-only-goes-one-way/
which led to:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/20/an-open-letter-to-the-center-for-inquiry/
Am I off base?
And slightly off topic, but notable nonetheless:
http://www.policymic.com/articles/43845/juan-mendez-atheist-congressman-delivers-first-secular-invocatio-in-arizona-history
Huh Vacula asked if there is any evidence for Rebecca Watson receiving threats of violence?The mind boggles.
Does it seem as if the only evidence he’d accept would be a video of some tattooed thug brandishing a shiv while threatening to rape her?
Because it seems as if anything less than that doesn’t fly with him, and threats on the internet are just a bit of a laugh.
Ins’t it interesting how Vacula uses the anonimity of the harassers/trolls as an excuse to dismiss them?
#11 great1american1satan
Agree 100%. I don’t expect the internet (or any social group) to be free of asshats, sickos and haters. But I do expect my fellow members of the groups I participate in to have my back when their ugly heads pop up. Too many of the spokespeople in the A/S movement seem to be more interested in not making waves (at best) or siding with the bro’s against the ho’s (at worst).
#15 leebrimmicombe-wood
But if she actually wasn’t raped, then she was over reacting to something that never happened and playing the victim card and attacking some poor man for a horrible crime – which he didn’t actually do! Damn radfems! (yes, that was sarcasm)
@great1american1satan – May 22, 2013 at 1:35 pm (UTC -7)
Despite my name I’m really a left-winger first and an atheist second. I’ve been attracted to the skeptic/atheist movement lately because I feel like it’s important. But the schisms do tend to make me wary, and especially the band of douche-bags who spend so much time harassing, they make me wary. Still, I think atheism and skepticism are important, so I hang around here. I’m glad to see atheists fighting back against the scumbags.
On the minus side, now Dave Silverman is going on Vacula’s show. I hate seeing someone like Dave enabling that self-promoting cipher.
But I doubt he was fooled by Vacula’s half-assed and disingenuous disavowal of the toxic awfulness. Hope he knows what he’s doing.
@18: When I ask myself whether I’m an atheist first or a “left winger”, the answer is almost always “yes”.
It’s not an either/or proposition or one of primacy. They work hand-in-glove.
Yay, I love Dave! I just wish I weren’t broke. A piddling donation for now but I’m taking this into account in my giving going forward.
Two of the three sides agree that the posting
of pure misogyny is completely unacceptable
Now one of those sides condemns it at every
opportunity that it gets and the other a bit less
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
Surreptitious – is there some reason you can’t just use normal puntuation? This is even harder to follow than the // instead of periods thing. Are you allergic to ending sentences or something?
Please just write normally.
Yes there is a reason and there is not much we
can do about it but we will stop if you really want
Though we may still want to lurk and read posts
Oh – ok if there’s a reason and you can’t help it, never mind. I guess the // works better than the poetry-like version! No, don’t stop.
btw, in case it hasn’t been posted already, you can follow twitter feeds on twitter.com.
Silverman’s is here:
https://twitter.com/mratheistpants