Originally a comment by Gem Newman on Follow, peasants.
They’re still pestering our group to join. The group’s organizer finally got fed up and said that we wouldn’t, because a lot of these guys were “gross”. That prompted this response from them:
Gross thoughts? I don’t understand.
Is there anyone else in your group I could speak with?
I’ll put it this way. In the last month I’ve traded more than 400 emails with group leaders.
They don’t normally have this much unexplained anger.
I mean, come on, really. How can you be a serious person and have so much hate for all three luminaries? Keep it to one, please!
I’d had enough at this point, so I had to chime in again:
Hey, you can talk to me, if you want. I founded the Winnipeg Skeptics five years ago.
While I would have perhaps phrased things a little more diplomatically, I’m certainly no more interested in having the Winnipeg Skeptics associated with Dawkins, Harris, or (especially) Shermer than Ashlyn is. Given what they’ve said recently, and the reaction that we’ve seen in some quarters of the various secular communities, you can’t possibly be naïve enough to be surprised when some people don’t respond positively to your “luminaries”.
As I said, you can talk to me, but you probably don’t want to. I may have started the group, but Ashlyn is the group’s organizer and leader, so talking to me won’t get you anywhere.
You should also probably learn to take “no” for an answer.
This apparently annoyed them a little, because they fired back:
Hi Gem,
I already marked you as a no.
You are a smart, evidence-based person, right? So I have to tell you that you have your facts wrong.
You are the one who is naïve. From the thousands of groups that I have reached out to, and have traded email personally with about 400 of them, yours seems to be the only one shaking with loathing about the academics who have done so much for the secular movement.
Perhaps you’ve fallen victim to groupthink, the idea that your tiny community of friends represents the viewpoint of the world. No one’s going to take you seriously with that attitude.
The fact is, if you are open to facts, that Richard Dawkins personally has more Facebook followers than the whole secular movement put together, and while some people have their concerns, we generally love him. You are the one in the minority.
Hey, facts are facts, I guess.
“Thousands of others have agreed with this, so YOU commit groupthink by not going along.”
Has Evelyn Waugh returned from the dead to subvert the Secular World Council* from within?
*Or whatever they’re calling it this month.
Pope Frankie surely has Dawkins beat in spades for people who lurve him. Doesn’t that mean that Dawkins should be treating the Pope as his thought leader?
Well, I gotta say: based purely on the calibre of the Thought Leading™ I’m seeing displayed in this eminently rational correspondence, I’m impressed. Oh sign me up. Do.
Right after I’m done drinking myself silly out of utterly mortified embarrassment, from the thought that anyone might imagine I have anything in common with such utter incompetents, that is.
(Ah. Yes. Dear. Dreadfully groupthink of me, I’m sure.)
Oh boy. This guy is still hounding us. In his most recent email, he says:
Which is weird, because I don’t recall saying that at all. I said that some people have reacted negatively to some of the things that these “luminaries” have said, and so he shouldn’t be surprised to find that some would not be eager to associate with these people.
For what it’s worth, I really wasn’t my intention to escalate this, and I have no interest in naming-and-shaming this guy. I just thought that they were being weirdly insistent in their correspondences with a small group in central Canada.
….and Argumentum ad Populum is even one of the Standard Fallacies. Not too impressed with the Thought Leadership I’m getting at the moment.
“Shaking with loathing”, eh? I had *NO IDEA* you could tell so much about a person from just an email!
Can’t…breathe…laughing too hard…too much irony…somebody help…
Not a lot of thought went into the Thought Leaders’ emails.
Has Evelyn Waugh returned from the dead to subvert the Secular World Council* from within?
Brilliant. 🙂
My stomach hurts from going into laughter spasm as well. OW.
Yay Winnipeg skeptics! Perhaps I should get out to another meeting.
Lesson number one* in marketing: Don’t alienate your audience by telling them they’re wrong, if they don’t want your product.
If these people tried to sell stuff, like second-hand cars, they’d be starving. Good thing they can rely on handouts from sponsors.
* Or perhaps number two, after identifying your audience.
I was invited to be part of the 1st version of SPI when it was called the Global Secular Council and they included several of us average unwashed thinkers. The guy that put up the seed money invited me. Then the crap hit the fan with Edwina at the Secular Coalition and the council was set free because the money person wanted Edwina to run it. That’s when it morphed into the Secular Policy Institute and they dropped all the unwashed people like me. They were nice not to tell me I was dropped. I noticed my bio was missing after yet another website rebuild.
The SPI is trying to do the exact same thing that the Secular Coalition is doing but without a pesky Board of Directors and input from an actual coalition. They also stole the Secular Coalitions’ Model Secular Policy Guide that was published in 2013. SPI even uses the same images used in SCA’s guide in all the sections under “Issues” on their website and gives no credit to SCA.
So I guess SPI is as close to a Joel Osteen mega-church seculars can get. They have about as much ethics too.
I think the term they were looking for was “echo chamber”, which is when one is stuck within a small group of isolated insiders with similar opinions. Yes there are some small spaces online where Dawkins for instance is reviled, but I mean even here on the FTB Hivemind femiblog, plenty of people have praised the D, and opposite viewpoints come in all the time. And even if one were in an echo chamber that has no bearing on the point: people are free to place varying importance on different actions of any given person and if associating with clueless old men, warmongers and rapists is not the goal of your group, what the rest of the world thinks is irrelevant.
Echochambers may be a subset of groupthink behaviour: if your group is small it can be insular. But in this case the criticism is essentially that your group has bad information (no refuting info was provided, condemning info and quotes are widely available online) or a direct insult – you didn’t investigate the claims yourself, and just accepted what your group thinks without examining the evidence.
So groupthink meant: “if you don’t agree with Dawkins, Harris or Schermer its because you’re either ignorant or gullible and dishonest!”
Add to that: “And most people agree with me so I’m right!”. Not a very self-aware or polite email.
Remember the original Twitter feed and how it seemed to be run (I think AJ Milne was the first to notice) by someone friendly to the pit? This reminds me of that.
Wow.
* I think you might mean Global Secular Institute, the second incarnation. Or were you still included then?
“Well of course I can take no for an answer, but let me keep right on telling you why you should be saying yes. It’s because you have your facts wrong – you know, when you say you don’t want to have anything to do with us. Those facts. The facts about what you want. You have those wrong.”
In their defense, you were their Communicators. 😉
…the academics who have done so much for the secular movement.
Examples, please? Which of those academics played a visible role in Kitzmiller vs Dover or any other important court case? Which of them even came close to putting their asses on the line for someone coming out as atheist inside a solidly-conservative-Christian community? Which of them stood up against the tide of utterly gratuitous abuse directed against women within the secular/atheist/skeptic movement?
The fact is, if you are open to facts, that Richard Dawkins personally has more Facebook followers than the whole secular movement put together, and while some people have their concerns, we generally love him. You are the one in the minority.
If we’re open to facts, then we have to follow the majority’s whims without question? I can’t believe a “thought leader” in the “secular” movement would so mindlessly support the same sort of majority-tyranny that real secularists and atheists have to contend with in their own communities and families every day.
For what it’s worth, I really wasn’t my intention to escalate this, and I have no interest in naming-and-shaming this guy.
Why not, Gem? All of us have a legitimate interest in shaming people who behave shamefully. Your group’s actions are exposing these hateful frauds for what they really are. You’re doing us all a HUGE favor here, and that’s nothing to be at all ashamed of. PLEASE keep up the good work here — you’re not widening a Deep Rift, you’re upgrading a moat.
Remember the original Twitter feed and how it seemed to be run (I think AJ Milne was the first to notice) by someone friendly to the pit? This reminds me of that.
Well, they do have Edwina Rogers, the career Republican lobbyist whose Big Thought Leadery Idea was getting the SCA to be more respectful toward secularism’s most bitter and dangerous enemies.
If these louts ever apologize for this wretched behavior of theirs, it will probably come from Shermer, who will say those unfortunate emails were written by a woman, and we all know women don’t do thinky, amirite?
Actually, looking at it again, these odious messages sound like something Shermer would say. (Not that that would necessarily stop him from blaming someone else if they got the wrong result.)
It doesn’t say much for the organization if they can’t get a marketing person who is professional. Have they hired a high school student? (Actually, some high school students are more mature and professional than this person.)
It was really quite shocking how quickly he went from “please join my group!” to mocking me. Definitely entices me to change my mind never.
It doesn’t say much for the organization if they can’t get a marketing person who is professional.
This sounds like one of the founders getting so jumped-up that he couldn’t stop himself from responding immediately and directly, without waiting for their marketing pros (if any, they may not think they need PR advice) to weigh in. (Again, I’m guessing Shermer.)
So again, thank you, Gem and Ashlyn, for a) helping to expose the true colors of that lot, and b) giving us all a hint of how they plan to deal with others in the foreseeable future.
And to the dismissive “Is there anyone else in your group I could speak with?”
Thank you, Gem, Ashlyn, and Doug for showing that they’re as arrogant and unprofessional behind the scenes as their public presentation would lead us to believe.
No kidding, like the telemarketer I got once who, after I nicely told him I was not interested asked if he could speak to my husband instead.
Why is this “Global” (Global!) institute hounding lil ole Winnipeg? Really, I don’t get it. Their whole reaction is beyond weird, but my mind keeps shunting off into the siding of “Why?” Has Winnipeg cornered the market on Thought Leaders and without them the GLOBAL outfit is nothing?
If so, you need to let the rest of the world know and stop with this Canadian low-key stuff. The world needs thought leaders in the worst way. Stop hiding them.
To me this all sounds exactly like the way they talked to me last summer, when the explanation turned out to be that the people running the Twitter account were interns who had just been turned loose to say whatever occurred to them.
Honestly I would have thought they might have learned better from that, but I guess not.
…the people running the Twitter account were interns who had just been turned loose to say whatever occurred to them.
That policy sounds quite appropriate to that group, given their strategy of pandering to the lowest (and possibly most hateful) common denominator to boost their public attention and book sales without dong any actual work, and then riding the wave of fanboy adulation and tribalism wherever it takes them.
Yeah, I mean, given that we’ve all become much more aware of who Dawkins, Harris, and Shermer are these past few years, yet they still command legions of fanboys, they may be entering the “we’re invincible” phase of self-image. “If all of this has come out and we STILL have devoted followers AND nobody with any power in the movement has stood up against us, then we don’t have to give a fuck anymore!”
@16
I was included on their website up until they switched to their current name.
Back in October I sent an e-mail to the founder – who was the money man who had invited me – to find out when the communicators would have something to do and have access to our Bios and what not because I wanted to change mine and I was told the change from being part of SCA to the independent Secular Global Institute was still in process.
Then I got an e-mail asking if I anything published like books or papers they could use in SPI and let them know if I knew anyone who had them.
It was shortly after that I noticed all the communicators were dumped from the website
Is “luminary” the new “bright”?
Thanks for the clarification, Doug Berger.
Good question! Part of it is a personal preference thing—I don’t feel good doing it for something that’s this relatively minor, I suppose? I mean, it would be different if this were one of the Big Name Thought Leaders or something, or if this person had said something really awful. When somebody is just being kind of an arrogant jerkface, I default to naming the organization, but not the person. Everybody shows their ass from time to time, myself included! But like other personal preferences, I’m not suggesting that this is the “right way” to do it. Just what makes me feel most comfortable.
And if I’m introspective for a moment, it’s probably also because I hate dealing with people like this, and I’d rather never receive another message from them, and naming-and-shaming makes it more likely I’ll be dragged further in (my privilege is showing here, obviously). And also because when I wrote that I’d spent almost twelve hours trying to debug a legacy system and some health concerns had come up in my family and my blood sugar was really low.
So… shrug.
Hah! I like that.
I’m pretty sure I know the name of the person that Gem is discussing. I’m assuming it’s the same one who wrote to me. I just ignored the e-mail, but given the extreme unprofessionalism of behavior like this, I’m thinking I may write back and explain clearly why this group doesn’t appeal to me.
OMG, that last letter is precious! Apologies, but I have to put in my 2c:
Nice passive-aggressiveness here, why not just move on instead of writing an apologist’s defense of your dear leaders?
Ahh, an appeal to intelligence and followed by the irrefutable facts that change our minds. OK, let’s hear it:
Huh? Appeal to popularity fallacy? Where is the objective data demonstrating how much they have done? How is this supposed to be evidence that Gem is wrong?
What? Among those with delusions of grandeur, I would suspect the SPI has more to worry about than the Winnipeg Skeptics. The projection present here is as thick as thieves, FSM help us if the SPI ever represents the “viewpoint of the world”.
Umm, this is just another appeal to popularity fallacy. @pontifex has 5.6M followers, to @richarddawkins 1.1M, so the Pope must be five times more generally loved than Dawkins, so while we have our concerns with the Pope, we must align ourselves with his most holy of organizations?