Lindsay Beyerstein, who is always great, interviews Mark Oppenheimer about his misogyny piece on Point of Inquiry. It’s a good listen. I was especially amused by his comments about the slymepit — not even worth bothering with — and the faint praise for Penn Jillette — nowhere near as bad as the slymepit.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Interesting. He gives some insights and comparisons that were not in the article.
I found it odd that he said a lot of people don’t believe that Shermer is guilty, just because it seems so improbable that he would do that. Well, doing the improbable to discredit the victim is a common technique — telling them that no one will believe them, and taunting them with it. Then, at the end of the audio, he says that he disbelieved one accuser, because her story was too improbable — almost breaking the laws of physics improbable — but it sounded odd.
Anyone know if there’s a transcript available?
Yes, I would like a transcript too, as I’m over my limit on videos, and my net access provider charges a lot when I’m over my monthly cap.
I too would love a transcript.
It was a good interview. I wish PoI had transcribed it — or will they transcribe it? — because it’s great material. I wish I had the time to provide a transcript… I could potentially listen to it and provide typo-ridden summaries of statements? I’m not a court reporter, but I am 130 wpm. :)
I don’t know if that has value. Let me know.
I’ll also comment that PoI has gotten a bit, what, sharper since disassociating from CFI. It was truly odd to listen to #FTBullies in a radio format.
(use of hashtag hopefully self-evidently sarcastic)
I was fascinated by the implication that the New Atheists – quite coincidentally a brotherhood of white privileged blokes – really seem to believe that they invented atheism all by themselves, that they made it out of whole cloth, that no such thing ever existed and that, of course, it has no connexion with any other trend in human thought.
What they did really was a branding exercise. It had benefits which we seem just about to have exhausted after a few years and problems which we are still trying to shovel up and dispose of neatly.
By the way I recommend this podcast where Brian Cox not only explains quantum mechanics in under a minute but gives his version of how science and society relate to each other. It is not the Harris/Dawkins version.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/tls/all
Menyambel @1
I assumed that was a reference to the earlier story he told of a woman who claimed to be impregnated by Shermer and forced to have an abortion, even though Shermer had gotten a vasectomy years previously, and therefore it was physically impossible.
Not quite impossible, but definitely extremely improbable.
I do know of a couple who managed to get pregnant when she was on the pill, he had had a vasectomy and they were using condoms (presumably one broke). Low odds are not the same as impossible.
Whatever. That’s what Oppenheimer said.
I for one would love it if you did that, PatrickG.
@ Gen: I’ll check later to see if they’ve provided their own transcripts, and if not, I certainly won’t mind listening to it again.
Maureen Brian touches on the most interesting points that I’d never really considered before — that Dawkins, Shermer, etc. really do believe that public atheism is theirs, would not exist without them, and that they deserve adulation and deference therefore. It really frames these last few years in a completely different light.
Not just privilege, not just sexism… they honestly do think of themselves as defending themselves from barbarian hordes, or some such.
Point of Inquiry is still a Center for Inquiry podcast. Always has been, always will be.
I’m afraid to say that Point of Inquiry does not transcribe its podcast.
melody, thanks for the correction. I’d conflated Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney’s new show with this one, definitely an error on my part. I’ll rephrase my point: I am heartened that PoI under CFI is willing to directly tackle these issues in a way that I would not previously have thought CFI was willing to do.
Also, thanks for the confirmation that transcription doesn’t happen. I would have hated to type all that and then have them put a transcript up! :)
For those who haven’t gotten out of high school (raises hand), the part where Oppenheimer talks trash about the Slymepit is at 23:00. :)
Also, this is a VERY rough transcript, done by me simply writing as fast as I could while re-listening to the show. There were a few sections where I had difficulty making out the word, marked with (inaudible), and I probably substituted some minor constructions here and there (amazing how phrases like “part of the” become things like “in the”, or vice versa). For the most part, though, I’m confident this is an excellent rough transcript, and none of my errors should affect meaning.
LB: Lindsay Beyerstein
MO: Mark Oppenheimer
===============
This is Point of Inquiry for Monday 22, 2014.
[musical interlude]
LB: Hello and welcome to PoI, a production of the CfI. I’m your host LB and my guest is journalist MO. Mark writes the Belief column for the New York Times and is the author of the new Kindle e-book “The Zen Creditor of the Upper East Side”. How’s that for a provcative title? Mark’s here to talk to me today about another provocative thing he’s written: a feature for Buzzfeed titled “Will misogyny bring down the Atheist movement?” Mark, welcome to the show.
MO: Thanks for having me:
LB: How did you get interested in this subject of misogyny within the freethought movement?
MO: I’ve been writing about the skeptical community — or more broadly call it the FreeThought community, to include scientific skeptics, atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, everyone — for at least — over a decade now. I’ve always been interested in the community and I’ve interviewed a good number of *inaudible* figures, so I always check in from time to time and see what’s up. Part of my job as a religion writer, which is how I describe what I do, is, I think, to be on top of anti-religion or irreligion or non-religion as well. So I check in from time to time and just, I guess, about two years I began to notice that there was a lot of talk about sexism within the community, so I began digging and it turns out there was a lot there.
LB: So when you think about misogyny in this community, what kinds of phenomena are you looking at, what kinds of evidence are you encountering:
MO: Sure, well, as I say in the tease, there are a few different phenomena. There’s the phenomena of sexual harassment and possibly sexually assult at freethought events, at conventions or meetups. And then, there’s the phenomenon of indifference on the part of people who organize these events or leaders in the movement so they hear report or they hear stories about these things and they don’t take enough action, which is its own form of sexism. And then, there’s a separate but allied phenomenon of abuse, especially online, towards women — and men — who talk about this problem. But i think you’re looking at at least three different, related things: either sexual harassment, sexual assault, sexual vioelence, in which people are together in person, indifference or insufficient attention on the part of people who might do something about it, and then hostility or abuse toward women and men who critique it or complain about it.
LB: And the in-person critique are sometimes related to the online critiques. I mean, I just thought it was really interesting that you’re one of the most infamous examples of the history of our movement was Rebecca Watson’s Elevatorgate video, in which she very gently reminds people that it’s inappropriate to proposition a speaker who has just spent the day at a conference trying to explain how to make people — how to make women — feel safe and secure in secular contexts. And all of the sudden it blew up into the most dramatic example of online abuse that I’ve seen in the secular community in years.
MO: Right, and I think that you put it exactly right, which is you began with her incident and her quite mild and I think very sane, uh, and proportional discussion of it which is she didn’t say that she’d been horribly mistreated or abused or wronged, she just said that ‘look, uh, it isn’t what to do to a woman who’s just given a speech saying that she’s concerned about inappropriate come-ons, uh, at events’. So that’s number one, and you correctly position the bigger problem as being the horrific abuse that she and defenders of hers received online once this became an issue. So I think that, you know, look, for — everyone in the movement is going to have their sense of what the biggest problem is — if you’re going to these conventions, you’ll be concerned with sexual harassment, sexual violence, or just sexism at the convention. If you partake in the community mainly online, then it’s going to be the vicious online abuse of women and men who talk about this problem. Um, and, you know, for some people, the problem is that if you want to be a serious intellectual movement, then your leadership has to take these things seriously. So, for some people, the problem is — the biggest problem is — how can the movement move forward and really take on, you know, fundamentalist religion, irrationality, other problems in America when its leadership seems not to embrace all aspects of a progressive agenda.
LB: In the piece, you write about how the current freethought movement is varied, sort of an amalgam of certain male-dominated subcultures, and that legacy still persists today in some of the conflict that they’re — that we’re having. Can you expand on that thought?
MO: Sure, so freethought is, look, I’ll just be very (laughs) crudefully(?) as an outsider observing it, I think a lot of people if they’re fair will recognize what I’m saying — it looks a lot like — a lot of overlap with the science fiction fan community, the gaming community, the chess community, and all sorts of hobbyist communities and subcultures that historically were very very male. And a lot of people have said to me within the community, look, until a few a years ago, you go to these conventions and there’s 99% guys and the women were the wives of some of the guys. Maybe that’s slight exaggeration, maybe it’s 85% or 90%, but it’s overwhelmingly male, which by the way is exactly what I remember from chess tournaments that I used to go to as a junior high student. So, these are communities that were strongholds for men that were safe spaces for some men who were quirky or had irreverent thoughts about society, and they functioned pretty well as male communities at a time when it was more ok in society for men to have these all-male spaces, political movements like political parties and political clubs, and activist organizations everywhere have broaded a lot since the 1970s but even more so since the internet made their views acceptable to everyone. Everyone with a computer. So really, since the 90s there’s been an infusion of interest from women which has been a good thing, but what it’s meant is that a community that used to run in the 80s and 90s as an occasional gathering, in-person of older white men is now mixed-gender, and to a slightly greater degree mixed-race, and that is threatening to some of the people who have a nostalgia for the glorious club that it used to be:
LB: But there’s still – the cultural split you talk about between the left-wing, freethinkers and their libertarian counterparts. How does that affect the dynamic?
MO: So if you look at all those communities that came together that had a confluence to produce thought, you know some of them were secular humanists or the people who were really into church-state separation are the people who are likely to be politically to the left, you know, these are political liberals and one key piece of liberalism is keeping religion out of the public square, or fighting creationism in schools, fighting about some of the more nefarious, um, encroachments of fundamentalist Christianity, and other fundamentalisms, but in America predominantly fundamentalist Christianity. So these are your more liberal freethought activists. But there are also in atheism, especially in the part of the movement that’s concerned with a sort of atheist purity, with the purest atheism, there are people who are followers of Ayn Rand, there are libertarians, there are people who have a kind of anti-government, anarchic right-wing agenda as well, you know, gun-lovers, people who say look, I want to have my guns, I want to have my money, and I want to have my freedom, and therefore, I’m against the Church, because the Church is, you know, wants to take all of those away from me, so you have people who identify with this kind of libertarian or libertine subculture, which also by the way, is a very male subculture, who have become atheists for their more identifiably right-wing reasons. And then you have these kind of historical liberals, and leftist, atheists so there’s a real culture clash there, and obviously those that come in with a more liberal political perspective have tended to be more sympathetic to feminist claims and women’s participation than those coming out of the more right-wing tradition.
LB: Where does Michael Shermer fit into this whole leftie vs. libertarian dichotomy?
MO: You know, I read a good bit of Michael Shermer, and I don’t have a sense of him as a strongly political figure. I know that some people have said that he is, uh, politically on the more conversative side, but honestly, you know, I’ve read so much by the man and if he’s expressed those views those haven’t risen to the top of my consciousness. He may well be a Republican, he may well be conversative, I’m not entirely prepared to say. I’ve seen that claim made of him — you may know better than I do, in fact. He did recently write this bizarre letter, if the copy of it I saw on Twitter is to be believed asking for leniency in the sentencing of Dinesh D’Souza.
LB: Yes, that was really (laughs) remarkable.
MO: Yes, which was very odd, and said extremely nice things about Dinesh D’Souza who, uh, is, you know, which is fine, we all have friends who have different — I hope we all have friends who have different political beliefs than ours — but I don’t see Dinesh d’Souza as an honorable figure, and I also see him as someone who’s dying to bring a Christian influence bear to society is jsut not — it puts him so beyond the pale for a freethinker or atheist — that I found that to be a very, very odd letter.
[11:00]
LB: Yeah, so, what surprised me — the fact hat he was holding up DDS who blames the cultural left for 9/11 and believes that Obama is trying to destroy America to fulfill his Kenyan father’s anti-colonialist patrimony, is, you know — referring to him as a great thinker and an important voice in our national conversation? I mean, you like the guy, but COME ON.
MO: It was very strange.. you know Michael Shermer as I claim in my article in Buzzfeed, for our purposes, for the purposes of this story I was telling, is to get the sense(?) that he is widely believed by activists on this circuit — and we do run into this thing with the casual atheist or the person who claims atheist beliefs, which are millions in America — and the maybe several thousand who are professional or even amateur atheist activists, right — but among that latter group, Shermer has been well-known for a while as someone who’s actually very, perhaps, promiscous, perhaps agressive, and I quoted several people with their own stories that captured him in ____ ways in conventions, one of whom said that he had sex with her while she was too drunk to give consent, so she’d initially called him a rapist for that.
LB: How did you go about — this is a really interesting story, because anyone who’s been active online and heard these stories over the years but they’ve always been without names — as a journalist, how did you go about tracking down the women with stories to tell and getting them to go on the record for the first time?
MO: I … asked a lot of people, whom I should talk to, and eventually certain names became clear to me — I don’t want to say more than that because I don’t want to, um, fuel any speculation about people who may have revealed their identities — what I will say is that, um, I did not get names from anyone who was an enemy of these women, that it was not the case, it was emphatically not the case that any of the so-called misogynists or sexist or people — anti-feminists — or people who refer to themselves in this way in online forums, um, none of them outed any of these women or gave me their names. Um, everything that I learned came from, um, people who were sympathetic to them, who were friends of theirs, people within their camp, who, um, gave me enough to figure out who they were. And what’s more, all of these women consented when I talked to them, to let me use their names and I don’t know why they consented — I think maybe they read older work of mine and felt I was trustworthy, maybe they decided that if I was doing a story on this that they felt duty-bound to be part of it — but journalism is really, um, about hard work and if you ask enough people over enough months….
LB: So what it was like to interview Penn Jillette — this is a question I’ve been dying to ask you?
MO: (laughs) Penn was the last interview I did for this story. I asked to interview him back in June and he didn’t get back to me — or I should say his representative that I delt with — did not get back to me, and they may just have dropped the ball, I’m sure they get a lot of requests. But I tried again and they did set up the interview, and I did it the day of or the day before the story was posted at Buzzfeed.com, and he was very, um, charming and gregarious and forthcoming, uh, I think he is a, um, honest. I don’t agree with his perspective, um, (pause), but I do think — one of the things that __ was critized for by people online was putting him in the same space as Michael Shermer — now, Penn as far as I know has never been accused of any sexual indiscretion — rape, harassment, lewdness, promiscuity, anything — it is the charge against him that he uses language that is demeaning to women.
LB: And not just that he uses language that is demaning to women — bad words the way Lenny Bruce did — but he will direct sexist slurs to individual women in our own movement.
MO: — He will direct sexist slurs to individual women, of which there are two specific cases that I was able to find. There may be more, but there are a lot of rumors that were unsubstantiated. So I was able to pin down a couple of specific cases, and I think he was wrong in those cases, and I think that was horrible, and I think it’s offensive them — of those cases- is not convincing. That said, I of course do draw the distinction between someone who uses very demeaning language and someone who, um, is physically aggressive in person giving people unwanted sexual attention and possibly worse. You know, as someone who has four daughters, uh, you know, there’s an entirely different level of concern that I have if they’re spending time with someone who I know to be verbally offensive and someone who I suspect to be physically aggressive or capable of physical assault… So, there is certainly critique to be made that they are different cases who belong in different articles — I think they belong in the same article because they go to a larger question of how women are viewed in the movement.
LB: Yes, I thought Penn was a perfect person to include in there — not because he deserves to be in a Rogue’s Gallery of the worst harassers in skepticism, because clearly as far as I know and you know and he’s not — but because he made such an impassioned and articulate defense for the boy’s club of skepticism, you know, we started this movement, he calls the entertainers and magicians — carnie trash and we’ve been talking dirty and being lwed and doing whatever we wanted for this whole time — and in his view htere’s absolutely no reason for change.
MO: Right, and you know, I think there’s some kind of coherence and sincerity to what he’s saying. As I said, I think he’s wrong, but I feel that, um, I’m not comfortable that he’s personally — he may be personally be incredibly respectful of women in his presence — the one person who said to me that he had demeaned her in person also said, look, I wasn’t personally offended by it, she said she knew it was his shtick, he’s boundary-crossing and boundary-pushing — again, I don’t defend that, but I do think there is a role for the provacateur in society and he believes he’s playing that role. So there’s a very different ambition there when compared to the person whose ambition it is to sleep with young star-struck inebriated women (laughs). There are degrees that are worth talking about here. That I did include him in part because I think, you know, he is part of the problem.
LB: I mean, it’s nice to have someone who’s willing to spell out the intellectual foundations of that worldview, who’s NOT doing it for ulterior motives, he just thinks skepticism should go on being the way it was when he was a kid:
MO: Right, and you know first of all I encourage people to read Amanda Marcotte’s critique of that position which she published today, a feminist writer, Amanda Marcotte, I thought it was very thoughtful and well-spelled out, she laid out a case against that as well as I can be.
LB: We will link to that on the website for this show.
MO: I also think that one of the things that comes out of this piece is that we don’t remember this boy’s club was made up of people — you go back to the 70s and 80s — especially there’s this period from 1976 to 1990 which was really the heyday of the rise and peak of the Christian right, and you know, people saying you have to say the Pledge of Allegiance in school and you know attacking people as anti-American or pro-Soviet or Marxist or anti-religious, you have to remember this group of people in freethought and atheism who gathered around people like james Randi or Paul Kurtz were very very brave, and were taking positions that at the time in American culture may have seemed very dangerous to say, and were, you know, it was far worse in the eyes of most Americans in 1984 let’s say — worse after 9/11 probably — to say the things that some skeptics are saying about God or Christianity or America, um, than it was to use the c-word toward women. And so the — it’s not surprising that it was a group of oddballs who just didn’t give a flying fuck what other people thought who were willing to take this position
LB: I grew up in the movement and I just can’t imagine people like Paul Kurtz even if he’d learned how to use Twitter back in the day but I cannot imagine him getting into the kind of petty fights that certain atheist leaders are getting into against, you know, feminists int he movement these days on Twitter — I’m talking about Richard Dawkins and his Dear Muslin – dear Muslima kind of stuff.
MO: Well, sure, I agree with you — social media makes everything worse, except when it makes it better, but it often makes it worse — but at the end of Paul Kurtz’s life, you know, he was pushed out of the Center of Inquiry in a series of other petty spats that had to do with *inaudible* so all subcultures, all movements have infighting. I don’t think atheists or secular humanists are any better or any worse than other movements that way.
LB: Sure, I mean, I’m just trying to push back against the narrative that, you know, there was this raucous, sexist good-old-days or bad-old-days depending on how you want to look at it and it somehow we’ve come to a difference in sensibilities — I think that open sexism came in from my perspective WITH the really outspoken New Atheism, that there were certain group of people who came into the movement who weren’t there before who were really interested in being in-your-face and offensive across multiple levels including overt sexists.
MO: You might be right about that, and it sounds like you know the history of the movement better than I do. I would only say though though that were talkinga bout a few different things here. Penn was specifically talking about Randi’s community of scientific skeptics, and I’ve done some research and actually I have another article in the works that involves the scientific skeptics, you know, debunking claims of the paranormal — community in Los Angeles where a lot of it was based in the 70s and 80s — and it was a bunch of real crazies — now again, that’s not to say they were all necessarily sexist or that it would be ok if they were — but that was a bit more of a Wild West community than the philosophical secular humanists that Paul Kurtz gathered around. So that’s just to draw out one important a distinction, and again none of this is to excuse or defend anything, um, but the other thing I would say is both of these wings were, you know, 95% male, so it’s almost hard to say well how much latent sexism was there, because they very rarely had to deal with women (laughs).
LB: That’s a very good point!
MO: And who can say how sexist Paul Kurtz — not to speak ill of the dead — how sexist he would have been if all of the sudden 40% of the people showing up at a particular convention were female? Um, he might ahve been very amenable as a man of a certain generation to — he might have ended up saying the kind of things that Richard dawkins is saying now — I don’t know that, I don’t know that for a fact, and it’s horrible to speculate:
LB: He’s certainly on the record in his humanist writings for total gender equality and that sort of thing.
MO: That’s a good point, that’s a good point, but then again I’m sure someone like Dawkins is as well, if you look at his writings closely enough.
[23:00]
LB: Let’s talk a bit about this entity called Slymepit. Did you meet any Slymepitters?
MO: I spent almost __ time on Slymepit, you know, you, as you know, there is a community of people who have become self-identified as anti-feminists or — they would say, free speech advocates — they would say they don’t want their speech curtailed by the delicate sensibilities of women rights’ activists or feminists or they would say humanists —
LB: What is Slymepit exactly? Is it entirely geared toward critiquing freethought? Or is it a community that has other purposes?
MO: I honestly didn’t spend enough time … I mean, the kind of things you read, Slymepit with a ‘y’ in case anybody is interested in checking it out, we certainly want people to do their own research for themselves … it’s certainly, when I looked at it, you only had to scroll down a couple inches on the screen before you would encounter something so offensive to women, so misogynists, so demeaning, so crude that, um, you just wanted to click off it — I didn’t — on my forays, I did look, I would poke around, was there an interesting philosophical point of view here? And let’s just say nothing I read rose to the level of articulateness that Penn had when he was defending his coarse language, that it just seemed a place for people to spew crude invective toward mostly women. So I didn’t spend a lot of time on it — there’s also a whole wing of the Skeptics and Freethought movement — and it might be a tiny wing, it could be five people with a lot of Twitter accounts between them — that identify as Men’s Rights Advocates — and these are some of the worst people in the world, they just live to abuse women… I didn’t really want to dignify that particular piece of the anti-feminist, freethought world with a lot of time in my article.
LB: Fair enough! I was interested in your discussion with the Amazing Randi who was talking about Shermer and he said ‘Shermer has been a bad boy on occasion, I do know that. I have told him that if I get many more complaints from people I have reason to believe that I am going to have to limit his attendance at the conference’. What did you make of that?
MO: He seems to me not to get it, entirely. Uh, he *inaudible* where Shermer said he was already drunk when these things happen and this is just what boy’s do when they get drunk or something like that.
LB: Which seemed to me to be really telling, like ‘that’s what men do’ as opposed to that’s what men have been allowed to do.
MO: Right, look, Randi is quite aged at this point, as someone once reminded me when I wrote something very harsh about an old person, we all get there someday if we’re lucky, we too will get old and indiscreet and maybe say things that we shouldn’t, or that our *inaudible* the world go, and he’s not, as far as I can tell, involved in the day to day operations of the James Randi Educational Foundation, which puts on this very large meeting in Las Vegas every year, The Amazing Meeting, any more — he seems, he sounded a lot like certain very elderly relatives I have had who have meant very very well and have big hearts but whose politics didn’t keep up with the times who just sounded like sexists from the 50s or 60s, um, so I don’t know what to say — here’s the significance of this, right, is that he, like Penn Jilette, is still exalted as a leader of the movement, so he’s not someone who has shuffled off quietly to the sidelines, he’s someone who’s can turn out big audiences, who is still revered, and who is still listened to. So the movement can’t have it both ways. If someone is past his prime and therefore isn’t the person to listen to publicly anymore, fine, but then don’t listen to them publicly anymore. But he still very very much beloved and still very very attended to, and yet, he is quite wrong on one of the major issues confronting the community, which is how to deal with complaints of sexual violence, and, and, sexists.
LB: You wrote a book called The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side about sexual abuse and harassment within American Zen Buddhism. Do you see parallels between the way the Zen community has dealt with abuse in its own ranks and the way the skeptical community has?
MO: I do see a parallel. I see two parallels that I can think of right now. One is that both communities have leaders whom they revere. I think that’s typical of all communities, but both of these are fairly young communities in America in their current form — Zen Buddhism really began to flourish in the 60s when a certain group of teachers came over from Japan, and began to plant seeds and ventures(?) and they very much had a guru model, where they taught other people and those people taught other people and it was all about whether or not your teacher had lineage from this, you know, one of these four or five great teachers who came over from Japan in the 60s. So there’s a kind of reverence for people that, that makes it very hard to criticize them or see their flaws. Similarly, the skeptical movement and the freethought movement since the 60s has built around the celebrity of a few people. In secular humanism, someone like Paul Kurtz, in scientific skepticism, someone like, you know, Randi, um, in and now in what you might call the New Atheism, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, people like that. And so these leaders become very, very important because the books that they sell and the seminars they lead are really the vehicle — the speeches they give — are really the vehicles for the growth of a young movement that badly needs to grow. So nobody wants to knock them off their pedestals, and people don’t want to hear about their flaws. So that’s kind of number one, is the reverence for leaders — which again, I don’t think you have, say, in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, I mean, these old, old institutions — someone is bad enough, they begin to cost you elections and you hopefully push them aside — there’s no sense that anyone is completely *inaudible) and then I think the second thing is that — and this may be true of all communities — but these particularly leap out at me, you have these people who believe they have a certain claim on the truth, and they believe they have a rigor and a, and a, (pause) a kind of stringent way of looking at the world that makes them less susceptible to error than other people. So within Zen Buddhism you have people who first of all, actually, in many cases believe they’ve had moments of enlightenment (laughter) and they believe that their practices make them see truths that other people can’t see, so you then say that this guy who sees all these truths is groping women and then lying about it, there’s a lot of people who say ‘I don’t believe that. How is that possible? He’s the one who taught me, who took me me far down the path of enlightenment, who taught me to sleep the imperannce of worldly possessions? How could you tell me that he would reach under a woman’s robe and feel her up like a common thug? It just doesn’t seem believable’. And similarly in the skepticism movement, you now, the whole point of my belief system and this community is that I don’t fall for ridiculous beliefs! I have a kind of rigor about my thinking, I parse evidence well and and I arrive at the correct conclusions, so therefore you can’t possibly tell me that I misjudged this person. And let me add one more thing, if I may, which someone pointed out to me, which, this is just conjecture, an interesting one, which is that because people in freethought are so interested in standards and evidence, they sometimes are exceptionally difficult to convince of anything that they haven’t seen, right, so look they don’t believe in the Resurrection because nobody — there’s no evidence that nobody saw the Resurrection — they don’t believe in a God we can’t see or verify, so then a women says I was assaulted when I couldn’t give consent and they say well, where’s the proof? And their level of proof is typically where’s the videotape or where’s the confession. And of course that’s not the kind of proof that we have, much of the time, for sexual crimes.
LB: Philip is also very rigorous in many ways, praiseworthy code of ethics within Skeptics and freethought which is the, you know, you should not say bad things about people unless you have that kind of ironclad proof, and in one sense that’s really admirable, I mean, it’s something we all like, something the movement should be proud of, but on the other hand, in the real world the way people get reputations, the way that you learn who is dangerous, who is safe, who you should trust, who you shouldn’t trust, is buzz about what they’ve done in the past, and it’s all so sure, it’s all so (inaudible) but you build up a corpus of data that allows you to operate in the world empircally:
MO: Absolutely, right, and we couldn’t function otherwise. I do want to say, though, that this is a piece — this article, you know — I’m mostly sure that I got things mostly right (laughs). But there are people who have jumped on the anti-Michael Shermer bandwagon who are crazy, unquestionably. You know, I mean, Michael Shermer believes that he’s a victim of a kind of witch-hunt, a hysterical panic. And, there are hysterical panics in the world, right, and sometimes they have to do with, you know, Satanic — so-called Satanic — ritual abuse, sometimes they have to do with episodes of chronic fatigue syndrome(?), sometimes they have to do with Gulf War Syndrome, we only have to read ____’s book, Hipsters to know about this, right.
LB: Or …. or Lawrence Wright,
MO: There are people who hear a rumor, and then they think oh I think that happened to me too and then everyone thinks it happened to them, but in fact it may have happened to one or two people but not hte next hundred. And there are people who have told Michael Shermer stories that are completely implausible, you know, and some of those are in the realm of rumor too, the person who says that he impregnated — that they were impregnated by Shermer — and forced to gete an abortion, but in fact, Shermer, of course, had had a vasectomy before he ever met the person. The person who said he had a gay affair with Shermer. I mean, possible? But I don’t think plausible. The one that I point to is the person who was telling people that Shermer had harassed her by the way he looked at her in the audience, and she was in an audience of hundreds of people, and I think seated many rows back, but she felt harassed by a particular leer that he gave her. You know, and and wherever there are people who might become safe to criticize, there will be people who will then want to join the crowd of critics. Let’s put it this way, whenever there’s a class-action lawsuit, some members of the class (laugh) will not be authentic members of the class, like they’re hitching a ride and hoping to get something out of it. do I think that such people exist, in the world of Michael Shermer critics? I know at least one does, because of the story that was just too wildly implausible to be true. Now,again, I don’t want to speak for Michael Shermer, but I think some of his defenders would say that all of the stories are like that, they’re all part of a hysterical panic where everyone is just, it’s become safe to accuse him, the way in junior high it becomes safe to say I slept with that slutty girl, even if nobody did. And that’s a real phenomenon, and it can hit men or women. However, I went and did a lot of reporting, and I reported some stories from people who I thought were, you know, credible, speaking plausibly true stories. So that’s the best Shermer(?) can deal with it.
Note that that last sentence was really weird — I listened to it three times and couldn’t quite make it out. After that, they just thank each other and music plays.
Also, in a bizarre quirk, this looked better in preview than it did as a comment. Sorry for lack of spacing.
Ok, I couldn’t take it — the lack of paragraph breaks make me feel like Ophelia Benson is going to come after me.
L: Lindsay Beyerstein
M: Mark Oppenheimer
===============
0:00
This is Point of Inquiry for Monday 22, 2014.
[musical interlude]
LB: Hello and welcome to PoI, a production of the CfI. I’m your host LB and my guest is journalist MO. Mark writes the Belief column for the New York Times and is the author of the new Kindle e-book “The Zen Creditor of the Upper East Side”. How’s that for a provcative title? Mark’s here to talk to me today about another provocative thing he’s written: a feature for Buzzfeed titled “Will misogyny bring down the Atheist movement?” Mark, welcome to the show.
MO: Thanks for having me.
LB: How did you get interested in this subject of misogyny within the freethought movement?
MO: I’ve been writing about the skeptical community — or more broadly call it the FreeThought community, to include scientific skeptics, atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, everyone — for at least — over a decade now. I’ve always been interested in the community and I’ve interviewed a good number of *inaudible* figures, so I always check in from time to time and see what’s up. Part of my job as a religion writer, which is how I describe what I do, is, I think, to be on top of anti-religion or irreligion or non-religion as well. So I check in from time to time and just, I guess, about two years I began to notice that there was a lot of talk about sexism within the community, so I began digging and it turns out there was a lot there.
LB: So when you think about misogyny in this community, what kinds of phenomena are you looking at, what kinds of evidence are you encountering:
MO: Sure, well, as I say in the tease, there are a few different phenomena. There’s the phenomena of sexual harassment and possibly sexually assult at freethought events, at conventions or meetups. And then, there’s the phenomenon of indifference on the part of people who organize these events or leaders in the movement so they hear report or they hear stories about these things and they don’t take enough action, which is its own form of sexism. And then, there’s a separate but allied phenomenon of abuse, especially online, towards women — and men — who talk about this problem. But i think you’re looking at at least three different, related things: either sexual harassment, sexual assault, sexual vioelence, in which people are together in person, indifference or insufficient attention on the part of people who might do something about it, and then hostility or abuse toward women and men who critique it or complain about it.
[3:05]
LB: And the in-person critique are sometimes related to the online critiques. I mean, I just thought it was really interesting that you’re one of the most infamous examples of the history of our movement was Rebecca Watson’s Elevatorgate video, in which she very gently reminds people that it’s inappropriate to proposition a speaker who has just spent the day at a conference trying to explain how to make people — how to make women — feel safe and secure in secular contexts. And all of the sudden it blew up into the most dramatic example of online abuse that I’ve seen in the secular community in years.
MO: Right, and I think that you put it exactly right, which is you began with her incident and her quite mild and I think very sane, uh, and proportional discussion of it which is she didn’t say that she’d been horribly mistreated or abused or wronged, she just said that ‘look, uh, it isn’t what to do to a woman who’s just given a speech saying that she’s concerned about inappropriate come-ons, uh, at events’. So that’s number one, and you correctly position the bigger problem as being the horrific abuse that she and defenders of hers received online once this became an issue. So I think that, you know, look, for — everyone in the movement is going to have their sense of what the biggest problem is — if you’re going to these conventions, you’ll be concerned with sexual harassment, sexual violence, or just sexism at the convention. If you partake in the community mainly online, then it’s going to be the vicious online abuse of women and men who talk about this problem. Um, and, you know, for some people, the problem is that if you want to be a serious intellectual movement, then your leadership has to take these things seriously. So, for some people, the problem is — the biggest problem is — how can the movement move forward and really take on, you know, fundamentalist religion, irrationality, other problems in America when its leadership seems not to embrace all aspects of a progressive agenda.
LB: In the piece, you write about how the current freethought movement is varied, sort of an amalgam of certain male-dominated subcultures, and that legacy still persists today in some of the conflict that they’re — that we’re having. Can you expand on that thought?
MO: Sure, so freethought is, look, I’ll just be very (laughs) crudefully(?) as an outsider observing it, I think a lot of people if they’re fair will recognize what I’m saying — it looks a lot like — a lot of overlap with the science fiction fan community, the gaming community, the chess community, and all sorts of hobbyist communities and subcultures that historically were very very male. And a lot of people have said to me within the community, look, until a few a years ago, you go to these conventions and there’s 99% guys and the women were the wives of some of the guys. Maybe that’s slight exaggeration, maybe it’s 85% or 90%, but it’s overwhelmingly male, which by the way is exactly what I remember from chess tournaments that I used to go to as a junior high student.
So, these are communities that were strongholds for men that were safe spaces for some men who were quirky or had irreverent thoughts about society, and they functioned pretty well as male communities at a time when it was more ok in society for men to have these all-male spaces, political movements like political parties and political clubs, and activist organizations everywhere have broaded a lot since the 1970s but even more so since the internet made their views acceptable to everyone. Everyone with a computer. So really, since the 90s there’s been an infusion of interest from women which has been a good thing, but what it’s meant is that a community that used to run in the 80s and 90s as an occasional gathering, in-person of older white men is now mixed-gender, and to a slightly greater degree mixed-race, and that is threatening to some of the people who have a nostalgia for the glorious club that it used to be:
LB: But there’s still – the cultural split you talk about between the left-wing, freethinkers and their libertarian counterparts. How does that affect the dynamic?
MO: So if you look at all those communities that came together that had a confluence to produce thought, you know some of them were secular humanists or the people who were really into church-state separation are the people who are likely to be politically to the left, you know, these are political liberals and one key piece of liberalism is keeping religion out of the public square, or fighting creationism in schools, fighting about some of the more nefarious, um, encroachments of fundamentalist Christianity, and other fundamentalisms, but in America predominantly fundamentalist Christianity. So these are your more liberal freethought activists.
But there are also in atheism, especially in the part of the movement that’s concerned with a sort of atheist purity, with the purest atheism, there are people who are followers of Ayn Rand, there are libertarians, there are people who have a kind of anti-government, anarchic right-wing agenda as well, you know, gun-lovers, people who say look, I want to have my guns, I want to have my money, and I want to have my freedom, and therefore, I’m against the Church, because the Church is, you know, wants to take all of those away from me, so you have people who identify with this kind of libertarian or libertine subculture, which also by the way, is a very male subculture, who have become atheists for their more identifiably right-wing reasons.
And then you have these kind of historical liberals, and leftist, atheists so there’s a real culture clash there, and obviously those that come in with a more liberal political perspective have tended to be more sympathetic to feminist claims and women’s participation than those coming out of the more right-wing tradition.
LB: Where does Michael Shermer fit into this whole leftie vs. libertarian dichotomy?
MO: You know, I read a good bit of Michael Shermer, and I don’t have a sense of him as a strongly political figure. I know that some people have said that he is, uh, politically on the more conversative side, but honestly, you know, I’ve read so much by the man and if he’s expressed those views those haven’t risen to the top of my consciousness. He may well be a Republican, he may well be conversative, I’m not entirely prepared to say. I’ve seen that claim made of him — you may know better than I do, in fact. He did recently write this bizarre letter, if the copy of it I saw on Twitter is to be believed asking for leniency in the sentencing of Dinesh D’Souza.
LB: Yes, that was really (laughs) remarkable.
MO: Yes, which was very odd, and said extremely nice things about Dinesh D’Souza who, uh, is, you know, which is fine, we all have friends who have different — I hope we all have friends who have different political beliefs than ours — but I don’t see Dinesh d’Souza as an honorable figure, and I also see him as someone who’s dying to bring a Christian influence bear to society is jsut not — it puts him so beyond the pale for a freethinker or atheist — that I found that to be a very, very odd letter.
[11:00]
LB: Yeah, so, what surprised me — the fac thtat he was holding up DDS who blames the cultural left for 9/11 and believes that Obama is trying to destroy America to fulfill his Kenyan father’s anti-colonialist patrimony, is, you know — referring to him as a great thinker and an important voice in our national conversation? I mean, you like the guy, but COME ON.
MO: It was very strange.. you know Michael Shermer as I claim in my article in Buzzfeed, for our purposes, for the purposes of this story I was telling, is to get the sense(?) that he is widely believed by activists on this circuit — and we do run into this thing with the casual atheist or the person who claims atheist beliefs, which are millions in America — and the maybe several thousand who are professional or even amateur atheist activists, right — but among that latter group, Shermer has been well-known for a while as someone who’s actually very, perhaps, promiscous, perhaps agressive, and I quoted several people with their own stories that captured him in ____ ways in conventions, one of whom said that he had sex with her while she was too drunk to give consent, so she’d initially called him a rapist for that.
LB: How did you go about — this is a really interesting story, because anyone who’s been active online and heard these stories over the years but they’ve always been without names — as a journalist, how did you go about tracking down the women with stories to tell and getting them to go on the record for the first time?
MO: I … asked a lot of people, whom I should talk to, and eventually certain names became clear to me — I don’t want to say more than that because I don’t want to, um, fuel any speculation about people who may have revealed their identities — what I will say is that, um, I did not get names from anyone who was an enemy of these women, that it was not the case, it was emphatically not the case that any of the so-called misogynists or sexist or people — anti-feminists — or people who refer to themselves in this way in online forums, um, none of them outed any of these women or gave me their names. Um, everything that I learned came from, um, people who were sympathetic to them, who were friends of theirs, people within their camp, who, um, gave me enough to figure out who they were. And what’s more, all of these women consented when I talked to them, to let me use their names and I don’t know why they consented — I think maybe they read older work of mine and felt I was trustworthy, maybe they decided that if I was doing a story on this that they felt duty-bound to be part of it — but journalism is really, um, about hard work and if you ask enough people over enough months….
LB: So what it was like to interview Penn Jillette — this is a question I’ve been dying to ask you?
MO: (laughs) Penn was the last interview I did for this story. I asked to interview him back in June and he didn’t get back to me — or I should say his representative that I delt with — did not get back to me, and they may just have dropped the ball, I’m sure they get a lot of requests. But I tried again and they did set up the interview, and I did it the day of or the day before the story was posted at Buzzfeed.com, and he was very, um, charming and gregarious and forthcoming, uh, I think he is a, um, honest. I don’t agree with his perspective, um, (pause), but I do think — one of the things that __ was critized for by people online was putting him in the same space as Michael Shermer — now, Penn as far as I know has never been accused of any sexual indiscretion — rape, harassment, lewdness, promiscuity, anything — it is the charge against him that he uses language that is demeaning to women.
LB: And not just that he uses language that is demaning to women — bad words the way Lenny Bruce did — but he will direct sexist slurs to individual women in our own movement.
MO: — He will direct sexist slurs to individual women, of which there are two specific cases that I was able to find. There may be more, but there are a lot of rumors that were unsubstantiated. So I was able to pin down a couple of specific cases, and I think he was wrong in those cases, and I think that was horrible, and I think it’s offensive them — of those cases- is not convincing. That said, I of course do draw the distinction between someone who uses very demeaning language and someone who, um, is physically aggressive in person giving people unwanted sexual attention and possibly worse. You know, as someone who has four daughters, uh, you know, there’s an entirely different level of concern that I have if they’re spending time with someone who I know to be verbally offensive and someone who I suspect to be physically aggressive or capable of physical assault… So, there is certainly critique to be made that they are different cases who belong in different articles — I think they belong in the same article because they go to a larger question of how women are viewed in the movement.
LB: Yes, I thought Penn was a perfect person to include in there — not because he deserves to be in a Rogue’s Gallery of the worst harassers in skepticism, because clearly as far as I know and you know and he’s not — but because he made such an impassioned and articulate defense for the boy’s club of skepticism, you know, we started this movement, he calls the entertainers and magicians — carnie trash and we’ve been talking dirty and being lwed and doing whatever we wanted for this whole time — and in his view htere’s absolutely no reason for change.
MO: Right, and you know, I think there’s some kind of coherence and sincerity to what he’s saying. As I said, I think he’s wrong, but I feel that, um, I’m not comfortable that he’s personally — he may be personally be incredibly respectful of women in his presence — the one person who said to me that he had demeaned her in person also said, look, I wasn’t personally offended by it, she said she knew it was his shtick, he’s boundary-crossing and boundary-pushing — again, I don’t defend that, but I do think there is a role for the provacateur in society and he believes he’s playing that role. So there’s a very different ambition there when compared to the person whose ambition it is to sleep with young star-struck inebriated women (laughs). There are degrees that are worth talking about here. That I did include him in part because I think, you know, he is part of the problem.
LB: I mean, it’s nice to have someone who’s willing to spell out the intellectual foundations of that worldview, who’s NOT doing it for ulterior motives, he just thinks skepticism should go on being the way it was when he was a kid:
MO: Right, and you know first of all I encourage people to read Amanda Marcotte’s critique of that position which she published today, a feminist writer, Amanda Marcotte, I thought it was very thoughtful and well-spelled out, she laid out a case against that as well as I can be.
LB: We will link to that on the website for this show.
MO: I also think that one of the things that comes out of this piece is that we don’t remember this boy’s club was made up of people — you go back to the 70s and 80s — especially there’s this period from 1976 to 1990 which was really the heyday of the rise and peak of the Christian right, and you know, people saying you have to say the Pledge of Allegiance in school and you know attacking people as anti-American or pro-Soviet or Marxist or anti-religious, you have to remember this group of people in freethought and atheism who gathered around people like james Randi or Paul Kurtz were very very brave, and were taking positions that at the time in American culture may have seemed very dangerous to say, and were, you know, it was far worse in the eyes of most Americans in 1984 let’s say — worse after 9/11 probably — to say the things that some skeptics are saying about God or Christianity or America, um, than it was to use the c-word toward women. And so the — it’s not surprising that it was a group of oddballs who just didn’t give a flying fuck what other people thought who were willing to take this position
LB: I grew up in the movement and I just can’t imagine people like Paul Kurtz even if he’d learned how to use Twitter back in the day but I cannot imagine him getting into the kind of petty fights that certain atheist leaders are getting into against, you know, feminists int he movement these days on Twitter — I’m talking about Richard Dawkins and his Dear Muslin – dear Muslima kind of stuff.
MO: Well, sure, I agree with you — social media makes everything worse, except when it makes it better, but it often makes it worse — but at the end of Paul Kurtz’s life, you know, he was pushed out of the Center of Inquiry in a series of other petty spats that had to do with *inaudible* so all subcultures, all movements have infighting. I don’t think atheists or secular humanists are any better or any worse than other movements that way.
LB: Sure, I mean, I’m just trying to push back against the narrative that, you know, there was this raucous, sexist good-old-days or bad-old-days depending on how you want to look at it and it somehow we’ve come to a difference in sensibilities — I think that open sexism came in from my perspective WITH the really outspoken New Atheism, that there were certain group of people who came into the movement who weren’t there before who were really interested in being in-your-face and offensive across multiple levels including overt sexists.
MO: You might be right about that, and it sounds like you know the history of the movement better than I do. I would only say though though that were talkinga bout a few different things here. Penn was specifically talking about Randi’s community of scientific skeptics, and I’ve done some research and actually I have another article in the works that involves the scientific skeptics, you know, debunking claims of the paranormal — community in Los Angeles where a lot of it was based in the 70s and 80s — and it was a bunch of real crazies — now again, that’s not to say they were all necessarily sexist or that it would be ok if they were — but that was a bit more of a Wild West community than the philosophical secular humanists that Paul Kurtz gathered around. So that’s just to draw out one important a distinction, and again none of this is to excuse or defend anything, um, but the other thing I would say is both of these wings were, you know, 95% male, so it’s almost hard to say well how much latent sexism was there, because they very rarely had to deal with women (laughs).
LB: That’s a very good point!
MO: And who can say how sexist Paul Kurtz — not to speak ill of the dead — how sexist he would have been if all of the sudden 40% of the people showing up at a particular convention were female? Um, he might ahve been very amenable as a man of a certain generation to — he might have ended up saying the kind of things that Richard dawkins is saying now — I don’t know that, I don’t know that for a fact, and it’s horrible to speculate:
LB: He’s certainly on the record in his humanist writings for total gender equality and that sort of thing.
MO: That’s a good point, that’s a good point, but then again I’m sure someone like Dawkins is as well, if you look at his writings closely enough.
[23:00]
LB: Let’s talk a bit about this entity called Slymepit. Did you meet any Slymepitters?
MO: I spent almost __ time on Slymepit, you know, you, as you know, there is a community of people who have become self-identified as anti-feminists or — they would say, free speech advocates — they would say they don’t want their speech curtailed by the delicate sensibilities of women rights’ activists or feminists or they would say humanists —
LB: What is Slymepit exactly? Is it entirely geared toward critiquing freethought? Or is it a community that has other purposes?
MO: I honestly didn’t spend enough time … I mean, the kind of things you read, Slymepit with a ‘y’ in case anybody is interested in checking it out, we certainly want people to do their own research for themselves … it’s certainly, when I looked at it, you only had to scroll down a couple inches on the screen before you would encounter something so offensive to women, so misogynists, so demeaning, so crude that, um, you just wanted to click off it — I didn’t — on my forays, I did look, I would poke around, was there an interesting philosophical point of view here? And let’s just say nothing I read rose to the level of articulateness that Penn had when he was defending his coarse language, that it just seemed a place for people to spew crude invective toward mostly women.
So I didn’t spend a lot of time on it — there’s also a whole wing of the Skeptics and Freethought movement — and it might be a tiny wing, it could be five people with a lot of Twitter accounts between them — that identify as Men’s Rights Advocates — and these are some of the worst people in the world, they just live to abuse women… I didn’t really want to dignify that particular piece of the anti-feminist, freethought world with a lot of time in my article.
LB: Fair enough! I was interested in your discussion with the Amazing Randi who was talking about Shermer and he said ‘Shermer has been a bad boy on occasion, I do know that. I have told him that if I get many more complaints from people I have reason to believe that I am going to have to limit his attendance at the conference’. What did you make of that?
MO: He seems to me not to get it, entirely. Uh, he *inaudible* where Shermer said he was already drunk when these things happen and this is just what boy’s do when they get drunk or something like that.
LB: Which seemed to me to be really telling, like ‘that’s what men do’ as opposed to that’s what men have been allowed to do.
MO: Right, look, Randi is quite aged at this point, as someone once reminded me when I wrote something very harsh about an old person, we all get there someday if we’re lucky, we too will get old and indiscreet and maybe say things that we shouldn’t, or that our *inaudible* the world go, and he’s not, as far as I can tell, involved in the day to day operations of the James Randi Educational Foundation, which puts on this very large meeting in Las Vegas every year, The Amazing Meeting, any more — he seems, he sounded a lot like certain very elderly relatives I have had who have meant very very well and have big hearts but whose politics didn’t keep up with the times who just sounded like sexists from the 50s or 60s, um, so I don’t know what to say — here’s the significance of this, right, is that he, like Penn Jilette, is still exalted as a leader of the movement, so he’s not someone who has shuffled off quietly to the sidelines, he’s someone who’s can turn out big audiences, who is still revered, and who is still listened to.
So the movement can’t have it both ways. If someone is past his prime and therefore isn’t the person to listen to publicly anymore, fine, but then don’t listen to them publicly anymore. But he still very very much beloved and still very very attended to, and yet, he is quite wrong on one of the major issues confronting the community, which is how to deal with complaints of sexual violence, and, and, sexists.
LB: You wrote a book called The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side about sexual abuse and harassment within American Zen Buddhism. Do you see parallels between the way the Zen community has dealt with abuse in its own ranks and the way the skeptical community has?
MO: I do see a parallel. I see two parallels that I can think of right now. One is that both communities have leaders whom they revere. I think that’s typical of all communities, but both of these are fairly young communities in America in their current form — Zen Buddhism really began to flourish in the 60s when a certain group of teachers came over from Japan, and began to plant seeds and ventures(?) and they very much had a guru model, where they taught other people and those people taught other people and it was all about whether or not your teacher had lineage from this, you know, one of these four or five great teachers who came over from Japan in the 60s. So there’s a kind of reverence for people that, that makes it very hard to criticize them or see their flaws.
Similarly, the skeptical movement and the freethought movement since the 60s has built around the celebrity of a few people. In secular humanism, someone like Paul Kurtz, in scientific skepticism, someone like, you know, Randi, um, in and now in what you might call the New Atheism, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, people like that. And so these leaders become very, very important because the books that they sell and the seminars they lead are really the vehicle — the speeches they give — are really the vehicles for the growth of a young movement that badly needs to grow. So nobody wants to knock them off their pedestals, and people don’t want to hear about their flaws. So that’s kind of number one, is the reverence for leaders — which again, I don’t think you have, say, in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, I mean, these old, old institutions — someone is bad enough, they begin to cost you elections and you hopefully push them aside — there’s no sense that anyone is completely (inaudible)/
And then I think the second thing is that — and this may be true of all communities — but these particularly leap out at me, you have these people who believe they have a certain claim on the truth, and they believe they have a rigor and a, and a, (pause) a kind of stringent way of looking at the world that makes them less susceptible to error than other people. So within Zen Buddhism you have people who first of all, actually, in many cases believe they’ve had moments of enlightenment (laughter) and they believe that their practices make them see truths that other people can’t see, so you then say that this guy who sees all these truths is groping women and then lying about it, there’s a lot of people who say ‘I don’t believe that. How is that possible? He’s the one who taught me, who took me me far down the path of enlightenment, who taught me to sleep the imperannce of worldly possessions? How could you tell me that he would reach under a woman’s robe and feel her up like a common thug? It just doesn’t seem believable’.
And similarly in the skepticism movement, you now, the whole point of my belief system and this community is that I don’t fall for ridiculous beliefs! I have a kind of rigor about my thinking, I parse evidence well and and I arrive at the correct conclusions, so therefore you can’t possibly tell me that I misjudged this person. And let me add one more thing, if I may, which someone pointed out to me, which, this is just conjecture, an interesting one, which is that because people in freethought are so interested in standards and evidence, they sometimes are exceptionally difficult to convince of anything that they haven’t seen, right, so look they don’t believe in the Resurrection because nobody — there’s no evidence that nobody saw the Resurrection — they don’t believe in a God we can’t see or verify, so then a women says I was assaulted when I couldn’t give consent and they say well, where’s the proof? And their level of proof is typically where’s the videotape or where’s the confession. And of course that’s not the kind of proof that we have, much of the time, for sexual crimes.
LB: Philip is also very rigorous in many ways, praiseworthy code of ethics within Skeptics and freethought which is the, you know, you should not say bad things about people unless you have that kind of ironclad proof, and in one sense that’s really admirable, I mean, it’s something we all like, something the movement should be proud of, but on the other hand, in the real world the way people get reputations, the way that you learn who is dangerous, who is safe, who you should trust, who you shouldn’t trust, is buzz about what they’ve done in the past, and it’s all so sure, it’s all so (inaudible) but you build up a corpus of data that allows you to operate in the world empircally:
MO: Absolutely, right, and we couldn’t function otherwise. I do want to say, though, that this is a piece — this article, you know — I’m mostly sure that I got things mostly right (laughs). But there are people who have jumped on the anti-Michael Shermer bandwagon who are crazy, unquestionably. You know, I mean, Michael Shermer believes that he’s a victim of a kind of witch-hunt, a hysterical panic. And, there are hysterical panics in the world, right, and sometimes they have to do with, you know, Satanic — so-called Satanic — ritual abuse, sometimes they have to do with episodes of chronic fatigue syndrome(?), sometimes they have to do with Gulf War Syndrome, we only have to read ____’s book, Hipsters to know about this, right.
LB: Or (list of authors I couldn’t transcribe fast enough). or Lawrence Wright,
MO: There are people who hear a rumor, and then they think oh I think that happened to me too and then everyone thinks it happened to them, but in fact it may have happened to one or two people but not hte next hundred. And there are people who have told Michael Shermer stories that are completely implausible, you know, and some of those are in the realm of rumor too, the person who says that he impregnated — that they were impregnated by Shermer — and forced to gete an abortion, but in fact, Shermer, of course, had had a vasectomy before he ever met the person. The person who said he had a gay affair with Shermer. I mean, possible? But I don’t think plausible. The one that I point to is the person who was telling people that Shermer had harassed her by the way he looked at her in the audience, and she was in an audience of hundreds of people, and I think seated many rows back, but she felt harassed by a particular leer that he gave her.
You know, and and wherever there are people who might become safe to criticize, there will be people who will then want to join the crowd of critics. Let’s put it this way, whenever there’s a class-action lawsuit, some members of the class (laugh) will not be authentic members of the class, like they’re hitching a ride and hoping to get something out of it. do I think that such people exist, in the world of Michael Shermer critics? I know at least one does, because of the story that was just too wildly implausible to be true.
Now,again, I don’t want to speak for Michael Shermer, but I think some of his defenders would say that all of the stories are like that, they’re all part of a hysterical panic where everyone is just, it’s become safe to accuse him, the way in junior high it becomes safe to say I slept with that slutty girl, even if nobody did. And that’s a real phenomenon, and it can hit men or women. However, I went and did a lot of reporting, and I reported some stories from people who I thought were, you know, credible, speaking plausibly true stories. So that’s the best Shermer(?) can deal with it.
Patrick G, wow, thank you so much for all the work you did, I really appreciate it. One thing:
That should be predator, not creditor.
Ha! Well, I warned you about occasional slippages. :) I think I got it right later on in the transcript.
In my defense, the words are almost interchangeable, which is why my fingers typed one word where my brain heard another.
PatrickG, thank you so much for all that work!
A Zen Creditor might be a good thing. They’d be less fussed about repayments being on time. :)
Thanks PatrickG! You’re aces.
Wow, PatrickG, I know how much work that is. You’re amazing.
All thanks may be submitted in the form of an email to PZ to remove the first, horribly formatted post. Still boggling how it looked good in preview and then turned into a giant wall o’ text.
Seriously, though, thanks for the kind words. However, it wasn’t that much work. I just put it on 3/4 speed and typed like mad. If I’d done it *properly* I would have gone back and listened to it a third time and corrected transcription errors. (Creditor! Ha!)
In any case, glad people find it of use!
Bravo to PatrickG for a lot of work for all of us!
Can anyone explain why Oppenheimer repeats what he said in his article about James Randi being functionally separated from his namesake organization when he has officially resumed its presidency since the beginning of September? Perhaps he wrote that part before The Fall of Grothe, but has nobody mentioned further developments to him since?!?
Thank you, PatrickG!