On the evening of Saturday, April 7, 2018, the American Atheists Board of Directors received a complaint regarding David Silverman, the President of American Atheists. The Board takes very seriously the concerns expressed and, in accordance with organization policies, the Board has placed Mr. Silverman on leave while an independent investigation is conducted. Mr. Silverman has pledged his full cooperation with the investigation.
The Board, led by Vice President Kathleen Johnson and myself, will fulfill the duties of the President while Mr. Silverman is on leave. National Program Director Nick Fish will oversee the day-to-day operations of the organization.
While Mr. Silverman is on leave, American Atheists will continue our work protecting the separation of religion and government, elevating the voices of atheists in our nation’s public discourse, and supporting our members and atheist communities across the country.
We are committed to transparency and openness about this process and will release more information as it becomes available.
I know what’s going on, and it’s been building for a while. It’s not just AA that’s investigating some allegations, but another organization as well, and the atheist movement is about to get another well-deserved battering.
Go about your business, citizens. Ignore the chaos.
These atheist “leaders” are showing themselves to be downright churchy in their abuses. Oh well.
Let me guess … is an asshole going to get a tiny bit of consequence for their assholish behaviour?
Jeez, the best part about not going to church was not having an “Organization” and a bunch of assholes trying to tell me what to do.
And as soon as you get away from that, you all huddle together and talk about how great Jesus isn’t. Fuck that noise.
You want to join an organization, join….well now that I come to mention it I can’t think of one. Unless you count things like the Tuesday night supper club. But spare me the Grand Organizational Hierarchy of Doom for the love of DOG!
We need more females in prominent roles. =)
Quoted in full for truth.
>>We need more females in prominent roles. =)
>Quoted in full for truth.
Maybe it’s best to replace all the men with women, just to be on the safe side for awhile. Mind you I am cynical enough to think that, given time, at least some of the women will turn out to be assholes in their own right, after, one hopes, a significant interregnum.
Ed Seedhouse:
Effusive yet cringe-worthy.
It’s one thing to say women should have proportional representation, but another to put them on a pedestal.
They’re just people.
Or: (men are assholes) ≠ (women are not assholes)
Or: (men are assholes) ≠ (women are not assholes)
While your logic is correct, it does not logically follow: men=assholes therefore women=assholes.
In my statistical universe, women are not conditioned from early childhood to expect the world to conform to their needs nearly as often as men that I have seen. If we are practicing harm reduction, putting disadvantaged and marginalized groups at the helms of power would be a good first step.
Margaret Thatcher. Phyllis Schlafly. Dana Loesch.
Best if women of color are chosen, not just white women.
For some reason, the title of this post made me think of hand grenades.
@9: Ok, how about at least taking that information into account in our Bayesian priors?
lumps
round back
Ayn Rand?
I know that the way society is structured means we need organised groups to press certain issues.
For myself I hate being part of any “organisations” as a member, committee member or officer. I have always seen that as a personal failing.
However, it increasingly seems to me that the sort of people who are drawn to those roles (irrespective of political persuasion) have an higher than average tendancy to abuse that power and position.
Bit of a dilemma, really.
Oprah Winfrey
As a hypothesis, given that we’re living in this kind of society where leadership positions are usually filled with men (a.k.a. “patriarchy”), when a woman manages to get a leadership position, it will often be by assuming character attributes typically associated with men, maybe even in more extreme forms. So, women who get leadership positions in a male-dominated society have a high likelyhood of exposing the same failures men in leadership positions do, no matter if the average woman doesn’t.
And then, of course, like Nixon and China, they would be perfectly positioned to throw a spanner into the works of equality, should they be so inclined.
Hmm, in my reality, men are granted greater leeway as individuals, are comparatively less policed in their obligatory masculinity than women in their femininity, and are more-or-less fully humanized, their strengths and accomplishment a testament to their own will, their ambitions admirable no matter how blinkered, and their foibles and failures rarely a reflection on other men. So power may corrupt, but it’s incorrect to say that patriarchy’s top tier of white men are interchangeable or identikit, that they are invariably shaping themselves to conform to standard issue (whose standard and where did it come from?). It’s true, however, that the greatest compliments that can be paid to a woman are either that she’s Just Like a Man, Almost! or she’s Not Like Other Girls. We’re not immune to that gas lighting-style propaganda.
Some women do find solace or sanity in believing they live in a just world, yes, and patriarchy cannot replicate itself without the active participation and indoctrination of girls and women. Assuming at the outset women will naturally sabotage any attempt at liberation or progress, buying into the self-serving myth that women are unusually competitive with one another and this decontextualized trope disproportionately contributes to their own oppression, doesn’t seem particularly profitable to me. Perhaps we could try it first before dismissing it as a lost cause because btches be catty and ball-busting?
Are you suggesting the average man, then, not in a position of comparative power, is exempt from bad behavior? If not, and everyone irrespective of gender or alignment is as equally likely as everyone else to be a bully or abuser, wringing one’s hands about what happens if the bad feminist mommies lean in and become mean girl corporate types is no longer a tenable objection to stripping white men of their privileges. “What if they’re mean afterwards?” is not a grown-up response to people clamoring for social injustice or a seat at the table.
Regardless of anything, this does not make god any less imaginary.
I agree that going through a generation or so in which the women run everything would be a good thing for the world. While there would undoubtedly be problems, I hope they would be different problems then the ones we’ve had from the last few thousands years with men in charge. This would make for a change that was both refreshing and instructive.
You are not alone. The echoes of that grenade are still audible to many, certainly to me.
Me too. However, it also reminds me of good people standing firm, so it’s not all bad.
brucegee,
The probability of that being true would, I think, be very low.
Selecting the best people for the job, male or female, would result in the best outcome.
I think we should be willing to compromise a little in the short term for the long term benefits of affirmative action*, but your suggestion would obviously be disastrous for the world.
*affirmative action to ensure the women with the required attributes for the job are not bypassed because of discrimination; plus positive discrimination where there has been long term systemic discrimination against women.