I closed comments and new posting, but The Atheist Experience was still left up here at FtB. Despite requesting some recommendations from the Atheist Community of Austin, what’s left of it, for what to do with the blog, I’ve heard nothing from them. So this evening a removed it from FtB’s roster for good.
What a freakin’ mess. Matt and his transphobic crew really did a great job of flushing a fine organization down the tubes.
Nothing? Dead silence for a week, when anyone from the new board could have sat us down and explained what had happened in their own words?
Wow.
Yeah. I’m pretty surprised that no one has made a transition plan for their blog content.
First approximation? This speaks badly of the level of organization in the organization.
More likely the reason they didn’t respond is because the blog here just wasn’t important enough for them to maintain. The value of a Freethought Blog – YMMV. I’m fine with seeing them go because I had some one-sided beef with MD over the way he conducted himself in the A+ forums. This represents the last of the active bloggers that have annoyed me departing, haha.
I don’t think transition plans are their thing.
(Ahem. I might have over-interpreted)
@Great American Satan:
OT: Good to see you in the comments.
I think it really is most damming thing at this time that they do not care even to try to make a effort to explain all of this. Just like RC, they think problems can be solved by just getting rid of people who ask for accountability. Now we just wait for MD to rant in one month time how they were dealing it on the backstage without no-one knowing about it and we should all just had faith that the big boys have it covered and know what is best for us.
They posted this on their FB group a week ago. I don’t know if they tried to contact you otherwise, or if they think you should have contacted them again.
https://m.facebook.com/groups/575347659285776?view=permalink&id=1409256029228264
Wow. Those comments. The remaining ACA fans sound an awful lot like Thunderf00t fans.
By the way, notice the evasion by omission: I sent email to the board, but also used the ACA’s contact form to send notice to the president and vice president, that is, Matt Dillahunty. He says nothing about that, which makes me suspect he got my notice and is now pretending to not have.
He also has not contacted us to let us know how to dispose of the old blog, but that “ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE PRESIDENT” is an admission that he knows about the conflict, but is even so avoiding any effort to resolve it with us. In fact, whoever their blog admin is had to have noticed last week that they were locked out of the site and couldn’t upload a new episode, yet again nothing was said to us.
I guess he’s just closing his eyes and pretending the whole problem will go away, as he’s been doing with the abrupt departure of so many of the AXP regulars.
I can’t see any of the comments, but I’d be interested if anyone wants to screencap or copy them
Desktop version has comments.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/575347659285776?view=permalink&id=1409256029228264
Click “272 Comments” the lower-right to reveal them.
Then click “View 36 more comments” to see older root-level comments.
There’s no convenient way to expand all the branches at once. I ended up writing a Tampermonkey script to do that.
Peez, don’t you know that Matt is busy doing “great, important work?” Just don’t ask what it is, or you’ll either get silence or blocked.
Based on my experience with atheist student groups, I suspect the lack of e-mail response is due to something totally mundane, like nobody actually checking either of the e-mail addresses you contacted. I expect a group like ACA to be a bit more together than a student group though. And that announcement from the president is kind of ridiculous because they don’t seem to consider that if the e-mails were lost, they ought to reach out to FTB themselves.
As Satan up there says, I suspect they weren’t wildly interested in the blog. In the past, whenever there was a ruckus that was talked about on the show and so forth it was always on facebook. That seemed to be where the action was generally. Plus, off the top of my head the main members who interacted with the blog the most were Tracie and John and they both left (as did most of the social media team if I understand correctly). For whoever is there now it might be a bit up in the air what social media assets they even have.
Regardless, word has been around and people have at least heard about it and could have done something about it. One would think anyway.
It’s a pity. That second string status made the discussions there pretty good when they got going.
I thought that myself. Perhaps they just haven’t gotten around to redirecting the mail to the new president. You’d think they’d have noticed when they couldn’t post the previous episode, though.
@Siggy:
Thus my statement that they are likely lacking “organization in the organization.”
This is all very disappointing. I was prepared for the longest time to give Matt Dillahunty the benefit of the doubt because he has valuable skills that I want on ‘our’ side. I liked that he can debate theologians on their own turf. I figured the somewhat “ideologically neutral”, hermeneutic way he addresses arguments was a good complement to the snarkier, more overtly moral style of the left. I figured it would help attract people who’d been conditioned to switch off their brains when they heard social justice vocabulary.
Which I guess it did, except they never took the next step. So now he’s left with a big club house full of debate society “skeptic” douchebags. What a waste.
I’m going to miss the AXP blog, but I do not regret seeing it go given the circumstances. It just gets worse and worse for Matt D and the remaining people in the ACA as I learn more about what happened.
Don’t you think that something is wrong when there is not one single comment against the echo chamber’s position on this matter?
This is the freethought blog, where you are absolutely free to tow the party’s line of thought, but dissenters are kept out or, much more probably, do not even bother to post. Just like me, of whom you are reading from for the last time.
That should be “toe the line”.
Yet another flounce from yet another whinging fool who’s demonstrably incapable of critical thought.
Here, I’ll help; there’ve been three threads on this topic with over 300 comments combined.
Next time you make a grand pronouncement you might want to increase your sample size.
@Andres Villarreal 19
It’s interesting. You could have said what you thought someone should say, but you chose to seize on the lack of challenge itself like that’s a bad thing (we want lots of people on the same page for political behavior).
Like so many others you have no idea what free thought is. It’s a philosophical school of thought that doesn’t include everyone getting to say whatever they want whenever and wherever they want. Like so many others you trade competence for rhetoric.
I just read about this, someone reported the whole axp facebook group and fb found there content that was against its community standarts.
Andres, #19
Oh gods, this echo chamber nonsense again…
Is it an echo chamber or is it a space where (almost) everyone agrees that transphobia shouldn’t be welcome or tolerated?
Kkehno. The ACA’s main page and their fan discussion group are still up and have recent posts. So what are you talking about?
Fossilfishy, that some of the content is gone? Not whole group.