It’s too bad that social media has to have that “social” component — as we all know, Hell is other people. I got some comments on this post about the ongoing atrocities in Israel/Palestine on Mastodon that earned someone an instant block. Look at this facile nonsense:
@escarpment@mastodon.online
@pzmyers It says in your profile you are an atheist yet you still seem to have been convinced by the religious moralizers that there exists a clearly defined objective standard of good and evil, which there is not.
@escarpment@mastodon.online
@pzmyers Also, though many people claim half-heartedly to condemn both Israel and Hamas (which in my view is unjustified), they spend the majority of the time and effort condemning Israel, therefore tacitly endorsing Hamas. They hold rallies against Israel, not against Israel and Hamas. They bring cases to the ICJ against Israel, not against Israel and Hamas.
First, they argue that because I’m an atheist, I can’t recognize good and evil. Those are religious concepts only! As if an atheist can’t have a moral standard based on entirely human values, and as if religious values aren’t totally fucked up and invalid. Checkmate, atheist! You are not allowed to condemn violence and genocide, because you don’t have a holy book telling you what’s right!
Next, now that they have established themselves firmly on the moral high ground vs. the trough of futility and despair that is the atheist position, they go on to read my mind. My condemnation of Israel and Hamas is “half-hearted”? Say what? I despise both with my entire heart — even an atheist and humanist can regard terrorist violence as brutal and cruel. That’s their justification for suggesting that I am “tacitly endorsing Hamas”?
No, I am not. I think both the Hamas leadership and the government of Israel should be dragged before the Hague and receive their just punishment. The difference between the two is that 1) right now, the Hamas leadership is being bombed into bloody gibs, and 2) my country is actively supporting the state-run terrorism by Israel, so I feel that condemning the violence my government is “tacitly endorsing” is more important today. There’s also the fact that the Palestinians are clearly the underdog, with about 24,000 dead citizens so far.
No matter, though: my perspective as an atheist and humanist is that no one should be butchering either Israeli or Palestinian civilians. No one should be arming the butchers, either.
I’ve been forced to block some people; in a couple of cases, I have blocked entire instances because they’re obviously right wing or alt-right.
But I’ve found Mastodon far less problematic than Xitter.
A major conceit of any religion is that it alone can define morality. Religions have pounded this so hard that even not very religious people accept this conceit. But of course human values preceded organized religious values. And even dogs know what being good means.
Agree on your Israel question too.
I missed where Hamas is bombing Israeli cities into rubble with their hundreds of jet fighters and bombers. While killing tens of thousands of random Israeli civilians, many of those being children.
When that happens, I will freely and enthusiastically condemn Hamas for pointless massacres that will solve nothing.
Obligatory rote statement cut and pasted from somewhere: I condemn Hamas for terrorism and the mass murder of innocent Israeli civilians and the occasional Palestinians who get in their way.
We need only to observe that the vast majority of Evangelical Christians support Donald Trump to know that religion and morality are unrelated.
“Absolute morality doesn’t exist, therefore morality doesn’t exist.”
I call this The argument from how do adjectives work, anyway?
I think you give this person too much credit, PZ! They indicate that there is not “a clearly defined objective standard of good and evil”! So they are taking, as you mocked, “the trough of futility and despair that is the atheist position.” And yet they still felt they were in a position to moralize at you!
Clearly, self-awareness is not a strength of theirs. (I would also note that it is those “religious moralizers” who claim that atheists must take up that “trough of futility” as they assert that only a god can establish said “objective standard of good and evil.” So who, out of you two, is the one buying into the BS the “religious moralizers” spew? Clearly, it’s them. So, as I see it, they batted 0-2 on self-awareness in their postings.)
@#1:
That’s a bar so low an earthworm would be able to get over it.
Even some of the people who think Mastodon is the best social media site out there think it could do a lot better in terms of giving high-follower users better options for curating notifications. Because if you’re dealing with a hundred thousand followers, personally banning all the assholes one at a time becomes a major chore, and if all the big name people with hundreds of thousands of followers decide it’s not worth dealing with Mastodon and go elsewhere, a lot of their followers likely will too.
My instance muted (but didn’t completely block) mastodon.online because of the large quantity of spam and trolls.
@7
The fediverse has a solution to this issue: choose an instance with stronger moderation and let your instance admits do most of the blocking for you. If you choose an unmoderated instance you’re going to experience unmoderated social media.
The inability to distinguish Palestinian civilians from Hamas clearly marks someone as either a moron or a disingenuous troll. Similarly, the inability to distinguish Jewish individuals from the Israeli state also reveals a lot.
The Bible, of course, fully endorses violence and genocide. In fact Yahweh frequently commands it, and punishes leaders for failing to fully carry out genocide in accordance with his wishes.
Have you tried reminding this wanker that Israel has been financing, propping up and using Hamas to undermine any possibility of a legitimate, peaceful Palestinian state? I’d love to see his response to that (if any).
And besides, there’s PLENTY of people condemning both Israel and Hamas, with or without acknowledging their collusion.
cervantes @ #11
Indeed, and one might wonder if those bits were introduced into the oral narratives that came to make up the Bible during the 3rd and 2nd century BCE by Judaean leaders to justify their progroms against their neighbors.
The premise of the old testament is that our god is bigger and badder than your god and very jealous and you better praise him and obey him and keep him happy or he’s gonna smack you dead.
The premise of the new testament is that you didn’t obey god’s rules so somebody’s got to pay and since the new god is so nice he’s not gonna make everybody pay like last time but now’s he’s just going to offer up a special guy to be tortured to death to make god’s rules happy. Then he’s going to show how nice he is by making that special guy a zombie who comes back to life but then goes away. You’re supposed to learn to be nice from that guy but still obey kings.
@8 I’m on mastodon.online and I’ve seen very little spam (and I’ve mostly managed to avoid trolls).
The moderation there seems very good.
Just checked and over 14 months I’ve had to block 12 people and mute 17. I had more than that in the first hour on twitter.
Based on this recent thread:
https://tech.lgbt/@ShadowJonathan/111721371108533882
I have concluded that the only legitimate monarchs are fediverse instance admins. The troll that PZ blocked (as featured in the OP) is on the instance mastodon.online, so according to the Bible the troll must obey @gargron@mastodon.social, the admin of both mastodon.social and mastodon.online.
The Bible would also indicate that PZ Myers must obey their instance admin, “hinged death kinnie” (@CobaltVelvet@octodon.social). But of course since PZ is not Christian he is free to ignore the Bible.
@15
It’s all relative: mastodon.online is moderated more heavily than Twitter or threads.net, but less heavily than some smaller instances. And Twitter itself is (maybe?) moderated better than Gab.
Somehow, the law of armed conflict managed to evolve away from and as a horrified reaction to the religious doctrine of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If you really want to know what “moral” is and how it descends from a particular deity and religious doctrine, just stand on a box somewhere in central Europe, or the northern end of the Arabian Gulf, or the floodplains south and west of Beijing, or anywhere within 1000km of the Ganges River, in about 1612 and proclaim that all religions have value in teaching morals. You’d better be wearing twenty-first century armor and have air evac on standby, though…
1) The actual leaders are millionaires and billionaires that live in Qatar. The terrorists they are financing and running are in Gaza and elsewhere. It’s like the Russian troops in Ukraine are getting smashed but Putin lives in Russian.
2) Israel has a right to defend itself against decades (which started as muslims starting an invading war) of terrorists trying to destroy it. Hamas kicked off this fight on October 7th. They don’t get to now cry about losing and getting beaten. What they did on October 7th was a warning to what they’d do to everyone if they were winning. Egypt doesn’t want the place, the people ruling the place want war and death, it’s all easy to sit back in another country and armchair dictate, but they have to end this, no country would put up with October 7ths carried out on them forever by a group right next to them. Yes, civilians getting killed is horrible. But people should be supporting Israel getting rid of Hamas, and helping and supporting them. I wonder if the combined UN armies flooded the area to brimming and spent the time rooting out Hamas and the leaders, if it would be less violent, than letting Israel do its themselves, while emboldening Hamas with all the support for “Free Palestine”. Hamas aren’t freedom fighters, they’re terrorists. And maybe Gaza should just be part of Israel now so everyone can move on.