I knew it. It’s all Rebecca Watson’s fault that Trump got elected.
Who would have thought that a woman asking, “Guys, don’t do that” would trigger a decades-long meltdown in certain man-babies?
Also…Rebecca, why are you still on Twitter? You’ve got a Bluesky account, say goodbye to the right-wing propaganda mill.
“See what you made me do”
BTW is it 15 years ago already? Things haven’t got much better since then, have they?
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA .
I don’t believe this for one second.
I’m sure he has always been a misogynistic slime mold.
Chances are also good he frequently gets kicked out of places for harassing women and he may have a few restraining orders out against him for domestic violence and stalking.
Misogyny is deeply embedded in some men in our society. I see it all the time.
.1. One guy I went to school with ended up divorced and also managed to accumulate 3 different restraining orders from 3 different women.
The idea of boundaries and consent is something that he never even thought of.
After the police and judges explained it a few times and he spent a few days in jail, he finally figured it out.
.2. On a different website, long ago, I would occasionally be attacked by a right wingnut. I quickly learned that he was a waste of time and blocked him. I dropped off that website a decade ago but still have my account and sometimes visit it.
He is near the end of his life now and wondering how it all went so wrong.
He’s been married something like 5 times.
None of his exs have anything good to say about him.
One of them committed suicide.
.3. This could go on for pages but a few examples show what a lot of our society is like.
And why fundie xians have a higher divorce rate than the general population.
See how sensitive they are to criticism? This doesn’t change my mind. If Rebecca Watson’s mild criticism did this why would I set aside such an effective tool? They’ve surrounded themselves with ignorance, incompetence, irrationality, and illogic because of criticism. They’ve abandoned decent people over criticism. Over the long term I’m fine with this. We drive all the ignorants together with criticism and they dysfunctional mess. I’ll have some splash damage but they’ll destroy themselves.
I’ve been a long time on again of again reader, but have never commented, but this reminder of elevatorgate made me make an account because I have been wondering about something for while and I’m interested in your thoughts on it. As I exprienced and remember it (and I’m not basing this on much else then that), the alt-right in many ways flowed from the atheism movement. It appears that many of them learned to argue here, or in the skeptic community at large, and then splintered of during elevator gate, and solidified into a somewhat coherent movement during gamergate. As “evidence” of this I think we can look at people like Dawkins or Coyne, and their followers. This makes me wonder how you see your own role here, what, if anything, do you think your role was in all of this? Do you see yourself as someone who unwittingly played a role in the development of the alt right?
@raven #5 – “You being so woke made me a Nazi” was never a very convincing argument. Left-wing people do not become right-wing just because someone else is more left-wing than they are.
#7: you’re poking a sore spot. I feel immense guilt at having contributed to the new atheist movement — I was providing cover for bigots. I was coming at it from a progressive perspective, but yeah, the right wingers had a grip from the beginning, and took over. They didn’t splinter off, they were the core, and I’m the splinter.
Glynn DeMoss Wolfe was, supposedly, married 31 times. What was it that persuaded so many women to marry him and then get divorced? Does having being a baptist minister have anything to do with it?
Never happened that way.
Coffeecups, just about every word you wrote is wrong.
The alt right came from the old right and isn’t much different.
They are all right wingnuts with the same ideologies and beliefs.
Your premises are wrong and that makes your conclusions wrong.
Here is what Wikipedia has to say.
There you go.
The drivers for the alt-right are the usual, fundie xianity, racism, fascism, misogyny.
What is the difference between the alt right and the old and new fascist GOP right anyway?
Very little.
This source says it is aesthetics.
The alt rights tend to be younger, dress better, and use the internet.
Some may be atheists and a whole lot are…fundie xians and trad Catholics.
@9: PZ, you are a good person. If you erred in the choices you have made, so [d]ucking what. I am slightly older than you and I think think yours were probably better than mine. I fled from the class-bound opportunities offered to me in the UK (Oxford being a good symbol) to be a hippie waiter in California, then various other jobs I found acceptable (in and around the noble trade of printing that is unfortunately being destroyed), and eventually as a lightly paid activist trying to work against techno-eugenics. Which is of course rapidly on the rise; the work feels like fighting the tide. But hey, being the splinter, the pebble in the shoe of society, is an honorable position. You go, guy!
I know I’m probably in the minority, but despite the assholes it generated I think that we needed “New Atheism” or something like it. Religion has had been allowed far too much political and cultural power. Supernatural claims were left unanswered out of some misguided notion of “respect” toward the idiots who believed them. Dubya’s administration was borrowing through the wall of separation and Creationism was sneaking back into the public schools. Atheists were constantly being vilified.
Now even the left is going back to pandering to the superstitious savages while those who dare not to believe in a god or magic go right back to becoming pariahs.
@9 I’m glad you were part of the new atheists. Skepticon 3 was my first skeptic/atheist convention and I loved it! So did many, many others. I still follow you and Rebecca and Surly Amy and Amanda Marcotte and some others I met there. I followed Dawkins, Coyne, and Harris for a while, but gave up on them around the time of Elevatorgate.
I remember having to watch Rebecca’s video several times to find the “offensive” section. It was so mild, so blink-and-you-miss-it, I really couldn’t understand how on earth it escalated the way it did. I still can’t. That the “facts not feelings” crowd got so butt-hurt by someone gently suggesting that they don’t approach women alone in elevators in the early hours of the morning at a conference where that woman had given a talk earlier that day where she’s specifically said she doesn’t like getting propositioned by men at conferences never fails to baffle me. It just felt like a group of men who were uncomfortable with the movement getting more diverse and not holding them in as high a regard as they felt they deserved jumped on the first thing they could and continue to make hay with it to this day.
@7 coffeecups: It’s a very slippery thing because the term alt right is rarely used precisely and has shifted in meaning more then once despite being a recent word. The term was originally coined for atheist hard right. This largely happened because there are more active people willing to admit to being atheists. However, the term immediately spread to far wider usage covering most new right wing movements, particularly those focused on recruiting. The focus on active recruiting probably did bring over some people from skeptic movements.
The whole association with atheism was dropped fairly quickly. The right wing in the US is too tied to right wing Christianity for any group to become widespread that doesn’t allow Christian members. As they became more directly active it evolved further to become largely American fascism. The original alt right had intentional aimed for deceptive names and methods for recruiting but as street level fascism it was too blatant for that. This low level fascism is what the term is most strongly associated with now.
@14
I think religion is just as strong today as it was 20 years ago. Maybe moreso: see the 10 Commandments in schools and the makeup of the Supreme Court.
The leaders of “New Atheism” now also have their own pseudo-religion with (as Katy Montgomerie would say) “magical sexed souls.”
I think there are degrees of rightward shift amongst atheists if they didn’t actually start there. James Lindsay’s neo-McCarthyism where he’s perpetually connecting the dots between Marxism, pomo, critical theory, and oddball tangents like George Soros’ (red-flag) reflexivity and Teilhardian progressive evolution (yeah WTF?) is an extreme example. Alongside him is Peter Boghossian who recently did a version of street epistemology that was titled “Is it ok for Haitians to eat the cats?”. Not “Is it ok for people to presume Haitians are eating pets in the US?”. His sidekick Reid Nicewonder is a prominent street epistemologist. Not a good optic for that offshoot of New Atheism unless they want to be perceived as part of the atheist right.
And when he’s not obsessed with Israel, Jerry Coyne is exploring right wing talking points and tilting at windmills of wokeism. He likes The Free Press, Chris Rufo, and Andrew Sullivan amongst others. There are some right-wingers in his comments section and they never get mysteriously disappeared. One oddball there is obviously drinking the James Lindsay flavored powder drink. Used to go by Thyroid Planet. He replies with esoteric stuff only people who spend hours mesmerized by New Discourses videos could decipher. Sad. There may be some partisans from the Elevatorgate wars who poke their head in when the Two Minutes Hate against PZ happens. Funny thing is Coyne often feigns being of the left. Also he’s a classical liberal whatever that may mean.
A popular Youtube channel that hosts Dawkins, Eric Weinstein, Sam Harris etc is of course Triggernometry. I tired of hate-watching it. I’d say they tend rightward. There’s a right-leaning atheist ecosystem. Debate me bros.
As for Four Horsemen, Hitchens went kinda neocon over the Iraq war though he was on the left. His stated views on Israel were more aligned with the Israel critical (perhaps anti-Zionist) Left. I mean he contributed an essay here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaming_the_Victims
…and he’s pretty reasonable in his criticism of Israel in Hitch-22. I bring Hitch into this as a potential backfire if Hitch osculator Coyne decides to link this blog post as another attempted slam on PZ. Bring it!
Some of them also claim to be “cultural xians”. Richard Dawkins is one of them.
They embrace all the hate and white male privilege of xianity and reject the magical Sky Fairy part.
One of the drivers in the fall in membership of US xianity was the discovery that you can hate and be a horrible person without having to go to church on Sunday.
I don’t think you have anything to feel guilty about PZ.
Joining up with other atheists to combat creationists who try to dictate that their religion should be taught as science is a worthy cause.
Just imagine what would have happened if Dickhead Dawkins had not led the team slymepit, pro male supremacy bros. He wrote Dear Muslima, and that was the actual reason for the schisms and the endless flame wars that followed.
And now we are here.
This showed up in my Youtube feed today and was worth watching. AronRa gets real about what has been a long running story arc now reaching its nadir for us:
Someone else who isn’t on the atheist right, and Coyne despises his wokeness, is Hemant Mehta. He’s been focusing on the church-state stuff— that we will soon be noticing rise to the forefront— for years.
IMHO elevator-gate is basically “How dare a [rhymes with witch] say I made them uncomfortable when I was being nice!” It’s on par with a bully complaining how the nerd “got him in trouble” by reporting him to the principal.
The theocrats think if they manage to takeover the country, it will be the same World-dominating country, but under their control and paying riches to them. They don’t realize that if they succeed this country will be as rich as North Korea and as bountiful as Afghanistan, exactly for the same reasons that those countries are what they are.
Hemidactylus @22: Wow, I don’t remember the last time I saw anything from AronRa. Got to have been over a decade ago.
#16 I had really similar experience. I think I saw the video before and then heard about this awful man hating person saying this hateful thing and it took me quite while to get that they were referring back to Rebecca. Had to re watch it again just to be sure but it ended up being one of those moments I fell off new Atheism. Noted that if they feel no quilt of going these lengths just to smear and be dishonest of “one of our own”, how could we trust their word over someone who is outsider. And that many were willing to take them by their word even if the video was up and anyone could check if it were as bad as it was made out to be.
I tried to mingle with local sceptic community but quickly cut my losses after seeing that they had openly MGTOW person in the board and no-one seemed it to be a thing worth discussing over.
That saying simply “guys don’t do that” can get this big of a reaction and stillhave lingering echoes and results really si staggering..
@ 25. microraptor : Didn’t Aron Ra used to have a blog on FTB or am getting confused here?
[StevoR, “Ace of Clades” was the blog name here. A decade ago and more, now]
@ ^ John Morales : Thanks.
I don’t think this “ex-Democrat” was reacting to anything Rebecca actually said — all she did was tell guys (in general) not to do a certain thing women found creepy. I’m pretty sure he was reacting to what other loony offended men were CLAIMING she’d said, which was far worse than anything she’d really ever said — and far more widely propagated even before Dick to the Dawks amplified all the bullshit to 11.