Karen Stollznow needs your help

Karen Stollznow has started a defense fund to help her fight off the legal harassment she faces right now. Time to donate!

My name is Karen Stollznow. I am an author and researcher with a PhD in Linguistics. In recent months, I wrote an article for a Scientific American Mind blog in which I spoke out about sexual harassment I’d endured from a male colleague for several years. I did this to highlight the wide problem of sexual harassment in the workplace for women, including those in scientific and academic fields. Many people who read the article immediately identified my harasser by name, and spoke publicly about my situation on their own blogs and other social media. They knew who my harasser was because he had recently been disciplined by his employer for his behavior.

As a result, my harasser filed a defamation suit against me, trying to bully me into silence. Although he’s spent thousands of dollars on a lawyer to clear his name, he knew that I could not afford the same. In my attempts to settle out of court he has tried to bully me into signing a retraction, which claimed that I had lied about the whole ordeal, including his ongoing harassment of me, and assaults at one of our professional conferences. Although I didn’t sign the retraction, he posted the document on his very public Facebook page and announced victory over me. This also lead to false public edits being made to my Wikipedia page.

I never lied about the harassment I endured and I have evidence and witnesses to attest to my experiences. The only crime I have committed is not being rich enough to defend myself. If you believe in justice and in protecting victims who are bullied into silence, please dig deep and help support this legal fund. I must raise $30,000 in the next two weeks in order to find legal counsel to fight these allegations and clear my own name. If my harasser succeeds in bullying me into silence, it will only serve to embolden harassers, and teach victims that they should never speak up, lest it ruin their lives.

Any money raised through this campaign that is not spent on these legal expenses will be donated to Colorado’s Sexual Assault Victim Advocate Center.

Thank you for listening to my story, and please give as you can. To contact me about this fundraising campaign, email stollznowlegaldefense@gmail.com.

You know what’s really tragic about this? She’s trying to end the harassment, and you just know that asking for help will make the harassers redouble their efforts.

Karen Stollznow has a new book coming out soon

Now this looks interesting: God Bless America: Strange and Unusual Religious Beliefs and Practices in the United States.

God Bless America lifts the veil on strange and unusual religious beliefs and practices in the modern-day United States. Do Satanists really sacrifice babies? Do exorcisms involve swearing and spinning heads? Are the Amish allowed to drive cars and use computers? Offering a close look at snake handling, new age spirituality, Santeria spells, and satanic rituals, this book offers more than mere armchair research. It takes you to an exorcism, a Charismatic church and a Fundamentalist Mormon polygamist compound. You will sit among the beards and bonnets in a Mennonite church, hear the sounds of silence at a Quaker meeting, and listen to L. Ron Hubbard’s sci-fi stories told as sermons during a Scientology service. From the Amish to Voodoo, the beliefs and practices explored in this book may be unorthodox, and often dangerous, but they are always fascinating. Some of them are dying out, while others are gaining popularity with a modern audience, but all offer insight into the past, present and future of religion in the United States.

My only question would be…are there religious beliefs that aren’t strange and unusual?

This book is full of nasty words

I find I’m only able to read it in short bursts, so it’s taken me a while to finish it. Stollznow’s On the Offensive: Prejudice in Language Past and Present is a catalog of slurs. It’s fascinating, but every page is basically, here’s a hurtful horrible word. Here’s where it came from. Here’s why it’s so awful. Here’s the context where it’s sometimes used in a non-awful way. So sure, you’ll get a few pages of thoughtful discussion of the various permutations of the n-word, which is useful to know, but it’s sort of exhausting as well.

It’s organized by category, so it’s easy to get your surfeit of racism on one day, and sexism the next, and ableism after that. The chapter on ageism was personally useful, at least. It provides a guide in how to address me.

Elderly person and elderly people are commonly used as polite terms. As a noun, elder has positive connotations and suggests seniority rather than being old. The word implies a sense of dignity and respect, and even power, influence, and authority, in phrases such as our elders and betters, elders of the tribe, the village elder, and elder brethren. (Ironically, in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, elder is the lowest ranking in the priesthood and typically refers to younger men.) In early English, elder was the comparative of old, while eldest was the superlative form (i.e., old, elder, eldest), so elder was equivalent to modern day older. The comparative adjectives older and elder are generally perceived as more polite than the unmarked adjectives old or elderly. While elder has retained positive connotations, elderly has now acquired ageist associations. Older is relative; everyone is older than someone else, so it has become the preferred term that is used in phrases such as older person, older people, older adults, or older Americans, as a general descriptor for people in later life.

Unfortunately, I lived in Salt Lake City for too long, and the Mormons, as usual, ruined everything. “Elder Myers” is a name that would be embossed on a plastic tag over the pocket of a starched white shirt on a beardless guy wearing a black tie, not me. I guess you’re just going to have to address me as that cranky geezer.

Oh, hey, geezer isn’t in the book, but silly old fart is.

Are you looking for spooky stories to tell tonight?

Karen Stollznow has written some and is selling them on Amazon. These are variations on the kinds of modern myths you may have heard as a skeptic many times, but they all have slight twists, which means we’ll probably be hearing these as True Facts™ sometime. Don’t Leave Me, Unforeseen Circumstances, Welcome Home, I Am Me, and The Dark Road are all available on Kindle right now. Download and read them at the Halloween party tonight! They’re all short stories and perfect for a creepy session around the fireplace.

I guess I can kiss my wikipedia page goodbye

Another of the casualties of the various schisms within skepticism and atheism speaks out. Hayley Stevens has long been exasperated with movement skepticism, and she explains why.

Nothing is ever going to change because Skepticism has several large problems that it will fail to ever address effectively:

  1. the movement often allows irrational people to be elevated to positions of power from which they’re almost untouchable when it comes to criticism
  2. the skeptic movement is full of creepy men who don’t know how to behave appropriately around other people and they won’t go away.
  3. the skeptic movement is full of the kind of people who support these bad people unquestioningly.
  4. the skeptic movement is full of echo-chambers in which specific versions of truth are created and from which any information that counters this is shot down and, sometimes, even censored.

That first problem is a common one in new institutions. The skill set to be a good charismatic public representative rarely involves the skill set that is required to be a good, fair manager. Most college professors, myself included, would be totally incompetent in the role of university chancellor…but academia at least has a career path through administration that leads to better training in administrative roles. If you’re a skeptic/atheist who writes a best-selling book, presto, you’re the head of a foundation. That’s often a recipe for catastrophe.

Her second point is true of everything. I can’t single out skepticism for that at all…although the habit of these movements in promoting people well above their competence means the creepy guys get power and never learn to restrain themselves.

The third point…oh, boy is that true. Take a look at the promotional materials for far too many cons and presentations: all any impresario has to do is make a poster with the name of one of the handful of popular speakers in a gigantic bold font, with the date, time, and place below, and the audience will appear. They don’t even care what he (note: they’re all “he”) will say, what the purpose of the talk is about, what issues will be discussed. It doesn’t even need a title anymore. Lesser beings within the movement still have to announce a subject for their talks, but we’ve built a movement around personalities rather than ideas lately.

As for the fourth point, Stevens expands on it herself.

That final point is why I started this article by mentioning Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia — the self-appointed information masters of Wikipedia who operate from within a private internet forum and seem to focus on two things:

  1. working exhaustively to edit paranormal/supernatural related articles
  2. working exhaustively to edit the Wikipedia profiles of Skeptic celebrities, including people who are terrible people and criminals.

It is my opinion that their brand of skepticism is not the good kind. Recently, the Centre for Inquiry (CFI) appointed the head of the ‘Guerrilla Skepticism’ group, Susan Gerbic, as a Fellow which shocked me for a number of reasons. Firstly, because I don’t think Gerbic and her team of editors are very good champions of the skeptic movement. Secondly, when Dr Karen Stollznow spoke out about her experiences of harassment at the hands of a colleague at CFI, Gerbic’s son wore a t-shirt which stated he was on the “team” of the accused, to a lecture that Stollznow was delivering at an event. Secondly, it was Gerbic who added the photo to Wikipedia of Harriett Hall wearing an anti-skepchick t-shirt at TAM.

It’s a good thing to have motivated people monitoring Wikipedia for supernatural nonsense, demanding some empirical rigor in articles. I approve of that. I’m not at all keen on the idea of a group of people who feel it is their mission in life to scrub all the blemishes off of their favorite skeptic celebrities, or worse, to slant articles to favor their preferred regressive skeptics.

For example, the “team” Gerbic’s son favored was “Team Radford” — there was quite a conflict within the movement over Radford’s contemptible behavior towards Karen Stollznow, and his lawsuit to silence her. He’s also been a denialist of the existence of the influence of stereotyping of the sexes, and a champion of the most trivial claims of evolutionary psychology.

But take a look at Radford’s wikipedia page. It’s huge. Every minor accomplishment is a triumph.

Did you know he “solved the mystery of the ‘Santa Fe Courthouse Ghost'”? He debunked the White Witch of Rose Hall! He’s also the world’s foremost expert on the Chupacabra. Yay. These feats of ‘brilliance’ are described at tedious length.

That he’s a serial harasser, that he once posted photos of himself in bed with a woman so he could leverage a lawsuit, that he pressured that woman to surrender and settle a suit in his favor by threatening to hound her through her pregnancy and labor, that he threatened to sue me unless I released evidence of a conspiracy (I did!), that he threatened to sue Rebecca Watson, that he belittles rape statistics, that thinks girls have a biological preference for pink, that he likes to bully four-year-old girls (and loses) — none of that is anywhere in his Wikipedia page. The guy is a toxic mess, but his wiki entry has been buffed to a high gloss.

That kind of willful blindness is one reason I am so over the skeptic movement.

It’s great that we have a dedicated group of watchmen keeping an eye on wikipedia to prevent supernatural crap from leaking in, but who watches the watchmen? They’ve got some strong biases, but they don’t have the discipline to prevent that from dribbling in.

Skepticism will not fix its problems by denying their existence

Nature has a short news piece on the Horgan/NECSS spat. I’ve read several of the rebuttals now, and I’m not impressed: I can agree that Horgan’s talk was kind of scattershot, but let’s not go the other way and pretend that organized skepticism is a happy clappy land where all the issues are objectively evaluated and treated with the weight they deserve. There is a terrifyingly substantial number of skeptics who are rank assholes who hate anyone who introduces the concept of social justice into the organization; they are dominated by us privileged white guys, too.

Anyway, the reporter asked me to comment, and I’ve got teeny-tiny mention in the story (which is appropriate, it’s not about me), but since I sent him a longer argument, and I have a blog, I’m including it here.

Steve is correct that there has been frequent discussion about priorities. What he left out, however, is that the conclusion of such discussion has typically been to shout down anyone who argues that there are major social issues that ought to be on the skeptical slate, like war and racism, as Horgan mentions, and I would also add that feminism has been a hot-button issue. Novella is one of the more open people on these topics, so he sees a more benevolent skepticism than I do. I found the intolerance and narrowness of a great many skeptics so frustratingly oppressive, that I had to simply announce that I would have nothing more to do with the skeptical organizations, and stepped away from them as a waste of effort.

There is a fair amount of diversity in the skeptical movement. There are a substantial number of skeptics who buy into scientific racism, for instance, or are climate change denialists, or even, I’ve discovered, a few who believe in flying saucers. At least those latter people get laughed out of the movement, but the others have been dealt with by largely avoiding the topics, because they would bring on too much dissent. And when they do deal with them, they tread far more carefully than they do when addressing psychics or Bigfoot hunters.

On the other hand, Horgan commits the fallacy of relative privation. Bigfoot and chupacabra are silly topics, but as long as a significant number of people believe in them, they are part of the skeptical purview…and they also represent easy learning exercises, a kind of skepticism with training wheels. It’s just that too often, skeptics think they’re smart enough to dismiss UFOs, and then use that cockiness to also dismiss sexism or racism as equivalent. It makes for a very unpleasant environment for a lot of us.

Another concern that should have been brought up is skepticism’s treatment of women. You should definitely get a few women’s voices in your article. Karen Stollznow has had a less than happy experience with organized skepticism; Rebecca Watson has worked happily with Novella in the past, but has some general grievances with both the skeptical and atheist movements. They can tell you about another problem: that chronic harassers are tolerated and even rewarded within skepticism.

I would hope that rather than pretending all of Horgan’s objections are irrelevant, that the next meeting of NECSS makes an effort to include a few speakers who broaden the range and who gore a few dangerously sacred cows, not just the spavined beasts that make for light entertainment.

A word of warning about Hits & Mrs.

hitsmrs

I’ve read Karen Stollznow’s new book, Hits & Mrs.. It’s fiction, a novel about a skeptical detective. But I need to warn you about two things.

It’s got sex in it. Not the kind of explicit recounting of urological details you’d find in pornography, but the characters are boinking regularly, and enjoying it.

One thing it lacks is reverence for organized skepticism — many skeptics are portrayed as jerks. It’s almost as if the author’s insider familiarity with the skepticism movement has disillusioned her.

Gosh. I imagine every one who reads this site is now horrified and is going to avoid the book.

Always bet on the lawyers to win

It’s a sure thing. Rebecca Watson tallies up the cost of dealing with Ben Radford’s legal blustering — but it’s incomplete. Not just because Radford never lets it end (he settled with Karen Stollznow and signed an agreement that the matter was formally closed and not to be discussed publicly any further…and then started barreling about threatening people about the subject he wasn’t supposed to discuss), but we don’t have the other side of the legal costs. How much has Radford thrown away on his crusade? I hope and suspect that it has been a lot more than anyone else has spent.

I’m confident that his lawyer is a very happy and successful person, at least.

I’ve heard of not-pologies…

chupacabra

But not-lawsuits? You know that Rebecca was asking for help to deal with a not-threat of not-censorship and a not-suit from the non-litigious non-jerk Ben Radford. Now she has posted her amusing response to Radford’s non-demands. So many contradictions! He keeps insisting he has no intention of suing in a cease-and-desist letter that demands that she take down posts she has written.

The biggest contradiction, though, is that this is all after Radford hounded Karen Stollznow into retracting and promising to never ever mention their disagreements ever again…an agreement that Stollznow has been honoring, while Radford keeps stirring the pot and reminding everyone what an asshole he can be.

I don’t think he wanted to bring this affair to a close at all.

Rifts just can’t get deep enough

hls

The myth-making machine is chugging away, full steam ahead. One thing I’ve learned these last few years is that atheists are damned gullible, and all you need is a small number of people repeating the same crap endlessly (and oh, twitter is such a perfect medium for repetition), and there’s a solid chunk of the atheist community that will promptly just believe, because they want to have faith in their leaders.

Case in point: there is a rump of delusional atheists who have faith that a legal document is proof that Ben Radford is not a serial harasser. It’s sad to see. It’s too bad Radford didn’t save a lot of money and spend just $100 on some gold leaf and a sheepskin and get a certificate declaring that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ, because that would have at least gotten those atheists tithing to him.

Do read this clear-headed perspective at Dubito Ergo Sum on the matter if you still believe a civil case cleared out of court is indisputable proof of innocence. You clearly aren’t cynical enough to be a good atheist.

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