Which do I dislike more, Encyclopedia Dramatica or Johnny Monsarrat?

Hey, y’all remember the Secular Policy Institute? The dodgy atheist organization that was formed when Edwina Rogers got fired from the Secular Coalition of America, and immediately signed up some big names like Dawkins & Harris & Shermer & Pinker & Boghossian &tc, who shortly afterwards all fled the organization? No? Maybe this photo will trigger your memory, or your gag reflex:

Yikes, but that was one atheist shit-show I wish I could forget. In addition to the desperate reaching to grab the Usual Suspects, there was another individual I’d never heard of, who was busily working hard to alienate other organizations, and also didn’t like me (but I’m so loveable!). This individual had a prominent role in the SPI, and was also working for the Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

That person was Johnny Monsarrat.

I know. Who? Never heard of him. But apparently he was going to be a new mover and shaker in the world of atheism He wasn’t. This was several years ago, and he’s more or less vanished from the scene, in part because of odd crackpot crapola in his history, like this:

Reader Jason sent over a blog post that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, following the story through a variety of twists and turns. The key player in the story is Jonathan Monsarrat, who among other things founded the video game company Turbine (Asheron’s Call, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, etc.). In early 2010, Monsarrat was arrested concerning events at a party in Massachusetts. The charges against him were later dismissed. However, there were various blog discussions among local bloggers and commenters. Not long ago, approximately three years after all of this happened, Monsarrat sued two named defendants and 100 “John Does” in a Massachusetts (not federal) court on a variety of charges, centering around defamation, but also including copyright infringement, commercial disparagement, deceptive trade practices and conspiracy. He’s asking for an astounding $5.5 million.

He’s one of those obnoxious people who flings around lawsuits when people say mean things about him, which, unfortunately, seems to be a common affliction within the atheist community. In this case, he tried to sue people who wrote about his rather tacky behavior and arrest record.

Upon arriving at the scene, police found broken beer bottles near the door of the first floor of the apartment and 25-30 teenagers inside. Many were attempting to conceal bottles of beer and other alcoholic beverages, the police report states. Open bottles of alcohol were found in the kitchen area as well as a small amount of marijuana.

Monsarrat identified himself as the host of the party, but denied that any alcohol was being served, the report states. When asked by an officer to inform his guests that the party was ending, Monsarrat became “argumentative” and refused to follow instructions, police said. Officers asked for identification from several partygoers who responded, “We’re in high school, we don’t have ID.”

So what we have is a fellow who is very full of himself and likes to file frivolous lawsuits who managed to get himself associated with some major players in atheism. He has a reputation as a copyright troll who brings on lawsuits with extravagant demands — basically, he’s a legal extortionist. And now he’s up to his old tricks again.

He’s suing Encyclopedia Dramatica for $750,000.

I detest and despise Encyclopedia Dramatica. It’s a kind ugly amalgam of 4chan Lite, fake news, and generic hate, a wiki for 12 year olds who want an outlet for puerile slurs. They even have a page about me with fake quotes and dishonest characterizations, so I owe them no fondness.

But here’s the thing: I don’t care. There are lots of sites filled with what they consider amusing lies, and no one in their right mind is going to cite Encyclopedia Dramatica as a source for anything — any claim made there is immediately tainted by juvenalia and their disregard for the truth. But I also have no patience for wankers who file SLAPP suits, having been a target for this shit myself.

I can’t quite bring myself to donate to their legal fund — it’s one of those sites that would improve the internet with its disappearance — but I also can’t condone this attempt to extort it out of existence, as a general principle. So I’ll just mention here that yes, you could hold your nose and donate to their legal defense fund, if for no other reason than that Monsarrat is a walking talking chancre.

Ugh. Feel so unclean now.

How much teleology and reductive stereotyping can you cram into a TED talk?

This is awful, but with good intent. Man has a child who is gay; he’s accepting and positive, so good on him for that, but he immediately goes on a quest to figure out why this has happened to him, and assembles a hodge-podge of specious rationalizations for why gay people exist. I just wanted to yell “Stop!” and say that if you accept your child for who they are, you don’t need to find a scientific justification for their life. Especially not when all he’s got is a positive bias and a collection of weak correlation studies.

Good grief. Here are some bits that made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

If this were a genetic error, natural selection should have long ago culled this from the gene pool.

This is simply false. Lots of genetic errors persist and accumulate, and the existence of a trait is poor prima facie evidence that it is adaptive. You’re looking at a prime example of the Panglossian fallacy.

About 20% of women never have children in their life, and that percentage is growing. It’s not being culled. Reproduction is not destiny. People can choose to be childless, and for some things, the mindless reductive assignment of fitness values is irrelevant.

Homosexuality is genetically programmed altruism. Gays were designed by nature to help us be kind to one another

Got that, homosexual people? You have a purpose, to be nice to all of the straights so that they can have more kids. You were designed by nature to be kind, so every time you are assertive or rude or aggressive, you are betraying the universe. Stonewall was contrary to your role in society.

I get where he’s coming from. He likes his gay son, and characterizes him as having “magnetism and charming wit”, but he can’t seem to accept that that is the way his kid is, and instead characterizes this behavior as something intrinsic to gayness. There are, apparently, no asocial or surly gay people.

So he talks about gay genes (or “male loving genes” on the X chromosome) and handwaves to justify all kinds of genetic associations. He also latches on the buzzword du jour, epigenetics, and turns that into an argument about intent.

Epigenetics chooses from among these [genetic programs] to determine which version of you is actually the best fit to the environment

Yikes. Substitute “god” for “epigenetics” and the teleology is more apparent, but it’s the same thing. Now epigenetics is an entity making decisions for you, and it always knows best.

And then there’s this stream of nonsense…

Nature devised homosexuality as a prescription for birth control

How does that work? An all-knowing Nature looks ahead and sees that your population is growing too fast, so as an alternative to making your generation stop breeding, it sterilizes the next generation? This is bad evolutionary biology. The rationale is nonsensical, too: you see, Nature is worried that your family might get too large, so it flips epigenetic switches on some of your kids so that they won’t produce grandchildren.

This one will not be overburdening the clan with yet more mouths to feed in the next generation

Aaaargh. Well, gosh, if Nature has a plan for your clan, what’s with the fidgeting around and making gay mouths to overburden you right now? Why not just go straight to spontaneous abortion? Oh, it’s because gay people are nicer.

He’s not going to be killing his brother in a fight over who gets the girl

Why would you expect that heterosexual children would kill each other over mates? Why would you expect that homosexual children would be free of jealousy and conflict? I have two brothers, and I never felt the urge to kill them for their women (they’re still alive, I didn’t murder them, so you can ask them). I’ve known gay people who were real assholes; there are gay people who voted for Trump. They’re not paragons, they’re human beings, with all the attributes of complicated individuals.

But I have to save the worst for last. This guy who believes in the extreme power of natural selection to optimize human populations for survival doesn’t like the idea of a “struggle for existence”, which is OK, Darwin didn’t much care for that phrase or “survival of the fittest” either. But then he substitutes a different misleading phrase: a snuggle for existence.

Cue projectile vomiting. Oh, look, it’s rainbow-colored!

Bring back Art Bell

Back in the olden days, you know, the 1990s, we would entertain ourselves by listening to Art Bell broadcasting weird conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific nonsense from his double-wide in Pahrump, Nevada, and we would laugh and laugh and mock him on Usenet. Bell seems pretty benign now, since he’s been basically replaced by the vicious kook, Alex Jones, who also has the ear of the president, unlike dotty ol’ Art Bell. Jones is enabling some ghastly stuff, like this discussion with Robert David Steele. Steele is an ex-CIA guy who now promotes something called Open Source Intelligence, which to my inexperienced brain sounds reasonable…but then he brings along all this other wacky baggage. Here’s Steele and Alex Jones having a flaky conversation.

This is totally bonkers. I think they’re talking about PizzaGate kinds of crap, where right-wingers see pedophiles everywhere, while somehow being unable to show any victims. (Meanwhile, real, known child victims of the Newtown murders get called “actors” and the killings are called a “false flag” operation. It makes no sense.)

AJ: He said Hunter S. Thompson wasa about to expose pedophile rings and things, and then it was disinfo against him, out of the pedophile rings, because he was writing about it. Let’s see what Robert David Steele has to say. Go ahead.

RDS: I agree with that and let me just point out that pedophilia does not stop with sodomizing children. It goes straight into terrorizing them to adrenalize their blood, and then murdering them. It also includes murdering them so that they can have their bone marrow harvested, as well as body parts. Pedophilia is much…

AJ: This is the original growth hormone.

Steele seems to think a lot about sodomizing children, murdering them, and extracting their organs. Adrenalin, by the way, is not a growth hormone.

It gets weirder, if less grisly.

RDS: Yes. It’s an anti-aging thing, and this might strike your listeners as way out but we actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20 year ride. So that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony. There’s all kinds of…

But why? Why do you need to ship kids out to a non-existent Mars colony to set up a pedophilia ring, when there are plenty of perfectly good pizza parlor basements here on Earth? Why would you spend as much money and effort as would be required to build a colony on Mars simply to set up a bone-marrow harvesting operation? Was Peter Thiel behind this?

Also, if it’s a 20 year ride — which is kind of slow for travel to Mars — wouldn’t they no longer be kids on arrival? If they’re 20+ years old, it’s no longer a pedophilia ring. The pervs will be so disappointed.

AJ: Look, I know that 90 percent of the NASA missions are secret and I’ve been told by high level NASA engineers that you have no idea, there is so much stuff going on. But then it goes off into all that, that’s the kind of thing media jumps on. But I know this: we see a bunch of mechanical wreckage on Mars and people say, “Oh look, it looks like mechanics.” They go, “Oh, you’re a conspiracy theorist.” Clearly they don’t want us looking into what is happening. Every time probes go over they turn them off.

But we don’t see a bunch of mechanical wreckage on Mars…oh, wait. It’s because they turn off the probes. But then, how does Alex Jones know about it?

You can skip the next part, it’s boring economic crapola. I include it just for completeness’ sake, and because, really, look at this conversation — it’s a pair of flibbertigibbets babbling all over the place. One moment they’re talking about raping and butchering children like Elizabeth Báthory, and then it’s off to Mars, and then it’s a conspiracy theory about secret wreckage on Mars, and now it’s about schemes for taxing people. Focus, Alex!

RDS: Alex, you’re one of the most original guys on the air, and you asked what should you do. I think you should be the truth channel in America. And I think you should try to systematically put guests on that Donald Trump is not listening to because they’re being blocked from him. For example, Carl Denninger, co-founder of the Tea Party. He should be a guest on your show talking about how the Trump health plan, the Ryan health plan, is completely dishonest because it doesn’t have a price list and it doesn’t allow the government to negotiate with the companies. You should have Edward Feige, the inventor of the automated payment transaction tax, that would eliminate all taxes including the income taxes on people like you and me, and it would tax currency and stock transactions

AJ: Is that the Tobin tax?

RDS: I don’t think so. It’s similar. It’s a tiny fractional tax on every transaction, including internal corporate transactions where a lot of money laundering goes on.

Trust Alex Jones to bring back the outlandish nonsense.

AJ: Sure. Well I don’t know about Mars bases, but I know they’ve created massive, thousands of different types of chimeras that are alien lifeforms on this earth now.

Oh god. The chimera obsession again. He needs to stop worrying, we’re too busy populating Mars with chimeras to be letting them run loose here.

I can’t listen to Alex Jones for long — he’s just too unhinged and dangerously delusional. We need to bring back bonkers radio that wasn’t openly evil, ’cause this shit ain’t it.

Yet our president listens to Alex Jones. That puts all those “fake news!” claims in perspective.

NASA has officially denied having slave colonies on Mars. But then they would, wouldn’t they?

What’s the difference between “wellness” and “health”?

I don’t know. The former seems to be a profitable buzzword for charlatans.

Four decades later, wellness is not only a word you hear every day; it’s a global industry worth billions — one that includes wellness tourism, alternative medicine, and anti-aging treatments. The competition for a hunk of that market is intense: In Manhattan, two for-profit meditation studios are vying to become the SoulCycle of meditation, and Saks Fifth Avenue has temporarily converted its second floor into a “Wellery,” where you can experience aroma and light therapy in a glass booth filled with salt, or get plugged into a meditation app during a manicure. Every giant corporation has a wellness program: yoga at Goldman Sachs, communal sleep logs at JPMorgan Chase. A new magazine has debuted out on Long Island this summer, Hamptons Purist. (“Look around the city,” says its editor, Cristina Greeven, who came up with the idea on a surfboard in Costa Rica: “It used to be a butcher, a baker, and a hardware store. Now it’s SoulCycle, Juice Press, and a meditation place.”) It will have to compete with the Goop magazine, to be edited by Paltrow and published by Condé Nast, which this spring also announced the launch of Condé Nast Pharma, a division that offers “brand-safe” wellness-based content to pharmaceutical advertisers. The advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi has its own wellness division, capitalizing on “women’s unmet wellness needs” in the marketplace.

Wait, a “wellery”? This bullshit has really gone too far.

I think what “wellness” is about is selling a need — your chakras are out of alignment, you need to fix them. Gluten is poisoning you, you need more quinoa. You’re getting older, you need to stuff this random thing up your vagina. The Martians are trying to control your mind, you need to wear this lead-lined beanie. All those magazines aren’t about helping you, they’re about telling you what’s wrong with you, and then selling a non-solution to the problem they’ve just imagined.

It’s very profitable, though!

“It’s been overwhelming,” says Ashley Lewis, senior director of wellness at Goop. “We sold over $100,000 worth of vitamins on day one, and that trajectory has just continued.”

The best advice comes from the author’s doctor.

My lovely, thorough, and smart GP says every year at my annual checkup: Please tell me you’re not taking any supplements. At best, she says, you’re doing no harm, you’re just giving yourself some very expensive pee.

Existential Comics tackles Scientism

This is terrible. I’m supposed to be on the side of the atheists, but I can’t help but agree that the philosophers have it right. In this comic, it’s Hannah Arendt (in gray), Mary Wollstonecraft (green dress), and Simone de Beauvoir (red scarf) vs. Sam Harris. Simone Weil and Elizabeth Anscombe help take on Richard Dawkins and Neil de Grasse Tyson in other parts.

The commentary is scathing, too.

“Scientism” is the position that Science can solve all problems, or that all problems are empirical. Philosophically, it is mostly associated with the strongest statements made by the logical positivism movement, which mostly died out in the mid 20th century. Culturally, however, it is stronger than ever, and is closely tied to movements like the so-called “New Atheists”. These newer, more naive forms of Scientism, also have a strong tendency to call philosophy “a big waste of time”, “pointless arguing”, “nothing but semantics”, etc. Rhetorically, they tend to say that non-empirical ideas have no way to guarantee they are true, so are pointless to talk about. This is a rather ridiculous point to make, since their entire movement is based around spreading a certain set of non-empirical, philosophical norms, which they apparently don’t feel it necessary to open up to criticism. What they mostly seem to mean is, assuming everyone agrees with us on the important philosophic questions, such as atheism, utilitarianism, capitalism, eliminative materialism, etc., then we don’t need anything but science. Well, this is a maybe true in a strange way, insofar that if everyone agreed on every philosophical position, i.e. if philosophy was solved, then we probably wouldn’t need philosophy. Philosophy, however, has not been solved. Furthermore, if it is going to be solved, it certainly won’t be solved by a bunch of people who don’t even read or engage in philosophy. The real goal is often just to draw a border around what we should or shouldn’t question, because they don’t want any of the fundamental aspects of society to change. And, well, people who don’t want society to change often also find themselves not wanting people to even think about changing society.

This is, of course, a deeply conservative position, and reflects the politics of the people who make this sort of claim. In a lot of ways “New Atheism” is just a political movement that is attempting to secularize conservatism (in particular, it seems, the foreign policy doctrine that the United States and Europe should be “exporting” their culture overseas, i.e. governing the Earth). People who want to change society in a fundamental way, not just improve the efficiency and technology within society, seldom use this kind of anti-intellectual rhetoric. For example, Mary Wollstonecraft, in the 1700s, was trying to convince people to allow women to be educated in the same manner as men. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that science or technology alone aren’t going to solve this kind of problem. People wanting to make comparable changes today also aren’t going to be fooled into thinking that all we need is more advanced technology, or to understand atoms better or something. Somewhat amusingly (or actually probably not that amusingly), people like Richard Dawkins, when attacked for their conservative views, will sometimes try to defend themselves by saying that they actually are feminists, or whatever. But, of course, when you get down to their views and actions, it’s obvious that what they mean by “feminism” is “gender equality was already achieved a few decades ago, so everyone needs to stop complaining about it.” Sam Harris, for instance, when asked why there were so few women in the “New Atheism” movement, had this to say:

There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women. The atheist variable just has this- it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.

The “critical posture”, of course, means “people who agree with Sam Harris”. Someone who doesn’t find it necessary to read a book about a topic before writing a book on that topic can hardly be said to have a “critical posture”.

The New Atheism is a “deeply conservative position” — but not for all of us. Unfortunately, those of us who want the New Atheism to be a progressive force are being rapidly squeezed out.

So it goes.

Welcoming the deep rifts!

Clementine Ford has published a book, Fight Like A Girl, and has written a number of columns like this one, It’s time we demanded more from boys, for all our sakes, to promote her next one, Boys Will Be Boys, that universal phrase used to excuse vile behavior. In that essay, she writes about some high school football players who anally raped an intellectually disabled 17-year-old African American boy with a coathanger and made him sing a song about lynching black people, and who then got off with probation.

For orchestrating this crime, Howard was sentenced to three years’ probation and 300 hours of community service. In his sentencing remarks, district judge Randy J. Stoker stated the attack was not, in his opinion, racially or sexually motivated.

This is a real problem Ford is describing. The judge let them off, and citizens of the town excused their behavior. How can you excuse anal rape? That’s just what boys do.

They’re 15-, 16-, 17-year-old boys who are doing what boys do … I would guarantee that those boys had no criminal intent to do anything or any harm to anyone. Boys are boys and sometimes they get carried away.

I was once a 15-, 16-, 17-year-old boy. I was never even tempted to sexually assault other boys, black, handicapped, or not. I think I rather resent this idea that because of my sex, I am predisposed to viciously and violently carry out sexual attacks on others, and I think I’m going to have to side with Clementine Ford on the fact that this attitude does a disservice to boys.

But having that attitude is apparently beneficial to a lot of Australians, because they’re very upset that Ford is going to be a speaker at the Atheist Foundation of Australia‘s Global Atheist Convention in 2018. I’m glad she’s speaking there — atheists need that kind of wake-up call — but wow, you should see all the hatred for Ford sweeping out of Facebook and YouTube right now. How dare she confront male privilege and chastise not just bad actors, but also all the people who make excuses for them, people like…the people hating on Ford.

So, the anti-feminists have launched a campaign to boycott a bookstore stocking her book (they seem not to have decided to campaign against either atheism or Amazon, though), and are trying to fill the AFA’s facebook page with threats of violence.

Just on 10% of all comments (that have been also deleted) have included threats of physical violence by men against not just Clementine Ford but other women here. These have included suggestions of being raped and having throats slit, a women told to ‘sit on a knife’, called whores and sluts, retards and so on.

Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. But hey, as one person made note. The women here deserved the threats because they were feminists.

Wait, aren’t these the same people who usually howl about free speech and hate deplatforming and other such sins? Never mind…it’s OK, because they’re feminists.

The title of the 2018 Global Atheist Convention is “Reason to Hope”. I don’t see much reason to hope in the misogyny sector of atheism, but elsewhere I do — in particular, that the anti-feminists have become so cartoonishly villainous and stupid that maybe more people will understand why they are pariahs. The anti-feminist atheists were furious in their attacks on Atheism+, as they are now on Clementine Ford, but I think what they’ve accomplished is to drive much of mainstream atheism away and create little ghettos of hatred for themselves. Congratulations to them on successfully establishing Atheism–!

Big Wooden Box gets snazzy video treatment

I was asked by Paulogia to say a few words about Answers in Genesis’s news story about my visit to the Big Wooden Box* in Kentucky. I think I said more than a few, because it turned into a half-hour complaint which he then made entertaining by turning me into a cartoon, and by adding lots of videos made by others of the interior of the Big Wooden Box. You should watch it.

*They really hate it when you call it the Big Wooden Box rather than Noah’s Ark. So guess what I’m going to call it from now on?

Which speech do you choose to defend, and which do you choose to shut down?

This is a fantastically good video by ContraPoints on free speech. It’s basically a dissection of what “free speech” actually means, showing how absurd the free speech absolutists are, and how appreciating the complexity of the issue is mangled by the right wing into claims that “the left hates free speech!”

The left doesn’t hate free speech. We kinda hate the cartoon version of free speech touted by right-wingers, but as ContraPoints explains, we do understand the concept very well, and probably better than they do: it protects the right of the speaker to express a controversial position as well as of the audience to hear it, and it’s actually strengthens defensible positions by exercising their defense. Minority positions need special protection because they are marginal, we have a duty to protect them from the tyranny of the majority.

ContraPoints agrees with all that. So do I. But we also recognize that a cacophony of loudly shouted views is not practical, and that giving everyone bullhorns does not protect anyone’s right to be heard. It’s a difficult balancing act. You need moderation for free speech to work. There are inherent contradictions and incompatibilities that make it impossible to be truly neutral on speech.

For example, social norms can have a silencing effect. The right-wingers are fond of complaining that calling them “racist” or “misogynist” hurts them terribly, is unfair and unkind, etc., etc., etc. But then what about expressions of racism and misogyny on the internet? Don’t you have to agree that those must also have a silencing effect?

Well, the reply goes, that’s just the hurly-burly nature of the internet. Just deal with it. You can’t change it (translation: we don’t want to change that part of it, we just want to change the part that lets you call us racists). It says a lot about these free speech absolutists in whose speech they rush to defend and promote and who they tell to take the abuse and get over it. Somehow, saying that “it is the nature of universities to promote more tolerant exploration of ideas than the shit-raging of Milo Yiannopoulos” is not accepted as an excuse by these same people.

We see a great deal of hypocrisy on this matter from the right. This video skewers Christopher Hitchens rather effectively, I think, and is maybe a little too generous to Dave Rubin, who is one of the louder proponents of alt-right bullshit while cloaking himself under the mantle of rationalism and free speech. Somehow that rationalism always expresses itself in cheerleading for racism and misogyny, but hey, that’s the hurly-burly nature of the internet.

I can think of other examples of this double standard, too: Bill Maher comes to mind. Sam Harris. Another recent instance is Carl Benjamin, proud defender of liberty, who gets called a “garbage human” by Anita Sarkeesian and is so crushed by an insult that he immediately whips around and petitions a conference to kick her off a panel. FREEDOM! Freedom for me, just not for you.

An even more cogent example: this video was temporarily taken down by a flood of complaints to YouTube by those same people who are so vocal about their inviolable right to express themselves however they want (or possibly by Hitchens idolators, who infest both atheism and YouTube, oblivious to the contradiction in that). I guess they just wanted to prove ContraPoints‘ point.

A bad Xian movie that I missed?

Mike Huckabee has been sued for illegally robocalling to plug his movie. It doesn’t surprise me that he’s a venal little spammer, but I guess he was also an ineffective spammer, because this was the first I even heard of his movie. I had to look it up. It was called Last Ounce of Courage, and you’ll never guess what it’s about.

Well, maybe you can. Imagine the most hackneyed plot of every Christian movie ever (you got it: Christians are persecuted!), and then imagine the most trivial, non-existent slight to Christianity ever (I bet you already guessed the War on Christmas), and then put them together. You got it! It takes the last ounce of courage for these feeble Christians to say the words “Merry Christmas” in the face of all these ferocious atheists who deny them that right.

Apparently, it tanked hard. I guess I’ll have to watch it in order to make fun of it once it comes to Netflix (I ain’t paying for it, that’s for sure.)