The war of the smug

Michael Nugent is a humane and intelligent fellow, and he’s distressed by the rifts that have formed in the atheist community. So he’s written a good set of guidelines for how atheists and skeptics should interact. I have a small problem with one of his suggestions, but otherwise, it’s an excellent and idealistic plan…and unfortunately, one that has already struck the shoals of rabid misogyny.

As he notes, we’ve got a problem with people who are furious that atheists dare to consider sexism and racism to be serious issues that we should deal with now. He takes the side that I knew he would, that these are problems we should address, because secular thinkers should be best equipped to deal with them.

As skeptics we should objectively examine the impacts of social discrimination, and identify the best ways to promote diversity and inclusiveness. By definition, prejudice depends on not having all relevant information, and as skeptics we are ideally suited to develop and promote arguments for inclusiveness and human rights, based on the evidence of the benefits to individuals and society. We could use this research to tackle the emotional and irrational thinking behind racism, sexism, homophobia, and other prejudices and discriminations. It’s at least as interesting a topic as many we discuss, and a more useful topic than most.

I am fully in agreement. This is the necessary job of this generation of atheists and skeptics, to extend our principles to embrace topics of wider social import. Michael is on our side; unfortunately, you can already see the rifts widening. The very first comment on his article is from someone raving about me and my (?) “horde of five-minute-hate skepchicks”, who then goes on to make up a bunch of lies about the recent disagreement with Rationalia. And of course a known slimepit denizen immediately chimes in. So one obstacle is that a contingent has dug in with illiberal, anti-social justice values, and they are quick to howl at any suggestion that they are less than flawless champions of truth and freedom.

Yes, there is a problem here. And the problem lies in people who are affronted at any extension of atheist values to embrace other social values. Which is why I have some reservations about Michael’s first suggestion, that we have to stay focused on atheism and skepticism. Those ideas should be omnipresent, they should inform what we do, but they need to be a foundation, not a final end result.

We’re in the midst of a little civil war, a war with the smug. For so long, it was an accomplishment to be an atheist — we had rejected the dogma of the majority. It’s really something important. And now we’re growing, and we gather in greater and greater numbers, and while it’s great to find ourselves in large groups of people where we don’t have to be defensive about our disbelief, it also becomes obvious that it is not enough. We are all people who have taken that first step towards real intellectual freedom, and some of us like to just stand in wonderment and demand applause for that one step…while others of us are saying, “good, now we can march forward.” And of course that opens up rifts between us, and of course the smug are sitting there incredulous, resentful that we aren’t content just to applaud those who made that first effort, and laud them as heroes. They want a cookie right now just for being atheists.

So on one side we have smug jerks who hate the idea of being progressive, but on the other, on my side, we’re quite ready to cut the troglodytes loose, and we’re quite ready to move on without them. We see the rift forming, and we actually see it as a good thing; as Natalie Reed said on twitter:

I don’t WANT to be allies with ppl who need to be dragged, kicking & screaming, into treating me like a human.

Michael has stepped into the no-man’s land between the raging forces, and it’s a gallant effort. But judging by the comments already on his article, he hasn’t convinced the smug anti-progressives that maybe they should embrace a wider scope for atheism, and he really hasn’t tried yet to convince the people on the other side that maybe the angry sexists and racists and sneering self-satisfied libertarians are worth bringing on board. I’m inclined to say they’re not, until they grow up and change.

But let me say here: Michael Nugent has put up a plea for civil discussion on these matters. Try it. If you comment over there, be polite to the smug reactionaries already commenting; and here on this thread, too, try to avoid being too vicious, as much as you feel the other guys deserve it. Address his suggestions in the same spirit he made them.

How not to respond to a Rethuglican

Ugh. Witness thuggish wingnut James Taranto’s comment on the killings in Colorado.


I hope the girls whose boyfriends died to save them were worthy of the sacrifice.

Perhaps he’d like to judge? Is he going to ask this question of every case where a person puts themselves in harm’s way to defend a loved one? What criterion is he going to use to define “worthy”?

That’s a repulsive sentiment he’s expressing, and seems to reflect a lack of empathy and an inability to imagine any kind of sacrifice without hauling out a ledger sheet to calculate its value. Not nice.

But then I read one of the first comments on the article at dKos highlighting Taranto’s sliminess. And I was ugh’ed out again!

I was prepared for a worthy rant. Apologies, should have known better. If another nitwit does something similar, refer them to Heinlein. Heinlein wrote “anycountry that does not place women and children first” as part of it’s values is a unethical country. (I am paraphrasing.)

Women take nine months to make a baby. Men take minutes. That fact prompted Heinlein’s writing.

Heinlein???!? Jebus, that man was an unrepentant sexist pig himself; I recoiled from his later books when I was 15, because they were too crudely horny and repellently attached to sexist stereotypes. When I was 15, and juiced on testosterone myself! Also, I was even then learning to dislike what would become a typical libertarian mindset.

But to respond to a challenge to women’s worth by declaring the importance of their baby-making abilities…talk about missing the whole point.

Not just Sally Ride

I had never heard of the Women in Space Program before, but apparently, after the Soviets sent Valentina Tereshkova into space, there was actually an effort to train American women as astronauts.

The participants of the Women in Space Program experienced tremendous success. “Nineteen women enrolled in WISP, undergoing the same grueling tests administered to the male Mercury astronauts,” Brandon Keim wrote in 2009. “Thirteen of them — later dubbed the Mercury 13 — passed ‘with no medical reservations,’ a higher graduation rate than the first male class. The top four women scored as highly as any of the men.”

The graduates were Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb, Wally Funk, Irene Leverton, Myrtle “K” Cagle, Jane B. Hart, Gene Nora Stumbough, Jerri Sloan, Rhea Hurrle, Sarah Gorelick, Bernice “B” Trimble Steadman, Jan Dietrich, Marion Dietrich, and Jean Hixson, called the “Mercury 13”.

I never heard of them before. They didn’t go into space, either. What happened?

Well, there were some revoltingly sexist attitudes at NASA.

In fact, one NASA official who declined to give his name to a reporter, said it made him “sick to his stomach” to think of women in space. Another called Tereshkova’s flight “a publicity stunt.”

A few did think of one use for women in space: “improving crew morale”. They nixed that because “such a situation might create interpersonal tensions far more dynamic than the sexual tensions it would release”. Yeah, they went there: the one thing a woman astronaut might be good for is getting her male colleagues off during long space flights.

So they come up with a lovely catch to prevent well-qualified women from joining the space program.

For a short while, it seemed that their quest to fly might advance. In 1962, the women were scheduled to continue testing at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Pensacola, Florida, but NASA declined to support their visit. Without official backing, the Navy canceled the trip. Cobb tried to save the program, flying to Washington and testifying before Congress. But NASA officials, John Glenn among them, told the Congressmen that women couldn’t be astronauts because they hadn’t flown jets, which were only available to the military, which also barred women.

This argument apparently proved persuasive and the Mercury 13 never got another chance to make their case for space, even after Tereshkova’s record-setting flight.

Would you believe I got a comment from a Thunderf00t acolyte on youtube just this morning?

FEMINISM IS A NON ISSUE. WOMEN ALREEEEEEEEADY HAVE EQUAL RIGHTS IN THE WEST. NO MORE NEED FOR FEMINISM IN THE WEST.

Nice to know these problems have all gone away already.

A voice of reason

Massimo Pigliucci lays out the story of the misogyny wars tearing bloody great rifts in the atheist/skeptic community. I doubt that it will heal anything, though, because the reasonable position he lays out is exactly the one that the freethoughtblogs and skepchick communities have been arguing for since the very beginning.

But one can hope that one more reasonable voice might wake up a few more people.

Somebody is going to have to explain comedy to me

I know it’s often offensive; it’s supposed to be offensive, especially if it’s targeting people in power. When Michael Richards had his temper tantrum, calling black members of the audience racist slurs, he crossed a line by targeting a more vulnerable group, and echoing a sentiment that was the product of centuries of oppression. It’s not surprising that the audience walked out on him and that his career took a crippling hit.

But something very similar just happened. Another comedian, Daniel Tosh, uses the stage to tell rape jokes, and when a woman in the audience calls out that rape jokes are never funny, he has a totally inappropriate response.

After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…” and I, completely stunned and finding it hard to process what was happening but knowing i needed to get out of there, immediately nudged my friend, who was also completely stunned, and we high-tailed it out of there. It was humiliating, of course, especially as the audience guffawed in response to Tosh, their eyes following us as we made our way out of there. I didn’t hear the rest of what he said about me.

And there’s what I don’t get. The audience laughed and stayed for that? Talking about raping a heckler is now a laugh line?

I don’t know, has his career taken a hit? It might be hard to tell — hosting a youtube clips show on basic cable isn’t exactly the pinnacle of comedy.

It’s just odd that people can have a sense of shame about racism, but it’s still considered hilarious to laugh at the idea of women being gang-raped (or, since I know it’s coming, that joking about prison rape is good for a laugh. Please don’t try to turn the joke around and make it about Tosh getting raped, because that isn’t funny, either.)

Anderson Cooper: Gay.

I’m sure the gay element here (I’ve heard rumors that there are a few of you) are happy with the news that Anderson Cooper has come out of the closet.

I’m here to detumesce you (not that your appreciation of the man was anything but intellectual). He’s also tossing god-bottery around.

In my opinion, the ability to love another person is one of God’s greatest gifts, and I thank God every day for enabling me to give and share love with the people in my life.

Sorry. But it’s still a brave bit of news. He wasn’t going to cuddle with you anyway.

The Great Oreo War

We Minnesotans have a constitutional amendment coming up in our November elections — certain anti-human, regressive elements in our state are peeved that anyone would dare to give equal legal protections to icky gay people, so they want to have us vote on this uncivil question:

“Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to provide that only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota?”

The correct answer, of course, is NO, written in tall bold letters with a flaming sword. You’ll probably have to settle for punching a ballot, but do it with fury, anyway.

So I’m pleased to see that General Mills, a major employer and creator of mass-market foodstuffs, has come out against the measure. Their CEO gave a $10,000 donation to opponents of the bill, and they also put out a lovely ad (I have been corrected: Kraft made the ad. So there are two companies to praise!):

Now the patriarchs and theocrats of the odious Minnesota for Marriage organization have declared war on Oreo cookies, an action as doomed to failure as declaring war on cute kitten pictures on the internet (wait, hang on, I should try to think of a better comparison…) There is now a campaign to show support for General Mills, which is a good thing to do when corporate America does something good.

But don’t underestimate the cunning of the Minnesota for Marriage folks! They are fighting back. After declaring a cookie the incarnation of Satan, smart move number one, they have made smart move number two: sentencing gays to death! From their facebook page:

Brilliant! There is a tactical genius behind all this, I’m sure. And he or she is probably gay.

Thunderf00t replies

I’ll confine myself to addressing just two points in his rebuttal.

  1. He accuses me of strawmanning his argument by claiming that he’s taking a black and white view of anti-harassment policies — that they should be either do-nothing or full-weight-of-the-law. He now explains that that’s not the case, he endorses using all kinds of intermediate levels of enforcement.

    Then I’m left wondering exactly what the point of his outrage was? That makes it sound as if he’s agreeing totally with what many of us are saying: we want these policies in place because they offer women recourse and support. Richard Carrier has very carefully laid out the intent and function of these policies. Perhaps Thunderf00t can read that and clarify whether he disagrees or not? Because his current posts try to have it both ways.

  2. Speaking of strawmanning an argument, here’s a beautiful example.

    IT WAS IN A BAR. I enjoyed it, she enjoyed it (she left a comment specifically saying so, just to remove all doubt (see MyLegMYCHOICE!)), AND I NEVER HAD TO CONSULT HER, NOR APPLY FOR PERMISSION FROM THE CONFERENCE, IN ORDERS SIGNED IN TRIPLICATE SENT IN, SENT BACK AND BURIED IN SOFT PEAT FOR THREE MONTHS AND RECYCLED AS FIRELIGHTERS etc etc. Indeed had I had to fill in the paperwork along with ‘permission to bite your leg in a horseplay photo’ form under conference interpersonal contact rule 144 b) 2, it would have probably kinda killed the moment, and neither I nor she would have got our mild thrills for the night. It’s boys n girls have fun in bars!

    I said precisely the opposite. These are situations where I agree — nobody is saying you have to fill out forms to play, and it would be ridiculous to do so. However, it’s also problematic. He doesn’t feel he ever had to consult her? What?

    I have heard this complaint many times. A woman goes to a bar at a meeting because she wants a drink, she wants to join in the conversation (because that’s where a lot of the informal talk goes on), and discovers that there are guys there with this attitude that groping is now permitted because the only reason that “girls” are there is to “have fun in bars”. Some women are there to flirt and enjoy a little horseplay…many are not.

    This really is the problem. You need to interact with people first to discover if they’re fellow companions out in the spirit of a little physical fun (you don’t need to formally ask; I presume in this case there were cues to say it was OK), and you cannot assume that every person there is willing to have you fondle them. Especially at a skeptics/atheist conference, where people sign up to learn about a philosophical/social position.

    Surprise. There are a lot of women who go to these meetings to be taken seriously and discuss serious topics, and have zero interest in having their legs grabbed. Not even in the bar.

Molly Rene has some choice words for people who confuse bars with brothels.