I get email: atheist future so white, we’re gonna need shades

It’s a marvel. Look at it. It’s polite, it doesn’t call me any names, it’s an appeal to pragmatism (of a sort), and it’s even got paragraphs. Gosh but it’s nice. Most importantly, he could make a valid argument that this is precisely the strategy the atheist movement is trying to follow!

You are wrong about atheism

Can I be a colonel in the Outrage Brigade?

You missed the point here. The point is not to worship people like Dawkins and Harris. And to put civility above principle. It’s more pragmatic. White unity is important because whether you admit it or not, it’s white people that have power in America. Congress is mainly filled with older white men.

So that means the most important people in the Atheist community should also be white people. If you want to fight for social justice, it’s white people that will make the difference, not black people or minorities. White atheists leaders will need to convince other white people to put pressure on white politicians. White politicians don’t listen to black people. They’re irrelevant.

So the point is that it makes sense that the atheist community is mainly white people. Bringing in minorities is pointless, as they lack power. So fighting against sjw’s and identity politics is prudent as white people are tired of sjw’s and identity politics. This is a way of bringing more white people to the movement. But remember white people are conservative by nature, so to gain social justice in the best environment will take time, even decades.

Therefore it is important that black people stay polite and don’t ruffle feathers. As right now they are causing too much fuss and slowing down progress. Bringing in more black people to atheism will be bad for blacks. They will only be loud and get in the way. They will alienate white people and white people in power because they call people racist and bigots.

This is why we don’t want Dawkins and Harris to be taken down. They speak to white people in a way black people cannot. They just have to wait and be patient.

Just one question.

Isn’t it true that most Americans are religious and conservative by nature, so atheists should also follow this tactic of not ruffling feathers and avoiding alienating people of faith while we wait patiently for them to give us something?

Otherwise, it’s adorable how he blithely unites atheism and white nationalism. Doesn’t even have to think about it. I wonder how common this kind of thinking is?

As cockroaches scurry for the darkness, so do the Nazis

The major social media sites have been making some weak, token efforts to clean up the racism and sexism endemic to places like Twitter and Facebook, but so far it’s been feeble. They’ll occasionally boot someone who gets as obnoxious as Andrew Anglin or Chuck C. Johnson, but it takes months or years of complaints (which I think is usually totally ineffective) or that they do something that is high profile and starts making the service look bad. But meanwhile, it’s fine for Joe Sixpack with 50 followers to scribble about how women should be happy to be raped, or that Jews belong in ovens, with no repercussions at all. We know, however, that Twitter and Facebook could prohibit hate speech, because they already do in France and Germany. It’s a conscious plan to allow Nazis to flourish in American social media. Why?

In an article about alternative social media, there’s a hint. The white nationalists, the Nazis, the MRAs, the general bottom-feeding trash of the internet, are getting worried about the few examples of evicted Nazis, and so are building their own new brands: a chat network called Gab, and there’s something that is an alternative to Patreon that is, amusingly, openly called Hatreon, for people who want to get paid for hating. If you’re wondering why American companies are so reluctant to block online hatred, one answer is that American tech workers have a high proportion of haters.

The early iterations of whatever Gab’s movement produces may very well be funded by its builders, many of whom purportedly have high-paying jobs in Silicon Valley. Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the Daily Stormer, told Mother Jones in March that the majority of his site’s traffic comes from Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley. “The average alt-right-ist,” the white supremacist Richard Spencer told the magazine, “is probably a 28-year-old tech-savvy guy working in IT.”

But why? Why would American computer programmers drift towards Naziism? I think there’s an answer to that, too. They’re saturated in triumphal capitalism, and in particular, Libertarianism, which is the gateway drug to full-blown greed, which they’ve branded as “liberty”.

Since Google fired Damore and Gab lost its spot in the Google app store, the effort to found an alt-right internet has taken on a new urgency. Dickinson released a slide deck on Friday to try to appeal to investors and new entrants who wish to join the budding movement. “Alt-Tech promises to restore and revive the old libertarian ethos of technology as a leveler and tool for increasing liberty,” read his slides, which proclaim that the movement doesn’t care about race, gender, or pedigree and that its motto is “Shut up and code.” The plan promises to revitalize rural and small-town America by providing engineering jobs to people who will build the new “anti-Marxist” internet. “The first VCs to fund these alternatives will be the ground floor profit-makers of the Alt-Tech revolution,” reads one of his slides.

In the past two weeks, a handful of far-right video bloggers have jumped onboard to promote the nascent movement, including Styxhexenhammer666, a popular libertarian video blogger, whose two videos about the effort have notched almost 70,000 views. Others have posted “call to action” videos, rallying technologists to join the movement to build “new ‘free speech’ platforms,” which have also attracted thousands of viewers. While these might not read as huge numbers, they suggest a movement with a groundswell of grassroots support.

They don’t care about race or gender. That usually means they don’t care about the inequities constructed around race and gender, because they’re mostly white men who have got theirs already. They also claim to not believe in ideology, even to be ideology-free, while not noticing that they’re soaking in a particularly ugly ideology.

“Most of the people that I see migrating to alternative social platforms identify as either Conservative or Libertarian,” one member of Gab who asked not to be named told me in an email. “They see how there is a double-standard when it comes to enforcing so-called ‘hate-speech’ by Google, Facebook & Twitter. Much of what is being censored or shadow-banned is not hate filled. It is often simply an idea that the loudest do not agree with.” Unlike legacy white supremacist sites, Gab isn’t centered on any one political ideology, even if many hate-filled ideologies gravitated there. Rather, it’s ostensibly a place that values free speech first, no matter how offensive it is.

Oh, right. “Free speech”. I like free speech, I think it’s an important value to have, because I want to be able to loudly declare these people to be rancid, hate-filled, selfish assholes. I also recognize that there’s a difference between openly detesting an ideology and inciting the torture and murder of whole peoples, a distinction they fail to acknowledge. “I hate Jews” is an opinion that labels the speaker as a bigot; “We need to organize to do something about the Jewish Problem” is encouraging people to do physical harm.

But how can they say they aren’t centered on any one political ideology when they also admit that they’re full of conservatives and Libertarians? If Google and Apple wander very slightly from the far right (it’s insane that anyone thinks a major American corporation is actually liberal), they get blamed for being a gang of SJWs. But Gab specifically and intentionally appeals to far-right fascists, and they get to claim they’re relatively non-ideological.

“If Google and Apple are straight-up corporations for their political sides, they should openly declare their discriminatory behavior. They should be proud of it,” said Gab’s Sanduja. “They should not be mendacious and talk about change and be different. Stop engaging in sophistry. Come out to us as the major SJW platforms you are.”

It’s always revealing to see them using the same buzzwords my personal haters are fond of. I’m not black, I’m not Jewish, I’m not a woman, I should be safe, right? My privilege is sky high. But they’ve found a way to target me, too, so it’s more than just an empathy for others, they’d like to kill me, too. After all, I am one of those hated Social Justice Warriors.

So now I have to be a white Nordic male with Libertarian leanings to be part of this in-group? Keep on narrowing your requirements until no one meets them. I guess this is the point where I’m supposed to quote Reinhold Niebuhr or Martin Niemöller, but you already know what they said, it’s obvious. Except to Nazis.

Racists (and psychologists) don’t understand evolution

I hate this study already. Some psychologists attempted to develop a psychological profile of the alt-right by interviewing them and using a questionnaire. Fine. There’s nothing unexpected in their results.

A lot of the findings align with what we intuit about the alt-right: This group is supportive of social hierarchies that favor whites at the top. It’s distrustful of mainstream media and strongly opposed to Black Lives Matter. Respondents were highly supportive of statements like, “There are good reasons to have organizations that look out for the interests of white people.” And when they look at other groups — like black Americans, Muslims, feminists, and journalists — they’re willing to admit they see these people as “less evolved.”

It’s that last bit that bugs me. One of their questions primed them with a bad pseudoscientific image, and then asked them to rate various groups of people on how “evolved” they are.

That question makes no sense. It starts by leading people to think an invalid, linear model of progressive evolution is scientifically reasonable, and then asks them to indulge in rating human beings. It doesn’t surprise me that Nazis are willing to dehumanize, but is it fair to miseducate in the process of figuring that out?

Here’s the average of the answers they got.

If they’d asked me this question, I would have slammed every slider straight to 100%, and then aborted the whole survey and told the investigators that their methodology was poisonous. But that’s me.

They’re trying to measure dehumanization, and I can appreciate that this might be an effective way to do it, but really, do we need to spread more misinformation in the process? They got a strong distinction, but I’m also annoyed by the comparison group.

The comparison group, on the other hand, scored all these groups in the 80s or 90s on average. (In science terms, the alt-righters were nearly a full standard deviation more extreme in their responses than the comparison group.)

How can you be 80% evolved? How can you even argue that different groups of Homo sapiens are “evolved” to different degrees? None of this makes any sense.

Although the result that Trump’s favorite Nazis think he is less evolved than women in general has got to burn.

Also, they determined that racists are not more economically stressed than other people. They are just goddamned racists. No surprised there.

Remember when country music wasn’t all jingo?

I barely remember it myself, but I do remember a machine that kills fascists. And now here’s a statement from the family of Johnny Cash.

A message from the children of Johnny Cash:
We were alerted to a video of a young man in Charlottesville, a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi, spewing hatred and bile. He was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the name of Johnny Cash, our father. We were sickened by the association.
Johnny Cash was a man whose heart beat with the rhythm of love and social justice. He received humanitarian awards from, among others, the Jewish National Fund, B’nai Brith, and the United Nations. He championed the rights of Native Americans, protested the war in Vietnam, was a voice for the poor, the struggling and the disenfranchised, and an advocate for the rights of prisoners. Along with our sister Rosanne, he was on the advisory board of an organization solely devoted to preventing gun violence among children. His pacifism and inclusive patriotism were two of his most defining characteristics. He would be horrified at even a casual use of his name or image for an idea or a cause founded in persecution and hatred. The white supremacists and neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville are poison in our society, and an insult to every American hero who wore a uniform to fight the Nazis in WWII. Several men in the extended Cash family were among those who served with honor.
Our dad told each of us, over and over throughout our lives, ‘Children, you can choose love or hate. I choose love.’
We do not judge race, color, sexual orientation or creed. We value the capacity for love and the impulse towards kindness. We respect diversity, and cherish our shared humanity. We recognize the suffering of other human beings, and remain committed to our natural instinct for compassion and service.
To any who claim supremacy over other human beings, to any who believe in racial or religious hierarchy: we are not you. Our father, as a person, icon, or symbol, is not you. We ask that the Cash name be kept far away from destructive and hateful ideology.
We Choose Love.
Rosanne Cash
Kathy Cash
Cindy Cash
Tara Cash
John Carter Cash
August 16, 2017
‘Not one of us can rest, be happy, be at home, be at peace with ourselves, until we end hatred and division.’ Rep. John Lewis

I swear, if I hear Melvin Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA one more time, I’m gonna have to puke in someone’s face. But I can listen to Cash all the time.

“it’s afraid!”

A big-mouthed bully is afraid!

Oh, sorry. Wrong video.

That’s Christopher Cantwell, an American Nazi, blubbering in fear because there might be a warrant out for his arrest over the mess in Charlottesville. He claims they have done everything in their power to keep things peaceful, by which he means that they went through all the paperwork for their anti-semitic, anti-black hate march…not that their intent was peaceful.

With a sneer in his voice, he whines about Chelsea Manning.

Chelsea Manning, this tranny fanatic, has a picture of himself — herself — talking about curbstomping Nazis, with a picture of this boot coming down on somebody.

You mean this?

Terrifying. Then, weirdly, he goes on and on about his gun.

If I was a violent guy you would have heard about it by now.

Oh, OK, I guess we would have, guy who has a page on his behavior at the SPLC.

[M]y goal here is to normalize racism, he explained to Hatewatch in one of two interviews for this profile. I’m going to make a commercial enterprise out of saying things that people want to make illegal. I’m going to make a whole fucking bunch of money doing it. Anybody who gets in my way is going to find themselves in a very long list of people who regretted underestimating me.

My proposal, and in all honesty, I’m still working out the details, has been to resort to force. For free men and women to forcefully defend themselves against agents of the State. To kill government agents who would otherwise use force against them, until their jobs simply become so dangerous that they seek other lines of work.

It’s the right thing to be concerned about the immigration, because you see these fucking hordes of unwashed religious fanatics pouring across borders with no resources just thinking that they’re going to collect welfare and fuck our women and fucking breed us put of existence. That makes me want to bash people’s skulls open, I understand.

I’m carrying a pistol, I go to the gym all the time, I’m trying to make myself more capable of violence.

And now he’s terrified, as terrified as the black people, the Hispanic people, the gay people, the transgender people, the Jews, all the people he has tried to terrorize.

Feels good. Cry some more.

And do turn yourself in to the police and clear up your status. I don’t think you’ll have any problems, you’re white.

Way to go, Baltimore

Quietly, in the dead of night, the city of Baltimore took down their confederate monuments. A statue of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson was removed, as well as…

Other statues being removed included the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Mount Royal Avenue, the Confederate Women’s Monument on West University Parkway and the Roger B. Taney Monument on Mount Vernon Place.

Wait — they had a monument to Roger Taney? This Roger Taney?

[African Americans] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.

What took so long, and why was such a slap in the face to American citizens put up in the first place?

They really are bullying cowards

So this is what happens when you confront nazis. They collapse.

Good grief. It’s just kind of a fun idea, being able to say ‘white power’. I love to be offensive, it’s all. What a pathetic child.

And then there’s this: Joe Love flies a Nazi flag from his home. A woman stopped and politely asked him about it; he starts ranting and insulting her. I guess he’s a big man when it’s a woman talking to him, but he changes his tune when a local newspaper contacted him.

Love says he bought the flag several years ago, but that he doesn’t believe in the symbolism Nazis attached to the swastika, the meaning most have of the flag in the decades since World War II.

That used to be a religious symbol in India until Hitler got ahold of it, Love said. A lot of people don’t know that… I agree with the symbol as it started out as a religious symbol. But as far as backing Hitler and being a white supremacist and Hitler, I’m not into that.

Oh, bullshit. Or should I say, chickenshit.

Tucker Carlson, xenophobic bigot and dumbass

I’m incapable of watching Tucker Carlson — it’s not just the dumb things he says, but that face he makes when someone he disagrees with says something smarter than he is. The knitted brows, the slightly parted lips, he looks like a yokel trying to puzzle out whether he likes this strange new experience, although he’s pretty sure he doesn’t.

But fortunately, some people do suffer through his shows to figure out what he’s doing, and it’s not pretty. It’s pure white supremacist bullshit, although he cunningly avoids coming right out and saying it. Instead of saying the 14 words, he just cusses out immigrants of all kinds and praises Western Culture, whatever that is.

The last few seconds are ironic. On this one issue, Bill O’Reilly was slightly better than Tucker Carlson (which is not to say that on other issues, he wasn’t worse). The Fox News audience is invariably drawn towards the very worst people.

Ignorance is a powerful force

Charles Pierce is dismayed and despairing. But at least we know who to blame: the guilty parties have been proudly engaged in driving the country into the gutter for decades.

Every Republican who ever played footsie with the militias out west owns this bloodshed.

Every Republican who ever spoke to, or was honored by, the Council of Conservative Citizens and/or the League of the South owns this bloodshed.

Every Republican administration that ever went out of its way to hire Pat Buchanan, and every TV executive who ever cut him a check, and every Republican who voted for him in 1992, and everyone who ever has pretended his views differed substantially from the ones in the streets this weekend, owns this bloodshed.

Every Republican president—actually, there’s only one—who began a campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, to talk about states rights, and who sent his attorney general into court to fight for tax exemptions for segregated academies, owns this bloodshed.

Every Republican politician who followed the late Lee Atwater into the woods in search of poisoned treasure owns this bloodshed.

Every conservative journalist who saw this happening and who encouraged it, or ignored it, or pretended that it wasn’t happening, owns this bloodshed.

The modern conservative movement—born of the Goldwater campaign, nurtured by millions of dollars from corporations and rightwing sugar daddies, sold day after day on millions of radios and on its own TV network—shoved the Republican Party right where it was dying to go anyway. These were institutions whose job it was to isolate this encroaching dementia from afflicting our politics in general.

Last November, we saw the culmination of four decades of the Republican Party trying to have it both ways, profiting from the darkest forces in American culture while maintaining a respectable cosmetic distance. On Saturday, we saw the culmination of the election that produced. At least, I’m praying this is the culmination. But I’m not sure about anything anymore.

All true. But what disturbs me most is this: our enemies are idiots.

We feared the tyrannical despot with vast armies at his disposal; the cunning wormtongue who undermines strong leadership. Who knew it would be a swarm of lice with the brains of 8 year olds, nattering inanely for the “lulz”, going “kek, kek” with a cartoon frog as their symbol?

I read the Daily Stormer article titled Heather Heyer: Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut*. Worse, I read the comments. My estimation of the intelligence of that crowd plummeted astonishingly, given that I had no high impression of them in the first place. I may have overestimated them in my comparison with 8 year olds — the pettiness, the viciousness, the amazing arrogance of these people patting themselves on the back for their “cleverness” and “wit” in going to great lengths to smear this woman they didn’t know, and who found villainy in the most innocent bits of information they could find (they dug up a photo of her with a black man — rage flared instantly) were appalling.

Stupidity, ignorance, and bigotry are the forces that are tearing apart the Republic.

*Not linking to it, obviously. One: Andrew Anglin doesn’t need the attention. Two: the Daily Stormer is currently featuring a front page splat from Anonymous, claiming they’ve taken it down (strangely, Anonymous says they haven’t). And three: GoDaddy, not the most progressive of hosting services, has finally had enough and announced that they are terminating their contract, and it’s going to be gone in 24 hours.

It isn’t just the South

His name was Henry Towne. He was a second cousin on my father’s side; he was always cheerful and laughing, and was the life of every party. He was also a fanatical John Bircher, and his house always had signs outside: “US OUT OF THE UN!”, and various such slogans. I felt sorry for his kids, because he set up a school for his fellow far right conservatives, yanked them out of the public schools, and I hardly ever saw them again.

I name him now because I didn’t when I was a kid. When I was about ten years old, he took me aside, knowing that I was already a science nerd, and he showed me some flyers he was handing out. It included a cartoon of a gorilla, with a list of characteristics they shared with Negroes: Black. Thick curly hair. Thick lips. Yellow teeth. Emotional. Violent. Criminal. I had black friends at school, but they looked nothing like that. I was a science nerd, and I knew enough about gorillas to know that they were nothing like that. Every thing in that flyer was a damnable lie, and I knew it.

And that asshole looked at me and said, smugly, “Well, what do you think of that?” And I looked at him, my mind racing, tangled up with politeness and the respect I’m supposed to give my elders, and I mumbled something vaguely affirmative, and he let me go.

I’ve been ashamed of myself for about half a century for that. I knew he was a dishonest bigot even as a child, and I said nothing. The last time I saw him was at my father’s funeral, almost 25 years ago, and again I said nothing, not about his racism, not about his ignorant political views, not about his abuse of his children’s educations, nothing. I just avoided him. He told some nice stories about when my father was a boy. I just sat quietly to the side, seething, torn between avoiding a spectacle at the funeral and wanting to grab him by the scruff of the neck and ask him how many poisonous lies he’d told this week, before throwing him out the door.

I didn’t. I’m ashamed of that, too.

This was in Kent, Washington, a fine suburban city in a thoroughly Northern state. My parents, fortunately, never expressed such odious views to me, but I had other relatives and friends who used all kinds of slurs casually; Henry Towne was just the worst of them. And he was so nice and polite about it! He could cheerfully, and in flawless, grammatical English, tell you the most vicious nonsense about any of your neighbors who weren’t sufficiently white, in his estimation.

Now I live in another fine Northern state, one with an excellent progressive reputation, and here is one of my neighbors, living just a few blocks away.

He has both a Confederate and American flag hanging in his garage. His truck has a sticker that says “God Bless America”.

There is a cancer at the heart of our country, and there it is, proudly displayed. My cousin, and this person, knew that they could express their bigotry with confidence, and no one would call them on it.

The scumbag who murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville is from Ohio. Richard Spencer was born in Boston. Milo Yiannopoulos is British. Tim Gionet, better known as “BakedAlaska”, is from Alaska. Mike Cernovich is from Illinois. Alex Jones is from Texas, so at least that one hate-filled loon is a Southerner. This bigotry is not a purely Southern phenomenon, it’s everywhere in America. We’re all of us complicit in white racism.

It is time to root it out.