Oh, go away, John Richards

I want nothing to do with that wretched hive of villainy, Atheist Alliance International. This is the organization that was led by Michael Sherlock, and has Gad Saad, Thomas Sheedy, Lawrence Krauss, and Michael Shermer on their advisory board. They seem to be shaking up a bit; Sherlock is out, and John Richards, their editor, resigned in January.

So why am I getting spam email from John Richards, who is starting a new atheist organization? Did he walk off with their mailing list? Add another strike to their list of unethical slovenliness.

No, I’m not going to tell you what Richards’ new venture is. I hope it dies. And rots. And leaves an ugly stain on his carpet.

It sure was easy to get outraged at those Catholic sex pests

Remember Cardinal Pell? Tim Minchin wrote a catchy song about him. Did you see Spotlight? Even the mainstream movie industry could make critically acclaimed movies about Catholic sex abuse. It was an easy target. Now Rebecca Watson singles out another rape apologist in…watch to the end for the unsurprising twist.

I’ll refer you to the Washington Post, in a 2018 article:

Organized secularism has been struggling with charges of misogyny, sexism and sexual harassment for almost a decade. The problem went public in 2011 when a then-little-known atheist blogger, Rebecca Watson, described unwanted sexual advances from a man at an atheist conference who followed her into an elevator and to her hotel room.

She was flooded with both supportive and haranguing comments. World-renowned atheist Richard Dawkins told her to “stop whining” and “grow up.” Dawkins — whose appearances at secularist gatherings can make or break attendance — has been called out multiple times for sexist statements but remains much in demand as a speaker.

Richard Carrier, a science historian and popular secularist speaker, has both apologized for and denied accusations of unwanted sexual advances at secularist and atheist events. He has been banned from at least one conference.

Michael Shermer, who has denied allegations of sexual harassment and assault from several women, remains editor of Skeptic magazine and a top speaker at secularist events.

Most recently, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, another star speaker and best-selling author, was suspended in the spring by Arizona State University for what it described as a decade of inappropriate behavior, some of it at secularist events.

Has Dawkins ever commented on the behavior of his good buddy, movie co-star, and lecture circuit partner Krauss? I am also amused by the sneaky low blow of saying that Carrier “has both apologized for and denied accusations”.

You didn’t think Atheist Alliance International was a respectable organization, did you?

Don’t be shocked or surprised: sex pests always bounce back and climb back into positions of prominence. The rehabilitation of Lawrence Krauss has begun.

I am very pleased to announce that eminent Cosmologist/Physicist Dr Lawrence Krauss has accepted our invitation to join the Advisory Council of Atheist Alliance International.

Lawrence has been an active atheist for decades. He was a personal friend of Christopher Hitchens, who sadly died nine years and three days ago (there’s been talk about designating December 15th “Hitchmas”) and he was an expert witness at the Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District trial of Intelligent Design*.

“Hitchmas”? What? Where has this talk been going on, and by whom? Anyone can talk about designating any day as anything — the question is, by what authority and who will care? There has been talk around my household (there, I’m already more specific than John Richards) of designating the 15th as Squidmas, so get in line.

But, you might ask, doesn’t AAI know about the decades of credible accusations of harassment, that ASU acted on the accusations to deny him his leadership of the Origins project, haven’t they read the articles describing his behavior in Buzzfeed and the Arizona State Press, haven’t they read Krauss’s own words defending Jeffrey Epstein?

Yes, they have. They just don’t care.

Our Executive Director, Michael Sherlock, has personally welcomed Lawrence onto our Council of worthy Advisors in the knowledge that he was an early victim of the woke movement (see Wednesday’s blog). Please note that no charges have ever been brought against Dr Krauss.

When asked about the potential blowback from those who have propagated and uncritically believed the unsubstantiated allegations made against Dr Krauss in the past, Sherlock stated,

“After examining the claims made against Dr Krauss, and finding no merit therein, I made a decision to position AAI firmly against the cancel culture that has infected the atheist and secular movement, particularly in the USA. As skeptics, it is important that we lead the way in practicing evidence-based thinking and behaviors and not give in to the fatuous and harmful aspects of a relatively new social and political phenomenon that holds allegations as conclusions by mere virtue of the existence of the allegations themselves.” Sherlock added: “I am extremely enthusiastic about working with Dr Krauss and believe that he will add immense value to AAI’s efforts around the globe”.

As “skeptics”, they will lead the way in practicing evidence-based thinking…by ignoring the evidence they don’t like. For instance, I know the conference organizer he assaulted in a hotel room, waving around a condom; she’s a good person who was in a committed relationship who wouldn’t do that sort of thing, and Krauss admitted that it all happened — he just claimed it was “consensual”. I was one of the people Krauss tried to dissuade from criticizing Epstein. As a guy, I was oblivious to all of his creepy behavior at conferences, but when all these women stepped forward to tell me all about his obnoxiousness, I believed them. AAI does not believe any of that, I guess.

By the way, that “Wednesday’s blog” he references reads like an MRA screed that belongs on one of their horrid sites, like A Voice for Men. It rails against the “new religion of wokeism” and literally calls any accusation of harassment against men a “witch hunt”.

Anyway, it set me thinking – let’s compare some of the properties of religions and wokeism…

The ‘Congregations’ are predominantly female. They are about purity and judgmentalism. They exhibit disapproval of whatever they deem to be unacceptable and they show intolerance of those who have different standards. This is the typically ‘polarising’ mentality that I wrote about a few days ago. https://admin.patheos.com/blogs/secularworldbyaai/wp-admin/post.php?

In summary, it’s a ‘Holier than thou’ attitude.

In wokeism, all the greys are gone. A person is guilty from the moment they are accused. It’s, “We have no time for the cumbersome processes of jurisprudence.” And the accused are immediately sentenced by being cancelled! Their associates are punished too!

What does this remind you of? Oh, yes! Witch Hunts! Jim Crow Laws!

And who are, by far, the most common victims?

Men!

Won’t someone think of us poor men, says the male-led organization that just appointed a known sex pest to their mostly male advisory board, which also includes Michael Shermer, Gad Saad, and Thomas Sheedy. They’re such victims!

How dare women show intolerance of those who have different standards (such as tolerating molestation and crude come-ons), or exhibit disapproval of whatever they deem to be unacceptable, like rape and groping. They need to appreciate the value of men who hold different opinions on those matters.

They also make the common defense that “well, they weren’t convicted of an actual crime, therefore they couldn’t have done anything wrong”, which is just stupid. There are lots of things that someone can do that don’t justify throwing them in jail, yet do warrant considering them unsavory and unpleasant and not someone you want to invite to a party, or a business meeting. They complain about black and white thinking while insisting that there exists a perfect dichotomy between being in prison vs. being a commendable citizen.

They also commit gross leaps of irrationality.

Allow me to point out that if accusations were an indication of guilt, we would have had no President Obama, since he was accused of not being born in the USA. Also, Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton would have been locked up because she was accused of leading a pedophile ring located in the basement of a restaurant that turned out not to have a basement!

We’re only talking about credible accusations backed up by evidence, which was lacking in the cases of Obama and Clinton, and which was present in the case of Krauss.

For instance, I can accuse the leadership of Atheist Alliance International of being a bunch of aggressively idiotic bigots and misogynists, using the evidence of those two posts, and suggest that no one should join that odious group or donate to them. Note that I’m not accusing them of an outright crime for which they should be arrested; I’m saying they are unworthy of support by any responsible citizen. John Richards and Michael Sherlock are simply truly awful people.

The worst takes on Elliot Page

I’m seeing two kinds of negative reactions to Elliot Page’s revelation. One is outright denial, verging on rage; the other is dull, stupid incomprehension. Neither are particularly attractive, or complimentary to the character of those making them.

The loudest example of the first is this editorial by Brendan O’Neill, in which he deadnames him and goes on and on, stupidly upset that a woman cannot just click her fingers and become a ‘he’. It’s about what I would expect from O’Neill, who is one of those peculiarly British reactionaries, a shrieking Trotskyite who always favors conservative authoritarianism. I really don’t get Brendan O’Neill, he’s such a strange creature. But here’s what he says about Elliot Page:

So that’s it, is it? Ellen Page is no more? She’s been disappeared? She’s been shoved down the memory hole, left to stalk that netherworld of people whose names must never be uttered out loud, like Bruce Jenner, Frank Maloney, Voldemort? Ellen Page, the actress most famous for starring in irritant quirkhouse movie Juno, has now declared that she is Elliot Page and that she’s a he. And, boom, just like that, Ellen’s gone. She’s being erased from film history. People are getting into trouble even for saying the word ‘Ellen’. ‘Who?’, woke identitarians ask, as if they’ve all gone mad.

It goes on and on like that, but the gist of it seems to be that he acts as if “Ellen Page”, the female, has been dragged out and shot, to be replaced by “Elliot Page”, the male, and that we’ve betrayed her by accepting their evolution. It’s an odd view that isn’t believed by anyone. There was a person, a human being, who was assigned female at birth, and who lived and grew and realized that the identity forced on them by the conventions of culture was not the identity they held inside. The person isn’t gone or erased, they’re still here — they just aren’t the person you thought they were, and they definitely don’t fit into the one of the binary cartoons you wanted them to conform to…but then, nobody does. Get over it.

The second type of anti-trans sentiment I’m seeing is the chickenshit sarcastic ‘skeptic’ who is Just Asking Questions, because they want to be able to run away fast if called out on their bigotry. Who else could better represent that view than Michael Shermer?

What a buffoon.

Oh, he’s serious (not trolling). Do I need to point out that he’s published many books, which he likes to claim are the product of “research”, and that he should have the tools at his fingertips to find all kinds of sources that could explain to him in great detail how to answer those questions? Does he usually “research” his books by asking leading questions on Twitter of his followers, who, he must know by now, tend to have a bit of a bias against the progressive views that he’d need to listen to? Shermer is definitely trolling. He’s just playing the dumbass to build some plausible deniability, and to pretend to be more open-minded than he actually is.

Also, he left off the question he really wants to ask. If Michael Shermer thinks Elliot Page is attractive and wants to assault him, would that make Shermer gay? Go away, Shermer, you’re just an awful person.

The horror that is the skeptic/atheist movement

This is so painful for me: Hayley Stevens has posted a measured critique of James Randi. It’s all true: Randi did flirt favorably with eugenics and climate change denial. He was a stage magician, not a scientist, and I can say from personal experience, from multiple long conversations with him, that it’s true. He would shy away from such ideas if he knew he was talking to a scientist, but he’d let the nonsense leak out, still. He had a poor reputation with women — he didn’t have much to do with them, which obviously didn’t affect me much, directly, but it did mean he was much more comfortable with us Old Boys and led to underrepresentation of women in the movement. He occasionally let that slip out, too, like his remark downplaying the sexual assaults of Michael Shermer, “Shermer has been a bad boy on occasion”. He personally introduced me to Lawrence Krauss, and was part of a conversation in which Krauss asked me to not criticize a certain guy named Jeffrey Epstein; Randi just knew Epstein as someone who liked sexy women and who donated to Krauss’s science efforts. Randi was immensely popular, but his lasting influence could have so much greater if he hadn’t been so narrow in many of his views. I hate to say it, but Stevens characterizes that movement entirely accurately.

This one isn’t so painful: Eiynah has a podcast titled “Woking Up” in which she totally shreds Sam Harris. Without reservation, I’d say that Harris’s ongoing popularity has been a disaster for atheism or the “New Atheism”, whatever that is, and she exposes the fact that he’s awfully supportive of racists and makes terribly bad arguments against the Left. I enjoyed that one, since I’ve never been a fan of the Harris school of deceptive reasonableness in the service of the worst possible takes. It’s easy to see right through him, and the people who can’t simply favor his polite racism.

No gods, no masters, and no goddamn hero worship.

There’s another atheist organization in the swamp

Here we go again. We have a new gang of atheists with the same old meaningless buzzwords: Atheists for Liberty. It’s for Americans who care about Enlightenment Values, specifically Atheists • Agnostics • Freethinkers • Non-religious • Skeptics • Independents • Conservatives • Libertarians • Classical Liberals • Centrists. I notice there are a few labels missing from their list, like liberals, progressives, and humanists, and that becomes even more obvious when you look at their “principles”, which are basically dogmatic conservative Americanism. Of course they worship Free Speech! But mainly because they hate social justice. Even much of the atheist community which used to pride itself on steadfast free-thinking principles, has fallen victim to the poisonous, emotional forces of Intersectionality, Social Justice, and “Wokeness”.

They never get around to saying what “Enlightenment values” are, but it sounds good. I expect that what they really liked about the Enlightenment was the eurocentrism, the racism, the slavery, and the colonialism. Bring back the 18th century!

The founder bios say a lot, too.

Thomas Sheedy is President and founder of Atheists for Liberty. Sheedy is an entrepreneur from Long Island, New York. He is an undergraduate in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs at the University at Albany, where he serves as an Auxiliary Officer for the University at Albany College Republicans. He has appeared on multiple podcasts, blogs, and YouTube video interviews, and has participated extensively in student atheist activism. Sheedy was an Assistant State Director for American Atheists, President of the Long Island Atheists, Event Organizer for Center for Inquiry Long Island, President and founder of the Ward Melville High School Secular Student Alliance, and a member of the Center for Inquiry Student Advisory Committee from Fall 2015 to Summer 2016. Additionally, he is a member of the Americans United for Separation of Church and State‘s Youth Advisory Council. In 2015 he received the Richard and Beverly Hermsen Student Activist Award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation and was FFRF’s student of the year. He also holds memberships with Turning Point USA at SUNY Albany, Louder With Crowder Mug Club, the National Rifle Association of America, The Ripon Society, and the American Conservation Coalition.

Yikes. American Atheists, FFRF, and Americans United, you disappoint me, coddling this viper in your midst; CFI, I’m not surprised; TPUSA and the NRA, this is exactly the kind of young asshole I expect from you; Louder With Crowder Mug Club, that must be comic relief, right? Crowder is one of the dumbest conservatives on YouTube, and you just pay him money to join that club.

Guess who the advisors to Atheists for Liberty are.

Go ahead, guess.

They’re the usual suspects in the atheist community.

[Read more…]

Travis Pangburn, “the Jacob Wohl of the IDW”

That’s the best summary of Travis Pangburn ever. It comes from this exposé of the swarm of sock puppets Pangburn has created on Twitter. Besides a small army of Russian bots, he also created a collection of pseudonyms — Dave Schroeder, Heatseeker, PangburnWarrior, SkeptixSocial, Jig, and JanJan, if not more — who parrot and praise him online (it’s fair, since he turns around and praises their wisdom, too). All of those, except Heatseeker and JanJan, responded to me on Twitter yesterday, as did @ThePangburn, of course. It’s all very amusing.

Then I checked out Pangburn’s “battlefield” site, his online forum where people are supposed to air their provocative ideas and argue over them. Pangburn has a proposition that “Antifa is a multi-group organization”, whatever that means (and don’t expect his incoherent writing to clarify it), and oh look, who is commenting favorably on it?

Pangburn made multiple comments on this thread right here yesterday, insisting that all he wanted was “intellectual honesty”. There is no intellectual honesty in sockpuppetry, Trav. It’s rather pathetic, actually.

In other sad, disappointing news, Travis is trying to resuscitate his career as a lecture/debate promoter. It’s desperate and pitiful.

Pangburn appears to be in the early stages of rehabbing his relationship with the IDW. He just announced promotion of a live NYC debate in March between IDW-adjacent moderate atheist activist Matt Dillahunty and far-right racist homophobic lunatic felon Dinesh D’Souza. Skeptic magazine EIC and IDW stalwart Michael Shermer has also recently talked up Pangburn on Twitter.

All I can say is…what the fuck are you doing, Matt? First enabling the implosion of the ACA, and now reduced to babbling on a stage with demented hate-peddlers?

The parasitic load just keeps getting bigger

Yesterday, Secular Woman posted an article about these harassing lawsuits by harassers, specifically mentioning the pending litigation by Richard Carrier and David Silverman. These are just the facts.

Richard Carrier was accused of persistent sexual advances and responded by suing two of his accusers, a nonprofit organization that reported banning him from their events, one blogger who collected reports of his behavior from him and others into one place (full disclosure: Stephanie Zvan is vice president of Secular Woman), one blogger who reported receiving reports for further investigation, and both blog networks on which these posts appeared.

Three years after his original suit was filed, Carrier is reduced to two remaining lawsuits. He continues to sue a former student group leader and the atheist blogger who said the claims against Carrier would be investigated. The other suits were dismissed with prejudice for jurisdiction or because the statute of limitations ran out while Carrier fought to keep his suit in a state without anti-SLAPP statutes. None of his claims or those against him have been heard in court, despite him recently telling a judge that was all he wanted. The defendants have spent well over $100,000 on their defense.

In April 2018, David Silverman was suspended from American Atheists after unspecified allegations were made against him. Shortly thereafter, he was fired after a review of “internal documents and communications related to the initial complaint as well as evidence relating to the additional allegations brought to the Board’s attention”. A Buzzfeed News article states that the original allegations involved “financial and personal conflicts of interest” and the additional allegations involve sexual assault.

In September of this year, Silverman filed suit against Buzzfeed, American Atheists, its president, and its chair. He also filed suit against another board member and both his accusers, claiming they had conspired against him. He did this despite both claiming he’d only been damaged by the financial allegations and being on record elsewhere as knowing one of these accusations dated back to at least 2013.

The purpose of these lawsuits is to disrupt and dissipate our efforts. The people who do these things are not our allies — they are opportunists and parasites. As atheism has grown, it’s become a fertile field to exploit, and there have been a lot of bad people taking advantage of us.

The only things lawsuits like these can do is use up the time, money, and energy of our movement and further discourage our activists from speaking up about how they have been treated. As a movement, we’ve spent years fighting past legal threats to warn people about those among us who abuse their power, like Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer. This work is critical to keeping our activists and building a stronger movement. If we want them to work for and support us, we must look out for them.

Secular Woman has a simple suggestion.

We at Secular Woman know that many secular organizations and activists already privately denounce lawsuits like these. Some do so publicly. We thank you for that. But we also urge that, as a movement, we work to get better at not rewarding disruptive, punitive, costly lawsuits like these.

Like, for instance, giving the litigious leeches prominent leadership positions in your organization.

Reminder: Marcus is auctioning off knives for our legal defense fund. I’m beginning to think that big, sharp, wicked-flashy knives are the most appropriate item for atheists to acquire nowadays. Also, as always, you can donate directly to our legal defense fund.

A remarkably delicious exposé

I’ve probably seen the name “John Glynn” around — he was prolific, and was getting published all over the Rightosphere and elsewhere. He even got published in the Huffington Post, so some left-leaning pubs had stuff with his byline. But I would have sailed right over it, because his work was all bumblingly ideological and built on evolutionary psychology BS, which immediately flagged him as a charlatan, despite his claimed status as holder of a doctorate and professorships at several universities. Really, people, saying you’re a professor doesn’t make you infallible!

But some people, especially those gullible enough to favor EvoPsych and conservative positions, were taken in, including Michael Shermer.

To his slight credit, Shermer exposed the guy as a fraud. He became suspicious, not when Glynn submitted glib garbage to his magazine, but when Glynn asked for a loan. You can lie about science all you want, but when you start eyeballing a right-winger’s wallet, their ultra-sensitive sensors start pinging. Anyway, it turns out with a few questions it was determined that Glynn did not have an advanced degree, and did not work for any university. Everything was a lie. He’d persevered in publishing crap all over the place, successfully, and fooled Skeptic magazine for three years. The key was offering to write stuff that catered to the biases of publishers, leaping right past any critical evaluation.

Look where else Glynn published! Areo, where the “grievance study” nonsense was published, where Helen Pluckrose is an editor. Quillette. The American Thinker. The Federalist.

The credibility of Skeptic magazine and Shermer has been nonexistent for years, and they’re cruising along on the support of people who still buy into the garbage Glynn was peddling, so they’ll be fine — in fact, they’ll probably be praising Shermer as a true skeptic for identifying the fraud, ignoring the fact that he’d been publishing him for years. John Glynn will be fine, since he’s an insubstantial, lying wraith. He’ll just invent another pseudonym and another set of fake credentials, and continue making contributions to the trash heap of bad media. So I’m chagrined to say that, while this revelation is amusing, it’s not going to make a speck of difference.

Suck it up, cupcake

Rex Huppke has your number, fragile little men. What’s with all the bold brave conservative guys rushing to demand satisfaction for being called mean names?

…following news there was an outbreak of bedbugs in the New York Times newsroom, David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, jokingly tweeted: “The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”

Hardly anyone saw the tweet, as the professor at that point had few Twitter followers. But Stephens saw it — and it hurt his feelings. So much so that he sent an email to Karpf and the university’s provost, writing: “I would welcome the opportunity for you to come to my home, meet my wife and kids, talk to us for a few minutes, and then call me a ‘bedbug’ to my face.”

Stephens was clearly trying to leverage his status as a Times columnist to get Karpf in trouble, all because he was mad the professor called him a bedbug. So much for Stephens’ worries about “the job security of professors.”

Jesus. Stephens writes opinions on one of the most prominent media platforms out there, and further, he’s one of the most despised conservative extremists at the NYT, and he lashes out at a mild insult? Try being a woman expressing a preference for a movie to her few followers on Twitter. She’ll get a thousand times the rage that Stephens gets, and she’ll deserve it far less. She’ll probably deal with it with far more equanimity than Bretbug. (He really is verminous pest who ought to be steamed out of the press, anyway.)

I’m humblingly low on any kind of media ranking, but I get constant, substantial harassment. The biggest noise was when Stuart Pivar tried to sue me for $15 million, or Michael Shermer blustering and threatening and sending me cease & desist letters, but I also get constant attempts to get me fired — remember Comma, the Sovereign Citizen who was dunning the board of regents with conspiracy theories? There are lots more examples of that kind of thing that I haven’t even bothered to mention. Another thing I don’t mention: over the years, there have been multiple instances of people setting up Pharyngula parody blogs, or even more petty, blogs that no one reads that attempt to rebut every post I put up. These are usually created by disgruntled ex-commenters who got banned, and have to express their resentment. Yeah, I get called worse than “bedbug”. I don’t care. I know these things will fade away in time.

And, of course, I’m getting sued by Richard Carrier for daring to investigate accusations of sexual harassment against him. You’d think, if he were confident that the accusations were false, that the appropriate reaction would be to welcome an investigation, but no — he lashed out with a set of absurd lawsuits against multiple people.

I know from experience. It turns out that poking your head up and criticizing the status quo will draw out swarms of delicate little flowers (strangely, all men so far) who will try to destroy you, often while piously declaiming the importance of Free Speech out of the other side of their mouth. Bret Stephens is just the latest, most prominent example of white male fragility. Would you believe he’s even comparing himself to persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany because a college professor called him a bedbug?

Maybe I’ve been underestimating my power. They wouldn’t be trying to suppress me if I were harmless, after all.

P.S. I may be an immensely dangerous college professor, but I still need help. There is a group of us being currently sued, and we need donations to cover the legal costs. If you can help out, we’d appreciate it!

P.P.S. The next big event in that case is September 24th, in a Minneapolis court. I’m not sure where or what time yet, but I’ll let you know when it gets closer, in case anyone wants to show up and listen to our lawyer orate eloquently.

P.P.P.S. Will no one think of the bedbugs?