Around FtB

So today I thought I’d read FtB like our critics do — twisting everything to fit their preconceptions that we’re all evil people. I might be mildly misrepresenting the content of their posts, but you won’t know unless you actually read them.

  • Stephen hates teachers so much, he wants to launch them all into space.

  • Hank notes that the deity is all-powerful.

  • Stephanie promotes the Slymepit, and explains how you can, too!

  • Dana is a bad blogger who can’t provide original content of her own so she just links to other people’s hard work.

  • Frederick finds that blacks have gotten richer since the Reagan years. Yay, racism is over!

  • Kate makes the case that therapists are all wrong.

  • Zinnia has gone all shallow and materialistic, crassly exhibiting her bling.

  • Aron thinks the Flintstones was a documentary, and shows proof that dinosaurs and humans lived together.

  • Nonstampcollector is getting chummy with Ray Comfort, and even photoshopped himself into a Way of the Master video.

I didn’t know I was signing up for a psychology experiment!

Jadehawk has an interesting post up on what psychology considers harassment — that is, when the pros assess effective harassment campaigns, what do they do?

Conclusion: Even mild interruption, ridicule, and criticism elicits stress responses, and all these mild stress-response-elicitors count as harassment in psychology. That doesn’t mean we should stop criticizing people, and it doesn’t mean that people who want to be skeptics, scientists and/or activists don’t need to learn to deal with a certain degree of both criticism and “trolling”. However, as with microaggressions, a constant barrage of aggression (some low-grade some decidedly less so) is typically more wearying/damaging than the occasional blatant, massive outburst. Consequently, telling a person who’s subjected for months to non-stop criticism, “satire”, parody, “trolling”, and plain old “as defined by every college campus everywhere” harassment* on multiple fronts that they aren’t being harassed is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Even the thickest skin will eventually be worn down** my months, or even years, of this sort of thing.

Yeah, years. But here’s the surprise from my perspective: what creationists and Christians did to me would not be considered harassment. They were not camping on my virtual doorstep greeting me first thing every morning with a flood of stupid videos and photoshopped images. They were not using twitter to masquerade as my friends under pseydonyms. They were not setting up blogs and forums with no other purpose than to malign me and a few other atheists personally. Even when I pissed off the Catholics, what would happen is that many individuals would fire off an angry letter or two, and then move on with their lives. It meant I got a deluge of email, but it wasn’t one or a few nuts going on a prolonged tear. Mabus was an exception. He isn’t anymore.

It wasn’t until I annoyed a subset of atheists that the real harassment began. Serious harassment. People who have no lives and think the most important thing to do every day is to pour out their hatred for me, or Rebecca Watson, or Ophelia Benson, or anyone on the Atheism+ forum. I’m not talking principled disagreement or even stupid disagreement: I mean commitment to do any dumbass thing they can to lash out, and being driven by hatred for a few people.

I do want to address one bizarre comment from some guy named Hunt, though, who is commenting on Jadehawk’s article.

A lot of these people deserve each other though. The Slymepit seems to be a perfect counterpart to PZ, who has trolled and harassed creationists, for instance, for a decade. He’s finally come up against people who are as willing to put the same energy into trolling back, irreverently and in a very similar way to what he’s done to others for years, and it’s pissing him off. What goes around comes around.

Nope. He doesn’t get it. I disagree strongly with creationists, and they disagree with me, but I don’t troll or harass. When I visited the Creation “Museum”, I informed them of my plans, I even signed an agreement to not cause trouble while I was there, not that I planned to; when I encourage my students to attend creationist talks, I also tell them to be polite and non-disruptive, and that the goal is to get information, not interrupt them. I don’t criticize creationists by sneering at their sexuality, defacing photographs of them, and getting up every day with cheery enthusiasm at the prospect of calling them fat, or ugly, or thinking of ways to tweak their names to make them sound like terms for genitalia.

I have a blog that ridicules creationism by dismantling their idiotic arguments, and that isn’t even obsessive about that…and definitely isn’t focused exclusively on just a few individuals.

What those jerks are doing isn’t in any way similar to what I’ve ever done. And what’s worse, it isn’t similar to what creationists have done: Eric Hovind may not be very bright, but he’s never sunk to the depths that the denizens of the Slymepit have.

But then, the false equivalence is one of the most common tools in use by the trolls. “He has criticized creationists, therefore he is fair game for me to draw him having sexual congress with a dog. It’s ‘dissent’!”

You know what’s most annoying to me, though? For years we’ve been trying to make the case to the public that you can be a decent human being while not believing in god. And then these slack-jawed, 4chan-lovin’, youtube-chatterin’ privileged gits come along and instead demonstrate that atheists can be the biggest assholes of them all.

Blocked!

The good people at CFI have been getting spammed by the usual cranky suspects on twitter, so they have officially announced their policy for blocking people on twitter. It’s a good set of general rules, and is actually simple common sense: there are people out there who don’t recognize reasonable limits and use twitter for non-stop harassment. I personally am pretty liberal about blocking — with something like a hundred thousand followers, it’s fairly easy to get swamped with noise, and one person trying to dominate a conversation can really derail everything. As Fidalgo points out, “‘block and ignore’ is Twitter’s own advice about handling this kind of thing.”

There are six comments on the announcement so far. Would you believe every one of them is from a slymepitter whining bitterly about the policy? Yes, of course you would. When all they’ve got is “raw hectoring” and abuse to offer, of course they’re going to complain when someone declares that they won’t be listening to raw hectoring and abuse.

Oh gob, evo psych again?

You may have already heard that Ed Clint, a guy who has been dedicated to bashing Skepchick and Freethoughtblogs for over a year, has cloaked his biases in a pretense of objectivity and written a long critique of one of Rebecca Watson’s talks, accusing her of being a science denialist and anti-science because she so thoroughly ridiculed pop evo psych. The excesses and devious misrepresentations in that post were painful to read, as was the revelation that Clint is throwing away his career by jumping on the evo psych bandwagon in graduate school (I frequently advise students on good disciplines to pursue in grad school; bioinformatics and genomics have a great future ahead of them, as does molecular genetics and development, but evolutionary psychology is one I would steer them well clear of, as a field that has not and will not ever contribute much of substance. The good papers in evo psych are the ones that use the tools of population genetics well and avoid the paleolithic mumbo-jumbo altogether).

Fortunately, Stephanie Zvan has already torn into his ‘analysis’, showing that it’s mostly misplaced and misleading. I’m relieved, because I’m going to be tied up for a while, and I found Clint’s response to be extremely irritating.

One think that particularly rankled is that Clint puts up a pretense of being objective and that his criticisms are nothing personal; bizarrely, he even puts up a photo of himself taken with Rebecca Watson as if that were evidence that he’s not biased against her. What he doesn’t mention is that he’s been sharpening an axe since the “elevatorgate” episode; together with a disgruntled ex-FtB blogger who left in a bizarre huff over not getting enough respect, he founded a competing network (which is fine, of course) which they proceeded to stock almost entirely with writers with an an anti-FtB and strongly anti-Skepchick slant — I’ve had to laugh at the lineup which looks largely drawn from the ranks of the Slymepit, a notorious anti-feminist/anti-Rebecca Watson hate site, and my list of banned commenters. And looking at the people who comment there, again, they seem to be largely driven by hatred of Watson and feminism in general.

Again, that’s fine — we have biases here at FtB, too, in that we tend to be pro-feminist and when we founded it, I specifically told Ed Brayton that we needed to be sure to include more than just old white guys like us — but what isn’t fine is to lie about your motives. Any day, I’ll prefer open antagonism from an avowed enemy than fair and dissembling words from an Iago.

For example, after telling people to avoid insults in the comments, this is what Clint has to say:

Although PZ’s behavior is unfortunate, I would urge a modicum of compassion. I believe he lashes out because he feels so small and vulnerable, and because he is. I can think of few other reasons for such unprovoked barking. He is making a mistake in coming after me. He will be wounded by it. I wish it didn’t have to be this way, and that we could just have a calm chat about it.

Condescending and smarmy, isn’t he? Ick. He won’t call me names, he’ll just call me “small and vulnerable.” Man, I despise that kind of sliminess.

I’ll follow up on Stephanie’s post later this week, when my schedule calms down, and what I intend to do is dig into the substantive flaws in both Clint’s hatchet job and in that awful discipline of evolutionary psychology. Seriously, in the reviews Clint recommended to give the background on what evo psych is, I was appalled — do these people have any understanding of modern evolutionary theory at all? I think the answer is clearly “no.”

Well, I won’t do that again

So, after a long grueling week of travel and work, I land at the Minneapolis airport, where my plane gets parked for half an hour while we wait for our gate to clear, and I open up Twitter. And am greeted by a pile of fan mail from someone called @SammyBoal, who had created their account just an hour before in order to vomit up innuendo and insults at me and Rebecca Watson. This was pretty awful stuff — sexual smears and contempt for women. Fortunately, twitter makes blocking people easy, so I did and all of those wretched comments vanished…and I also made this statement:

These sickos will sink to amazing depths…the slymepit mentality is appalling.

@SammyBoal didn’t last long after that. The wave of revulsion, with people clicking on block, block, block to this bozo, led to the software at Twitter suspending the account. I wasn’t the only one appalled.

But then the hyperskeptics kicked into action. I got dunned with people claiming that the slymepit really wasn’t that bad, how dare I damn them with this accusation, I should research the place before making such accusations (never mind that I’ve had past experience with it, that I see its denizens commenting all over FtB, and that it’s fucking called the fucking Slymepit).

@SammyBoal isn’t a Slymepitter – please research that crap before putting it out there. Thanks.

Your pit doesn’t seem much better. You just like it because of the way it agrees with you & vice versa.

Having read all the posts there (yes, I have – bronchitis has afforded me a lot of time), don’t see that kind of asshatery.

Oh, really? I am skeptical of your hyperskeptical hyperskepticism. But OK, I’ll go look. Briefly. And right away I found one of the Slymepit denizens disavowing @SammyBoal.

What this person – https://twitter.com/SammyBoal – is doing is quite another, fucking repugnant, and I hope he/she/it isn’t hanging around here on The Slyme Pit. If he/she/it is, please speak up so I can ignore your vile crap now.

That’s a good start, but when your regulars think a person like @SammyBoal could be a likely hanger-on, you’ve got a problem. Even they think it is entirely possible that this was a pseudonym for one of their long term Watson/Myers haters.

But have no fear. The party line quickly absolved them of guilt: it was an ally of Watson putting on an act to make the Slymepit look bad.

I think it’s a sock to make her disagreers look extra bullying, rapey, and stuff

Right. So for years and years, Rebecca Watson’s bestest friends have been cobbling up sock puppet accounts to send her hate mail. Those thousands of revolting youtube comments? All buddies putting on an act. If we carry this logic further, the Slymepit itself is a great big pretense put on by all of her pals who make daily piles of insults and threats just to make her feel good about herself.

Ahh, but the best part: the haters were all fired up because the video of Rebecca Watson speaking at HFA has just been released…and their response was to post photos of obese women in degrading situations. Over and over. Amplified and made worse because everyone quotes the original ‘witty’ photo, so you end up with a whole page of fat woman photos, with people tittering over them and speculating whether it’s a drunk Rebecca Watson or Stephanie Zvan, and somehow they start whining about Natalie Reed and Ophelia Benson. The whole impression is of a bargain-basement 4chan where all of their childish ire is aimed at women on freethoughtblogs.

Who knew bronchitis affected the eyes?

Oh, well. I am vindicated, and next time some blinkered asshole tells me to hyperskeptically examine my well-founded assumptions about the slymepitters, I’m just going to direct them to this post, because I’m not going to read that vile collection of misogynistic scum again, no matter how hard they try to guilt me into it.

Repudiation

Dear Ron Lindsay:

I have to take exception to one small part of your recent post.

Greta Christina and PZ Myers have recently suggested that is it not necessarily a bad thing to be divisive. True, it is not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on what one is separating oneself from.

In her blog post, Greta Christina responded to the charge that the Atheism Plus initiative is divisive by claiming that the secular community is divided already. As evidence for this claim, she offered several deplorable incidents and actions, principally involving hate-filled threats and comments to women, many of which would be familiar to anyone active in the movement. She then asked rhetorically why such vile conduct has not been called “divisive.”

But if hate-filled comments and threats to women have not been expressly called divisive, it’s because such conduct does not threaten to divide the movement. It has already been repudiated, both implicitly and explicitly, by many, if not most, of the organizations in the movement.

[Read more…]