Missing the #ReasonRally

You can watch it, sort of, right here:

There’s a lot of stutter and lag in that feed, but you can get the gist. You can also follow #ReasonRally on Twitter. From the shots of the crowd, it looks to be comparable in size to the 2012 Reason Rally — so it’s good, but isn’t showing a lot of growth. It’s also not raining! I hear it’s hot and muggy, though.

I have very mixed feelings about it. I want this event to succeed, but I’ve lost a lot of enthusiasm for the movement in general — there are just too many asshats within atheism, and rather than disavowing them, the movement seems determined to try and take a middle road, appeasing the people who treat women as subhuman, being reluctant to embrace social justice as the significant contribution atheism can make to society, and regarding minorities as people who should be absorbed into current atheist goals, rather than transforming them. But I’m hoping it will grow and evolve.

Meanwhile, those same asshats are praying for the Reason Rally to fail. You want to see a raging failure to evaluate evidence? Look here.

That’s so dishonest it hurts to see it. No one expected 400,000 people to show up for this event; estimates were in the range of 10K+. So right away it’s an invalid comparison. And then, that’s not a photo of the Reason Rally in progress on the right. If you look at the youtube videos, there actually are quite a few people there, and that photo makes it look as if no one is there at all.

It’s not about white people’s victimhood

Right now, the usual trolls are doing their best to lie about Skepticon: they’ve seized on that one incident in which Mark Schierbecker was unfortunately given a slot to speak as an excuse to rant about how Skepticon hates autistic people (nope), how Skepticon called him a racist (nope again — that was what his own publicist said), that they were abusing an “autistic kid” (no way — he came to Skepticon fresh off interviews on Breitbart and Fox News), and how evil SJWs are. I saw people calling in biased outsiders like Milo Yiannopoulos, Thunderf00t, and Sargon of Akkad to contribute to the propaganda, and I’m sure we’ll see more noise from them soon; it was also somehow magically tied to #gamergate and the standard anti-feminists.

I thought about writing a rebuttal, but decided the best thing to do was just present the views of a few black people who have a genuine interest in this matter.

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That joke didn’t quite work out as intended

Yesterday, I posted a link to our “FtB Customer Service Department”. This was intended as a joke — we don’t have such a thing — to mock the idea that we do have such a thing. We don’t. Unfortunately, it backfired on me: some of you saw it was in fun and sent in very complimentary messages about FtB as a whole (thank you very much), and some people sent in serious technical concerns which I’ll have to forward to the appropriate parties (note that we already have a link for that sort of thing, Technical Support), and a few people sent in wacky demands and apparently didn’t understand that we don’t have a central authority.

Here’s the full story on authorities at FtB.

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We got mentioned on Boing Boing!

That’s the good news. The bad news it’s in an article about rage-blogging, click-baiting, witch-hunting professional victimizers who profit greatly from online hate.

Oh, not us. I know those are accusations frequently leveled against freethoughtblogs, but the irony is that it’s the other side that has been doing a really good job of monetizing obsessive hatred. While we struggle with really ugly ads (we hate them too) just to keep a maintenance level of support for our small community of writers, the gamergate goons and people like Phil Mason have tapped into a much more lucrative income stream: misogyny pays.

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I don’t agree with everything this guy says, either

Way too many clips of Thunderf00t mugging for the camera, and the conclusion staggers home with a feeble “I’m not that kind of feminist” disclaimer, but otherwise, it’s nice to see the Phil Mason School of Logical Fallacies exposed so well.

It seems strange to see people defending a game called “Hit Man”, though. You aren’t required to murder those strippers doesn’t exactly sound like an accolade — it’s still a game where you pretend to be a professional murderer.

A cautionary tale

Kotaku points to a couple of fascinating essays: one by Dan Golding on the End of Gamers, and the other by Leigh Alexander, saying gamers are over. They’re making similar points: not that gaming is in decline, or that all gamers are horrible people, but that the behavior of unchecked hooligans on the internet has so thoroughly fouled their identity that reasonable people are abandoning the tribe. Calling yourself a gamer has acquired the cachet of identifying as a white supremacist — it stinks.

What really worries me, though, is how much the gamer story sounds like the atheist story…only they seem to be farther along in their implosion than we are, or are imploding more rapidly. We atheists should be taking notes and telling ourselves not to go down this path. I have the feeling we aren’t.

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Good luck, NSC

Nonstampcollector has made an update video to let us know what he’s been up to lately. Congratulations on the familial expansion!

He also talks a bit about his departure from FtB and the deranged haters out there. He references his final post, and links to a copy archived elsewhere. Don’t bother to go there — it’s hosted on one of the lunatic anti-FtB wacko’s sites. I’ve put a copy here below the fold.

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