I guess I’m not the only one disenchanted with movement atheism

Somebody is mad as hell.

Remember when we used to get so pissed off at theists telling us we had no basis for morality, that we’d probably murder and rob banks without a god to keep us in check, and we could just point to religious terrorism and child-raping priests and smirk? Those were the good old days. It turns out that dogma and authoritarianism can afflict even secular communities. There goes our more-rational-than-thou defense!

One amusing fact for you all: when Ed Brayton and I were putting together this little network we’re on, we were trying to figure out what name to give it. I was all for something in-your-face, with “atheism” front and center and some kind of impudent logo. Ed advocated for something a bit more…open and friendly, and came up with Freethoughtblogs, emphasizing freedom from dogma rather than loud atheism. Oh, man, he was right. It would be awkward if this were Atheismblogs right now.

A Puzzle for Humanism

I should start by saying: unlikely my previous posts, this isn’t properly a book review. The major ideas in the discussion spring out of Kate Manne’s book Down Girl: The Logic of Mysogyny. I do give a general review of the book over on Goodreads; TL;DR: The book is excellent, timely, and thoughtful; people should read it. Manne illustrates a particular problem that I think is worth raising on this blog, given the discussions of ethical positions around humanism, feminism, Atheism+, etc.

Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” is one of the most widely cited phrases in public ethics and social justice, but it is often egregiously misused. Somewhat famously, Chelsea Clinton cited it in discussion of a man casually committing a horrific act of violence; political scientist Corey Robin was quick to point out that this is not the way Arendt was using the phrase. Documentarian Ada Ushpiz has similarly pointed this out in criticizing Eva Illouz. To gloss over these longer responses there, the dialectic goes like this.

Many folks think that “the banality of evil” refers to the attitude of indifference towards humans by the person causing harm; the idea that evil can be regarded as banal by the person committing the evil act because they have dehumanized the victim. This is the wikipedia gloss on Arendt’s view, butthe focus on dehumanization actually gets the point entirely (and dangerously) wrong.

Manne points out, as Arendt did as well, that many callous and casual acts of violence are not the result of dehumanization of the person against whom one directs the violence, but rather the result of paranoid or vindictiveness. The effort to dehumanize Jews holds far less prominence in Nazi thought than the thought that Jews were manipulating the political state of affairs, exploiting gentile Germans, and the like. It was not regarding them as inhuman, though there are tropes that track dehumanization, but rather the paranoia around “the Jewish Question.”

[Read more…]

If you ever doubted that Steven Pinker’s sympathies lie with the alt-right

Just watch this clip.

He starts out by explaining that the alt-right are highly literate, highly intelligent people who have been radicalized by exposure to true statements that have never been voiced on college campuses. You see, once Leftist dogma has been exposed as a falsehood, these bright young people just take the red pill and veer way off in the opposite direction.

You might be wondering, as I was, what were these True Facts that have triggered the defection of these brilliant students from progressive causes? Give me specific examples! He obliges.

  • Capitalist societies are better than communist ones. How odd. I don’t see anyone insisting on that: instead, I see a lot of academics who point out the flaws in capitalism, which, apparently, are lies and don’t exist. Then he makes it worse by using as more specific examples the difference between North and South Korea (I’ve never met anyone who thinks North Korea is a better place to live than South Korea.) or between East and West Germany before the fall of the Berlin wall. You will rarely encounter a more pure and absolutely dishonest straw man.

    How about if the comparison is between, say, a ragingly capitalist country like the USA, and a socialist democracy like Sweden? It gets a bit less obvious.

  • Men & women are not identical in their life priorities or sexuality. Again, who is arguing that men and women are identical? He says there is someone on the Harvard campus who argues this, but doesn’t bother to name names. Generally what I’ve seen on the left is approval and encouragement of differences — that men and women are different, but that the bigger differences are between individuals, and that those differences should be respected. We do object to being compelled to fit into the straitjacket of just two stereotypical gender roles. We also don’t think you can go from a karyotype to a flawless description of life priorities or sexuality.

  • Different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates. Oh, yeah, he went there. Look at crime statistics and all those violent black criminals! We’re done, that’s all the analysis you need to do (and, by the way, those leftist college professors do not deny the statistics at all). But why do black communities have higher crime rates? It wouldn’t have anything to do with poverty, or discriminatory policing, or the existence of laws that basically criminalize being poor, would it?

    And of course he brings up that always-useful distinction, that Islamic people are more likely to be suicide bombers, as if that were the sole kind of violence that one ethnic group can perpetrate on another. How many Muslims have been killed by Christians? This is not to excuse either kind of violence, but to point out that playing selective games with the statistics to ignore institutionalized violence is profoundly dishonest.

I’m just going to have to say it outright: Pinker is lying here. These are all ideas that are routinely discussed at universities. The leftist positions he is caricaturing are far less dogmatic than he is claiming, and the alt-right positions far more so. There is no censorship that prevents addressing them; there is an expectation of greater, more evidence-based rigor in any discussion of such complex social, economic, and historical issues, and trying to pull the kind of misrepresentations and naive assertion of stereotypes that Pinker is babbling about here will get your arguments slapped down hard. I am shocked that a Harvard professor would promote such ignorance and falsehoods.

Here’s a longer clip in which Pinker goes on to say the same sort of things that are routinely said in classrooms, all while doubling down and saying the “politically-correct left” is not allowing them to be said. He is completely un-self-aware. I guess it only counts if a politically incorrect person like Pinker says them as if they were his own novel idea, rather than the mundane substance of typical classroom discussions.

Why would a school in Washington state be named after Robert E. Lee, anyway?

There is a Robert E. Lee Elementary School in East Wenatchee, Washington, and some community members are irate because the school board has proposed changing the name to just Lee Elementary. Some because it doesn’t go far enough.

“Lee needs to be gone, period,” JJ Jackson told the board before the vote. “My kids attend schools in this district and they come home daily complaining about racism, about teachers,
about clothing that a white kid can wear, but they can’t,” said Jackson, who is black. “Please
explain how the world’s biggest gang, the KKK and neo-Nazis, why it’s OK to support them.
Going forward, Lee is a no. It needs to be gone.”

I’m with him. Others, it’s because, well, change is bad, I guess.

“You should reject this group’s agenda because it will not stop with this name. This is but a microcosm of what is happening in our country. There are more important issues like assuring
our kids are getting a quality education,” he said. “Leave it the way it is. Set the standard right
here and now and stand up to this.”

I would like to know what “quality education” this fellow wants to see in his schools that’s more important than the complaints that Mr Jackson brought up. I rather suspect that they’re more of the conservative agenda than anything to do with actually improving and funding public education.

Maybe somebody should point out to them that, while Washington was not a state at the time of the Civil War, the territory did side with the North and actually recruited the Washington Territory Volunteer Infantry to support the defense of the region during that war.

Bonus amusement: there is a Ulysses S. Grant Elementary in Wenatchee.

Eggers also suggested addressing Grant Elementary at the same time, though that suggestion did not move forward.

As long as someone is explaining what side Washington was on in the Civil War, they might also mention that Grant was a Northern general and American president, and was not a slave-holding traitor to the country.

I know we’re not supposed to have heroes, but some teachers deserve the title

The money is always supposed to move upwards, and it’s a crime to question it. Take, for example, this Louisiana teacher who dared to ask why administrators were getting raises when teacher salaries had been frozen for years:

Local news station KATC reports that Deyshia Hargrave, a teacher at Rene Rost Middle Schools in Kaplan, Louisiana, attended a Vermilion Parish School Board meeting on Monday to ask questions about how the board could vote to increase the superintendent’s pay despite the fact that many school employees have worked for years without a pay increase.

Hargrave was informed that she was not supposed to ask questions at the meeting, as this was only intended to be a forum for public feedback. Nonetheless, board members tried to answer her questions.

It seems to me that asking a question is a perfectly reasonable form of feedback, especially since asking administrators why they have given themselves a raise is much more polite than simply stating that you protest the inequities constructed by the ratfuckers in charge, which would not be a “question”, and therefore would be allowed.

Unfortunately, in America in 2018 there can only be one response to questioning authority.

Now they’re saying she wasn’t arrested, she was just thrown to the ground and handcuffed. Just.

The next Mythicist Milwaukee con will be worse than the last

That’s a prediction. They tried to invite Sincere Kirabo to the next Mythicist Milwaukee con, and Kirabo is a Very Big Name in the humanist/social justice community, well-respected, and a great writer and speaker. You’d think that was a good sign, right? Wrong. You have to read what they propose that he do.

We are reaching out to see if you would want to be a speaker at Mythcon V. Our idea for your event would to be part of a discussion on “The effects of social justice activism in the African American community” [sic] This topic title is not final. The idea is to have you on stage with someone that would hold opposing views. We would have a moderator that would be present just to keep the conversation moving along.

That was my emphasis. This is exactly the kind of crap they pulled last time: they need an excuse to put an edgelord front and center on stage, and they do it with the pretext of setting up a debate with someone with more respectable views. When I get invited to do a creationist debate, this is always the case: the organizers are really all about promoting the creationist ass on stage, and that’s who the audience is bussed in to see, and they just want me there as a foil for the dishonest twit.

You do have to wonder who the Milwaukee frauds were trying to get who holds opposing views to a black social justice advocated. Richard Spencer? Jared Taylor? Some whiny racist vlogger from YouTube? It doesn’t matter. They’re going to have another audience of white alt-right anti-social-justice atheists there, and they just want an obliging target for them jeer at. Kirabo’s response is perfect.

Or, as secular activist Alix Jules paraphrases the request that he also received: “Please justify your existence, anger, and rage, while defending your humanity.”

They also tried to get Alix Jules? Jesus.

I will not negotiate my humanity. I will not play accomplice to interrogating the significance of Black liberation to indulge the white gaze.

This leads me to a point many who consider themselves a part of the atheist movement may not want to hear: the misguided audacity Mythicist Milwaukee has displayed reflects aspects of an ethos deeply entrenched within organized atheism communities.

It isn’t like Mythcon 4 is the first time atheists or self-described secular humanists have misapplied the right to free speech to express or celebrate dehumanizing views. It isn’t like Mythcon 4 is the first time atheists or self-described secular humanists have trivialized the struggle for a more just world and dismissed it with terms like “identity politics.”

I acknowledge that these elements are alive and well within the humanist movement, one made up of a non-monolithic variety of outspoken individuals, groups, and organizations who share mutual interests but also embrace diverging goals. I’ve gradually disassociated myself from organized atheism (outside what’s necessary for work) because it’s too common to meet those involved in this movement who not only don’t prioritize matters of social change for collective liberation, but also regard those who value these ambitions with contempt. Those aren’t my people, but more than that, they’re obstacles to my work.

I don’t want to waste time and energy trying to convince people why they should examine their allegiance to unjust ideologies, or why they should want to act in solidarity with marginalized communities. I prefer to invest my time in communities of people who acknowledge that there are major social problems that demand solutions.

I’ll just say right now that this conference is gearing up to bring in speakers, and if you get an invitation from them, just say NO right now, unless you want to get tangled up in another contentious shitshow. Or unless you’re a shitlord. Then just go right ahead.

Hard to believe the attempt to vindicate Sandusky retroactively continues

His conviction on dozens of counts of child sex abuse was pretty solid, but some are still trying to claim he was convicted on the basis of that bullshit “repressed memory therapy”. He wasn’t. Here’s a damning summary of the trial that slaps down those “skeptic” claims that the evidence against him was a collection of fantasies.

And then…Sandusky had an appeal built around the claim that unreliable “repressed memories” were used against him. This whole argument has already been debated in a court of law!

Here’s what the judge said in the appeal.

Although he was denied access to the victims’ psychological records, Sandusky was permitted to call witnesses to explore whether the victims had undergone repressed memory therapy prior to trial, and he did explore that subject with Dustin Struble (“Struble”), Michael Gillum, Aaron Fisher, Brett Houtz, and Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, none of whom affirmed the defendant’s hypothesis.

During his direct testimony, Gillum, Fisher’s treating therapist, plainly and credibly stated, “I don’t deal with repressed memory [and] I don’t work with anyone who claims to have repressed memories or anything along those lines.” (PCRA, 03/24/2017, p. 159). He further articulated his negative assessment of repressed memory therapy and why he did not engage in it. (Id. at 164-165). While Struble acknowledged that he and his therapist had discussed methods of unearthing repressed memories, moreover, he stated definitively that he had not undergone that type of therapy prior to the defendant’s trial. (Id., 05/11/2017, p. 20).

Dr. Loftus had a different opinion based on “impressions” from Gillum’s book, statements Struble made two years after the trial, and the fact that the victims whose excerpted trial testimony she reviewed did not give consistent stories to the police, the grand jury, and the trial jury. (Id. at 71-90). Having been rendered after an uncritical review of an absurdly incomplete record carefully dissected to include only pieces of information tending to support Sandusky’s repressed memory theory, however, that opinion was entirely ineffective to rebut Gillum’s and Struble’s definitive denials.

Note that comment, that none of the experts called upon “affirmed the defendant’s hypothesis” that the victims had gone through repressed memory therapy…the very thing that the “skeptics” disagreement with the trial result hinges upon.