Skepchick go approval seeking from ‘White Male Privilege’

So having gotten roundly called for her shameful behavior at TAM (The Amazing Meeting), Amy ‘crying over a T-shirt’ Roth from Skepchick has gone approval seeking! Not from female bastions of the secular community like Harriet Hall (who clearly was distancing herself from folks like the evermore erratic and fringe Skepchicks), but ironically from what under almost any other circumstances the Skepchicks would call the ’white male privilege’ of the secular community.  However in reality she has not actual got any! NONE!

Ronald Lindsey, Dave Silverman and Nick Lee have all ‘spoken out against hate directed against women’ on Skepchick.

Y’see this is one of those ‘dissent from Darwin’ type stunts that the Discovery institute would pull.  For those who don’t know the dissent from Darwin thing was done to create the appearance of dissent when in fact essentially none existed, just like skepchick are suggesting that there is all this ‘hate against women’ when in fact essentially none exists (beyond criticism and/or trolling).  So how did the Discovery Institute and Skepchick achieve such a remarkable feat? Why by using language so broad that anyone and everyone, including myself, could agree with it.

In the case of the dissent from Darwin the statement was basically that all theories including evolution should be subject to critical scrutiny (well of course! who could disagree?), and in the case of Skepchick it’s ‘speak out against hate against women’ (well of course! who could disagree?).  Now firstly, if someone had asked me this question, my immediate response would be ‘why is Skepchick embracing sexism on this issue? Shouldn’t we be against all hate, irrespective of gender?’  Indeed at least two of the respondents actually elucidated to this. Kudos to:

Dave “American Atheists stands by all its members, supporters, and allies, and we will not tolerate hate directed at any of us. Period” Silverman, and Ronald “Hate-filled invective has been directed at many different people, male and female” Lindsey.

Then of course my second question could be, ‘why are you asking me such loaded questions?’  Really what do you expect me to say? is there ANYONE who would disagree with that position?  I mean if these people had been asked to speak out against hatred against males? or blacks? or puppies? how would they have responded? “No hatred against all of the above is obviously okay”?, of course they wouldn’t.  It’s such an obviously manipulative question.  Thankfully most of the respondent gave measured answers not far off where I would have planted my banner.

I would have started with the obvious and fair first question.

“do you think there is a real problem with ‘hate against women’ in this community? “

I’ve got to say I’ve seen essentially NONE.

I’ll tell you what I have seen, I’ve seen people get called idiots for saying and doing stupid things, y’know stuff about elevators (Rebecca Watson) and T-shirts (Amy Roth), although it is very conspicuous to those who can read what is obviously not said, that NONE of those who speak out against ‘hate against women’ actually specify that they think either Amy Roth or Rebecca Watson had a valid grievance in either case.

Indeed, while Amy Roths introduction to Nick Lee was glowing, if she had actually bothered to read what he wrote, she might have found precious little support for either her or Rebecca Watson.

“Not every flirtation is unwelcome attention, until one side announces it is, and then it should stop.”

So according to Nick there was nothing wrong with what happened to Rebecca Watson in the elevator. NOTHING.

“It is also complicated by the right of people to say what is on their minds even if it makes us feel uncomfortable.”

And there’s Amy ‘crying over the T-shirt’ Roth CLEARLY rebutted in the very next sentence.

Calling someone an idiot for acting like an idiot does not become ‘hate against women’ simply because the person in question was a woman.  This is one of the two general categories of the ‘hate against women’ that Skepchick encounters.  Look it’s obvious, how would people respond if I ‘embraced victim-hood’ like the Skepchicks.  That is any time anyone said anything ‘nasty’ against me I simply claimed that this was just sexism and misandry?  Yup, I would expect exactly the mockery that the Skepchicks get.  Far from sexism, this treatment represents equality in the secular community in that these people (the Skepchicks) are being judged on what they say and do, rather than on their gender.

The second general category of ‘hate against women’ Skepchick encounters is people trolling them.  Now it’s my reckoning that of the three ‘leaders’ Skepchick have thus far got to ‘speak out’ on this, two probably have no idea what trolling is.  Trolls do not hate anyone; they just get off on how easy it is to control people, particularly people who are hypersensitive on an issue (e.g. feminism) by pushing the right psychological buttons.  Skepchick is grade A trolling material and are seen to be some of the most easily puppeteered people on the webs.  What trolls will do is type some manipulative reactionary shit into a comment box and then laugh as those being trolled dance like puppets on strings.  With experience it’s easy to spot most trolls.  To be honest it is shameful that the Skepchick are so easily trolled as it shows their grotesque naivety to the interwebs.  So how can I be so sure that the Skepchick is just getting trolled?  Well it’s very easy, unless you actually think that there are really hundreds of atheists who are looking to rape Rebecca Watson (in which case the atheist community would have a huge fractional population of folks intending to be rapists and the ‘leaders’ response would be ENTIRELY inadequate), SHE’S BEING TROLLED!  Her ‘rape threats’ are exactly as valid as the ones I got on my first video that addressed this,

I’d just like to say thunderf00t should be raped, and I want to rape thunderf00t so he loosens up a little bit, and also thunderf00t is too ugly to rape.

Oh Noes, I’ve got multiple rape threats.  Where are all the atheist leaders speaking out against hate directed against men in the secular community?

and to be honest her parading these around like a ‘trophy proof’ of misogyny in the atheist community at conference after conference makes her, and anyone else who is taken in by it look as stupid to the new internet savvy generation of atheists as Oprah and the 9000 penises that she was worried a pedophile syndicate had ready to rape children.

Really leaders, you are showing your age in the internet generation to be taken in by this sort of thing.  There is only one way to win against a troll.  DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS.

Skepchick do not only openly violate this law, they put up glowing neon signs saying ‘we seek out and feed any and all trolls’.  On the internet this is almost as bad as feeding the gremlins after dark then throwing them in a lake Superior, then complaining about the gremlin infestation, it’s the equivalent of putting a big sign on your own back saying ‘kick me’ then crying about the ‘sexism’ of those who kick you.

Ana from the Young Turks pretty much calls it like it is on this segment.

Other than that, where are these people who ‘hate women’?  Does anyone actually have any evidence for this ‘hate against women’ that is NOT someone being calling out someone for saying or doing something outrageously stupid, or being trolled, or some mixture of the two?

In which case I have to ask these Leaders, who exactly are these people that they talking out against?  Where are they?  If no one actually knows, then why are they speaking out against a problem that doesn’t exist?  Inquiring minds need to know!

RE: Youtube starts banning ‘religiously offensive’ videos

   To be honest when I first got the take down notices, about 6 of them in an hour or so (4 content inappropriate with no chance of appeal, and two privacy complaints) I thought,

‘another harassing and minor annoyance in running the channel.  A quick email to YT should sort it out.’

   I was then simply stunned when youtube claimed these videos had been reviewed by professional and impartial moderators and were removed for either hate speech or privacy violation.  The more so as some of these videos constituted some of the milder things I’ve said about religion.  The bottom line was, if this really was the new bar for hate speech, not only would it in an instant render the Thunderf00t channel unviable, it would render virtually every rationalist channel unviable.  Youtubes actions were simply unintelligible.  Indeed if someone had told me these were youtube actions, I simply wouldn’t have believed them.  But there were the words on the screen in black and white.

   I had no option but to make the video “Youtube starts banning ‘religiously offensive’ videos“.  There were simply no other alternatives.  A fairly high stakes game given that youtube could easily have said my action violated the terms of service and just killed the account.  But then again, if the words I had in black and white on the screen were correct, then channel was already dead, and the only thing left to do was give a good accounting of itself before the inevitable banhammer.

    By coincidence this happened about one week after the Hamza Kashgari incident.

Kashgari made about 3 vanilla tweets mildly critical of Islam only to find himself in fear for his life.  He fled Saudi, only to be arrested in Malaysia.  There he was deported back to Saudi with no due process to face a potential death sentence over three tweets.  That’s fucked up beyond ALL recognition.  But it really underscores the problem that religions find arbitrary things offensive.  Given this simple observation, having a clause in the Terms of Service about not offending religions is simply incoherent.

   If youtube really is willing to give religion this latitude of freedom, and to further scale what they consider ‘hate speech’ by how offended people are, then youtube would inevitably find itself in thrall to the Imams.  Many of them find anything that is not Islam offensive beyond comprehension, as was demonstrated by the Imam crying over the three tweets of Kashgari calling them ‘the worst thing he’d ever read’.

   So it was that I wrote potentially my last email to youtube asking them to apply whatever policy they had uniformly, which, taking ‘The Best emotional PORN‘ as the benchmark, would mean either about 7/10 of my videos would be hate speech, and they should delete them and ban my account, or reinstate the videos (which are vanilla compared to some of the videos on my channel).

The BEST emotional PORN, the new bar for ‘hate speech’,  Really?

   Thankfully, some 48 hrs later, with over 17000 thumbs up, well over a thousand mirrors and ~160k hits Youtube had a change of heart over what constituted hate speech.

   Now I have mixed feelings about this.  The Churchill quote about ‘The United States will always do the right thing…. once all other options have been exhausted’ kept coming to mind.

   Sure Youtube had done the right thing, and had the humility and plasticity to correct their previous mistake (a fairly honorable and humble act), but only once all other options had been exhausted.  You then look at what other options youtube had on the table (banhammer, ignore or stick to original judgment), and this is BY FAR the most dignified thing they could have done.

   So all things considered, I think this is as happy an outcome as could have been hoped for.  For the strong response of the community (and yes, it was the communal action that made this possible, for I as an individual had tried to take this to a sensible resolution and failed (I have the gut feeling it was not my email that swung the balance here)) ensured that free speech is maintained on this forum.

Many Thanks to all who made this outcome possible!

July 8th (Westboro Baptist Church)

Friday 8^th July, the Phelp interview.  The main reason I thought the Phelps would be fun would be a passage in Luke (also in another gospel I think), where Jesus is describing the end times.  Two men in a bed!  Jesus says you can get raptured if you are two men in one bed!  I also listen to a load of xian radio going across country, and I could make such a great gay sermon from this.

‘Remember Lotts Wife!  This is clearly a reference to not looking back, and the very next line is about two men in a bed.  Jesus is quite clear about his choice of sexes here, he could have said a man and his wife, he could have said a mother and her child, but no, its two men in ONE bed, ONE bed, signifying the one-ness of the two men… etc etc’.  This is always what bugs me when people start blathering about being ‘scholarly’ in Christianity.  I’ve listened to the scholars, and yes of the stupidity they issue forth, this (two men in ONE bed) comment wouldn’t even register above the noise!

Anyway bear in mind it was just an idea, and that I had driven from Columbus to Kansas city the previous day, and had no time to prepare at all.

They were very courteous when they greeted me, Megan and Megan, one young and pretty, the other as ugly as her opinions.

I had hoped to try and keep it all on a civilized, clear and logical level, but it became almost instantly obvious that this was a lost cause.  The hostility of ‘Meg the Eldar’ was really something I was unprepared for.  The volume, the amount, and the hostility in the pitch of her voice was that of a bitter, bitter woman.  Like a dog that’s been tormented daily till all it knows how to do is attack anything that comes within biting distance.  The daughter, I had the feeling was only there for eye-candy, or was just there as a spectator so Meg the Eldar could show her how to properly hate something not of the cult.  The daughter spoke softly and had it just been me and her we might have made some progress.  She had a venomfangx look to her.  Every argument had a ‘memorized by rote’ unthought through answer, but given time it might have been possible to untangle some of the mess.  But alas, Meg the Eldar, from the very start was throwing in pointless insults at every opportunity, ‘your nothing special’ ‘your country is worthless’ ‘your mother…’ etc etc.  Water off a ducks back for me of course, I’ve had more shit thrown at me than that before. Battle-hardened to the childish feces flinging 🙂 .  Eventually, I decided that Meg the Eldar could not be allowed to streamroller the events by doing 90 % of the talking, only 5% of which was relevant, but when I accosted her about it she threatened repeatedly to leave.

Realizing that she essentially had the trump card of just walking out, I  went for the ‘Jesus endorses homosexuality’ gambit.

It hit the spot, and they ‘RAGE-QUIT’.  The great thing was though that Meg the Eldar acknowledged that women should be grinding mill with rocks when the rapture happens.

PWNED BITCH.

After that back on the road, and drove for a LONG time.  Made it to Colorado Springs by dusk, and stopped off at a coffee shop to upload some stuff, catch up with email etc.  But by this time I was a spent wraith.  My plan had been to head up to the mountains and find some quiet forest road to park on.  Eyeballing the map ‘Cripples Creek’ looked fun.  Boy did I get it wrong.  I was expecting things to get quiet and empty very quickly.  Not a bit of it, turns out its all ski resorts etc up there.  Nothing worse that having to drive on and on and on in the dark when you are exhausted.  But alas no alternatives.  Eventually gave up and found a larger siding and just crashed out.  I had figured the traffic would die off quickly after midnight, but not a bit of it.  There was a steady stream of cars, every minute or so throughout the night.  I just couldn’t figure it out.  Where were they coming from and going too? To me this looked like a road to nowhere.  At any rate I woke up in the night to see Jupiter rising over the mountains.  First time I’ve seen him this year!  Hopefully nearer opposition I will get a team together to do a global planetary timelapse!