Things you C*N’T say! (transcript)

[0:00] Thunderf00t: Today’s message is brought to you by Jessica Valenti, feminist author who, under the banner of “MORE FEMINISM, LESS BULLSHIT”, Tweets: “I truly believe that American culture prefers girls chaste and dead over slutty and alive.”

[0:17]: Well, thanks for letting us know what MORE feminism will look like, Jessica.

[0:22]: So, there’s ALWAYS someone out there telling you what you CAN’T say. I mean, let’s start from the very top. Some people think that the word ‘nigger’ is so offensive that they ALWAYS, and in many ways, childishly substitute it by calling it “the N-word”.

[0:39] clip from YouTube, “Charles Barkley discusses the N-word on TNT”: “I’m a black man. I use the n-word. I’m going to continue to use the N-word with my black friends, with my white friends.”

[0:52] Thunderf00t: Even Seth McFarlane backs away from using the word.

[0:55] clip from Family Guy: “WHAT did you just call me?”
“I thought that was your name!”
“THAT IS OUR WORD! YOU’VE GOT NO RIGHT USIN’ IT!”
“Hey—hey—hey—I’m cool, I’m cool. No problem . . . Could—could you pass me the oar, N-word Jim?”
“THANK YOU”

[0:10] Thunderf00t: I mean, don’t these people realize that language is context-specific? The word ‘nigger’ is neither universally offensive-

[1:18] clip from Pulp Fiction (YouTube, “SHEEIT NEGRO!!”)

[1:30] clip from YouTube, “Chris Rock – Black People VS. Niggaz (Bring the Pain 1996)”
“Every time black people wanna have a good time, ign’nt ass niggas fuck it up . . . CAN’T DO SHIT . . . CAN’T DO SHIT! without some ign’nt ass niggas fuckin’ it up.”

[1:45] Thunderf00t: Nor does it make a lot of sense to always allude to it as the “N-word”.

[1:50—3:20] clips from YouTube, “Top Gear Presenter Jeremy Clarkson Apologises over N Word . . .” and from Life of Brian

[3:20] Thunderf00t: I mean seriously, what would be the point of having words that you CAN’T use?

[3:26]: And some people think that the word ‘cunt’ is so offensive that they always, and in many ways, childishly substitute it by calling it “the c-word”.

[3:36] clip from YouTube, “Paloma Faith On Meeting Diane Warren & The C Word”: “Her favorite word was the C-word.”
“OH NO, it’s not like that.”

[3:40] Thunderf00t: Well this video is about words like these, and the people who think that you shouldn’t be able to use them.

[3:48] clip from YouTube, “Ban Bossy—I’m not Bossy. I’m the Boss”: “Words matter.”
“Let’s just ban the word ‘bossy’.”

[3:51] Thunderf00t: Well, in the atheist community, it’s people like PZ Myers. Apparently, he thinks that every time someone uses the word ‘cunt’, every single woman on the planet is insulted, devalued, and demeaned.

[4:05] clip from YouTube, “Rebecca Watson – European Atheist Convention 2012”: “And when I point out that ‘bitch’ is a gendered insult that demeans all women—again—most people, get it.”

[4:13] Thunderf00t: In a recent article titled, “How to drive a Brit crazy” he states “It turns out to be really easy. All it takes is five little words. “’Cunt’ is a sexist slur”.

[4:24] Thunderf00t: So PZ tweeted this image here: which is meant to be a social-justice-warrior joke about what happens when the outraged-about-everything brigade want to point out that “‘cunt’ is a misogynistic slur”.

[4:38] clip from YouTube, Feminist Frequency, “Kanye West’s Monster Misogyny”: “’Misogyny, as defined by The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology, is a cultural attitude of hatred for females simply because they are female.”

[4:45] clip from Skepchick Video [?]: “-um, more that I think that there are a lot of things that are, uh, part of a misogynist culture or milieu that would go by unnoticed by most women. They went unnoticed by me for most of my twenties.”

[4:58] Thunderf00t: That is that it conveys HATRED for ALL women.

[5:05]: So PZ goes on: “I retweeted it, and then the replies came flooding in. The defenses are hilarious, irrational, and indignant. It’s incredibly common to see people protest that it’s a perfectly acceptable word; everyone says it in England; it doesn’t have any sexual connotations at all, because apparently, people in the UK are so stupid that they don’t remember that it’s a word that refers to the female genitalia.”

[5:34] Thunderf00t: Well actually, let me tackle that one. Not just as a Brit, you understand, but as someone who has travelled extensively in the wide world. Firstly, colorful language is rarely literal.

[5:47] clip from YouTube, “Trekkie Lingo! ;-)”: “Your use of language has altered since our arrival. It’s currently laced with—shall I say, more colorful metaphors.”

[5:54] Thunderf00t: When people are saying words like ‘dick’ or ‘cunt’, they are not literally referring to the genitalia of all men or women on the planet.

[6:03]: Secondly, no it doesn’t drive Brits crazy. Indeed, quite the contrary, it just shows that you are perfectly fitting into the stereotype of the archetypal American, as the culturally narrow-brained moron.

[6:16] clip from The Simpsons, (YouTube “It’s Chowder!”)

[6:24] Thunderf00t: -arrogantly thinking that your use of the language in YOUR culture is how ALL other cultures around the world must use their language. Sorry, but language just isn’t like that. It’s very plastic in its meaning.

[6:40]: So, for instance, in America, ‘fanny’ means ‘bottom’. It’s a nice way of saying ‘ass’, and it’s a term that you can quite happily use in polite conversation. Not quite so much in England. No, in England, ‘fanny’ means what ‘cunt’ means in America.

[6:58]: Indeed, when I was a kid in England, the terms were perfectly interchangeable. Yeah, there’s one hell of a learning curve on that one. So yeah, news flash social-justice-warriors, the whole planet does not revolve around YOUR use of language. Just because YOU swoon at the mere mention of the word ‘cunt’ does NOT mean that the rest of the world does too. Yes, words have very different associations in different places.

[7:29]: So for instance, in England what you call ‘pants’ in America, are called ‘trousers’. And what they call ‘pants’ in England, are called ‘underpants’ in America. Indeed in England, the term ‘pants’ can even be used as sort of polite and comical swear word in that if something is ‘rubbish’—ah—sorry, something is ‘garbage’, then you would say that it’s ‘pants’.

[7:52]: Well, when I was a kid in England, the word ‘nigger’ was nowhere near as offensive as it is deemed in America. And this is because we didn’t have the Deep South in England; which is where the name acquired most of its social connotations.

[8:08] clip from YouTube, “Where did the N-word come from?”

[8:19] Thunderf00t: There really weren’t that many African sorts in England. But if there were, the offensive term used in England dated back to the colonial days, which was to refer to black folks as ‘Wogs’.

[8:30] clip from YouTube, “Niggers & Wogs”

[8:41] Thunderf00t: But like I say, the term wasn’t that widely used, because there weren’t that many African folks in England. However, after WWII there was a fierce labor shortage in England. And lots of people came over from both India and Pakistan. And so it was that the name ‘Paki’, short for ‘Pakistani’ became a very offensive way of referring to people with brown skin.

[9:05]: Now for people who didn’t live in that culture, it’s probably difficult to see why it should. I mean, surely ‘Paki’ is just a contraction of ‘Pakistani’, right? Why should that be offensive?

[9:17]: But like I was saying, language is rarely that logical. And it carries a lot of the social baggage of its civilization. I mean you could claim that ‘nigger’ is just a phonetically contracted way of referring to someone from Nigeria.

[9:32]: Or maybe another more pertinent example, would be ‘Jap’, which could simply be viewed as a contraction of ‘Japanese’. But it picked up most of its negative connotations during WWII where it was widely used, especially in America, as a pejorative. And yeah, the term has much more offensive connotations in America, than elsewhere in the world. I mean, this is just the plasticity of language.

[9:58]: And, likewise, other contractions of nationalities or nicknames for cultures are not seen as offensive. So for instance, referring to people from Britain as ‘Brits’, or referring to Australians as ‘Aussies’, or Americans as ‘Yanks’, just isn’t offensive. Language can just be infuriatingly illogical like that.

[10:17]: However, yeah, in England, the term ‘Paki’ is seen as a very strong term. It’s almost like ‘nigger’ in America and is a derogatory way to refer to dark skinned people, along with other terms, like ‘coon’ or ‘the brown people’.

[10:32]: However, if you’re over to Germany, the ‘brown people’ refers to something entirely different. It refers to the modern incarnation of the nationalists—you know, after Hitler’s “brown shirts”. They are “the brown people”. And while we’re talking about things that can be UNfortunately offensive in German, ‘schwarze’ means ‘black’ in German. Whiiich, phonetically speaking, makes this one the most unfortunate names EVER.

[10:59]: And in parts of Germany, cats have seven lives, not nine. And you go a little east to the Slovak ones, and you find that dogs don’t go ‘woof’, but ‘haf’. And cows don’t go ‘moo’, but ‘boo’. And in Easter, they chase girls, and whip them, to make them strong and beautiful for the next year. And the girls have to give them candy in return. EEh, it’s kind of like trick-or-treating; which in itself is a pretty weird thing to do if you think about it.

[11:26]: And in places in Spain they throw tomatoes at each other. And one day a year in Germany, women are allowed to go and cut the ties off men.

[11:35] clip about weiberfastnacht

[11:45]: Or in England, once a year, we celebrate a guy failing to blow up the government, by making an effigy of that man and burning it on a fire. Seriously, that’s “family fun” in England—is burning an effigy of a man who’s been dead for a couple hundred years—on a fire!

[12:03]: Oh, and don’t get me started on all the different ways that cultures celebrate Christmas. It’s like they say: travel broadens the mind—it really does. And you know you’ve travelled enough, when you come back to your native country, and it feels like just another foreign land, with its own set of peculiar customs. And you just come to the conclusion that when in Rome, do like the Romans.

[12:28]: And it takes a special level of arrogance to expect every culture on earth to conform in every detail to what YOU find offensive in Minnesota.

[12:40]: As for the word ‘cunt’ demeaning all women, well like I was saying: language is rarely that literal. When people refer to someone as a ‘cunt’, they’re no more making a reference to the genitalia of women, than calling someone a ‘dick’ is a reference to male genitalia.

[12:56] clip from YouTube, “Trekkie Lingo!”: “Are you sure it isn’t time for a colorful metaphor?”

[12:58] Thunderf00t: Or that calling someone an ‘unclefucker’ is referencing someone who actually fucks their uncle.

[13:03] clip from South Park

[13:06] Thunderf00t: These are just colorful metaphors of our time. So no, around the world the word ‘cunt’ or ‘fanny’ means different things in different cultures, like in Australia, where the word ‘cunt’ can almost be used as a term of endearment.

[13:24] clip from The Sound of Music “what is it you can’t face”

[13:34] clip from YouTube, “Australia, Yeah, C**t – Australia’s new National Anthem”

[13:46] Thunderf00t: So what’s the point of all this, I hear you ask. It’s to let people like PZ Myers and the “I-find-that-offensive!” brigade, claiming that because the word ‘cunt’ is really offensive in America, that everyone in the entire world should find it as offensive as they do.

[14:05]: And the strange thing is these folks think that this is showing how wonderfully thoughtful, egalitarian and progressive they are. When actually, it shows the exact opposite—of just how arrogant, narrow-minded, and ethnocentric they are, to expect the entire English-speaking world to fall in line with their use of language in, say, Cowpoke [?], Minnesota.

Many thanks to Linda for supplying the transcript 🙂

FTB and the conspiracy to defraud/ Drawing a line under this pointless crap

Chuckle, so my evil HAXOR skills have earned me the honor of a dozen or so blog posts telling me what an evil, evil man I am.

Pah, N00b, Neo would have just re-clicked the subscribe button!

The bizarre thing is the principal horror seems to be over something I did NOT actually do.  Namely that I DID NOT drop anyones docs!, and what’s more docs they had already ‘officially’ sent me on their mailing list.

-So how to turn something I did NOT do into an evil act of malice?

Why by speculating of course!  The argument continues like this, ‘but you are an evil haxor, therefore why should I trust you when you say u wont drop docs’.  That’s right, in the absence of any actual doc dropping, speculate that they MIGHT doc drop!  Oddly enough the one question such folk will never directly answer, because they know the answer as well as you, is ‘do you think I would drop anyones docs?’

Thankfully FTBers don’t apply this reasoning to their own, such as the good man PZ.  He was clearly dishonest to me about the deal when I came on board at FTB (freedom to blog about what I wanted my ass! ‘rip into anyone you want’ my ass!)…..  He ‘HACKED’ a phone system by ‘stealing’ a passcode and using it to ‘break in’!! ‘He’s dishonest! Unspeakable, it’s a unconscionably horrific breach of trust… he should be drummed out of the community as a pariah etc etc’ /sarcasm

Why shouldn’t he drop someones docs too?  After all, on paper he officially has access to all the personal details I do!

‘Indeed, given his hatred of me, why shouldn’t he leak docs himself, then blame me for it?  I mean if you read his posts, is there any level the bilious odious man wouldn’t go to fulfill his vindictive vendetta of hatred of….. etc etc.’

-Wow, I can engage in inventive filled paranoid rambling about crimes people MIGHT commit as much as FTB!

However all this time I had been working on the basis that FTB had a significant media footprint, which I now think is wrong.  Put simply, even though FTB have a LOT of skeletons in the closet, and engage in some pretty cheap and vindictive scheming (I wouldn’t have stayed long associated to such a group, even if they hadn’t expelled me first), the bottom line is they are a small group, they are kings of a small hill of beans (I’m still getting more hits than 10 of their bloggers having been gone for a month! see below): they simply are not worth the time when there are bigger fish to fry!  So let me take this opportunity to draw some sort of line under this (I know that sentence alone will have bought rapturous applause from many sectors!).

Bear with me on this…. this is going somewhere!

From my evil haxor skills, FTBer were saying the following on their secret mailing list about a month after I was thrown off.

“Plus, TF had more hits than ten of our bloggers today.  Please tell me he is not getting paid for them.  And that we are divvying up his spoils.”

Firstly FTBers are actually suggesting, not only an intention of stealing, but to do it as a group and to share their ill gotten gains from this fiscal theft.

Secondly, I laughed my ass off when I read that.  Even after being gone from FTB for over a month, I’m still one of their prize bloggers!  If they were the significant organization I initially thought they were, their petit conspiracies would have been a bigger burden on the community, and my whistle blowing more pertinent.  However that’s simply not the organization FTBs is.

Anyways, Ed Brayton, the guy who holds the purse strings responds thusly.

“I haven’t even given any thought to the point at which I would stop paying him. The blog was killed on July 1. I could call that the end or pay him for hits in July, which were not unsubstantial. Or at this point I could just tell him to go fuck himself.”

Lets try to draw a line under this Ed.  DPRJones has a charity event coming up for Medicine Sans Frontier. You can donate ALL my ‘not unsubstantial’ earnings to this charity event (try to keep it dignified Ed, make sure you let people know where the money came from), and then you can delete my blogs hosted on FTB.

To be honest, I wouldn’t want to be seen to profit off petit drama like this (I never monetize videos that deal with this sort of thing), and I’m sure FTB would likewise agree.  Indeed it would be nice to see FTB follow my lead on this and donate all the revenue generated from this pointless drama to the same charity.

From my chair, that pretty much draws a line under this.

This request has been personally sent to Ed Brayton.  Balls in his court now.

FTB wants Thunderf00t ‘drummed out of the community’ and ‘forever a pariah’

So Ed Brayton, thats the leader, or owner or something of freethoughtblogs is now referring to me in these terms:

“I want to do whatever it takes to make sure that he is essentially drummed out of this movement, never invited to speak anywhere again and is forever a pariah.”

Awwww, what did I do to be referred to in these terms you may ask?

Turns out freethoughtblogs has a secret mailing list which they use, among other things to conspire against people (indeed I laughed when they cooked up what they thought was the ‘least damaging story’ to FTB for my expulsion.  Boy did the truth take a backseat in that thread!). Now as with many top secret mailing lists of course FTB has some footer saying how everything on this mailing list is ultra-confidential (kinda a contradiction of terms in my books sending out ‘secret information’ to an entire mailing list) but that doesn’t stop FTB OPENLY disclosing/ leaking whatever they want on that list when it suits their purpose. For instance they were quite happy to openly talk about Greg Ladens ‘threats of violence’ on the mailing list and PZ was quite happy to discuss the happenings of this ‘ultra confidential’ list in his video (sorry too late to delete the evidence boys, I’ve got it all!). Oddly enough, freethoughtblogs did nothing to admonish this sickening and evil violation of trust, or write blog posts about how this could result in the exposing of peoples real identities, people losing jobs, getting turned into newts and burned at the stake or some shit. Nor do they seem to realize that their main beef that I ‘stole their personal details‘ is clearly stupid. I, and everyone else on that mailing list, would have had all of those details (whatever they actually are, I still have no idea) anyways from when they originally signed me up to the mailing list. So what exactly are these personal details they think I’ve ‘stolen’ here?

Secondly I DONT FUCKING DOC DROP.

Even if I actually knew what this personal information was (I seriously have no idea who most these people are) I wouldn’t care, because:

I DON’T DOC DROP. Never have done. Never will.

Honestly if I were in FTBs shoes I would worry about the other guy they expelled, Greg Laden, who also has access to all their personal data. He has a history of threatening people on FTB and stalking people elsewhere. Like tracking people down in real life and trying to get them fired (Abbie Smith of the blog ERV) etc etc. Notably this was all done while Greg was at FTBs.

Now I always found the behavior of the folks on freethoughblogs on this secret list to be kinda cliquish, where chinese whispers morph from rumors to facts within one or two emails. For instance, when I first joined I was accused of being an ‘rape culture apologist’ guilty of ablism, devaluing addicts, and not being careful between challenging islam and outright racism, all based on no evidence whatsoever! ya freethought at work!

Many emails on this list were on points on which “everyone” on FTBs agreed, simply for the applause of everyone who responded. There was a LOT of self-congratulation and self-re-enforcement (herding) behavior there. Conversely even modest disagreement was greeted with snide derision. The sad thing is that freethoughtblogs refer to themselves in humor as ‘the hive mind’ and as ‘free thought bullies’, when in reality both are actually fairly accurate descriptions. So why is any of that important?

So a week or so ago a guy called Michael Payton who works for CFI Canada  (Center for Inquiry) put up a tweet about finding FTB unreadable. Now it turns out ironically Michael is on FTBs side on the issue of harassment policies at conferences (well mostly), however that didn’t matter if he was going to speak ill of freethoughtblogs and this precipitated an angry torrent of twitters from at least one FTBer and another to write an entire blog post about it (promoted by PZ Myers of course), and as with all such posts on FTB he (Payton) was repeatedly branded in the comments section with pejorative terms such as misogynist and MRA (the irony being that he posted an article on skepchick ‘speaking out against hate against women‘ FACEPALM). Indeed it turned out that merely hours after this tweet, CFI Canada had been contacted with calls for his dismissal. Yes his real life job was being threatened because of one tweet about FTBs!

That was a pretty disturbing turn of events having someones job targeted so quickly after a single tweet about FTBs, and after a brief chat with Michael, and knowing that FTB were going ballistic about this on their secret backchannel with some THIRTY messages being circulated on the backchannel about his single tweet, let him know what they were saying about him (naturally no personal details were passed on). Michael did not want to know, he did not need to know that personal info.

This is some of the chatter I passed on to Michael.

Just an early warning, I’m strongly leaning towards publicly making a minor deal of this – not focusing on Payton exclusively, but just as an example of the general attitude of dismissing all of FTB despite not being familiar with hardly any of us – *unless* there’s either an  actual apology to us or some kind of sufficient reason for why it would be a bad idea to draw attention to his remarks at this time, such as a relevant illness.

WTF is it with FTBs and skepchick always wanting people to apologize for stuff? Anyways they continue:

I’m usually not one to get involved in internal disputes in the movement, but if a national leader of the SCA or American Atheists had been so openly dismissive of FTB as a whole, I imagine we wouldn’t just let that pass unnoticed. So I’d just like to know if there’s any good reason why I shouldn’t do this, even if I can’t necessarily be privy to the details of it.

Translation: is it safe to do a knife job on this guy?

and

“But his statement was so broad, so casually dismissive of some of the smartest people in this movement (me among them, I’d like to think), that he can’t really be surprised that one of them took offense at it and criticized him for it, can he?”

What sort of person actually writes shit like that? (well Ed Brayton as it turns out). I’m guessing you can see at this point why they are so terrified of this stuff becoming public. Personal details my ass!

Well FTB found out that I had given Michael Payton access to this information, I then became the subject of the secret societies wrath. This is just one example of MANY. This is Ed Brayton (the head/ owner or similar of FTB) talking about what he wants done to me.

“I want to do whatever it takes to make sure that he (thunderf00t) is essentially drummed out of this movement, never invited to speak anywhere again and is forever a pariah.”

That’s right, all I did was clued someone in whose job was being threatened as to FTBs little conspiring (some THIRTY emails over his single tweet!) against him and for this heinous crime FTB now wants me ‘drummed out of the community’ as ‘a pariah’.  And now this whistle blowing action is being reported on FTBs as:

 It is clear now that he is a cruel man out to destroy anyone he thinks he can, either out of spite or out of a total disregard for collateral damage in his hatred for PZ.   -Ashley F. Miller

This was is not a surgical strike. It was a firebombing. And it seems to have been done for no reason other than to pursue a personal vendetta.

This is a gross violation of basic human decency. There is no possible spin that can make it into anything else. -Greta Christina

Yes, we want to make Thunderf00t/Phil Mason a pariah in the atheist movement, and for good reason: he’s a dishonest scumbag. The nice thing for us is that he’s making it easy: Phil Mason is destroying his own reputation with his sleazy behavior. Who in their right mind would ever trust that guy with any confidence at all? -PZ Myers

He is a vile hypocrite who has lost whatever shred of credibility he may have had left. -Jen McCreight