How could anyone possibly have known?
Salon has an amusing piece by Alex Pareene on what the pranks of Andrew Breitbart mean. First Pareene quotes Politico’s take on that:
Responsible people in power and in the mainstream media are only beginning to grapple with this new environment — in which facts hardly matter except as they can be used as weapon or shield in a nonstop ideological war. Do you dive into the next fact-lite partisan outrage — or do you stay out and risk looking slow, stupid or irrelevant? No one is close to figuring it out.
then points out
Actually, VandeHarris, lots of people figured this one out! It was really easy!
Does that remind you of anything? It reminds me of anything. Some things are not as difficult as some people make out. Obvious glaring fakes are not as hard to spot as some people claim.
Pareene points out a lot of things that made the story look fake to the most casual eye.
Real-life reporters are supposed to be baffled as to how to respond to this fact-lite outrage? Shouldn’t they have just found the full video, or interviewed Sherrod, like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution did? If you have to write about the latest Breitbart outrage RIGHT THIS SECOND, you write, “Bomb-throwing propagandist with history of disregard for factual accuracy posts race-baiting video intended to score political points against NAACP and black people in general.” It was a really easy story!
Yes, that does sound familiar.
What matters is that the story MIGHT be true.
A black woman really might have cost a white wwII verteran his farm because she hates white wwII veterans.
Scientists in Alabama might really read the God Delusion and decide to chase anyone who owns a bible out of the building, making it impossible to teach evolution in Tennessee.
It’s great how many parallels you can find when you go looking for them. Mooney should be looking over his shoulder!
Can anyone be that naive? When was the golden age when facts mattered? Before Iraq? Before Al-Shifa? Before Gary Webb, Robert Maxwell, Iran/Contra, Watergate and Vietnam? Hell, I could keep this up right back to the Stone Age!
The phenomenon of suspiciously easy prankability and the fears of panicky accomodationists seem related to the two bias studies described in a recent Ben Goldacre column:
The first (Lord, 1979) found that people looking at scientific papers found “extensive methodological holes in the evidence they disagreed with, but ignored the very same holes in the evidence that reinforced their views.” The second (Munro, 2010) also looked at people’s interpretations of scientific studies and found “People whose pre-existing stereotypes […] had been challenged by the scientific evidence presented to them were more inclined to believe that science had nothing to offer, on any question”.
Also, is the phrase “mooney-mouthed” in popular use yet?
must see:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/23/fox-news-shirley-sherrod_n_657512.html
note the use of the term “Exhibit A”, and the decidedly non Christian outraged blonde with the crucifix around her neck, or is that a Christian attitude. I get so confused.
Oh those outraged blondes on Fox. They’re scary.
In her defense, the blonde woman with the crucifix is still more or less capable of moving her eyebrows, which I found refreshing.
It reminds me of an awful lot of anything. I’m wandering off the topic, I know, but one of the things it reminds me of, in a slant way, is the story from last year about the cop who jumped out of his Humvee and brandished his gun at a bunch of young people at a snowball fight. It’s come out that Detective Baylor is claiming that he was afraid that the snowball throwers might be anarchists, which of course explains everything. Those people, after all. They’d do anything. They could kill you with a snowball. It could happen. Therefore, anything is permissible.
In addition to the LGBTQ rights model that Stewart and I were just talking about in the previous thread, I’m starting to think it’d be a not a bad idea to keep a weather eye on what’s happened in anarchist movements. Atheists and anarchists have a fair bit in common, I think, including a good deal of common history. We’re both implicitly or explicitly challenging entrenched systems of authority (moral authority, state authority, and others) that we believe are unjustified. We’ve both been so demonized that people who aren’t even atheists/anarchists have been attacked as such because it makes such a fine attack. And then there’s the whole herding-cats thing.
I don’t know much about anarchism first-hand except that every anarchist I’ve actually met has been a sweetheart and some of them make a shockingly tasty vegan cupcake. But – speaking of obvious glaring fakes – I do perceive that many anarchists have been quite concerned about agents provocateurs, and with reason.
I’ve always had a soft spot for anarchists because of their role in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. The anarchists and the POUM (Trotskyists) were the real left and the Stalinists were…well, the Stalinists, and they crushed the anarchists and Trots. For awhile there was real egalitarianism and hope in Barcelona…a different way the left could have gone.
More recently though I tend to think of them as clowns intent on breaking the windows of Starbuck’s.
See that’s why “new” atheism is a pussycat really. We don’t break coffee’s windows, we go inside and drink it.
you seem to ignore the legions of child soldiers they’ve conscripted to do your wet work smashing stained glass windows while you have a latte and discuss philosophy.
Just ask Mooney, there are commenters on his blog that have seen the stones, the broken glass, the sacred relics smashed … and conversations stopped.
Yeah, I’ve no soft spot for anarchists, either. I think of them like I think of committed libertarians: Don’t try to talk with me about how the world works. I know how I think it works.
But you know whom this reminds me of, for whom I do have a soft spot? Wiccans!
We’re sentimental folks all the same, ain’t we?
Aside from the Zerzanites who are mostly down in Eugene — and oh, have black bloc tactics ever been a godsend for the agents provocateurs — our local anarchists seem to me to be pretty chill. If I remember the politics correctly, a couple of them started the Seattle Free School, where I took an embroidery class and finally learned to make French knots. I think the Really Really Free Market and the Bike Shack at the old Wayward Cafe both tie into local anarchist movements. And then there’s the annual book fair, not to mention Left Bank Books. So, a bunch of unholy terrors who… give stuff away, enjoy books, fix bicycles, and sew pretty things. (Though in fairness, French knots are evil. So there’s that.) I’m not describing them dismissively, btw; I respect all that.
I have a soft spot for the old Spanish anarchists, too, especially after reading William Archer’s meticulous book, The Life, Trial, and Death of Francisco Ferrer. Archer’s a moderate himself, but the treatment of Ferrer has him all but spitting nails. Comparing it to the Dreyfus affair, he calls them both “militarism, inspired by clericalism, riding rough-shod over the plainest principles and practices of justice.”
I have a soft spot for Wiccans and other pagans myself. Not so much the “I have spoken to the Goddess!!! She is REAL!!! I am very special!!!” types (they exist and annoy me) but many others. I’ve had some pretty interesting conversations with pagans, especially about magic and acting. And that John Michael Greer is no slouch.
And, yeah, yum, on the whole, those people also know how to cook. Maybe it’s all the potlucks. Maybe I just get sentimental when somebody gives me a cupcake. Maybe it’s time for me to go get one right now.
I agree with Scott (and Polly O). I’m very respectful of religion myself, but I’ve seen atheist colleagues brainwashing children and training them to smash churches, burn coffee-houses and send blog comments politely expressing disagreement.
I bake really great cupcakes too. Not vegan, but 100% godless. In fact, the university Secular Society of which I am a member will be giving away free godless cupcakes at uni next week in order to tempt people into a life of freethought. The way to a person’s heart is through their stomach they say, and I’ve seen nothing to challenge that in the posts above. Maybe I should make a few vegan ones too, so the anarchists like us as well.
Excellent plan. Plus if you bake a few vegan ones, you can tug at the heartstrings of people with egg and dairy sensitivities as well. I’m always surprised at how many people I know avoid dairy products. I don’t have any recipes I’ve tested myself, but Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World is popular.
If you haven’t made them before, don’t be surprised if they’ve got a little less loft than your usual recipe. I think that a not-so-ethereal flavor such as chocolate works well in a slightly denser cake. Finding a good vegan frosting may be more difficult; it’s hard to measure up to a good buttercream. It’d be interesting to experiment with a glaze of dark chocolate and coconut cream, cashew cream, and/or walnut oil.
Your Secular Society sounds pretty great, Emily.
Anarchist =/= window-smashing nutter. Read Kropotkin, Mutual Aid.
Kthxbai.
Also see Bakunin’s God & State.
Having lived through the idiot Black Bloc jerks setting fire to police cars during the Toronto G20, I can’t say I have any respect for anarchists.
Among the more modern not-so-window-smashing anarchists are the late Colin Ward and, arguably, Noam Chomsky.
Having lived through the WTO smashup in Seattle ten years ago, I am not without sympathy. (Though perhaps “lived through” is a bit hyperbolic, since what I actually did was get the hell out of the city center once the tear gas came out.) Actually, from here, that looked like one part idiot Black Bloc and one part police riot — an acquaintance in local government had some hair-raising stories about trying to get the Seattle police force to act with anything resembling sanity, especially once they’d pushed everybody up into Capitol Hill. Massive, massive fuckup. But, as usual, I digress.
Incidentally, at least one cop car burner has something rather odd about him. If anarchists and other leftists seem a little paranoid about infiltrators and provocateurs in the Black Bloc, well, they have their reasons. (*shrug* On the other hand, I’m kind of thinking, “Guys, what did you think would happen if you put on masks and got all propaganda-by-the-deed?”)
I am no fan of the Black Bloc I saw at WTO. But they are not the sum total of modern anarchism. I suspect they’re not even particularly representative. Like atheists, it seems to me that anarchists mostly get along and do their own thing.
Every movement has its huge jackasses, not excluding the New Atheists. While atheism does not have fundamentalists per se, we sure do have our Cat Piss Men. And we do get judged by them. I think that’s unfortunate and imprecise.
Ahhhhhh – you’re telling me, ever so subtly, that this is how the Myth of the Evil New Atheists works – the same way The Myth of the Totally Random Anarchists worked with me. Good point. Mind you, I said the thing about breaking Starbuck’s windows in full knowledge that that’s a very superficial and media-based, i.e. ignorant, judgment…but still, I said it, and that’s a good point.
I don’t think it’s the whole of the Myth of the Evil New Atheists by any means, but I do think that something like that is one of the things at work.
Yes, and so do I, for that matter. That’s part of why I object to Mooney’s endless campaign: because it just makes that all the more likely. But even if that is part of it, it still seems surprising that people whose job it is to think clearly and consider evidence and know how to admit error, keep brandishing the Received Wisdom on the subject as if it were infallible. As if Atheists shout in people’s faces had been written on the sky in letters of fire.
Cam —
What are Cat Piss Men?
It’s a phrase from geekdom, especially comic book and science fiction geekdom, to describe a certain walking cliche. Five Geek Social Fallacies mentions him. (There are also Cat Piss Women, but that’s not really the main archetype.) Aggressive, clueless, odiferous, and usually sexist, the Cat Piss Man will corner you and insist that you listen to his over-loud diatribe on the Green Lantern. This is his way of asserting dominance and picking you up. (Because, really, who among us ladies isn’t bowled over by a strong, manly opinion about the Green Lantern?) He is probably harmless but he is incredibly, incredibly tedious. He may have Asperger’s, but it’s at least as likely that he’s a generally neurotypical person with godawful social skills. He is fascinated by his own opinions and inordinately proud of the strength of his convictions, and he will trot them out at you at any opportunity and non-opportunity. In short, he’s the smelly, loud, intrusive guy who makes people want to drift quietly away to somewhere else and never come back.
I’ve known one or two guys who were like that about atheism. Though only one or two.
<q>Responsible people in power and in the mainstream media are only beginning to grapple with this new environment — in which facts hardly matter except as they can be used as weapon or shield in a nonstop ideological war.</q>
*New* environment? There’s nothing new about this. Shouldn’t a journalist know at least a little tiny bit about the history of journalism? “Remember the Maine”, at least.