Year: 2010

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.

Several people (some via email rather than comments) have pointed out this observation of Glenn Greenwald’s in a letter at Salon:

I think it’d be worth it to sue [Andrew Breitbart] just to uncover his “source” who did the editing. “Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

Ignore the part about suing, that’s not the issue here. The issue is the implicit claim that a fraudulent “source” does not deserve or have a right to remain anonymous and the explicit claim that journalists are supposed to expose such sources when they (the sources) use the journalist to propagate the fraud. The above-mentioned people note that this means Chris Mooney, being a journalist, is supposed to expose his fraudulent “source” who used him to perpetrate a fraud.

That is an interesting point. It prompted me to take another look at those two (everlasting, wretched) “Tom Johnson” posts. Well yes – Mooney does help the fraud to perpetrate smears of Dawkins, PZ and Jerry Coyne.

In Counterproductive Attacks on Religion – Exhibit A “Tom Johnson” says

Many of my colleagues are fans of Dawkins, PZ, and their ilk and make a point AT CONSERVATION EVENTS to mock the religious to their face, shout forced laughter at them, and call them “stupid,” “ignorant” and the like…

In comment 10 on that post “Tom Johnson” corroborates his own story by saying it’s true:

Sorbet, I don’t doubt that you have NA friends who are not combative, but please don’t doubt that I have NA colleagues that are. For what it’s worth, I’m not exaggerating my case or making things up.

Well, it is, of course, worth nothing, and exaggerating and making things up are exactly what he was doing. He goes on, in his pleasant way:

…when I ask them about why they feel that they need to chastise the faithful when they’ve asked us to come help (trust me, we have heated discussions), they directly quote PZ Meyers, Jerry Coyne (especially), and Dawkins as why it should be a “good” scientist’s job these days to attack the faithful – no matter how moderate the faithful may be. I then get called a faithiest (thanks, Jerry Coyne) for NOT calling the religious ignorant and stupid.

So there you have it – a known fraud telling lies about people on the blog of a journalist, who is still protecting his identity. “Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

On the second post, My Thanks to Tom Johnson, Mooney smeared a number of people:

Last week, the New Atheist comment machine targeted the following post, in which I republished a preexisting blog comment from a scientist named “Tom Johnson” (a psuedonym).

I’m part of that offensively-named “machine” because I did a post, not “targeting” the Tom Johnson post, but pointing out that it looked like bullshit and was the product of an anonymous source and that Mooney, as a journalist, should be more skeptical than that. I was right, and I did nothing wrong in expressing skepticism about “Tom Johnson,” but I was part of the smear based on the lies told by the fraudulent “source.” “Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

Food for thought.

Martha Nussbaum starts her discussion of burqa bans with her version of the justification for the free exercise clause of the US Constitution and freedom of religion in general. It’s a rather sentimental picture.

Let’s start with an assumption that is widely shared: that all human beings are equal bearers of human dignity.  It is widely agreed that government must treat that dignity with equal respect.   But what is it to treat people with equal respect in areas touching on religious belief and observance?

We now add a further premise: that the faculty with which people search for life’s ultimate meaning — frequently called “conscience” ─  is a very important part of people, closely related to their dignity.

The problem with that as a justification for the free exercise clause and for freedom religious practice is that it’s so incomplete. Nussbaum is very very fond of talking about religion as the way “people search for life’s ultimate meaning,” but that’s far from being all that religion is, and Nussbaum’s presenting it that way is misleading, even obfuscatory. Religion is other things too, including a set of rules. A religious set of rules is often reactionary, and it is always “sacred,” which makes it less accountable to human ideas and wishes, and more difficult to change.

Religion is not just about the individual’s search for meaning; religion is social, and often demanding, or frankly coercive. The free exercise of religion often means the freedom to force subordinates to obey religious rules. Nussbaum makes the whole system sound a lot more benevolent than it can be assumed to be.

That’s especially obvious in the case of the burqa. The burqa is not really part of women’s “search for meaning” in the sense people like Nussbaum, and like me, understand it; it’s part of a system of rules forced on people by tradition and custom and authority. Yes it may be that some people “find meaning” by obeying such rules, but the truth is it doesn’t matter if they do or not; the rules are rules, and they have nothing to do with freedom.

Mona Eltahawy made a compelling point in a discussion of the burqa ban:

What really strikes me is that a lot of people say that they support a woman’s right to choose to wear a burqa because it’s her natural right. But I often tell them that what they’re doing is supporting an ideology that does not believe in a woman’s right to do anything. We’re talking about women who cannot travel alone, cannot drive, cannot even go into a hospital without a man with them. And yet there is basically one right that we are fighting for these women to have, and that is the right to cover their faces. To tell you the truth, I’m really outraged that people get into these huge fights and say that as a feminist you must support a women’s right to do this, because it’s basically the only kind of “right” that this ideology wants to give women. Otherwise they get nothing.

Well yes. That’s not a slam-dunk argument for state bans on wearing it, but it is at least part of the picture, which critics of the ban tend not to dwell on.

 I have met Muslim women who have a very elaborate explanation for why they wear the burqa — they say that women are candy or diamond rings or precious stones who have to be hidden away in order to appreciate their worth. And I’m appalled! We should talk about this because if we’re really going to discuss this as feminists, is that something a feminist should be defending? That a woman is a piece of candy?

………..A bowl of ice cream?

People are discussing the uses and abuses of irritation, or anger, or zeal, or dickishness, or baying for blood. This is prompted by a talk Phil Plait gave at The Amaz!ng Meeting a couple of weeks ago. He took an informal poll, Matt D tells us:

Let me ask you a question: how many of you here today used to believe in something — used to, past tense — whether it was flying saucers, psychic powers, religion, anything like that?…Not everyone is born a skeptic. A lot of you raised your hand. I’d even say most of you, from what I can tell.

Now let me ask you a second question: how many of you no longer believe in those things, and you became a skeptic, because somebody got in your face, screaming, and called you an idiot, brain-damaged, and a retard?

Not many hands. But as lots of people have pointed out…so what? Hardly anyone does get in people’s faces, screaming, and call them idiots, brain-damaged, retards. Many people do various things that are well short of that, some of which could be considered alienating to some; excessive; tactless; and so on. But that’s not a very exciting claim. Some people are tactless and alienating. Well yes, how true. And?

Stephanie Zvan notes that sometimes a blast of well-directed anger is exactly what’s needed.

a friend gave me Flim Flam. James Randi told me how people had lied to me under the guise of nonfiction, under the guise of science. He was, in fact, kind of a dick about it. That’s not a very nice book by any definition of the word. It uses name-calling. It sneers.

But oh, it was exactly what I needed. I needed it both for the information it gave me and for the anger and vitriol. Without Randi’s vitriol, I wouldn’t have been able to make the clean break in thinking that I did.

PZ says again that things aren’t as simple as mean bastards v wonderful nice people.

Everybody seems to imagine that if Granny says “Bless you!” after I sneeze, I punch her in the nose, and they’re all busy dichotomizing the skeptical community into the nice, helpful, sweet people who don’t rock the boat and the awful, horrible, bastards in hobnailed boots who stomp on small children in Sunday school. It’s just not right.

The awful, horrible, bastards in hobnailed boots who bay for blood and stomp on small children in Sunday school. Let’s have the complete picture here.