No.
It’s odd nobody described the year long campaign of vilification aimed at Chris Mooney as bullying or harrassment. Oh right, no it’s not…
@PhilosophyExp
Jeremy Stangroom
- It wasn’t year long. It was season long – summer 2009. It was about four months, June through September, while the promotion of Unscientific America was in high gear.
- It wasn’t incessant. It responded to articles Mooney, or Mooney and his co-author Sheryl Kirshenbaum, wrote attacking “new atheists.”
- It lacked a number of features of the harassment campaign that Stangroom is minimizing by tweeting this.
Still. I get that it probably felt like bullying and harassment to them, so in that sense perhaps it was. On the other hand Mooney was a Name at the time, in the wake of the success of his best-seller The Republican War on Science. He was able to get articles published in a lot of very visible mainstream outlets. He made new accusations about “new atheists” each time. I still don’t think it was particularly unfair for bloggers to respond to the accusations. I get that Mooney sees it differently though.
So I should be able to see the same thing about the people who harass me every day, right?
No. Because the two are not comparable. Thanks anyway.