When violence against women is just a joke
Meanwhile…the “skeptics” movement frays some more.
But then, lies and misrepresentation are Andy Lewis's stock in trade.
— PZ Myers (@pzmyers) October 5, 2018
Hello PZ, I know nothing about this spat, but I have known andy, maria and Alan for the last 8 years and they are decent honest people. Have you come across them before, and have you always viewed them as liars?
— Simon Singh (@SLSingh) October 5, 2018
I am judging them solely by the bigotry they demonstrated on my blog. Don't know them otherwise, nor do I care to.
— PZ Myers (@pzmyers) October 5, 2018
See it? 18 minutes apart – lies and misrepresentation are Andy’s stock in trade, then 18 minutes later I don’t know Andy apart from his comments on this one blog post.
So that’s quite a disjunction, but much worse is the sewer of comments on that post, which I read with disgust yesterday. A couple of people there are literally rejoicing that Maria MacLachlan was physically attacked at Speakers Corner last year; others are minimizing it. Now we see that PZ has no problem with that, but does have a problem with people who object.
John Morales:
alanhenness, what makes you imagine I believe they were all wrong?
It was a scuffle at a protest. A minor scuffle, at that. No injuries, even, and it resulted in a fine and costs. And it was to the letter of the law.
In fact, I wrote so: “I do get how the judge had to uphold the letter of the law”. Add to that the police and the CPS, FWTW.What I mean to express is that I find it laughable to consider it as constituting “male violence against women” (interesting use of the plural, there). Might as well claim a celebrity knocking the camera off some paparazza is the same thing.
So, yeah. Less than impressed by your characterisation.
Making a mountain out of a molehill, is what you’re attempting. Ain’t working.Be aware that you have only yourself to thank for providing me with that perspective, I took Maria at her word, earlier.
(Violent assault, my arse)
Porrivil Sorrens:
Oh man, thanks for the vids, always glad to see a FART get their comeuppance.
Well, it was less than what she deserved, but violence against fascists is good, no matter how light.
A. Noyd:
Given the penchant anti-trans bigots have for doxxing and harassing trans women, a known TERF activist with a camera would reasonably read as a threat to a lot of trans women. Not that getting physical and batting at the camera was a wise course of action, but it didn’t exactly lack provocation either. It’s like talk of “peaceful ethnic cleansing” or those forced-birthers who go around taking photos of license plates near Planned Parenthood.
And then finishing up with:
A claim I have never seen supported with evidence.
I have seen plenty of indisputable evidence for transgenderists harassing gender critical people, though.
DARVO. Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.
Hey, PZ? Fuck you.
I don’t see any disjunction. They made false and bigoted posts. They were banned for it and called out on it. They then lied about why they were banned. Sounds like a pattern to me, and justifies the “stock and trade” line. Did I miss something?
Jeezus. The disjunction is announcing that X (it doesn’t matter for this purpose what the X is) is Andy’s stock in trade and then announcing that this is the first you’ve heard of Andy. You can’t know the “stock in trade” of someone you just met an hour ago. The idiom implies established acquaintance.
As for the rest, no they didn’t and no they didn’t.
Ug… I *really* find myself wondering why I ever bothered following this scumbag.
What else does one expect from a professor of biology who denies that chromozones are a reliable marker of a person’s sex?
Pharyngula used to be one of my daily (or several-times-daily) reads. Not for the last couple of years. PZ’s commentariat seems rabid to me.
This is the only blog I read that I am willing to read comments. This is the only blog that has a commentariat that can disagree without tearing each other apart, and are willing to openly discuss ideas that challenge and sometimes even threaten their point of view.
^ ditto to both #6 and #7 for me
Oh man, that conversation sure livened up once I stopped checking it :(
Also, note that a punch to the face recieves “violent assault, my arse” while the mere presence of gender critical feminists with cameras is a “threat” and “provocation”. And that just from the comments quoted above – I’m certain there is a vast amount more victim reversal from those rabid liars.
I certainly didn’t read all of it, but I read much of the reaction to Andy and then to Maria and Allen.
Ophelia’s ostracism from the so-called Freethought Blogs network for, horror of horrors, daring to think for herself when challenged by a reductive and ill-motivated question was the beginning of the end for me; PZ’s abysmal punting on the Tuval affair (a mealy-mouthed claim that using the phrase ‘witch hunt’ was not on because there are real women getting murdered by the accusation) was the last straw. I’ve not been back since. Looks like I’ve got no reason to start now.
PZ is rather fond of making a mountain out of an atom of carbon. Hyperbole is, if you’ll forgive me, his stock in trade. His post leading to that ‘discussion’ is about Angelos Sofocleous, the President-Elect of Humanist Students who resigned after the usual rage-out of the woke for tweeting this;
as well as certain criticisms of the transgender movement (not transgender people) and suggestions for its improvement. In his resignation letter he bemoaned the fact that on certain issues no discussion is allowed, no rational discourse or exchange of views.
Nothing too outrageous, I’d say, but I am wrong, because according to the word of PZ, Sofocleous is denying trans people their humanity and right to exist, and making assertions that are potentially harmful. Furthermore, Sofocleous wants to deny their civil rights, or enslave them, or kill them!
PZ ends this balanced assessment of ‘RT if women don’t have penises’ with
‘Fiercely attacked..’, and he’s not talking aboult elderly ladies with cameras. Christ on a pogo stick! His beloved Horde are good at bad-faith reading, seeing what they want to see rather than what is written, and getting into a frothing rage at their own invented version, but PZ has raised it to an art form here.
I am now going to take a deep breath, switch off my irony-meter, and try to get through the comments without emesis rearing its foul head. Wish me luck!
Ophelia,
Consider the time line. The claim about lies and misrepresentation was made after PZ examined that thread, which is perfectly congruent to the claim that, until he had done that examination, he hadn’t known Andy.
In short, there is no disjunction:
1. Comments are made in PZ’s blog.
2. PZ forms an opinion about Andy on that basis.
3. PZ expresses that opinion.
4. Simon questions PZ about whether PZ had a pre-existing opinion.
5. PZ responds that he did not, but that he formed it as per (2).
Oh good God! I’m only 22 comments in and already seen several ‘Dear Muslimas’ and a lot of ad hom. arguments, along with PZ getting totally irrelevant by comparing the ‘women don’t have penises’ to his nonsensical ‘if a woman loses her ovaries is she still a woman’? PZ, you transphobe, men can have ovaries, too! Oh, and one Jeremy Shaffer claims that ‘Since “women don’t have penises” is a statement similar to “it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” ..’
Is it Jeremy? Is it really a similar statement or is it a false equivalence?
John, #13. If his knowedge of a person is what he garners from comments on one blog post then he has no basis to declare what that person’s stock in trade is. PZ has taken a few comments on one issue in one one thread and declared it representive of that person’s habitual modus operandi, when clearly one thread cannot supply enough data to back up the assumption. This is not to mention the obvious point that the ‘lies and misrepresentations’ statement is based only on PZs interpretation and is offered with no corroborative evidence.
It would be akin to me declaring as fact the idea that mansplaining is your stock in trade, since you are attempting to show Ophelia where she’s mistaken. We know that that would be unfair and untrue, and a look back through more comment threads would prove the lie of what I said, but I based it on not much less information than PZ had at hand when he made his statement as fact.
Acolyte, sure. But that constitutes a hasty judgement, not a disjunction. The connection exists.
Sorry, but this is priceless.
Reasonable questions, ones that have been raised here on many occasions. The first response to that comment in its entirety:
There’s nothing like a succinct answer to clarify matters, is there?
#16. The disjunction is between PZ stating a sketchy (at best) knowledge of Lewis, and his statement as fact that he knows Lewis’ stock in trade. Nothing to do with timelines except for the 18 minute gap between the inconsistent statements.
I know nothing of Lewis except for his comments on a single thread, lies and misinformation are his stock in trade is a sentence containing a rather obvious disjunction, wouldn’t you say?
Acolyte, I did read Ophelia’s #3 prior to posting, though I quoted from the OP.
Perhaps I’m too hung up on terminology; for me, a disjunction refers to either the logical connective or, in ordinary language, a lack of connection between things. I took it as the latter, but perhaps I was too literal.
But I now think it here refers to apparently contrasting claims, so in that sense, I suppose so.
—
FWIW, PZ has stated he no longer considers himself to be part of the skeptic movement.
(https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/05/05/i-officially-divorce-myself-from-the-skeptic-movement)
Yes, he no longer considers himself part of scepticism as a movement… but does he also consider himself no longer a sceptic?
I cancelled my FtB RSS subscription a while back, now. The only one I miss is Mano Singham – I might re-add just his feed. He seems out of place there, somehow.
Comment 124 pretty much sums up my attitude to Pharyngula these days:
PZ increasingly seems to be increasingly descending into groupthink. The site is still in my RSS feed but I do find myself skipping past his posts more and more these days.
PZ stopped being a sceptic when he started accepting that personal feelings outweighed biological and physical facts. That was also the last time he could claim any feminist credentials, in my opinion.
“Words are tantamount to physical violence” is an odd fit at Pharyngula, where they/we used to laugh at Christians wringing their hands about “militant atheists” and PZ having a “cyberpistol.”
Graham Douglas @21, I used to think Mano was a reasonable fellow, too, and then about a month ago he posted favorably about an article that was positively dripping with anti-Semitism (basically of the those-mean-Jews-are-conspiring-against-that-nice-Jeffrey-Corbyn variety), and had nothing to say when called on it.
Shit. Now I have to revise my opinion of Mano.
The entire skeptical movement seems to be falling out of sync with reality and skepticism, and heading straight for an abyss of “what I want to be true really is supported by science” – anti-feminism, racism, sexism, failing to account for all the variables…
There’s nothing wrong with involving the emotions, but FFS, do not call yourself skeptical when you do that. Do not go out and cherry-pick data, or just make shit up (which I think PZ does a lot) to support your preferences.
I know that some of the things I believe are probably not as well supported as I think they are. I also know that I probably don’t know which things those are, because I believe them. At the same time, I have found myself on many occasions looking at works that agree with my basic position and finding myself wanting to yell at the author – Evidence! No, that’s a straw man! Wait, did you just use anecdotal “evidence”? Ooops, didn’t support your argument very well there, now did you. Meanwhile, I am sure that I’ve overlooked something that I believe that I haven’t done that well on, and I’m willing to admit that I might be wrong.
The problem with PZ is that he has fallen into that mode of believing himself to be in the right all the time, and has committed the cardinal crime of confirmation bias. Over and over again. And he’s become a mansplainer, telling women what they should think about the trans issue, because, well, he’s a biologist, right? So he knows things other people don’t know (he hasn’t actually said that, but right now I felt like comparing his attitude to the orange-in-chief).
“Attacked” – – I suppose PZ really believes the emotive lies about how transgender people are in particular danger of murder. Critically examining that claim might take time away from using his blog to support cultish propaganda.
“Silenced” – – This is hilarious. It’s very clear who is being silenced–and not just on Pharyngula. Everywhere.
At least one sociologist has noticed:
“would like to be able to simply exist” “define them away” Oh, goody. THIS dumbshittery again. “No, you’re not a woman” is equated with “no, you don’t exist.”
*https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/10/trans-rights-have-gone-wrong/amp/
How has PZ not banned this person?:
When called out on that, Porivil doubled down:
PZ banned the 4 people 3 days after these 2 posts from Porivil, so apparently he’s fine with Porivil’s threats.
I am honestly disappointed. I’m not surprised PZ is cleansing the hive mind of freethinkers, but I did expect him to take a stance against violence.
Well quite; that’s exactly what we’re objecting to.
Ha, yes, I guess that is exactly what you’re objecting to. For some reason the 2 comments I cited seemed to me to cross an additional line, actively calling for violence rather than simply gloating that violence happened and was deserved, but after re-reading them all now it’s really not that clear.
They’re claiming Maria “violently shook” someone now?
There’s videotape, and the man who attacked her (who had publicly announced his intention to “fuck up some TERFs”) was convicted, but they still manage to assert this reality-challenged narrative that blames the (female) victim.
Ah, well. They’re used to believing absurdities. I’ll bet they practice. I’ll bet Porivil can believe six impossible things before breakfast.
Skeletor, believe it or not, you missed out the worst comment by that particular POS, made in response to this;
The charming P. Sorrens replied
‘Get the wall!‘ So there it is. PZ will ban people for arguing their case in a polite and respectful manner despite the name-calling, provocations, dishonesty*, and the sheer frustration of trying to have an adult discussion with people who want to assume the moral highground whilst flinging shit around like so many zoo chimpanzees, but he’s absolutely fine with his people promoting arbitrary executions for anybody not totally with the programme. Sorry, who are the fascists in this ‘getting the wall’ scenario, again?
*dishonesty such as (emph. mine)
Hmmm!
Lady M, the ‘victory’ was that the magistrates insisted on Marie referring to her attacker using female pronouns.
Fucking pathetic little maggots! A person more cynical than I (and there can’t be many) might read through that thread and see a kind of power struggle within the Horde to take Caine’s place as leader of the nasty kids.
Screechy Monkey, #24, whilst I agree that the article that Mano quoted from certainly seemed anti-Semitic in content, that has to be balanced against the fact that Norman Finkelstein, the author of the piece, is himself Jewish. A holder of a Ph.D in political science, he has long studied the Israel – Palestine conflict and is an open and vociferous critic of Israel in respect of that conflict.
In light of the above, is Finkelstein an anti-Semitic Jew indulging himself in a hit job on British Jews, or a Jewish academic writing a balanced assessment as he sees it?
The reason Corbyn has been labelled anti-Semitic is chiefly because as a long-time champion of Palestinian rights he resisted when a Jewish lobby demanded that Labour’s anti-Semitism policy include criticism of Israel over the conflict with Palestine as an anti-Semitic act, a definition very much following and possibly motivated by the Trump model of openly siding with Israel.
It was obvious that any principled person would baulk at that, especially one who has stood for the rights of Palestinians and criticised and protested Israeli anti-Palestinian policies and the methods employed in carrying them out for decades. Yet attempting to negotiate the terms in the definition was enough to get Corbyn labelled an anti-Semite, which is ridiculous but was immediately seized on and amplified by the anti-Corbyn factor within the Labour Party (the Tory-lite Blairites) which just handed ammunition to the Tories and the media.
Just another day of the Left eating itself. Conservatives across Europe and America must be unable to believe their luck; they don’t even have to work hard to get anywhere because the opposition is too busy tearing itself apart to bother doing actual opposition politics.
Acolyte of Sagan @33
Not quite. The reason people have accused Corbyn of antisemitism is that he has consistently turned a blind eye to it throughout his political career — and this is a lot more noticeable now that he’s the party leader. He has also made statements that can certainly be interpreted as being antisemitic (claiming that Jews don’t understand irony, for example).
The anti-Semitism policy you refer to is the argument over whether Labour should adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. This is not some far right conspiracy but a widely accepted definition that Corbyn pushed back against for reasons that did not stand up to any sort of scrutiny.
I can’t say whether Corbyn is an antisemite or not, but I do think that he lacks the self-awareness to recognise his own ideological blinkers.
“Porivil Sorrens” is so mindless and abusive that I wonder if it’s an extended trolling…but I don’t have the inclination to spend more time reading Pharyngula to try to get more evidence.
Paul, ‘can be interpreted as’ means nothing. Just take a look through the comments on the linked Pharyngula post to see how the most well-thought out, reasonable stance ‘can be interpreted as’ vile, transphonic fascism.
I fail to see how a long-standing advocate of the rights of Palestinians having a problem accepting the notion that criticism of Israel’s anti-Palestinian policies is anti-Semitic does not stand up to scrutiny; it was a principled stance against an idea that would make Israel all-but immune from criticism and hang Palestine out to dry. Criticism of Israel’s policies is not anti-Semitic by any stretch of the imagination, and neither is trying to retain the right to hold Israel to account for its excesses.
Nobody, no institution, no country has the right to not be criticised, yet for reasons of their own there are factions of the Left who would see any criticism of Israel and Islam as anti-Semitic and Islamophobic, a level of stupidity that demands resistance.
Is Corbyn an anti-Semite? I don’t think so, but I prefer to assess a person on their words and actions rather than on interpretation and assumption, both of which will naturally be skewed according to one’s personal biases, political views, and agenda.
Acolyte of Sagan @36
The reason I used that particular phrase is that I genuinely don’t know whether Corbyn is an antisemite or if he’s just a bit thick.
Plenty of organisations and parties have adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism and still manage to criticise the actions of the Israeli government. So I’m left wondering why Corbyn, uniquely, has such a problem with it.
Here I agree with you. I suspect that Corbyn’s problem is that he tends to see things in black and white terms and is therefore incapable of recognising when the support of Palestinian and Muslim issues of some of his fellow travelers tilts into antisemitism.
On the basis of his words and actions, Corbyn has turned a blind eye to antisemitism in his own party and prefers to generalise rather than deal with the issue. He’s been willing to share platforms with Holocaust deniers while refusing to share a platform with mainstream centre-right politicians during the Brexit campaign.
All of this points to a politician who — at the very least — has an inflexibly partisan view of the world and I think this inflexibility is at the root of his inability to either recognise or deal with antisemitism when it arises.