Oh what have we here.
He didn’t defend me. He refrained from joining the other bloggers in trashing me, for a time, but he sure as hell didn’t defend me. He privately begged me to stay, while doing nothing to defend me in public.
Then, in the end, he broke down and did a post saying I needed to “own” my mistakes.
Also, I wasn’t dismissed. I left. That “her dismissal” is a lie. He may have forgotten by now, but the fact is I left.
Comments
29 responses to “In her own words”
I think of all the times we Pharyngulites refused to respect the sincere, principled insistence of so many, many people who insisted they knew God, felt God, communed with God, and/or became One with God — how we argued with them, offered alternative explanations, undermined the authority of their individual sovereignty — and now I wonder. Were we denying their humanity?
I thought we were appealing to our common humanity, which includes a tendency we all have to make the same kind of errors. And when our rational arguments fell of deaf ears because “I KNOW what I KNOW and CANNOT be mistaken” I believed they hadn’t matured into proper humility on the issue. I didn’t believe they weren’t human. Or did I miss it?
Were we the baddies?
(I thought I’d posted this earlier,but it seems to have disappeared into the aether.)
I’m not sure that I’m ready yet to stop reading Pharyngula, but it may come. I’ve been greatly saddened by PZ’s total adoption of the trans creed.
Sastra, yes, I didn’t quite register that last line when I wrote the post. I’m pretty sure I never disrespected anyone’s humanity.
That bullshit line is just one more of those empty or unreasonable or both slogans – like “trans rights are human rights!” and “trans people exist!” and “you are denying our existence!”
What does it mean to respect someone’s humanity? It’s just jargon. The PZ of the past knew that. He knew that disagreeing with people on facts or interpretations or rhetoric isn’t disrespectful, much less disrespectful of their humanity. Saying men are not women is not saying they are not human! Ffs.
I used to read Pharyngula, even before sciblogs. But after the debacle the comment section there became absolutely untenable, and PZ’s posts became less science (and less humour). Not interested.
I was also reading here before sciblogs, btw. You are an old friend in many ways.
Myers’ latest blog post is pretty vicious, wishing all sorts of horrible things to happen to Trump and saying it’s in his heart so sharing such feelings is appropriate. I don’t like Trump at all myself and the sooner we’re rid of him the better. Engaging in fantasies about Trump suffering is simply a waste of time though, just as it would be to wish Trump would go to hell. I’ve never liked people who threaten you with hellfire and damnation because there is no hell, so all they’re doing is bullying. Which is what Myers has become – a bully with a bully pulpit he uses shamelessly to heap abuse on people. People like Trump do that and so to far too many others. Let’s be better than that, please.
@5 Good point J.A., I could use some improvement myself. I don’t wish sickness or death on Donnie Dipshit, just some humility. I really do hope he gets well soon, I want him to lose the election fair and square, with no excuses.
It is just like the religious arguments. The religious right cannot separate criticism of ideas from attacks on their person. Cannot differentiate any questioning of their moral authority from persecution. They, of course, are free to take joy in their delusion that the rest of us will rot in hell, but that’s different. Because they love us – just not the sin. The religious can make blanket judgements on our moral character but to question their moral authority to do so, makes us the bad guys. Sadly, a movement away from theology hasn’t diminished the human capacity for religious thinking. Even without gods we love our dogma. But as my old pappy used to say, “It’s no coincidence that dogma and dogshit start out the same way.”
Pliny @7, I agree, religious people take attacks on their religion personally, I was just thinking that. This Myers dude too, whoever he is (I was out of the loop), just in the post above engages in personal attacks. questioning Corriente’s ability to hold a “principled set of informed values”, and insinuating he does himself, and calling her a troll. Not to mention the personal insults to Ophelia, calling her a bigot and saying she doesn’t respect people’s humanity. These are all personal attacks, so who’s the troll? Seems clear to me.
Just read a post by this Myers dude in which he called JKR a “pious bigot.” I’ve seen enough, the guy seems to be another flame war addicted troll. Done with that. :D
“Demanding their humanity be respected” i.e. demanding that their estimate of themselves be respected.
Disrespecting people’s humanity is something that the Islamic state did, or Nazis, or the Ku Klux Klan i.e. treating a set of people as not fully human. It’s a huge claim to make against a blogger who took exception to an ideology.
@Sastra #1
It depends, did your caps have skulls on?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
@bascule #11:
Close: squids.
I suppose it’s possible he forgot, but it seems unlikely. I remember your last post or posts on ftb where you said you had enough of it and that you were going back to your own site, which you linked to, and then you noted you’d be happy to be on a site without the horrible ads.
After such a big public dust up and leaving, I don’t think he’d forget. If he’s that forgetful, maybe he shouldn’t be sharing his alternate facts about the situation on Twitter.
It’s even still on his site:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/08/21140/
Also the (it/whatever) pronouns proudly leading the way in Myers’ twitter profile. There is misogyny cloaked in the self righteous pronouns, but it’s hard to tell who’s simply ignorant of that, and who’s all too aware of it.
takshak @ 4 – waves hello
Skeletor @ 14 – yep. I wanted it to stay. The usual thing was for people to take their blogs down but I said no, I’m leaving it there.
I find it strange that PZ is misremembering your departure as a dismissal, as it is regularly stated by the usual suspects that you “flounced”, i.e. left in a huff, but of your own volition. Still, I don’t think it is fair to say PZ didn’t defend you, given this thread. Perhaps it was brief, but it was there to begin with.
No, that was the one where he said I had to “own” my mistakes. I never considered it a defense.
I mean yes he was trying to tamp down the rage of his commenters, but he was at the same time telling me I had to think what they told me to think, in other words that I had to change my mind in the way they told me to. I had to agree to the magical claims. I couldn’t believe them if I tried, and I think trying to bully people into agreeing to lies is…not what the founder of a “freethought” network should be doing.
No, that post is what decided me it was time to leave.
At the time even some friends told me oh look PZ is defending you at last.
No, pals, he isn’t.
And the comments on that post just underline it. It was a bloodbath.
Now now, Ophelia, we know that (just like people still get hunted as witches in Africa), people in Transylvania still bathe in blood, so using that as a metaphor simply marks uppity as a thoughtless bigot and PZ would be extremely disappointed in you if he saw that.
At the risk of boorishness, the above is an allusion to PZ’s handling of the Tuvel affair, where his only word on the matter was that using the term ‘witch hunt’ to describe it wasn’t fair because witches in Africa. Yes, he really is that big of a coward. It appears he hasn’t grown any braver since.
Had a quick look at the “why I banned X, Y, and Z” thread. Against the TERF position that sex is real, and that, for example, penis is a characteristic of men (I didn’t pay attention to the analogue used for women), PZ’s response is to label the example as the fallacious “all crows are black!” which, as everyone knows, goes out the window as soon as anyone finds a crow that is white. But that’s a misrepresentation of what’s being argued. It’s not an “all crows are black” claim at all. The parallel would be to say that “all men have penises.” If you find any man who doesn’t have a penis, then the statement is false. Rather, the argument is that all human beings who develop with penis and testicles, i.e., male sex organs, belong to the sex class called male. The same reasoning in the crow example would be “all crows that have male sex organs can be identified as male,” by definition. Finding a female crow doesn’t affect the identification of male crows as male in any way. It’s just really poor reasoning and argument.
TOAO!
(Wonder what PZ would have to say to that? Can I identify as an otter when I cannot swim, don’t eat raw fish, and have opposable thumbs?)
iknklast did you mean to use a different name on that comment just now?
Skimming through the thread that Holms linked to, a couple of things stood out. First, the accusations that Ophelia was providing “aid and comfort” to the enemy–brings to mind images of her tearing sheets into strips to be used a bandages to bind the wounds of belligerent “TERFs”.
But more interesting is Hj Hornbeck quoting this from a blog that Ophelia linked to as apparently damning evidence:
If believing that constitutes transphobia, then I guess I’m a transphobe.
Yes, that’s Rebecca Reilly-Cooper.
Her analysis of the claim that people who [say they] feel like women are women was pretty much the nail in the coffin of my attempts to ignore my doubts about the trans dogma. She pointed out (or argued) that there is no such thing as “feeling like a woman” because there’s only individual experience of it, each unique to that individual. It’s not a coherent concept so…what’s left? Nothing much.
I can’t say I feel I lost out by learning from RRC as opposed to Hj Hornbeck.
#19
I guess there is a different feel to a situation when you are experiencing it, vs. looking at it from the outside.
#26
Thanks for the point from RRC about individual feelings and how they’re not anything much when it comes to what being a woman is about.
The philosophical point, as I understand it, is that it’s not possible to generalize from one’s own experience to all others in the same category. See Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” (which RRC cites, if I remember accurately).