Author: Ophelia Benson

He told us in a comment on the “omigod there are sock puppets here!!” thread yesterday that he had figured out what is going on and would write more soon. He didn’t do it soon, but he did it. He did say more.

He said yesterday “was quite a day.” Yes, it was. What made it quite for him, do you suppose? Was it realizing quite how many people hold him in contempt? Was it seeing all his efforts at concealment and carrying on as if nothing had happened, just turn into more blog fodder and more contempt? Well yes, probably. Other than that, there wasn’t anything particularly quite – unless of course his car broke down, but he didn’t mention that. Yes, probably he didn’t much enjoy seeing his continued stonewalling of me and his frantic deletion of comment after comment after comment bring him no satisfaction other than scorn and indignation.

To those legitimate commenters who were annoyed by bad behavior—and had reason to be!–I’m sorry we didn’t catch on to what was really happening before now. And I want to emphasize: That apology goes out to ANY commenters who may have encountered a sock puppet on our site.

No it doesn’t. That’s pure bullshit. Why? Because he’s still deleting posts for no good reason apart from the fact that they mention me. He’s still banning me – so the apology does not go out for instance to me, because you can’t apologize to people while still doing arbitrarily unreasonable things to them.

Now in a sense people’s blogs are their blogs, and they can delete anything they like and ban anyone they like. But in other senses it’s not so simple. Mooney and Kirshenbaum have made a specialty of telling off various named people, so in a sense they have a certain obligation to allow disagreement for the sake of fairness.

A big reason they should not have banned me, or should have lifted the ban soon after imposing it, is the fact that some members of their fan club – some of them William’s sock puppets – asserted that I was lying, then repeated it, then repeated it several times more. The ban meant that I had no ability to reply. M&K obviously liked it that way. That’s dirty.

Some people think “Chris, The demands for apologies are absurd….You were duped and he should apologize to you…But you apologize? Nonsense. These folks would have you apologize for having 10 fingers and 10 toes.” But those people are wrong. Mooney has been determinedly demonizing atheists as a group for more than a year, and in one post he relied on an obvious fraud to do so; yes he should apologize.

So we’re looking into ways of doing more, starting now. And because of that, commenting here may become a bit more challenging than before, at least temporarily…(For now, rest assured that if your comment is substantive, thoughtful, not an attack, etcetera, then it will appear fairly promptly, although not instantly of course.)

No it won’t; not necessarily. That’s a falsehood. Plenty of comments that fit that description have been deleted; many have been posted on other blogs for safekeeping.

In short, Mooney has learned nothing.

What’s it all about? What have Mooney and Kirshenbaum been up to all  this time? What are they doing, what is their plan, what do they want? What are they after that is worth all this dishonesty and unethical behavior and blatant concealment and refusal ever to admit getting things wrong and slandering people they dislike while relying on obvious fakes and frauds?

The story – the “frame” – is that they want to persuade atheists to be more aware of “communication,” so that we can all unite to do something about the terrible problems we are facing. The idea behind that – one which they spell out at frequent intervals – is that the people they call “the New Atheists” are rude and mean and thus make it impossible for us all to unite. The story, or “frame,” is that we (overt atheists) are mean and bad and they (M&K and other accommodationists) are nice and good. We create division, they create unity. We are dividers, they are uniters.

Oh really. Was Mooney being a uniter when he jumped up at the AAAS conference to ask the panel, “What about the New Atheists?” Is he ever being a uniter when he shouts – for the hundredth time – “what about the new atheists?” Is he not, in fact, being the opposite of a uniter? Is he not making a great point of cutting out the “new” atheists for purposes of othering and hatemongering? Is he not “uniting” only in the sense of uniting all the Nice people in hating on the Bad new atheists? Is he not “uniting” only in the sort of sense in which the Republicans united “the silent majority” against the hated minority? I would say yes, he is.

I would say Kirshenbaum is doing the same thing, and not very subtly.

Shortly after moving, I met a new neighbor on my street. He loves astrophysics and we have similar tastes in books and music. His name isn’t Phil, but for the purpose of this post, that’s what I’ll call him.

I like Phil a lot. He’s smart and witty with a healthy dose of skepticism…Phil nearly always wears one of those black t-shirts with a large red A across the front to express “where his allegiances lie” (his words)…

Early on, Phil wanted to know whether I was an atheist too since I’m in science. I explained that I don’t like labels because they mainly serve to divide people one way or another. And then we get war, bigotry, genocide, and so on.

Really. She doesn’t like labels. And yet…The Intersection is simply packed to the rafters with labeling of “the New Atheists.” Most of it, we now know, is sock puppetry by one foul-mouthed person. Yet Sheril Kirshenbaum, who doesn’t like labels, shares the moderation at this blog where “new” atheists are scapegoated with demented levels of venom and (as we now know) plain old lying.

So, to sum up, it’s all bullshit. All of it. They’re not uniters, and they never have been. They’re otherers and demonizers, and when they are found to have embraced a flagrant fake while heavily moderating people they dislike and just plain banning me – their solution is to close comments to everyone but flatterers.

They should have copped to it. They should have apologized to all the people they’ve helped to demonize all this time. They haven’t. They have the ethics of the people at Fox News.

That’s what it’s all about.

Further developments in saga of YNH – William – bilbo – Milton C – PollyO – and “Tom Johnson.”

“Tom Johnson” was also another alias, although his story was loosely based on things I had heard other general students say. The conference context or whatever was, as already mentioned, obviously false. When Chris contacted me, I made up a story about being a grad. student as an explanation about where the story came from because I didn’t want the Tom character to get exposed as false.

Chris Mooney commented on that confession. He said he was shocked and appalled.

However, he has not bothered to apologize to, for instance, me. He or he and Sheril Kirshenbaum banned me from commenting at The Intersection soon after I began trying to get them to do a better job of justifying their claims and to criticize their energetic and often inaccurate bashing of new atheists. Commenters who agreed with them were not banned or even moderated, no matter how abusive their comments were. One “bilbo” repeatedly called me a liar after I posted a list of questions for M and K. Note what William just said:

I posted most often as “milton c.” and “bilbo.” I also appeared as “seminatrix” and “philip jr.,” and I believe I posted as “petra” on the value of science blogs thread. My posting under multiple names on the intersection was much like YNH: out-of-context sniping and trying to make a chorus of agreement when I was challenged.

Yet Mooney and Kirshenbaum found that perfectly acceptable, while I was banned. The ban is still in effect, despite what they have just learned. These are not honest people. We knew that, but boy does this underline it. These are shockingly dishonest people.