It’s about time.
Rebecca has pointed out the activities of her more obsessed and malevolent haters. I’ve been following one particular clump of them, at intervals, all this time – yes they’re still at it. Would you believe it?
I’ve now amassed a following of obsessive creeps who have seemingly devoted their lives to hounding me down and making sure I never dare to speak my bitch mind again. Their tactics? Scientologist-level private investigation to dredge up the deepest, darkest mysteries of my past combined with grade school-level name-calling. It’s impressive, really. Really. Really.
You sure as hell have, I thought as I read that. Boy have you. The ones at Abbie Smith’s blog – that’s the clump I mentioned above – are the ones I know about, and that exactly sums up what they’ve been doing.
Abbie Smith at ERV was, as far as I could tell, the first to actively encourage people to replace intelligent discussion and inquiry with blind hatred and bile. That’s where the name “Rebeccunt Twatson” apparently arose – see? Impressive! If you listen hard enough, you can hear the ghost of Ambrose Bierce chuckling and nodding his head in approval.
And Twain and Mencken joining in. Right. Abbie Smith has also repeatedly called Rebecca a bitch – or a fucking bitch – in comments at ERV. People who should know better have egged her on. It’s been disgusting.
Then there’s a blog called Grey Lining written by someone named Franc Hoggle. Apparently nearly every post is now about me. Lucky me! He focuses on the really important things, like how I made a YouTube video recently in which I mistakenly said that Galileo was executed by the Church. Within minutes, I updated the video to flag the fact that I was wrong, but that doesn’t matter. Hoggle says that I must be “dumber than dog shit” and suggests I be taunted for the rest of my days. How dare anyone ever get anything wrong and then immediately correct it!
That’s when Franc Hoggle isn’t vomiting his hatred all over the undead ERV thread on the subject.
Then there’s this elevatorgate blog, in which a man attempts to convince my fellow SGU co-hosts to kick me off the podcast. I learned of this one from Steve Novella, who emailed it to me with the subject line “Another stalker”…
I think Steve discovered that blog because that person was one of the ones derailing this SkepticBlog post about the SGU 24-hour podcast. That’s right: a quick, simple, upbeat post from Steve publicizing our 24-hour show was quickly turned into a whine-fest from people demanding Steve “fire” me from the show. To support their argument, they linked to the above blogs because they seriously believed that it would convince others. As you can see in the thread if you dare to dig through it, they were not successful.
I followed that one, too, mouth hanging open in astonishment.
(They talk a lot of shit about me too, by the way. Nowhere near as much as they talk about Rebecca, or PZ, but still a lot.)
…they can continue to call me a cunt. After all, they derive so much joy from it, and to me it only makes things clearer. “Cunt” is what misogynists call outspoken women with contrary opinions, in an attempt to silence them.
That’s what this is really about: silencing. No one starts an entire site like the “elevatorgate” blog in the hopes of having a debate. No one comes up with a nickname using a word like cunt because he wants to resolve differences. No one tells a woman she would be lucky to get raped because he wants to offer solid evidence to contradict her point that misogyny is just as bad amongst skeptics and atheists as it is elsewhere.
Oh it’s about silencing all right – they make that very clear. They try to pressure everyone who invites or hires Rebecca to do something to univite her or fire her. This is frankly and explicitly about silencing.
And it’s a fucking outrage.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)