Tag: Deep rifts

  • Not lord of the manor

    Tessa Kendall has a post on Bullies and predators, expanding on Michael Story’s post yesterday.

    Because of the stupid libel laws in this country, the Offender cannot be named publicly, which makes him harder to deal with.

    I’m one of the hosts of London SitP, along with Carmen and Sid. When I started going to SitP, very few women came. Sometimes I was the only woman there at the King’s Head in Borough. Over the years, we’ve worked hard to encourage women to come and now a lot do. We want them to feel safe and comfortable. This isn’t a major problem, we don’t want to blow it out of proportion, but we do want to act responsibly and nip it in the bud.

    This shouldn’t need saying but apparently it does – this is not acceptable behaviour. There are no excuses. You are not ‘just being friendly’. If you were, you’d be doing it to men too. You are not lord of the manor and women are not your personal fiefdom. Your position in the Skeptic community does not give you immunity. Even though the law may protect you, there are other ways we can deal with you – and we will.

    What does “in Borough” mean? Southwark? Lambeth? Elephant and Castle?

    But never mind that; notice the difference between that response and the response of an important segment of US skepticism. Notice the difference between telling off the perpetrators, as above, and telling off the women objecting to the behavior, as last May. Notice standing shoulder to shoulder with the women versus rebuking the women for speaking up.

    Well done London SitP. If only if only if only that important segment of US skepticism had done as well. If only. Think of all the rifts that would not exist, the quarrels that would not have happened, the friendships that would not have broken. If only.

    It should have been so easy – such a no-brainer. Tessa certainly makes it look that way. By “easy” I don’t mean easy to carry out or problem-free, I mean morally unambiguous. Easy to choose. Which side should we back up, here? The gropers, or the women who don’t want to be groped without invitation? It should have been so easy to choose.

    This kind of sexual predator behaviour is a kind of bullying and, like all bullies, the Offender is relying on silence. I’ve been bullied in the past; I know how it makes you feel and I know how hard it can be to do anything about it so I know it’s a lot to ask you to speak up. But we will sort this out.

    Bullies and predators pick their victims carefully. It is not your fault he does this to you. You have not ‘led him on’, you do not ‘deserve’ this. He is the one in the wrong. You’re not ‘making trouble’ or ‘causing a fuss’ by telling us. And anything you do say will be treated in confidence, so you don’t need to fear any personal consequences – which is another way bullies maintain their power. [emphasis mine]

    See? It’s so clear, isn’t it. Why couldn’t we have had that? Why couldn’t we have had that instead of blame for speaking up? Blame for speaking up, let me remind you, a mere few days after the speaking up happened. Why did we get told off for making trouble and causing a fuss instead of told we weren’t doing that?

    Well, maybe the London skeptics learned from what happened last May, and resolved to do the opposite. Maybe doing it the wrong way helped to make clear what the right way is. But I can’t help feeling rather sad that we had to be the raw material of the lesson.

    Carmen, Sid and I really strongly encourage you to tell us if you see or suffer from the Offender. We will back you up and anything you tell us will be treated in absolute confidence. You can leave comments here (which in no way implies that you’ve been directly affected unless you make that explicit), you can email us, DM us on Twitter or tell us face to face. That’s @tessakendall, @carmenego or @sidrodrigues.

    But DO NOT name him publicly.

    For legal reasons. That means here, too.

  • Your Hit Parade

    I thought that was the last of it, but there’s this adorable song that was performed at TAM.

    Dedicated to James Randi, JREF, and all clear-thinking individuals who are fond of dirty words.

    lyrics

    He said “Come up for coffee”
    Before she reached her floor
    Now, some folks who have vaginas don’t show up here anymore
    Well, perhaps that guy was wrong
    But can’t we all just get along?

    Now, Professor Richard Dawkins
    Said, “Really, what’s the harm?
    He never put his cock in or even touched your arm.”
    Well, even smart guys get stuff wrong
    Can’t we all just get along?

    Soon the blogosphere went ape-shit
    And that ape-shit hit the fan
    Some cried, “Hey gals, just chill out,” and some said “Kill the man!”
    We all stood our moral high ground,
    Using 20-dollar words
    Lots of people talkin’
    But nobody bein’ heard

    Yes, Dawkins was a dick,
    And he shouldn’t get a pass
    But honestly, some chicks should pull the sticks out of their ass
    It’s not the weak against the strong
    It’s not Fay Wray against King Kong
    I heard last year some girls got grabby With Paul Provenza’s schlong!

    But here’s the point of this whole song:
    Can’t we all just get along?

  • Dividing bridges

    Kristjan Wager has a good post on the Deep Rifts. He’d rather have the rifts than no rifts at the price of entrenched sexism.

    So, to sum it up, there are deep rifts in the movement, and I think it is fine. Not only that, I feel more comfortable being in a smaller community within the movement, which doesn’t include people whose opinions and behavior I find repugnant. I can still appreciate the good work done by those people (like I did with e.g. Hitchens) without wanting to be part of the same community.

    Fewer but better Russians. (I kid, I kid.)

    Massimo Pigliucci also has a good post, although he does do the “both sides” thing, which given what a big chunk of the other side is like, really isn’t as reasonable as it might sound to a novice.

    Oh wait, no he doesn’t, or at least he clarifies in a comment that that’s not what he meant. I’ll leave the above paragraph because there are people who think that is what he meant, so this will perhaps help.

    Here’s his clarification:

    there may be a misunderstanding here about what my call for moderation concerns. Of course there is no moderate position to be held about sexism (or racism, for that matter): it’s bad, period.
    But there is moderation to be called for in how we talk and act about it. The example in question here, discussed by Russell Blackford in the post I linked to above, is AA’s overly reaching “no-hugs” policy, which – it can be argued – doesn’t really address the actual issue and potentially undermines a sense of community by attempting to over-regulate normal human interactions.

    Sure. Specifics can be discussed, calmly and reasonably. (I’ve been staying out of those discussions, because honestly I don’t know enough about the subject to have a useful opinion. I was invited to participate in the conference call with American Atheists to discuss their policy, but I wasn’t available at the right time – which is just as well.) Specifics can be discussed, calmly and reasonably – which includes not calling people Talibanesque or Femistasi.

  • The Oppressed Sisters and their Approved Male Chorus

    The second part of problems with Why it’s totally fine to call The Sisterhood of the Oppressed Feminazis and Femistasi and totalitarian.

    Remember the Women in Secularism conference the other week? How that conference was hailed by the Oppressed Sisters and their Approved Male Chorus!

    Wow. I don’t have much more than that.

    Well wait, one thing occurs to me. Paula’s counterpart Liz Cornwell was at that conference. Liz and I were both absolutely electrified by the talk that Wafa Sultan gave, and excited about possibilities for RDF to help her get the word out. It seems odd that Paula is willing to be quite so rude about the conference. She’s angry at “the Oppressed Sisters” for dividing the movement, but that remark doesn’t seem very collegial.

    But also, wow. She might as well call the “Approved Male Chorus” pussy-whipped – that’s about the level of that remark.

    Far from encouraging new women to get involved, all this hysterical and unjustified insistence on how dangerous our conferences are for women, how hostile our movement is to them, the indignities and humiliations they will be exposed to should they dare to set foot over the skeptical threshold could have been calculated to scare them away.

    That’s all nonsense. Nobody’s been saying that. That’s ridiculous.

    DJ Grothe was, predictably, shot down in furious flames by the Sisters when he dared suggest such a thing recently, yet Ophelia Benson herself would have us believe she’s been scared away from attending a conference because of the exaggerated and over-the-top messages she got about the terrible risks she’d face if she went.

    So for the second time she all but calls me a liar, and she presumes to be able to know what it’s like to get a peculiar email that could be read as an exaggerated warning or as mockery or as a threat.

    It’s interesting that she calls me out by name twice. I guess she really didn’t like me when we met at QED. She certainly hid it well. I liked her a lot, despite the fact that we’d disagreed sharply over elevator issues and she’d defriended me at Facebook. I must be gullible!

  • Nazis and Stasi and bears, oh my

    Dear oh dear, lots of new assigned reading first thing in the morning; how will I ever catch up.

    There is Rebecca’s post on being called Feminazis and Femistasi. (I read that yesterday actually, but late in a long and rather nerve-racking day, so I’m treating it as new.)

    There is Paula Kirby’s eagerly-anticipated (since she announced it yesterday) Google doc “Sisterhood of the Oppressed” (gee I wonder what that could possibly be about, and what its take might turn out to be).

    There is Alex Gabriel’s unanticipated and lovely mash-note to Freethought blogs. Alex’s note is especially pleasant because it includes detailed accounts of what he likes about a whole slew of particular blogs on the network, which makes a nice contrast to people who simply rant endlessly on Twitter about “FTB” as if it were allonething. It also offers the comradely suggestion to tweet #WeLoveFTB. It offers it for the same set of reasons as the one we were talking about on the video yesterday. (That was only yesterday? It feels like weeks ago now.)

    All of these people are tremendous, and so are many of their co-bloggers from the little of them I’ve seen. But none of them is the biggest reason I love FtB.

    The biggest reason is the same one other people have been criticizing them recently: that they speak out so often, and so eloquently, on feminism, queer and racial struggles, politics and other Causes That Aren’t Directly Related To Atheism. That while primarily they’re an atheist network, they’re a collective of atheists with other opinions, where atheist discussions on justice, ethics and politics can take place – especially where the perspectives of the marginalized are included.

    If we had a word for atheists doing this, what would it be?

    Oh yes. ‘Freethought’.

    The criticism of religion is a very much older beast than RDFRS, or CFI, or FreethoughtBlogs itself. It’s older than the skeptical movement writers here belong to, and which focuses (don’t get me wrong, correctly) on attacking religion epistemologically.

    In Europe, the historic home of freethought, and elsewhere in the world, there exists a long and esteemed tradition of thinkers and writers who called out religion for being unjust and oppressive: traditionally, feminists, Marxists, queer theorists and all the other famous bêtes noires of the Daily Mail have been the first to bash religion. There’s clearly no real dichotomy, and many people who identify with these groups also foreground science, but I relate to that atheist tradition at least as much as to Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris. And I love FreethoughtBlogs – I adore it – for representing that contingent.

    So here’s my invitation to you, if you love it too. Now that I’ve set out what makes that set of writers special to me, I’m not going to try and stop people calling them bullies or totalitarian. They’re entitled to their opinion – but so are we, and while the FtB crowd are, frankly, being bombarded with abuse, I think we ought to share it.

    Remember when Tory politicians said we needed to privatise health, and #WeLoveTheNHS trended? I think it’s time for #WeLoveFTB.

    Tweet it. I’m about to. Tweet it so that everyone from that network knows we support them, and find love as well as hate when they search for FtB.

    Thank you, Alex.

  • That’s not a Godwin, that’s a Wollstonecraft

    More deep rifts. Or the same quantity of rifts, but deeper. Or more, and deeper, rifts. Or rifts that are no deeper but spread out over a wider landscape. Or –

    Stop it at once.

    Wossa rift this time? It’s calling Freethought blogs totalitarian and comparable to both Nazis and the Stasi.

    That’s a bit much, I think.

    One reason for my judgment there is that Freethought blogs is not actually a secret police force. It’s not actually any kind of police force. It doesn’t have a police force. It doesn’t have state power. It doesn’t have any power, except the power of opinion.

    There are other reasons, but that will do to be going on with.

    The sad thing is that it’s Paula Kirby calling us that, on Twitter (and elsewhere, for all I know). I would dispute the claim with her on Twitter, but I can’t because she’s blocked me. I can’t dispute it with her on Facebook because she defriended me there last year, because we disagreed about elevators. I don’t have her email address. I have no way to dispute the claim with her except here, and I want to dispute it, because I think it’s wrong. I also think it’s a little skeevy to block people so that you can say vile things about them and they can’t see you do it. I’m surprised at Paula – I’d have thought she was better than that.

    Paula’s a terrific writer. She was very nice to me at QED, despite the defriending last year. We were on a panel together, along with Maryam and (don’t laugh)…DJ Grothe. Adam Lappin was there. (He was also at my talk the day before, and took extensive notes.)

    Alex Gabriel took a picture.

    See? I’m next to Paula. Sad, isn’t it.

    Paula said

    Those who disagree are by definition strawmanning. That’s part of the Feminazi doctrine, isn’t it?

    and

    It’s still part of Feminazi doctrine! Pharyngula, Skepchick and B&W, by contrast, have of course been bastions of calm reason!

    Someone asked her if she really wanted to sound like Rush Limbaugh, and she replied

    No, just like me, thanks. I quite like Femistasi too. One form of totalitarian thought is, after all, much like another.

    The response was

    Really? Radical feminists are as bad as the people who butchered millions of Jews?

    [Paging Orac! Paging Orac!]

    Paula responded

    The allusion is to totalitarian thought and no tolerance of dissent. FTB is currently awash with it.

    The other

    Regardless of the unpleasant atmosphere on FtB (and elsewhere), it’s a ridiculous equivalence and you know it.

    Paula

    I disagree. I see real strains of totalitarian thought over there. And I lived in a totalitarian state for 2 years.

    So there you are. She seriously said, and repeated in response to incredulity, that she thinks Freethought blogs is like Nazi Germany [paging Orac! Paging Orac!] and East Germany. She lived in the latter, and she says she thinks FTB is like it.

    I find that staggering. Really staggering.