Whenever I get drawn into these gender angst sewers, and I get a quick refresher course on the state of modern discourse, where even Tweets can defy some attention spans, I am invariably reminded of the ‘nets prehistory and the days when dinosaurs such as Serdar Argic ruled the landscape, crushing all within their path.

Argic (or whoever it was), aka Zumabot, after the return email path of sera@zuma.uucp, was widely rumoured to actually be the Turkish secret police (Turkey is notorious for its hypersensity about and denial of its own genocide of Armenians). Whatever was behind it, it was probably just a bunch of automated scripts, with some human oversight, that scoured early Usenet for any posts that could even vaguely be construed as anti-Turkish and then auto-responded to them with vast volumes of denialist anti-Armenian gibberish. So you could post something along the lines of –

Yeah so we want to the movies last night and after went down to the Anatolian for pide and kebabs…

and almost immediately get a follow-up post (or a few dozen) that was something like this –

Then I guess you would agree that ‘Armenian woman’ and ‘sex’ are irreconcilable. Is that why Armenians would rape and slaughter Muslim women? At the end of the Armenian genocide of the Muslim people, the German author Dr. Weiss, his Austrian colleague Dr. Stein and his Turkish colleague Mr. Ahmet Refik visited Trabzon, Kars, Erzurum [followed by usually about 500 lines of atrocity propaganda and bogus statistics ]1

It was quite awesome to behold and, at one stage, you could even buy Serdar Argic World Tour t-shirts by mail order.

I am reminded of Zumabot because that’s what much of what the responses to anyone that dares criticise poor Becky in this current little spat look like – it does look ‘bot generated, most of it would probably even fail a Turing Test and it would be fascinating to see one applied. “You are just repeating the same tired argument”, “you really just don’t get it do you?”, and the coup de grâce, “you are just repeating the same tired argument which only proves you just don’t get it”…

Much like animals recoiling from fire, it is doubtful if any of the fem-bot Taliban even pause to read the articles they are responding to before diving in, pitchfork in hand. Or they do try to, but cognitive filtration just presents them with lots of white space dotted with a few trigger words (yes PZ – you are as guilty as anyone else, which is very disheartening).

The whole debate just becomes an exercise in futility – as arguments with any kind of fundamentalism do. You want to ignore them, but then that horrible thing called a conscience stirs and reminds you that silence in the face of idiocy is little more than an admission of defeat, and you succumb and demand a point of order.

Every now and then though, you do stumble across items that restore some faith that all is not lost. Especially when you see some of the younger chicks in the various scenes that can resist the Borg mind control from their elders who have no hope of ever knowing better – and the groupthink pressure and intimidation and vile slanders they know they will receive – and speak up on their own behalf and of their own volition (found via Quixotic Journey) –

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This young woman goes by the community name of Rose St. Clair and she has a list of stuff referenced in the video itemised on her Youtube page. Brave lady, eminently sensible, and whilst there is a point or two we may differ on, I am sure she is as capable of defending them as she would be at listening to my objections without melting into incoherence or resorting to cheap victim plays and misandrist slanders – and we might even learn something from each other.

The key difference between Rose and the flash mobs that have overrun the bigger blog forums is that she is prepared to use her own brain, has a healthy mistrust of the mob mentality, and most importantly of all, is prepared to at least try and empathise with the other, instead of running around looking for rope and a high tree. What is the main defining characteristic of the narcissist / psychopath / sociopath that any introductory psychology text can give you?

Lack of ability to empathise

To quote you Watson – hello? you just don’t get it do you? And you don’t. This is how the mind of the zealot operates. Empathy is for losers that don’t have axes to grind. Reminds me of the old Bertrand Russell quote –

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt

Rose is prepared to doubt, prior to simply condemning on the basis of personal emotive irrationality. One is a skeptic. The other has more in common with Vlad Tepes as far as objective, unprejudiced reasoning goes. You decide which is which.

The second vid is not quite so serious in presentation, but probably more serious in its message, though of course this will go flying over the heads of those who’s minds are already set in concrete. It’s quite chuckleworthy and so far, the comments on its page haven’t descended into spelling or grammar flames, but I should still probably point out that the English appears to be the second language of the author AmetReloads –

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Quite a delicious view – with a delicious sting in its tail. When you mount special, exceptionalist pleadings for sympathy on the grounds that you somehow have a monopoly on suffering, you open yourself up to an infinite regression of n+1 exceptionalists that can undo all your martyr squealings on a whim and, as much as you hate it, revert you to the status of just another ordinary person.

This video takes a dig at the elevator assailant being black, which would probably have caused Watson to have quite a radical attitude readjustment. And if it wouldn’t, then how about if he was black and in a wheelchair? That would get really hairy. Or better yet, let’s abandon the idea it was a male altogether. Let’s assume it was a lesbian…2

I think it’s a pretty safe bet to take, especially in the last case, that Watson would not have proceeded to mount the same spectacle for the masses as she has currently done. Nor a for crippled black dude. That leaves us with a rather ugly realisation – Watson, for all of her holy indignation, would herself allow her actions to be dictated by discriminatory opinions on race, gender, sexuality and physical (dis)ability.

Remember Becky, you no more have the monopoly on tortured logic than you do on suffering, victimisation or oppression. If you’re allowed to think like a lunatic, so are we. Fair is fair. You want to play victim politics? Then you can’t really cry if when you paint yourself into a corner. As will always happen. Just like death and taxes. I can hear that oh but that’s different whine start up again… no… it… isn’t.

Face it. The only reason we are dealing with this crap is that it was a white male – that most detestable of all demographics. No other reason. The lynch mobs are ready and waiting. Voices prepared to defend them are rare to non-existent, and if any do have the temerity to speak up, they will disappear under an avalanche of disapproval. The blog hits are in the stratosphere. The publicity – not something money could ever buy. It’s just that easy. It’s just too easy. Unfortunately. And it’s taken advantage of and exploited to the max…

All of this assumes of course, to don the Devil’s Advocate cap, that there even was an elevator incident in the first place. Curious by omission is that not one person has questioned this to date, nor has there been any kind of corroborating evidence. All we have is an anecdote. What was the name of one of the communities embroiled in all of this? Oh yeah, the skeptics. That’s right. Pretty skeptical bunch.

So is this person actually out there somewhere or not? It would be fascinating to hear the other side. But, given the atmosphere of reasoned calmness, snowflakes and hell spring to mind. Poor bugger (if he exists). Probably put him off pussy for life – scarred into now seeing each woman he meets from here to eternity as an unexploded bomb.

The last item on the menu, and by far the most interesting, is some continued Google analysis of our present state of affairs. Simplest just to present the graphics and let them speak to you themselves first –

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This is just so jaw-droppingly awesome, I was pretty much left speechless for a while after I entered these searches out of curiosity. This is just incredible. Just how in the hell do you manage to flood Google to that extent? I mean seriously…

Well, let’s look at this logically and rationally. This current, noxious atheist misogyny meme to the best of my knowledge was kicked off by a Greta Christina blog back on September 9, 2009, as I mentioned in my preceding post, close enough to two years ago. It was also curiously enough, a blog about Rebecca Watson.

Googling using date delimiters does not always give the best results, a lot is generally lost by date info not being captured correctly, but nevertheless, it is interesting to compare the 12 months just gone with the 12 months preceding the original Christina article –

Adding +rebecca +watson to the string gives the same ratios as above for the year just gone, but for the earlier results only return low double digits and mostly completely irrelevant accidentally hooked items. But still, more gob-smacking results.

What are we looking at here? Looks like a one-woman army on a crusade to me. Watson is there from the very first blog on this poisonous issue and is the one constant fixture throughout it all to the here and now. This is way more than just common axe grinding misandrist obsession, this is more a full blown pathological monomania. Honey, I don’t want to get in an elevator with you – I don’t even want to be on the same fucking planet. Just what in the fuck is your problem? What sort of horrifying skeletons do you have in your closet that could deform and unhinge your mind to this degree? I find my nauseating contempt giving way to almost feelings of pity.

So, as far as we the communities go, the question begs, what is actually doing more damage to the atheist and skeptic communities here? Is it –

a) actual, verifiable misogyny, or

b) a deranged individual hellbent on slandering and villifying our communities without justification and painting them as vile, bigoted and dangerous sewers on the basis of deranged, Munchausean hallucination, exaggeration and hyperbole?

I can tell you who really is happy watching all of this – and that is the conservative xtian blogging community. Right now they are looking at us and laughing with sadistic delight. They are looking on us as as jellyfish spined buffoons, hypocrites, hysterics and just general all round losers and loving every second of it. Watching this community eat itself with malice, backbiting and slander. Seeing all of their assumptions of where godlessness can lead manifest before their very eyes just for them – a gift from their god…

This is what this hysteria has achieved. What a crowning success. What a great leap forward for us.

It’s just so awesome that I no longer even want to have anything to do with it. Fucking losers. The god-freaks are right.

1 – Actual genuine Serdar Argic post from my archives

2 – This is of course nonsense. Everybody knows that there is no such thing as a predatory lesbian.