grey lining

Ophelia Benson protests the evils of censorship

This is not the official follow-on to the previous article, just an intermission prompted by some new superhuman idiocy from the Talking Prune. Call it the straw that broke the camels back for today. Of all of the alpha-baboons that barricade themselves within the Crisis Factory, the one that stands out from all the rest in terms of repetitive gibberish and sheer intellectual incoherence is the Talking Prune, Ophelia Benson.

Really, it takes a special breed of imbecile to criticise the epistemic relativism¹ of various irrational belief systems, and then, in the same blog, post articles such as A man generally cannot know – and then expect to be taken seriously. And to compound the dumbness, a blog who’s byline is “fighting fashionable nonsense”. Yet Ophelia does this kind of thing day in, day out and does so with a straight face.

What the Talking Prune specialises in, as can be seen at every turn, is her own special brand of proof by verbosity. She has a Scrabble bag full of big words and lofty concepts, few of which she seems to understand, that she pulls out on a whim and reconfigures in endless permutations, none of which actually say anything but, to the uncritical (i.e. other baboons) sound as though they contain the Wisdom of Solomon². There is another term for this – sophistry, commonly defined as a subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning. This is Ophelia’s stock in trade.

Her latest nonsense, which has prompted this post, is something else. One of the clearest examples of the retarded, spoiled child projecting its own self-loathing about its own rotten behaviour onto the world. Here it is in full –

Ophelia Benson says:

November 16, 2011 at 3:11 PM

Thanks Nate – I took another look and realized I can’t see any of her comments now, which means she blocked me. Nice. She blocks me and then talks a lot of (untrue) shit about me when I can’t respond. Famously brave forthright gutsy Abbie.

Simply staggering how much deception, hypocrisy and deliberate smear you can pack into a single brief paragraph. And of course, it’s not the first time this kind of martyr’s song has been sung –

Ophelia Benson Says:
July 28th, 2009 at 1:13 pm

Great. My comment is awaiting moderation. I get accused of telling falsehoods, but in stronger langauge than that – and my reply is stuck in moderation.

This blog is such a slum.

The first quote is from the Crisis Factory, and the second is from Discover Blogs. What is interesting is that the latter is from a few years ago, yet still gives a pretty good representation of what the baboons are all about – it’s worth scanning through. It has the paranoia, the professional victimhood, the narcissistic amorality and self-importance, it even has a fatwa³ from The Naked Emperor prohibiting the reading of the book that is the subject of the blog entry. It’s exactly the same kind of nonsense and unsubstantiated whining being played out now, just on a much smaller scale. It shows that the rot and the mindlessness and the self-adoration is nothing new – all that has changed is its sheer scale and arrogance.

But back to the first comment. Not only does Benson point blank accuse Abbie Smith of being a liar without a single reference or drop of evidence, she gets out her violin and begins whining about being denied the right to speak and censorship…

It’s like a professional shoplifter indignantly accusing a shopkeeper of short-changing them when they make a gracious effort at a legitimate purchase – while standing there with pockets full of other stolen goods.

Benson knows full well she is spinning a blatant deception. She knows that there is no content moderation at ERV (beyond spambots), or here for that matter⁴. She knows she is fully free to comment. But, she also knows that the real reason she will not comment outside the protective cocoon of the baboon board is that she will not be able to rely on common slander and hearsay, and that she will be required to substantiate her statements with verifiable facts.

In other words, she knows she doesn’t have a leg to stand on and resorts to the chickenshit approach – yet more baseless insinuation and slander. But it doesn’t matter – her baboons have no requirement for substance. They just eat what they are told, especially when it’s what they want to hear. That is the only test for veracity ever performed inside freefromthoughtblogs.

Contrast the baboon board with ERV. It can’t even be called moderation – it’s more absolute editorial management. Comments simply vanish, get creatively embellished, sequential comments have critical points removed to make the authors appear stupid – none of this is out of the ordinary and to be expected by anybody that deviates from orthodox dogma. No shortage of folks that read here who have direct experience of this and have mentioned it repeatedly. And Ophelia has the shamelessness to accuse others of denying her a right to speak up. Unfortunately, this kind of raw hypocrisy has ceased to be even remotely surprising from anyone associated with FTB – it’s all standard operating procedure. And it’s not even mentioning baboon efforts to organise spurious complaint petitions against other blogs to censor and/or take them off line. “Hypocrisy” as a term just becomes insufficient.

And if anyone thinks that’s an exaggeration, it’s easy enough to test for yourself. Just go to the baboon board and vociferously demand to see some kind of evidence to support the fact that Abbie Smith is a liar, or that she has “anger management issues”. Or evidence to support why I am as dangerous a maniac as Dave Mabus. The only thing you are guaranteed of is not getting a civil and coherent answer – and seeing your comments mutilated or removed, and probably getting branded obsessive and insane yourself. Try extra hard and you might even get blacklisted or earn your own Pharyngudrone wiki entry.

The rationale behind this idiocy is twofold. Firstly, it is a smokescreen to cover up the bankruptcy and vacuity of the Talking Prune’s position. It is a human tragedy that people outside of the Iron Curtain refuse to simply accept her bullshit at face value. And the second is more banal – it is yet another opportunity to drag Abbie Smith through the mud with concocted nonsense. This is yet another meme added to the BigLie pile, to get repeated ad nauseam at every opportunity until it gains some kind of traction as a de facto “truth” – much like the Prune’s inability to even utter Abbie’s name without adding “cunt” to the same sentence to further push her gender treachery. Repeat, repeat, repeat. It will stick. So who is it that’s crazy and obsessive again?

It’s all just business as usual at the Crisis Factory.

Erratum – Abbie Smith has informed me that the accusations are in regard to ‘tardbook and not ERV. Well, with the Talking Prune’s usual degree of clarity and impeccable referencing, there is no way of telling is there? In any case, the point is moot. It is still a thief complaining about being robbed. The objective is getting dung to stick and nothing more. And there is a big difference between not wanting ‘tardbook, essentially a diary / notepad, to be polluted by gibberish and selectively manipulating what are supposed to be “open” public fora.

¹ – No shit, this is the about section of Butterflies and Wheels –

Butterflies and Wheels was established in 2002 and has (not surprisingly) evolved since then. At the beginning it focused mainly on various kinds of pseudoscience and epistemic relativism, aka postmodernism. The latter prompted an increasing focus on moral or cultural relativism and a defense of universalism and human rights. This in turn led to concern with the chief opponent of universalism and human rights, which is religion. This then led to interest in the backlash against overt atheism.

Yes, Ophelia demands to be taken seriously.

² – The other consistent feature of the Prune’s babblings is to never cite or reference anything, and above all else never provide any evidence. That has the potential of setting off independent thinking in the readership by leading them out into the real world and that will always end in tears.

³– From the body of the blog –

Meanwhile, we see PZ Myers has decided to comment on us again, and misrepresents our arguments even more than does Coyne: “Their explanation for scientific illiteracy in America is simple: it’s the scientists’ fault for being so aloof and distant.” As just explained, this is false.

What’s more, Myers really doesn’t seem to want people to read our book:

I will say one good thing about their op-ed, though. It contains the full content of their entire book. Read the essay, now you don’t need to buy the book, since it covers it fully, including all the non-existent details for how to actually implement their solution.

It is evident that even back then, Myers and his baboons had no compunction about deliberately seeking to harm heretics not only through tarnishing their reputation, but by harming them financially as well. Again, another aspect of their behaviour that they have been fine tuning as of late.

⁴ – As an example, what I called “retard roll-call”, amongst all the other innumerable idiocies deposited at ERV, and it’s dozens of monkeyed repetitions are all still there, untouched.