grey lining

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Left: Ricky Gervais on the cover of the September / October 2011 United Kingdom Edition of the New Humanist. Will the US version have the same genital fortitude with their version?

Quite an appropriate image, cf. Atheist Flagellants And Puritans and subsequent babblings. I think Gervais has a pretty good handle on the idiocy that is overtaking the godless world.

The New, New Atheists are fetishising suffering for the sins of the world.

Trouble is, most all of them are pudgy and pink and well-fed and have no real problems, so they begin fabricating them. Case in point, atheist misogyny and the new cult of elevator worship.

Might I suggest, a la Lenny Bruce, instead of crucifixes (or electric chairs), these new, new atheists adopt the wearing of little Elevatorgate tokens around their necks – (more…)

No image. Not worth it.

Before the Four Horseman became a thing (turn of the Millenium), or what some call the “New Atheism”, we were a self-contained community of indignant fuckheads grinding our own axes sequestered in all forms of life, professional pursuits and political opinions – back then none of that mattered to anyone and no one cared. That “herd of cats”. All that mattered was a shared intolerance for bullshit – especially the supernatural kind. Nothing else was really relevant. Freethinkers – that’s all we really were. Just minds challenging minds. A demographic Jackson Pollock image of society that would get into screaming arguments with each other over minutae as an intellectual exercise just for its own sake – then get up dust off, shake hands and tomorrow forget anything ever happened. Contrast that with today.

But then Dawkins, Saint Hitch, Dennett and Harris found a stage in pop media and made the world aware. That was the death knell. It empowered the stupid to crawl out of their closets, still clutching their (in)security blankets and handfulls of burnt bible pages (see RationalResponse), and proclaim themselves to the world as pseudo-godless as well (see atheistnexus and related sites). People with no concept of the prohibition on bullshit we had always maintained. Just damaged souls with a bottomless pit of grievances religion had caused and no idea what Freethought actually was nor any kind of rudimentary self-discovered moral compass. Shit happened, culture wars ensued, new fundamentalist idiocies were rammed down our throats (see atheism+). The original cabal of actual atheism was shouted down and exiled as pariahs.

So we are back to square one – we lurk in the shadows and laugh amongst ourselves at the new stupid, the new church => the New New Atheists.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Paraphrasing Orwell in the light of Freethoughtblogs

“Criticism is ‘silencing’, you know. Banning, though, is just maintaining ‘safe space’.”

“It is churchy. It’s the kind of behaviour that made me give up religion in the first place.”  — ‘tardbook friends comments. To FfTB’s horror, they’re female, and worse, don’t think I’m a monster.

“Where do you find these fanatics that most atheists don’t give a damn about?”

“Just saw this article at The Crisis Factory. You called it over a year ago. New, New Atheism.” — and the obligatory males have to stick stick their dicks in.

Though many will deny it, there is no such thing as a person that does not get a smug satisfaction rush out of the simple act of saying “I told you so…”

Yes, I called new, new atheism, but it was well over a year ago. At my best estimate, I was sounding the warning bells as far back as 2008¹. It was only here, over the last year, that I have started pushing the point that the rabble that now hogs the public spaces of the godless have little, if nothing, in common with the in-your-face, out-of-the-closet new atheism pioneered by what has come to be known as the Four Horsemen – Dawkins, Dennet, Harris and the late, dearly missed Hitchens. (more…)

Yes, if the “threats” are credible, people do go to jail

A British woman has been told to expect a jail sentence after being convicted of the misogynist trolling of a feminist campaigner, adding new fuel to the debate over freedom of speech on social networks.

In the case that prompted Twitter to introduce a ‘report abuse’ button, 23-year-old Isabella Sorley and 25-year-old John Nimmo both pleaded guilty to sending menacing messages via a public electronic communications network. Sorley, who has numerous previous convictions for being drunk and disorderly, has been told she faces jail, while Nimmo is likely to receive a non-custodial sentence.

The pair had, separately, targeted Caroline Criado-Perez, who last year successfully campaigned for novelist Jane Austen to appear on English banknotes. Sorley tweeted: “I’ve only just got out of prison and would happily do more time to see you berried!!” and ‘Rape?! I’d do a lot worse things than rape you!!” — [Forbes.com] (more…)

Unfinished blog I’ll never finish, presented as is –

You can take the man out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of the man.

Not as though there is a shortage of things to dislike the Vatican about, but at the top of the list of persistent, relentless annoyances has to be the continual caterwauling against the concept of gay marriage, as though it would bring about the collapse of civilisation itself – whilst turning a blind eye to, and denying, the existence of homosexuality within its clerical cloisters and, unforgivably, not only denying the existence of rampant paedophilia, but effectively providing a safe house network for paedophile priests to evade criminal prosecution and continue molesting children to their hearts content as they are shuffled from diocese to diocese.

Ireland, according to the cesspit of lies, is 84.2% catholic. And if you place credence in urban folklore, 98% drunk. Certainly, St. Patrick’s day – which rolled around again just recently and is something to either celebrate or fear, depending on your liver and tolerance for belligerent and incomprehensible assholes – does nothing to dispel this figure. (more…)

The censor never sleeps –

I was genuinely shocked. Not that Marcotte blocked me, but that I wasn’t already blocked preemptively according to the distributed wisdom of CFI Director Melody Hensley in her efforts to sanitise the internet and create a rape-free safe space where people from all walks of life can furiously nod in agreement with each other. I had never interacted with Marcotte prior to this, and the reply box being visible and active proved too much of a temptation. (more…)

The Center for Ideology

Let me paint a landscape for you as 2012 ceased to be…

On November 12 2012, Russel Blackford, in a rare moment of absolute exasperation, tweeted what most folks actually feel, but restrain themselves from articulating –

I will NOT be attending any convention / conference that features Rebecca Watson as a speaker. What were the Australian Skeptics thinking? smh

— Russell Blackford (@Metamagician) November 12, 2012

dilbert.com

On November 10, Rebecca Watson took her very own brand of air-headed cluelessness to new heights in a talk at Skepticon 5, dragging evolutionary psychology through the mud as some kind of tool of patriarchal oppression. Whether Blackford’s tweet was a direct result of this exhibit of buffoonery or not is not known, but doesn’t seem likely given the video was not posted until November 20. If by some chance it did, it only vindicates Blackford’s outburst as Watson now consistently paints a picture of skeptics and atheists to the outside world as a bunch of ill-educated, poorly read, perpetually squabbling clowns. Remember Galileo Becky? No, that was not an excusable “slip up” – it’s basic junior high school level history/science knowledge. It reeked of the pig ignorance of a stupid girl-child that fills her vast expanses of idle time between booze ups playing video games and tweeting snark instead self-education – the latter being what many folks would assume came as a minimum responsibility for someone that feeds at the teat of the community and claims to represent it. (more…)

Wormtongue – what Adam Lee hates seeing in the mirror

When you look at the whole menagerie of A+, freefromthoughtblogs and Skepchick and the various toilet slaves, snake oil peddlers, shills, frauds and confidence tricksters that squirm around it like maggots in carrion, it is a daunting task to try and determine which is the most obsequious toady of the lot.

I think that title has to belong to Adam Lee / DaylightAtheism though. He’s come from nowhere in the last few months, but with sheer bloody minded determination has made even yay-yap slugs like oolon look like ethical pillars of independent thinking, dignity and self-respect.

Adam’s first claim to fame was the glossy, clinically fact-free, propaganda advertorial he managed to inject into Salon – and leave a sour taste in many people’s mouths that Salon too can be consigned to the pile of online media portals that have “editorial integrity” as a marketing buzzword and not something that they actually waste any time on practising. (more…)

Bloghog tries to be more incoherent than Ophelia Benson. Comes close.

As the old German proverb goes, blood is thicker than water. The cesspit of lies states “It generally means that the bonds of family and common ancestry are stronger than those bonds between unrelated people (such as friendship)”. But often it is also used as a lever to coerce obligation, “this phrase is usually used to remind family members that their allegiance should always remain with their family first, and outside acquaintances second”.

It’s all a rather convoluted way of describing what are base mammalian pack instincts. In humans, whatever way you look at it, the results are always skewed in the same way – the pack does not see flaws that are obvious to outsiders and, conversely, exaggerates trivial achievements to the level of heroism whilst others don’t seem to notice a thing. Case in point: Jen McCreight’s daddy thinks the world is being unfair and cruel to his precious princess that has, evidently, done so much for the rest of us and lets us know in word salad of appeal to pity and bare-knuckle machismo. All sic – (more…)

“pssst, franc did it…”

Baboons are so giving. Within a day of the Survival Guide post, they have barfed up some perfect examples of exactly how vile they can be when they gather in their echo chamber and start their paranoid whispers about how cruel the world is to them.

The first is merely amusing. The fact that Reddit Atheism+, much like freefromthoughtblogs and skepchick, is being censored with the zeal of a North Korean newspaper is a given and not a surprise to anyone. What is a surprise though (at least to me) is that they found a way to disable the Reddit post “dislike” arrow. I guess clicking the “dislike” arrow on what someone says is a coat of paint away from violent rape at knife point – if you listen to Marcotte and Skeptifem enough it is anyway. So they removed it.

There is a special added bonus with this to boot – now, r/atheism+ can really state that EVERYONE agrees with what they say, and technically, they will be telling the truth. Who says the Naked Emperor can’t teach new tricks? This style of lie-that-isn’t-really-a-lie is his main area of expertise. (more…)