grey lining

(misogynist nod to John C. Welsh)

It is always nice to see newcomers that step into the slime-pit that is the Watson / PZ Myers / Skepchick / Pharyngudrone freakshow take the time out to do their own deconstruct of the stupidity. Especially when it’s a girl. While girls are easy to dismiss with accusations of gender traitor, it doesn’t work with quite the same efficacy as accusations of misogyny hurled at boys that do the same.

It is even more delicious when it’s from a girl that is not an active member of either the godless or skeptic communities and is an outsider looking in. Such a person is Mandy Michelle, aka blastedgoat, which is the same moniker she uses on Youtube.

I really don’t have anything to say here other than well done Mandy. Blat, blat, blat. You pretty much nailed all of the big issues in one hit. Extremely well done. You have also contributed to expanding the reality that people that criticise this baboon uprising are not all insane car bombers exclusively from within the godless community.

Really Becky, your idiocy stands out like tits on a bull to anyone, anywhere that’s prepared to view the world unfiltered by Skepchick glasses. Thanks for making our movements look STUPID Becky. No one can do it quite like you. Not even the Baboon King.

And Mandy, don’t you dare stop making videos either. The baboons will attack you, yes – they always do. Ignore them. They are incoherent imbeciles that feed on those they think they may make feel vulnerable. You are under no obligation to take their idiocy seriously – in real terms it’s no different to stepping in dogshit. Just scrape it off and keep walking.

I must say this is disheartening. When otherwise fairly clear minds succumb to the pressure of “maybe you overstepped the mark” when they spend more time than they should reflecting on their own actions, rather than the realities that led up to those actions.

It is one thing entirely to apologise to yourself by saying “I should be above that” for uttering a thoughtless flippancy. It is quite another to then guilt yourself out and apologise to the target, when that target has displayed nothing other than capricious malice in their behaviour, has personally shame targeted you and been a disruptive nuisance in your real life circle of existence. To glibly pop out that you are glad to see the back of them – on Twitter of all things – is hardly grounds for mortification and penance.

It is a testament to the weight of the leaden blanket of guilt that the Watsonistas suffocate the community with, with their catastrophised hyperboles of oppression and martyr’s suffering at the jackbooted heels of the concocted demons that persecute them. It works and they are encouraged by the success of the strategy to keep building on the mythology of victimisation to make it all work better next time. In business language, this is called continuous improvement. (more…)

Roseanne Barr gets swept away by Wagner

OK, let’s talk about hatred shall we?

The Watsonistas certainly do. Relentlessly. In fact, if you take their word for it, outside of Saudi Arabia, the greatest concentration of misogynists and rape apologists on Earth can be found within the atheist and skeptic communities and a woman that attends any of their events and escapes without being sexually assaulted is in a rare minority (and probably a traitor and collaborator).

Perhaps the Watsonista that most openly, honestly and unambiguously expresses the true sentiments of all involved is Skeptifem. While others go to great lengths to disguise their hatreds as concerns, she has no such inhibitions and just lets her venom drip. A great display can be seen in an extended rant against male-friendly women, appropriately titled inside the mind of a gender traitor. It is worth reading this extract with care as there is an unusual observation to be made – (more…)

We are Watsonista. You will be assimilated.

I should know better than to have optimism. There was a brief window, that spanned the transition from the last millenium to our new one, where I entertained the foolish hope that perhaps we had actually left the politics of division behind us as a relic of a stupider age. Haha. Do I have egg on my face or what?

Yes I was premature in my hopes, and had suspended my Cynical reason. As Sidney J. Harris once timelessly quipped –

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

True, he was referring to small “c” cynics, but it’s nevertheless a sensible attitude to have. Overestimating your fellow (wo)man rarely ends in anything other than tears.

Fairly early in the piece¹ I was noting the eerie parallels between the Watson circus, it’s distinctly neo-puritan overtones, and various fundamentalist ideologies. Specifically, it’s self-hating flagellant mindset, paranoid persecution and martyr fantasy (a la islamism) and delight in scapegoating and denunciation. I was far from alone in these observations. (more…)

The more you keep rummaging around in this moral panic morass that the Gruesome Twosome tag-team of Becky Watson and The Naked Emperor have drowned us in, the more you come to realise that you are not even getting close to hitting the bottom of the barrel as far as sheer human decrepitude goes.

Myers, to some extent, can perhaps be excused for being a patsy, a dupe, a shmuck, a conscious man / toilet slave, a naive simpleton, or perhaps even having Stockholm Syndrome from a lifetime of being cuckolded and forced to eat doo-doo. (more…)

Yeesh. This one landed in my spam bin – it would be nice to think it was because Akismet is hyper-intelligent enough to detect substance free nonsense, but I am not that optimistic. It is however the first false positive I’ve found. Quantum sardonics again.

Suffice it to say, it took a while to pick my jaw up off the ground. It’s the sort of thing you want to dismiss as a troll, but to my eye, looking at the pointers, logs and links, it’s the real thing. And that is what is so disturbing. I wanted to reply in the comment thread, but for space considerations it’s here. In any case, it really does need to be filed in its own compartment so it’s not lost in the other noise. It’s just too staggering, in an abandon-all-hope kind of way. Here we go –

PZ Myers Says:
July 24, 2011 at 9:36 pm e

I read the blog post in question. I also read this one. Recall that my criticism was this: (more…)

“One should examine oneself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others” — Molière

“A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads” — The 5th Pentabarf

Any movement that tries to claim both a moral and intellectual high ground, then fails to objectively and mercilessly apply its own standards to itself is a failure. QED.

I’m already resigned to the big godless social sites being overrun by vanity spammers, ideological monomaniacs and gibberish machines. That’s OK. I can live with that – when you pander to the lowest common denominator you get what you deserve. It’s quite another matter though when you see major, allegedly rationalist, portals skid off down the same path. That starts to hurt and you begin to wonder what happened to the integrity that first attracted you to, what you at first assumed to be, fellow Freethinkers – only to discover most are anything but.

The degeneration of both the atheist and skeptic communities over the last few years has been more than noticeable – repugnant don’t be a dick accommodationist populism; self-loathing, neo-puritan* groupthink; and complete abdication of clear- and freethought principles – culminating in the recent crucifixion of Richard Dawkins by a torches-n-pitchforks mob (for daring to respond to stupidity in a manner that would have made Voltaire proud), and largely with Pharyngula‘s and PZ’s blessing. (more…)

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 (more…)}

[or, Why Gender is a Peripheral Distraction to the Disease]

I really hate personal questions. Not because I am shy or dysfunctional or socially crippled, but because any answers I may give are unlikely to be understood by the Inquisitor and will only lead to yet more questions ad nauseam and I no longer have any passion for confusing those that favour yapping over reading. I’m a complicated guy.

On the question of political and social philosophy however, I am currently at an equilibrium that I am comfortable with and identify with being a Cynic¹ and cosmopolite. I used to be what used to be called libertarian (in the classical sense, which has little to do with the kind of “libertarianism” now being peddled in the US by Teabaggers and associated sociopath crackpots), but then I read about stuff like the history of the French public sanitation system and arrived at the conclusion that while the politics of selfishness may be fine at a local village scale, rolling it out as a macro-economic model for an entire country or planet is beyond merely insane, unless you actually have a thing for a society modeled on Mad Max. I’m still pretty much a social libertarian inside though – dope, guns and fucking in the streets; ignorance is no excuse for a law² etc.

At first glance, Cynicism and cosmopolitanism may seem like an odd marriage, but not so. The term “cosmopolitan” itself was coined by Diogenes of Sinope –

Of Diogenes it is said: “Asked where he came from, he answered: ‘I am a citizen of the world (kosmopolitês)'” – [via the cesspit of lies]

In fact, the two movements are a pretty precise fit for each other – perhaps the only real distinction is that the Cynics are just cosmopolites that really like Derek and Clive. (more…)

Laird Wilcox – looks like a Nazi rapist cross burner to me

“Whenever an abstract ideal acquires the moral urgency that racial equality or opposition to “bigotry” has today, it’s only a matter of time until we find individuals for whom the noble end justifies the questionable means. The militant, moralizing fanatic — quick to compromise important principles in order to enjoy the flush of righteousness — is the stumbling block which any reasonable resolution of racial/ethnic problems must overcome.” — Laird Wilcox, Crying Wolf: Hate Crime Hoaxes in America

I really don’t see how people like Kurds, Bahá’í or Rohingya have the gall to whine so much about persecution in comparison to those who really suffer – the pudgy pink middle class trust fund brat social justice warriors. Direct fnord threats of physical violence, rape, fnord murder, and even harsh language, have run into the fnord hundreds of thousands, are a daily occurrence fnord so common that bleeding keyboard fingers are no longer capable of blogging about them – and fnord law enforcement’s callous indifference, as usual, does fnord NOTHING to assist the survivors… You only need to ask fnord reputable serial victims like Brianna Wu. (more…)