NOTE: Just one more day of the Man Boobz Pledge Week! Big thanks to everyone who has donated!
If you haven’t yet, and want to, here’s the button you’re looking for:
UPDATE: Vacula has resigned.
As most of you are no doubt aware, the atheist and skeptic movements have had just a teensy bit of a problem with misogyny in their ranks. You may recall the unholy shitstorm that erupted last year when Rebecca Watson of Skepchick casually mentioned in a YouTube video that it might not be such a good idea for dudes to try to hit on women in elevators at 4 AM. The assholes of the internet still haven’t forgiven Watson for her assault on the sacred right of creepy dudes to creep women out 24 hours a day, every day.
Watson is hardly the only skeptic to face vicious misogynist harassment for the crime of blogging while feminist. Last month, Jen McCreight of Blag Hag announced that near constant harassment from online bullies was wearing her down to such a degree that she felt it necessary to shut down her blog – hopefully only temporarily.
I can no longer write anything without my words getting twisted, misrepresented, and quotemined. I wake up every morning to abusive comments, tweets, and emails about how I’m a slut, prude, ugly, fat, feminazi, retard, bitch, and cunt (just to name a few). If I block people who are twisting my words or sending verbal abuse, I receive an even larger wave of nonsensical hate about how I’m a slut, prude, feminazi, retard, bitch, cunt who hates freedom of speech (because the Constitution forces me to listen to people on Twitter). This morning I had to delete dozens of comments of people imitating my identity making graphic, lewd, degrading sexual comments about my personal life. In the past, multiple people have threatened to contact my employer with “evidence” that I’m a bad scientist (because I’m a feminist) to try to destroy my job. I’m constantly worried that the abuse will soon spread to my loved ones.
I just can’t take it anymore.
McCreight’s harassers and their enablers were delighted in this “victory,” taking to Twitter to give McCreight some final kicks on the way out the door. “Good riddance, #jennifurret , you simple minded dolt,” wrote @skepticaljoe. “I couldn’t be happier,” added @SUICIDEBOMBS. “Eat shit you rape-faking scum.”
One of the celebrators that day was an atheist activist named Justin Vacula, who joked that “Jen’s allegedly finished blogging…and this time it’s not her boyfriend who kicked her off the internet.”
So here’s the latest twist:
Justin Vacula has just been given a leadership position in the Pennsylvania chapter of the Secular Coalition for America, a lobbying group for secular Americans whose advisory board includes such big names as Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Susan Jacoby, Wendy Kaminer, Steven Pinker, Salman Rushdie and Julia Sweeney.
It’s an astonishing choice. In addition to gloating that bullies had led McCreight to shut down her blog, Vacula has harassed atheist blogger and activist Surly Amy, including writing a post on A Voice for Men (yes, that A Voice for Men) cataloging all the sordid details of his supposed case against her. At one point he even posted her address, and a photo of her apartment building, on a site devoted to hating on feminist atheist bloggers.
Blogger Stephanie Zvan has set up a petition on Change.org urging the Secular Coalition of America to reconsider its choice. You can find further examples of Vacula’s questionable behavior there.
As Watson notes in a post on Skepchick, Vacula’s position with the SCA is likely to “drive progressive women away from the secular cause.” She adds,
I will never, ever get involved with SCA so long as someone like him holds a position of power anywhere, let alone in a state I live in. So Vacula is actively driving people away from SCA. …
It’s all a real shame, because SCA fills an important role in our movement and I’d like to give them my support. … I don’t believe secular organizations should reward bullies and bigots with high-level positions, even if those positions are volunteer-only.
I recommend that everyone here take a look at the petition.
This was good too:
Also, now whenever anyone prefaces their remarks with a disgusted “Ugh,” I now think “Why are they addressing Ugh? Ugh didn’t say anything about that.” 😉
@CassandraSays
No, I can’t link to studies that find that “faith” is a cognitive flaw. One would have to sufficiently define faith first. I would define it as “believing things that are contradictory to evidence or without evidence” but clearly faithy people define it otherwise. I can dig up studies about pareidolia and falsely attributing agency and magical thinking, all examples of beliefs contrary to evidence, if you’re actually interested. I’m not a psychologist though and I have no formal training in psychology proper; I apologize for misuse of terminology.
The other reason to conclude that faith is a cognitive flaw is that there is no evidence whatsoever in the existence of a deity (or fairies, or psychics, or whatever supernatural crap we’re embracing this month), not that one can get a theist to stop cognitively wriggling around long enough to get a good definition of “god” out of them. (And no, warm fuzzies don’t constitute evidence of anything but the existence of warm fuzzies themselves.) Then the task set to scientists is to explain why people believe things for no reason.
But really, why bother with the discussion. Everyone gets to believe what they want to believe for whatever reason as long as it makes us feel happy. It would be mean to seek the truth, especially if it’s unpleasant, and it would be even meaner to tell other people about it. Fuck the truth. Fuck reality. Who cares what the evidence says, as long as we feel good about it, that’s what’s really important.
Cloudiah: he was cast through a knee darkly? WTF?
And in regards to “confrontational”. In my part of the country, merely stating that one does not believe in god(s) could be considered confrontational. Asking someone to stop proselytizing to you because you’re an atheist would almost universally be considered confrontational. And if you want to actually explain why you’re an atheist after someone has told you that you need to find Jesus, well, that’s pretty much the equivalent to kicking puppies. Atheists are supposed to sit down, shut up, and be vaguely ashamed of themselves. Extra points for frequent praise of faith and wishing one could believe.
hellkell, It’s either a knee, a lense, a curved surface of a body of water, or either of two fluid-filled invaginations near the proboscis of a thorny-headed worm. I’m voting for the last.
^lens^
“Dark Meniscus” is the name of my new VNV Nation cover band.
Wooo! Thorny-headed worms! MRAs should have lots and lots of encounters with them.
(They are parasitic worms (acanthocephalan is the real name) that use their spiny proboscises to embed in the intestinal walls of their hosts. I heart them so hard.)
Maybe it’s just my flawed, religious brain, but the argument about truth-seeking always confuses me. The existence of “God”, or any other deity, is eminently unfalsifiable. I support science searching for answers to the universe, but things that cannot be proven true or false are outside of the realm of “truth”.
So why should a belief in something entirely unverifiable that (presuming that said belief does not encroach upon anyone else’s ability to live as they choose) doesn’t affect you MATTER?
Juggler!
Stamen of privilege!
Dark meniscus!
I LAUGHAGE. SO. HARD.
I am wrong, I know I am wrong but I cannot admit I am wrong. So let me be a weasel and say it is a draw.
One more:
Um, you might want to see a doctor about that, buddy.
@teiresias
It’s really more complicated than that. I don’t want to bring up the whole elevator gate discussion again. If you’re interested here’s a lengthy post about the whole drama: http://freethoughtkampala.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/elevatorgate/
omfg I knew that style of metaphor seemed creepily familiar!
salientsight and E.L. James — SEPARATED AT BIRTH?????
Dammit, so many good band names, but I’ve already committed to calling my band Nazi Buddhas from Space.
(Note: I will not actually call my band this.
Remember, if you’re going to put an anarchist up your ass, make sure it has a flared base!!
Seriously, as long as those beliefs aren’t being used to hurt others, why the fuck not? Why is it such a bad thing that people believe things that make them happy? Can’t we just let people have their beliefs and not make passive-aggressive comments about the deluded la-la land they live in for holding them?
I’m getting the vibe that you want to be nasty about religion because theists have been nasty about your lack of it. Which really isn’t a good way to solve problems or lead to discussion at all, on either side.
Holy crap, how can anyone be so pretentious? This is only the first paragraph.
Hang on:
I first learned of the #occupywallstreet movement back in September of 2011 while reading Adbusters, a Canadian cultural magazine.
I was reading issue 97 during my morning commute on the Skytrain when my eyes landed on the now iconic poster of a ballerina standing gracefully atop of Modica’s Charging Bull sculpture, while in the background of the image a group of protesters in gas masks was being pursued by riot police, a clear contrast to to the calm and gracefulness of the ballerina’s figure in the foreground.
There! It’s not perfect, but it says the exact same thing while being half the length and being far more readable.
Thomas: Well, Wikipedia says this: “Harassment covers a wide range of behaviors of an offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behaviour intended to disturb or upset, and it is characteristically repetitive. In the legal sense, it is intentional behaviour which is found threatening or disturbing. ”
I’m not convinced that what happened fits this definition. But I’m not really interested in arguing over the word harassment. So let’s call it a draw.
Let’s not.
Are you alleging his actions weren’t intentional?
Are you saying the target of his actions didn’t find it threatening, or disturbing?
Because unless that’s what you are arguing, you are saying what he did was harrassing behavior, and you want me to let you off with saying it’s not.
It was, and your terms make it so.
Everyone should inform themselves and listen to the other side of the story before they sign the petition. I think that’s a fair request.
It’s passive aggressive arrogance. It assumes the people here who disagree with you haven’t done that (because if they did they’d see different shades of grey… the ones where going to moderate lengths to post someone’s address, and then adding to it when AFfM wanted to repost it are perfectly innocent; and calling the dude out for it is more wrong than what he did; and is, “just political”.
Again, you are wrong, and inept.
Lest we forget, you’ve admitted you don’t engage here in good fait..
Aaagh! You apologize to the English language this instant, young man!
@Linds
The existence of a deistic god is unfalsifiable. The existence of other types of gods are often falsifiable. Once the deity starts interacting with the physical world, supernaturalists are in trouble. Then the questions start. It’s unfortunate that we’ve had to push the idea of “non-overlapping magisteria” in order to have science not be rejected outright by the faithful, since it is, in most cases, a lie we tell to children.
Why does it matter? As I explained initially, believing things for no reason is not good. If you decide that it’s okay to do that, what won’t you believe? (View the phenomenon of “crank magnetism”, where people tend to believe many, many irrational things at the same time. Owly has a terminal case.) And that just makes it all the harder for people who do believe in empiricism to get things done. Try explaining to an aid group why dumping free food goods into a developing country is often a bad idea, when all they can see is how good they feel when they do it. Or to a health care system that half of “alternative medicine” is transparently bullshit that doesn’t work and it’s practically a crime to spend money pushing it.
@cloudiah
In other words, I went to some trouble to search for her personal info in an obscure government database that relatively few people know about.
In other words, the kids nowerdays are really good with these computer machines. There is is thing called “google” where you can find all kinds of information in seconds. Back in the days we went to the library. Technology really confuses me.
Seriously! I can’t stand when people try to classify other people’s opinions or beliefs as being neurological problems; it just screams “I don’t want to have to engage with your opinions, so I’ll put them in a category of things that are automatically wrong.”
It’s also way, way, waaaaay too close to the many historical cases of dissident thought and behavior being classified as mental illness for my taste.
(Disclaimer: being Christian is of course not “dissident” because it’s the majority, but it’s still an awful way to treat differing opinions, regardless of how widespread they are!)
Thomas: I’m quite familiar with the story, and there is ZERO justification for the way Watson has been treated.
@Myoo, We need Ithiliana in here to be all “bad cop” on this guy. (Said guy later talks about how he now identifies with cops because as boys they all poked dead animals.)