CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here.
So the mighty Paul Elam has acknowledged — in the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, at least –that there might just be some sort of problem going on with regard to, you know, that whole fake screenshot thing. You know, the blatant fraud that A Voice for Men mangling — sorry, managing — editor Dean Esmay seems to have engaged in to cover up a mistake.
But, Paul being Paul, he somehow manages to turn his sort-of acknowledgement of the problem into an attack on me, bizarrely blaming me (the person who actually pointed out this fraud) for him not knowing about it before today:
As much as I hate to say it, Futrelle does have a valid point. I am looking in to it today, and unlike Futrelle, I will address the results of my inquiry in public no matter where they end up.
I don’t mind looking into problems, even when they are pointed out by such a bald faced liar. I would have actually been aware of this sooner if his blog were worth reading. I had to become aware of it in your comments to even know there was a problem.
Well, Paul, I would have happily brought my findings to the comments section of A Voice for Men, rather than the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, but you may recall I am banned there. And I wonder if anyone there would have had the courage to stand up and say that, gosh, this Futrelle guy has a point, given how quickly people are censored there for deviating from your site’s perverse “conventional wisdom.”
And gosh, Paul, how unfair it is to expect the publisher of a site to be aware of what’s, you know, published on it. Concerns about the story were brought up by your own commenters shortly after it first ran. Esmay referred in an article and an editorial note to my alleged “lies” about the story; it didn’t occur to you to even go look at what I had said? And even aside from the phony screenshot, or anything I’ve written, did you really think that Esmay’s bizarre explanations for the original mistake made any kind of sense?
In other words, are you incompetent, or are you lying about being unaware of the problem until now?
In any case, I await the results of your “investigation.” I am especially eager to see how you will manage to spin things so it becomes someone else’s fault. Will it be some evil conspiracy that “set you up?”
And when exactly have I lied, Paul? Could you offer a citation? When I point out the lies on your site, I fucking back up each claim.
[EDIT: Added some stuff in the “gosh, Paul” paragraph and made a few other changes.]
I just love this place. Seriously.
Seconded, Aaliyah! 😀
Thirded. I’m totally behind on comments. This was a weird day.
If I hadn’t delurked before, I would have had to post just for “Lap Carousel”.
Lap Carousel was pretty hilarious.
Hey guys, could you send some encouraging thoughts towards Husband and his colleagues? From tomorrow on they’re gonna shut down commuter train traffic. Long story short: Their employers want to make their work situation shitty. Like, they want to schedule people to work four hours in the morning and four hours in the evening instead of eight hours straight, don’t want to pay them for the entire time they’re at work during night shifts (the trains stop running for a few hours every night, and during those few hours the workers take a nap at some train stop – the employers don’t think they ought to get paid for napping, only for actually being on the trains), and there’s loads of other crap. So, they’re gonna try to simply keep the trains and several of the bus lines on hold until the employers cave in on this.
LABOR MOVEMENT STUFF!!! I am sending all the encouraging thoughts towards your husband and his colleagues. SOLIDARITY FOREVER!
Go, Mr. Dvärghundspossen & Co-Workers!
@j
You’ve probably noticed, but reddit in general is where the sophomoric goes. X marks the spot where the sophomores love to hide.
Maybe there are decent subreddits, but I’ll be damned if I’ve ever run into one…
Assuming that you know why the people on any given site think Hitchens was a misogynist, otoh, is rigorous, thorough, not at all shitty thinking.
Also, the contents of the laundry basket seem to have become ambulatory and acquired the ability to use the internet again. Shame there doesn’t seem to be any way to prevent that.
And as for Hitchens, he may be a misogynist, but first and foremost he’s a hack polemicist, a profession that is responsible for imposing so much cheesy contrarianism on the world. It was very easy, once upon a time, to make a quick buck in print media by writing according to the “but what if all of our contemporary cherished values are politically/historically/scientifically naive?” formula. All written with a sort of world weary tone and a “see how moderate I am in the face of all of this sound an fury?” posturing to it.
British people are good at selling this type of stuff to Americans, but not nearly as good at foisting it off on other Brits. Dawkins, for example, is nowhere near as popular in the U.K. as he is in the U.S. from what I can tell.
There does seem to be a deep vein of anything contrarian = mindblowing wisdom here, that certain writers and TV pundits make an excellent living by tapping into.
Yeah, it just seems so disingenuous, and with Hitchens, every time I read one of his articles, I always got the sense that he was too smart for the argument he was making. Seemed like he just knew exactly how and why what he was saying would piss people off, and that was the only reason why he was saying any of it… but he knew better than to go full-Rush Limbaugh, he always stayed within the bounds of reason so he couldn’t be too easily dismissed…
Bwahahahaha!
*Lap carrousel!*
I always thought Hitchens was more PT Barnum than Serious Thinker, and found it confusing that so many people bought the idea that he was a good source for wisdom on how to live your life or think about things. It’s not like he was trying all that hard to hide the bread-and-circus aspect of his writing.
Thanks, Cloudiah and Unimaginative!
Regarding Hitchens and that… Haven’t really read anything of him. But I think it’s common in Sweden as well among certain kinds of people to assume contradicting some common opinion equals wisdom. Sure, sometimes the majority are in the wrong and contradicting them is wise, but sometimes a majority opinion is really solid and contradicting it is just stupid. But just like there are people who always follow the herd, there are people who compulsively go in the opposite direction, and the latter is no more clever than the former.
Late to the board, but I gotta speak up a bit.
On Fallacies and personal belief:
Technically, yeah, it’s still a fallacy to say you believe in something because you want it to be true, even if you never try to use it to convince anyone else. But… well, frankly, if you’re not trying to spread the word, so to speak, it boils down to that thing you do that harms no one but yourself (and quite possibly not even that). So the fact that it’s a technical use of a fallacy is an irrelevant data-point. Kittehserf, you’ve never foisted your beliefs on anyone; never insisted they act as if those beliefs were true for them, and so on, so seriously, speaking as a movement atheist: More power to you. Movement atheism is supposed to be pushing for secularization of governance, and shielding education from religious meddling. Going around picking fights with people just because we disagree over something harmless would be stupid, unproductive and asshatish.
*****
Which gets to statements like “Screw the atheist movement”. I do not defend, and in fact, utterly condemn the various asshats in the movement. As of this week, we can toss the entire national board of CFI on the pile of “people I don’t wish to associate with any longer”. (I didn’t expect them to fire Ron Lindsey for his mansplaining sabotage of Women In Secularism 2, but the vacuous statement they issued was, in many ways, more offensive than an actual statement supporting Ron would’ve been). And I’ve already written off JEF for pretty much the same set of reasons.
But I refuse to give up on ‘movement atheism’, because there’s a whole lot of shit going on in this country, derived specifically from religious beliefs and institutions. Weakening the power of, say, Christian fundamentalism in U.S. politics isn’t gonna get rid of sexism and homophobia (so this isn’t the only fight, and you don’t have to be a movement atheist to be a feminist*), but I really do believe it will make those fights a lot easier.
So I’m going to keep pounding the Atheism+ drum every time this discussion comes up, because it really is clearly an effort at ditching the asshat atheist brigade, and I want them to win that fight in the long run.
*: This parenthetical is to clarify my position, not tell any theistic feminists on the board anything they don’t already know.
******
Ugh, as if this post weren’t depressing enough… David? This link is right up your alley. Massive trigger warnings for sexism and rape on this–the post is someone complaining about the actual source of the offense, but I don’t want to provide too many links to the actual kickstarter that set her off:
http://caseymalone.com/post/53339539674/this-is-not-fucking-harmless
The vast majority of Hitchens’ career took place within American media, to my knowledge, so, yeah, definitely more popular there than in the UK. I don’t find Dawkins any less popular in the UK than in the US. In some regards he’s more prevalent in the UK, for example, his contributions to the BBC. He’s known for his work in ethology and evolutionary biology though, matters on which he is qualified. I don’t think his writings on atheism have anywhere near the splash in the UK that they do in the US. Far fewer people care.
Hi freemage, you and I must read the same things! (I just dropped that link off in the forums.)
See also libertarianist. Just because the majority thinks that, say, privately funded fire departments are a stupid idea doesn’t mean that your support of that idea makes you a brilliant iconoclast. Sometimes it’s just a stupid idea.
@Dvarghundspossen, LOTS of positive thoughts for Husband and his co-workers! I used to work for the railways myself, mumblemumble years ago, and I’m in a union. Screwing around with shifts is a shit move, and whoever expects people to do split shifts should have to do it for a few months themselves, on the same pay and conditions, first, before they try imposing it.
@anadiomene, great comments on Hack Hitchens. 🙂
@freemage – ::high fives:: Theist/deist/worshipper of Ceiling Cat/whatevs though I am, and put off by the more assholish elements of movement atheism*, I am all for secularism and the complete separation of church and state. We’re not as badly off here in that respect as you are in the US, but we’re still nowhere near where we should be.
Important News!
I was friendzoned by a cat tonight!
On the way home I saw a big grey tabby in a shop window. I stopped to say hello and he RUBBED UP AGAINST THE GLASS, I mean it was obvious he wanted to be patted, he was sending all the signals, amirite? But when I went into the shop he ran away. Yes, ran away!!!11eleventy!!! The shop human said he always does that. He’s just a TEASE.
He was probably off to ride the lap carousel. My life is over, I am reduced to beta status forever.
*same as any assholishness, though, so that’s nothing special.
Typical feline hypergamy, Kittehserf.
Certainly is. 97% of cats are hypergamous lap-carousel-riding w*************s!
freemage, yeah, I retweeted a link to that earlier, and hit that “report” button on kickstarter. I guess we’ll know in a few hours whether kickstarter will actually pull it.
J:
In reference to what is he an idiot or is he an idiot generally?
J:
Racist why? Misogynist yes, imperialist yes (but also see his stance on Palestine and Cyprus).
J:
No clue about any misogynist views of his, so I can’t comment on that, but why is he a dullard or a crank scientist?
J:
Nice disclaimer really but I don’t see any particular difference between online theists and online atheists, outside of belief in god. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you as I’m not entirely sure what “*internet* movement” entails. Online, I see both theists and atheists I wouldn’t like to hang out with, not in particularly different quantities. I realize I might come across as defensive about this but, in some, usually minor, aspects, it’s no fun being part of the atheist minority in a relatively religious country.
theladyzombie:
I might be misreading you, as well (maybe you mean that they use silly arguments in support of evo-psych, not that evo-psych isn’t a valid field), so take that as a general statement since it seems to be a common view on the internet anyway: evo-psych of course is a legitimate field, though it’s a shame journalism prefers to give prominence to the worse studies out there. Not all of it is Kanazawa and Miller. Casual dismissals of evo-psych remind me of casual dismissals of sociology and psychology. To anyone who has spent time of his life studying it, this comes across as “ha, nice degree loser. what’s next on your radar, astrology?”