In the middle of my JULIA & BUDDY production
I took the time to address the issue of Richard Dawkins vs. Adam Lee on July 6. It isn't only them though, but what they represent - New Atheists vs. Social Justice Warriors.
In case you aren't familiar with the terminologies - "
New Atheists" are generally considered to be lead by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett, and until he shuffled off this mortal coil, Christopher Hitchens.
Since Hitchens is gone other atheists are up for being considered as the fourth of the Four Horsemen of atheism - see the Wiki I linked to above. Steven Pinker is one of the most prominent runners-up, and I think the most appropriate - like the others he is devoted to explaining human behavior through evolutionary psychology, a research theory that posits among other things that women have evolved to be more monogamous than men, and less capable, innately, at math and science ways of thinking than men, which is why, as
Larry Summers famously argued, women don't have as successful careers in STEM.
And Hitchen's own personal contribution to this mighty theory is that women have evolved to be unfunny. Outside of the New Atheist bubble, Hitchens is known as the guy who said women aren't funny. Serves the asshole right.
The New Atheists also tend towards xenophobia, especially against Muslims, most likely in a terrified response to the 9-11 attacks. Sam Harris is especially awful in this respect, justifying torture and promoting ethnic profiling in security checks.
I've discussed my objections to the New Atheist celebrity leaders throughout this blog, right from the very beginning
if you count Pinker, who has flirted with the edges of more hard-core sociobiology - the racial aspect - through
his publicly proclaimed intellectual affiliation with right-wing operative Razib Khan.
While Pinker has no trouble citing Khan to back up his own work, he has stated that Stephen Jay Gould's critical views on evolutionary psychology should be discounted due to Gould's leftist political leanings. Although as far as I know Gould was never an actual political operative like Razib Khan.
Pinker's absolute, shameless, blatant hypocrisy on this issue should be more widely-known and should certainly give anybody pause when deciding whether to worship Pinker as a Great Man of Atheism, along with those other seriously flawed celebrity atheists.
On the other side are the Social Justice Warriors, who are just as obnoxious as the New Atheists, but in different, and sometimes opposite ways. I haven't been criticizing Social Justice Warriors for as long as New Atheists, but I have certainly been doing so a lot lately. Surprisingly there is no entry in Wikipedia for Social Justice Warrior - I will probably remedy that soon - perhaps because the term is less well-known, although Richard Dawkins has been using the term lately. But science fiction writer Will Shetterly, while not the coiner of the term, has been most prominent in using the term, even
writing a book about SJWs.
SJWs have well-known proponents, although they don't have the celebrity status of the leading New Atheists. But SJWs tend to think and act in mobs anyway, through the power of social media aggregation, and so are less likely to stand alone as an individual celebrity.
One of the most prominent SJWs is
Mikki Kendall, whom readers of this blog know I have a personal beef with: several years ago she used her Tumblr account to proclaim me, by name, as a "racist." This was because some friend of hers I argued with on Facebook decided I was a racist because I defended John Lennon and Yoko Ono's use of the N word in a song written 40 years ago. They used the N word to make a serious political point about sexism, not to attack African Americans. But you can't reason with a SJW mob. They know what they know and anybody who argues with them is automatically a racist.
The power of Google-bombing a person's name is still under-discussed in the media, considering how much power it has to harm people, and legally. Google suggests that if you don't like what somebody is saying about you, which is showing up in Google results, ask them to take it down. But if you ask a SJW to take it down, that only confirms your guilt in their mind, and they will simply post even more links, to make their defamation against you go even higher in Google results.
Kendall was joined in her Tumblr smear of me by K. Tempest Bradford, also via Tumblr.
Bradford is a science fiction writer, and
included by Shetterly in his blog on SJWs. I had a Facebook exchange with Bradford during which I asked her to stop smearing me, and I found it fascinating that Bradford basically excused the smears on the grounds that I was rude to friends of hers when I argued with them. In other words, smearing me as a racist was justifiable payback for my bad manners. I will have more to say about Bradford's response, and the attitudes of SJWs generally as soon as I get a chance.
In any case, I concluded on July 6 that both sides are idiots.
However, I must acknowledge that
Richard Dawkins has scored one for the New Atheists by this statement, made with Ophelia Benson:
It’s not news that allies can’t always agree on everything. People who rely on reason rather than dogma to think about the world are bound to disagree about some things.
Disagreement is inevitable, but bullying and harassment are not. If we want secularism and atheism to gain respect, we have to be able to disagree with each other without trying to destroy each other.
In other words we have to be able to manage disagreement ethically, like reasonable adults, as opposed to brawling like enraged children who need a nap. It should go without saying, but this means no death threats, rape threats, attacks on people’s appearance, age, race, sex, size, haircut; no photoshopping people into demeaning images, no vulgar epithets.
Richard adds: I’m told that some people think I tacitly endorse such things even if I don’t indulge in them. Needless to say, I’m horrified by that suggestion. Any person who tries to intimidate members of our community with threats or harassment is in no way my ally and is only weakening the atheist movement by silencing its voices and driving away support.
Bravo.
I was one of those who pointed out that
Dawkins had a responsibility to denounce the shitstorm of rape and death threats that his ill-considered personal attack on Rebecca Watson inspired, and so even if this statement is three years late, it's something.
To give you a sense of how it should be done, recall that idiot Twitterer Suey Park called for the Colbert Report to be cancelled because of her own obtuseness (deliberate or not) over Colbert's parody of the Redskins football team name. I'm still not entirely convinced that Park is not a sock puppet of some right-wing think tank - her friendship with Michelle pro-Japanese-internment Malkin alone is extremely suspicious. But she could be real, and just a garden-variety dumbass Social Justice Warrior.
When his show returned after the weekend, Colbert defended himself, in character, but while
he was doing it he said:
"Now all of this was started by a hash tag activist, or hashtivist, who has been viciously attacked on Twitter, and if anyone is doing that for me I want you to stop it right now. She's just speaking her mind and that's what Twitter is for..."
And that's how it's done. But Colbert is an entertainer and while his show and the Daily Show has a clear demographic, they can't speak only as the leaders of a self-selected group of people.
And that's what makes them different from both New Atheists and Social Justice Warriors, who tend to live in their respective bubbles. So New Atheists will make the most outrageous claims about the religious and religion in general without providing evidence, and as if all New Atheists live in a world in which they don't have to co-exist with religious people - including close friends and relatives.
Social Justice Warriors are perhaps more insidious - under the guise of social justice they will attack anybody, even allies, or perhaps especially allies, who ventures even slightly out of the political correctness compound, or who even leave themselves open to the slightest misinterpretation, as in the Colbert controversy. They are so in love with their self-image as defenders of justice that they will try to invent cases of injustice so they can get their superhero tights on and fight it.
Of course the New Atheists have their own dreams of glory - they like to imagine themselves standing tall against the forces of ignorance and superstition and, in their most misguided logical leap, terrorism which they equate with Islam. And so they support stupidities like the outcry against the "9-11 mosque."
I went to the counter-demonstration.
Now it appears that Richard Dawkins was not getting off on the power of having his slavish New Atheist followers attack feminist atheists - especially but by no means only Rebecca Watson - at least if Dawkins was to be believed. He apparently was oblivious the the phenomenon, or at least didn't seem to understand he might have the power to reduce the viciousness through speaking up against it. Well now he has, so let's see if it works.
So that gives New Atheists a boost over Social Justice Warriors at this point - I consider Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism to be a SJW because he censored me when I suggested that certain of Ayn Rand's literary output might have been due to Ayn Rand possibly having an autism spectrum condition. He told me to STFU and allowed his good buddy Azkyroth to attack me as someone out to hurt people with Asperger's.
And mind you, I had been contributing to the discussion of Atlas Shrugged on Lee's blog for months, and had shown no indication of wanting to harm anybody with Asperger's. But that does not matter - when a SJW has their hero tights on, you cannot reason with them any more.
It's issues having to do with brain functionality that is one of the big problems with Social Justice Warriors. Just as it is unacceptable to use gender and race and other physical features to suggest a difference in emotional/intellectual expression, they believe it is also unacceptable to even discuss the possibility that conditions like Asperger's, or even mental illness might have an influence on the way a person expresses themselves.
You can see it in
Greta Christina's response to somebody suggesting that the disgusting "Amazing Atheist" might have a mental illness:
Brian Walsh @ #13: Please don’t do that. The idea that hateful and vile people must be mentally ill gets trotted out a lot (it did with the Elliot Rodger shooting), and it’s very problematic. It diminishes responsibility for hateful and vile behavior. It marginalizes people who are mentally ill, perpetuating the idea that we’re dangerous and/or evil. And it disproportionately gets used to protect white people. (As has been pointed out many times by many people: When a white person shoots a bunch of people, they’re mentally ill. When a black person does it, they’re a thug. When a brown person does it, they’re a terrorist.) Please don’t do it. Thanks.
Please note that she doesn't present an argument for why the Amazing Atheist is not mentally ill - she proclaims that it is unacceptable to suggest that anybody who is hateful and vile has a mental illness.
Just as it is unacceptable to Lee and company for anyone to speculate that Ayn Rand might have had Asperger's. Because friends of Adam Lee and Greta Christina (or apparently Christina herself) have Asperger's and mental illness. And so you must not ever say that anybody who is bad might have the same condition.
This is censorship, plain and simple. They think they are promoting social justice, but what they are doing instead is making areas of discussion taboo. And demonizing anybody who wants to explore that area of discussion.
Social Justice Warriors are wrong in this. Wrong and stupid. And they need to admit that their censorship and shaming attempts are wrong. And chances are they never will - they believe in their own absolute correctness and moral superiority and you dare not attempt to argue with them or they will have no qualms about smearing you and attributing all kinds of evil against you. And then they will censor you, so you cannot argue back.
That's what Dawkins and company mean by "witch hunts" and they do have a point. So New Atheist are slightly up on Social Justice Warriors in my book.
Until the next horrific thing they do/say/support. Tune in for future reports.
Aura Bogado