New Atheists vs. Social Justice Warriors

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.

New Atheists cover themselves in more shame

I've been too distracted lately to pay attention to the ongoing war between the Social Justice Warriors and the New Atheists, since the Bill Maher vs. Ben Affleck controversy, but I see that the New Atheists are still ahead in the obnoxiousness race right now.

Richard Dawkins can't seem to wrap his head around the concept of straight white male privilege.

Sam Harris is looking for stories of political correctness. He's probably still sore that he was criticized for defending torture and proposing ethnic profiling.

Michael Moore joins the Islamaphobia brigade. I always thought Moore was more likely to be a SJW than a New Atheist.

But the most telling item is the profoundly racist web site, American Renaissance, enthusiastically agreeing with an Islamaphobic editorial by Jerry Coyne.

American Renaissance has always loved the New Atheist brand of gender and sometimes ethnic essentialism expressed in evolutionary psychology - Steven Pinker and his best buddy Razib Khan are favorites. And now they can love the New Atheist xenophobia too.

But never count out the awfulness of the true Social Justice Warrior. More about that soon.

2014 Roundup

My more typical New Years Eve

Well 2014 was much better than 2013 if only because I didn't have a  major operation during the entire year. Actually it was better than 2012, too, when I was unemployed for six months. And 2008 - 2011 because I had a horrible job (and others agree) which, combined with major depression caused me to develop an anxiety disorder, which I'm still dealing with - but which is improved thanks to therapy.

In 2014 I managed to finally produce the full-length version of JULIA & BUDDY which I had been trying to do since 2011. I also completed a first draft of DARK MARKET about Ayn Rand and the 2008 meltdown, started my play about Marilyn Monroe, wrote a 10-minute play about the Bronte sisters. I also made almost serious money from ads on the NYCPlaywrights web site - I made twice as much money from the blog in December 2014 as I did in December 2013.

Also in 2014:

 >  The liberal media finally woke up to the perniciousness of Social Justice Warriors, thanks in part to the Feminism's Toxic Twitter Wars article in The Nation and to the ridiculous kerfuffle fomented by a friend of right-winger Michelle Malkin who goes by the Twitter handle of Suey Park and her moronic attack on Stephen Colbert. Followed up by the less well-known but just as significant "Jacobinghazi" in which the absolute awfulness of Sarah Kendzior became crystal clear.

And of course I have a personal interest in the SJW phenomenon, since I was smeared by SJWs way back in 2011 for daring to think that a song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono was not racist, and thanks to the collusion of Google and Tumblr, smears against me by SJW Mikki Kendall and SJW K. Tempest Bradford still show up at the top of Google search results on my name.

It should be noted that in spite of the name Social Justice Warriors, these people do nothing to promote social justice. They simply use good causes to promote their own careers, through endless Twitter wars and attacking liberals and feminists. I still have to wonder how much of the SJW phenomenon is sock puppetry by the Right, the SJW attacks are so ridiculously focused on the Left, virtually ignoring the actual perpetrators of social injustice on the Right.
But although the SJWs were called out in 2014 instead of universally lionized as heroes of the Left as they were in 2013, I also discovered that those who might be allies against Social Justice Warriors turned out to be just as fond of anti-feminist rhetoric, as when I found Doug Henwood attacking "bourgeois feminists" (whatever that is - I saw via Facebook that Henwood seems to live as bourgeois a lifestyle as anybody I've ever known) and discovered Will Shetterly supporting faux feminist right-winger Christina Hoff Sommers who has a long, long history of anti-feminist statements and is currently a "resident scholar" at the far-right, Koch brothers-supported American Enterprise Institute.

Leading me to conclude once again, as with the SJW vs. New Atheist war, that both sides are idiots. And feminism is as usual under attack from all sides. But on the plus side, I received a very nice email from Katha Pollitt for defending her against Kendzior's scurrilous attacks.

 >  The Rise of Ayn Rand Awareness - in the past I have been amazed by how many people - educated and, I thought, well-informed people had no idea who Ayn Rand was. But I think more and more people are aware of her, partly because some prominent Republicans are followers of hers, including Rand and Ron Paul and Paul Ryan. And just this past month she's been getting lots of publicity lately thanks to this story: Ayn Rand helped the FBI investigate whether ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ was commie propaganda. And one of the New Yorker's most viewed blog posts of 2014 was a parody Ayn Rand Reviews Children’s Movies. So this is definitely the year to produce DARK MARKET - if I can manage it financially or find a producer or co-producer.

 >  My dating life - I actually had one in 2014, although it was a string of indisputable failures. The one guy I might have liked well enough to be intimate with turned out to live in a pit of filth in Brooklyn, and was shameless enough to invite me into it. I had a date last night with a guy who claimed to be 58 but who finally admitted to being older, although he never said how much older. At least 60. He really liked me though, enough to inquire, as I was about to go through the subway turnstile at the end of the date, "when was the last time you had your pussy eaten really well?" I guess since I have mostly been dating guys under 30, I assumed that making such explicit statements on a first date was an issue for younger guys. Coming from a guy who is at least 60, it's just gross. I mean, if it was a really hot guy saying that on a first date, maybe it would be tolerable. But I really doubt there is any 60 year old guy in the world attractive enough to qualify as really hot. Certainly not this guy. You would think he'd have enough restraint and gravitas at that age not to bust out with something like that in a freaking subway station. Some people never grow up I guess. My therapist says the best way to meet people is through activities that you like, but I haven't had any luck through the world of theater. So many men in theater are gay, and the ones who are not gay, and at all attractive, are in too much demand from the straight female actors. Oh you goddam teasing actors. And it's just as bad if not worse with directors. And almost all straight male playwrights I know are creeps.

 >  Jury duty - my first as a citizen of New York. It was a hell of an experience and I hope to get a play out of it, TWELVE ANGRY JURORS FROM QUEENS, but so far I've only gotten a few pages written. 

 >  Running - this was my real success story. I have run more in 2014 than in my entire life. Two official 5K runs, and almost weekly runs of 3 - 4 or even 5 - 6 miles. And I plan to start off 2015 right by running in the NYRR Midnight Run tonight. My daughter has me in training for a 10K for 2015 and she's even talking half marathon. Wow. Running, like all endurance physical activities, can be very unpleasant, but I keep doing it because first of all, I get to spend time with my busy daughter, but also it seems like every time I look in the NYTimes there is another article about how running and other exercise keeps you young:

How Exercise Changes Our DNA
Now new research reports that the answer may lie, in part, in our DNA. Exercise, a new study finds, changes the shape and functioning of our genes, an important stop on the way to improved health and fitness.

Got a Minute? Let’s Work Out
According to a lovely new study, a single minute of intense exercise, embedded within an otherwise easy 10-minute workout, can improve fitness and health.

Run to Stay Young
Running may reverse aging in certain ways while walking does not, a noteworthy new study of active older people finds. The findings raise interesting questions about whether most of us need to pick up the pace of our workouts in order to gain the greatest benefit.

Does Exercise Really Make Us Smarter?

Still, the findings are strong enough to suggest that exercise really does change the brain and may, in the process, improve thinking, Mr. Stothart said. That conclusion should encourage scientists to look even more closely into how, at a molecular level, exercise remodels the human brain, he said. It also should spur the rest of us to move, since the benefits are, it seems, not imaginary, even if they are in our head.

What’s Your Fitness Age?
Dr. Wisloff and his colleagues offer free exercise suggestions on their website. But he said almost any type and amount of exercise should help to increase your VO2max and lower your fitness age, potentially increasing your lifespan.

How Exercise May Protect Against Depression

Exercise may help to safeguard the mind against depression through previously unknown effects on working muscles, according to a new study involving mice. The findings may have broad implications for anyone whose stress levels threaten to become emotionally overwhelming.

Running 5 Minutes a Day Has Long-Lasting Benefits

Running for as little as five minutes a day could significantly lower a person’s risk of dying prematurely, according to a large-scale new study of exercise and mortality. The findings suggest that the benefits of even small amounts of vigorous exercise may be much greater than experts had assumed.

Want to Be More Creative? Take a Walk

For almost every student, creativity increased substantially when they walked. Most were able to generate about 60 percent more uses for an object, and the ideas were both “novel and appropriate,” Dr. Oppezzo writes in her study, which was published this month in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Well that's enough for now - I find it pretty compelling.

Now I'm off to run in Central Park to mark the beginning of 2015.

New Atheists vs. Social Justice Warriors - round 2

When I last blogged about the ongoing war between the New Atheists (most prominently represented by Richard cranky old man Dawkins) and the SJWs (lead by Adam censorship Lee) the New Atheists were on top thanks to Dawkins being less obnoxious than usual.

But thanks to Dawkins remembering who he really is, and Sam Harris never forgetting, the Social Justice Warriors are back on top.

Lee had an op-ed about Dawkins in the Guardian recently: Richard Dawkins has lost it: ignorant sexism gives atheism a bad name:

But over the last few months, Dawkins showed signs of détente with his feminist critics – even progress. He signed a joint letter with the writer Ophelia Benson, denouncing and rejecting harassment; he even apologized for the “Dear Muslima” letter. On stage at a conference in Oxford in August, Dawkins claimed to be a feminist and said that everyone else should be, too. 

Then another prominent male atheist, Sam Harris, crammed his foot in his mouth and said that atheist activism lacks an “estrogen vibe” and was “to some degree intrinsically male”. And, just like that, the brief Dawkins Spring was over. 

On Twitter these last few days, Dawkins has reverted to his old, sexist ways and then some. He’s been very busy snarling about how feminists are shrill harridans who just want an excuse to take offense, and how Harris’s critics (and his own) are not unlike thought police witch-hunter lynch mobs. Dawkins claimed that his critics are engaged in “clickbait for profit”, that they “fake outrage”, and that he wished there were some way to penalize them.  

For good measure, Dawkins argued that rape victims shouldn’t be considered trustworthy if they were drinking.

I was just discussing evolutionary psychology with anthropologist David Price and others on Facebook today, thanks to this excellent criticism in the Nation, and right in the middle I saw the story about that idiot Sam Harris - Harris claims that atheism and skepticism are innately masculine.

Although I despise Harris for his right-wing hideousness (supporting ethnic profiling, torture, and opposing gun control), and general stupidity, he was the only member of the New Atheist "four horsemen" (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Pinker) whom I thought I had no reason to accuse of misogyny. I should have known better.

As always, the main question about Sam Harris is this: Why does anyone take Sam Harris seriously? 

Favorite quote from that article, which is over a year and a half old but still relevant:

Before delving further into this NRA wet-dream of an essay, let us reflect on an important facet of Harris’s personality. The common thread running through all of Harris’s logic-abortions, the key to understanding how a purported “intellectual” can be so consistently wrong and so morally repugnant, is his unbridled cowardice — both of the intellectual variety and an all-pervasive, crapping-his-pants fear that manifests itself in the form of sophistry and a brazen disregard for following the available evidence to its logical conclusion.

It is true though that SJWs like to engage in witchhunts as I found out myself directly when I was targeted by Mikki Kendall and K. Tempest Bradford, but I had a good laugh over Rebecca Watson's payback of Richard Dawkins' infamous Dear Muslima letter - Dawkins, Harris and friends like to imagine that if they get any criticism for the mind-bogglingly stupid, sexist things they say, they are the victims of a "witchhunt." 

For the record I don't consider Watson a SJW, although Mikki Kendall was promoted at least once on her Skepchick site. 

So the SJWs have won round 2 against the New Atheists. Now what group-think censorious awfulness will the SJWs come up with next to show that they, not New Atheists, are the biggest assholes? I expect we'll know within a month or so. 

Myers gives Jerry Coyne a well-deserved thrashing

Jerry Coyne is a proud New Atheist along with misogynists Christopher "women aren't funny" Hitchens, Sam "women have too much estrogen to be skeptical" Harris, and Richard "Dear Muslima" Dawkins, which means that of course his true religion is evolutionary psychology*.

P. Z. Myers, who regrettably has some SJW tendencies like siding with that idiot Suey Park against Colbert, over the Redskins parody, nevertheless is a stalwart critic of the standard inanities of promoters of evo-psycho and responds to Coyne here:

But then Coyne pulls his magic “proof” out of his hat: the existence of sexual dimorphism. Yeah, who has a problem with that? Men and women look different in grand and subtle ways. Some of those differences were almost certainly selected for. Again, I don’t know anyone who denies that, so it’s kind of weird to use it as his triumphant example. Except that he seems to think all those lefty wackos — you know, feminists, apparently — are in the business of denying the obvious.

But the left-wing opposition to evolutionary psychology as a valid discipline in principle, especially when it involves differences in sexual behavior, seems to me based more on ideology than on biology. Ideologues cannot allow any possibility that males and females behave differently because of their evolution. Such people think that this would buttress the view that one sex would be “better” than the other.

I know a lot of modern radical feminists. I’m pretty solidly in the left-wing camp myself. And NO ONEdenies the physical differences between men and women, or claims that evolution could not have played an important role in shaping the diversity of modern humans. Nor do any claim that there aren’t significant behavioral differences — we encounter those every day. What we oppose is the credulous insistence that every single difference is a product of selection, that the influence of culture is noise gently overlaying the purity of the biological signal, and worst of all, the idea that the status quo is justified as a product of biology (which Coyne at least tries to distance himself from at the end).

But please, spare us the simplistic causal explanations for these differences that rely on cartoony, evidence-free speculation, like that men evolved to be bigger than women because they had to punch each other lots in fights for dominance. Perhaps we should recognize that culture creates roles that can generate differential selection pressure on men and women, and that human behavior is far more complex and cooperative than cavemen bashing each other with clubs.

*and Islamaphobia - you pretty much can't be a "New Atheist" unless you consider women to be intellectually inferior to men (not just "different" which they like to pretend is what they're really saying) and consider Islam to be the Great Satan.