A Dose of Perspective

The anti-Atheism+ crowd, the ones who go around complaining about it everywhere, like to suggest that everyone sees things the same way they do. In fact, they say this to each other a rather lot, reinforce the idea even.

Every once in a while, however, that idea comes up against a fresh audience. It did just that yesterday, on a MetaFilter thread dedicated to Annalee Newitz’s io9 post on conferences and conventions dealing with harassment. This being MetaFilter, the discussion was pretty good. In fact, it was better than I’ve seen MetaFilter on harassment, but they have been talking about the topic almost as much as the rest of us lately.

After a good chunk of mostly respectful and non-derailed talk, up showed Decani, whom some of you will recognize as Jack Rawlinson.

Re the only one of these three I actually know a lot about:

Though some would cast this as a war between sexism and feminism, it isn’t that simple.

You can say that again. And the only people casting it in that way are those on the Watson/Skepchick side.

There are women and feminists on both sides of the debate.

Aye, and plenty of them on the non-Watson/Skepchick side, too. And the numbers are increasing as Atheism+ spins ever further out into la-la land.

The divide is between people who believe feminism is integral to skepticism (Watson) and those who think it’s irrelevant (Dawkins).

No, it really isn’t. That shows an incredibly superficial reading of the situation.

Yeah, I know. It all looks so familiar, not to mention multiply debunked. But does it work on a novel crowd?

For that, you’ll have to read the rest of the thread. SPOILERS: At least until the flounce.

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A Dose of Perspective
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8 thoughts on “A Dose of Perspective

  1. 1

    Hehe I like the flounce – very similar to what I got at the Slymepit. They are unable to explain why they do what they do without me being au fait with 2+ years of documented ‘wrong doing’ by the FtB side. In a rare moment of perspicacity they admitted I’d have to be insane to trawl through it all… For which the obvious retort is if that is the case maybe they should take a step back and take stock of their own sanity on this issue.

  2. 2

    Excellent essay linked in comments there: “Count”

    http://www.quinnnorton.com/said/?p=610

    It was always the ones that said they didn’t see gender or color who did the most damage. “They’re just words,” they would say, “Why do you let them hurt you?” And with that, my pain was made as invisible as me. “They’re just words.” Indeed, just the verbal incantations of power, like law and code and everything else that made the world. I decided to leave tech for words.

    But now I’m all shouty. Now people are angry at me because I have a stage, and they can’t make me invisible and ignore me, because the truth is you can’t ignore words, and I have the words. So now they really hate me. The others, the majority, sit uncomfortably with the conflict. No one is quite sure what to do, they want things to be abstractly better, but they don’t want anyone to be loudly upset, either. One side is considerably louder than all the others.

  3. 4

    They are unable to explain why they do what they do without me being au fait with 2+ years of documented ‘wrong doing’ by the FtB side.

    Notice that several responders did go to the links Decani supplied, did read them, and did want to discuss them. Those folks asked him what he thought was wrong with the positions he linked to, because they didn’t see anything unusual in them. He didn’t answer.

    So, its not just ‘I won’t answer you until you go read xyz,’ its ‘I won’t answer you after you go read xyz, either.’

  4. 5

    I enjoyed that MeFi thread immensely – there are some very thoughtful people over there. Just curious, but how do you know Decani is JackRawlinson? Not that I’m doubting, but I didn’t see him claim that identity while over there (to be fair, I read the thread late last night, so it’s possible I just missed it.)

  5. 7

    I bowed out of the site myself in 2009 due to their moderation civility fetish, but my fianceé is a regular MeFite and I just shared this with her. Her eyes got wide and she said “actually, I’m not surprised. Decani is wrong on everything.

  6. 8

    I read and enjoyed the Metafilter thread today. But I must have not refreshed it over the course of the day, as I think I missed the flounce.

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