Some comments left on one of the three or four irritable Facebook posts I fired off about Ricky Gervais yesterday:
All hail the great Atheist Community!
Butterflies and Wheels
Gnu atheism, women's rights, internationalism, universalism, and gossip
Some comments left on one of the three or four irritable Facebook posts I fired off about Ricky Gervais yesterday:
All hail the great Atheist Community!
I sort of half agree-ish with both sides. Almost nobody was willing to discuss things, just repeat themselves and throw insults about.
There’s two “atheist communities”: the one that’s about atheist folks getting together for good stuff including but not remotely limited to atheism… and then unliked, unlikable shitheads who get together for the sake of various bigotries unrestrained by liberal religion.
Ugh. It’s one thing to say “misogyny because religion”, but remove the religion and the equation is reduced to “misogyny because asshole.” SO disappointing.
@Joe: Yes, it will sort itself out because the “unliked and unlikeable” people won’t be able to get along.
manochese, you’ve lost any charitable interpretation from me at this point. Why should anyone have the same discussion with you that they have had thousands of times for years already? Why won’t you take the many responses already given to you and consider them, rather than mischaracterize what actually happened. Too bad they have a short temper with people who act like apologists for sexism. You’ve been answered and there is a mountainous body of literature out there to look at if you really are pro-feminist, you know, instead of dragging your tired harangue over to Ophelia’s blog? (There is nothing novel or special about your dialogue. Realize that. Which why you’ve probably been called a “special snowflake” already.)
But just to be clear, you half-agree with “joke” of “Behead those who insult C+++”? “Relevance Deprivation Syndrome” as a real thing and a counter-argument? Seriously? PZ was at least “half-right” about you. Or you are trying very hard to make it seem that way. Insults are for tiresome people who won’t actually accept for consideration (for more than two seconds before they feel the need to post a “response”) an answer, in, in fact keep repeating themselves. I really wouldn’t continue to play that game here.
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And if this is too far off for your article, Ophelia, I apologize for the hijack/derail.
Melissa at Shakesville coined “I’m not offended, I’m contemptuous” back in the last decade, and I riffed off that for a longish post of my own in 2011 – Don’t mistake expressing contempt for taking offense:
When I tell someone they are saying/doing something contemptuous, I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt that they might care about marginalising/oppressing others. If their response is to detail stridently/gleefully just how much they don’t care, then they’ve just saved me a lot of time and emotional energy that I could have wasted interacting with them as if they were ethical trustworthy human beings.
In PZ’s thread, you stated unambiguously at least 4 times that the c-word has no sexist connotations in the UK; considerably more than that if you count the instances where a charitable interpretation of your words left them somewhat ambiguous. Then you shifted to repeatedly claiming that to be true just for your particular region as well as that nobody there had ever complained it was sexist, and that people there only ever objected to it on the grounds that it was generally vulgar.
Of course your interlocutors are going to repeat themselves when you respond to them by repeating the same demonstrably false bullshit over and over.