Exciting news! I criticized that silly Sovereign Nations conference that was endorsed by Dawkins, but is run by a freakin’ far right Catholic not only for its religious premise, but because it only had three speakers: Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose, who don’t have a reputable idea between them. You’ll be thrilled to learn that they have now added two more speakers to the roster, Andrew Doyle, a comedian of sorts who really hates social justice, and Titania McGrath, a radical intersectionalist poet.
Except they can’t even do that right. Titania McGrath is a fictional character, invented by…Andrew Doyle. I guess that’s one way to stretch the budget, counting all the imaginary people living in the heads of your speakers.
Last April, I decided to set up a satirical account on Twitter under the guise of radical intersectionalist poet Titania McGrath. She’s a po-faced young activist who, in spite of her immense privilege, is convinced that she is oppressed. She’s not a direct parody of an existing individual, but anyone who regularly reads opinion columns in the Guardian will be familiar with the type. Given that such individuals are seemingly impervious to reason, and would rather cry ‘bigot’ than engage in serious debate, satire seemed to be the only option.
Doyle is the living embodiment of Mr. Gotcha, that smug know-nothing who pops up to declare that criticisms of society by people who benefit from society are invalid because they live in a society, and who thinks that you can’t decry the abuse of privilege if you have any hint of privilege yourself. It’s a cunning ploy to universally reject the voices of everyone on the planet who finds the status quo intolerable.
Wow. That conference is going to be a barrel of laughs and hypocrisy. I wonder if anyone will attend?
Sovereign Nations are based in Orlando and yet somehow don’t acknowledge the rightful sovereign nation that their own city was stolen from, the Seminole Nation.
…said every bigot who wondered why people don’t want to debate them. I don’t get a lot of joy out of identifying bigotry, but there is a lot of it out there. Pretending it’s something else is a huge waste of time.
po8crg @ 1
Knowing these arses, they would no doubt reply “It wasn’t ‘stolen.’ We rightfully conquered it!”
Akira MacKenzi @3: No, they wouldn’t say they conquered it, they’d claim that the Seminoles gave it to them as a gift and besides, look at how much better the Seminoles have done living in white society where they have flush toilets and electricity, they should thank us for the privilege.
Akira MacKenzie@3
The usual way to couch that in fake rationality is to claim that they weren’t using the land efficiently (and thankfully, we don’t hear that much now). Suburban Americans don’t use land or resources efficiently either. If you can “relocate” Native Americans from the plains to use their land for “efficient”, “productive” farming, then you ought to be able to force suburbanites off their green grass lawns and into high-rise apartments. Surely, there is a more productive use for all that land. A suburban American my counter “It’s my land and this is how I like to live.” which I think is fair enough, but it’s funny that this argument does not apply to indigenous people anywhere as long as somebody sees greater economic value and possesses the means to steal it by force.
Question: why hasn’t the author of “A Manual for Creating Atheists” withdrawn from a conference put on by far-Right Catholics?
Possible Answer: he cares more about flipping the bird at progressives than destroying myths and promoting critical thought.
I’m not familiar with Titania McGrath but if she’s like any other “satirical” creation by the right, she’s made in the image of the strawmen that live in their heads and any actual progressives wouldn’t have bought into her being real.
@7 Tabby Lavalamp
I am, and you’re precisely right.
“anyone who regularly reads opinion columns in the Guardian will be familiar with the type”
Evidently he ‘regularly reads opinion columns in the Guardian’, or he can’t have become ‘familiar with the type’.
What an odd fetish – their self-proclaimed expertise at what they would classify as bad smells must inevitably require returning to sniff into them repeatedly.
Hj Hornbeck @6: That and any money he stand to make out of it.
What I hate the most about the “Yet you live in society” crowd is that they do not believe it.
Petey et al. published in journals, right? They must endorse those journals!
Conservatives must be 100% OK with taxes. They keep living here. Ditto our pop culture: you go see a movie or buy an album or a phone, you therefore endorse secular music!
Everyone agrees you can change the status quo. Only conservatives pretend that liberals can’t.
To paraphrase the old line about meeting assholes all day: “If you meet just a handful of people who call you a bigot rather than engaging you in serious debate, it’s probably because they’re not interested in serious debate. But if you’re constantly meeting people who call you a bigot rather than engaging you in serious debate, it’s probably because you’re a bigot.”