I’m trying to pretend I didn’t.
The ol’ Firebrand Atheist is now reduced to antivaxxer/conspiracy theory apologetics.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I’m trying to pretend I didn’t.
The ol’ Firebrand Atheist is now reduced to antivaxxer/conspiracy theory apologetics.
So if he watches people playing Russian Roulette, does he nod sagely at their lifestyle choice? Because that’s exactly what this woman is doing.
@1 brucegee1962
Nah, if you play Russian Roulette, you only risk your own life. This is far more deplorable.
Yeah, this is more like giving someone a pass for drunk driving.
Possible? Is it likely enough to merit serious consideration? No.
And yet, we’ve all been “listening” to this person’s “tribe” for the past year. FWIW, I won’t be chipped either. That’s a true statement. Nobody is being chipped.
This is not The Prisoner.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered!
https://youtu.be/hphXPJJMl7g
Speaking of those who once were admired, Harriet Hall is looking pretty terfy:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/irreversible-damage-the-transgender-craze-seducing-our-daughters/
Standing tall for the right to spread plague!
I just got out of a week in hospital for a minor fall compounded by an imbalance of electrolytes. If people like this had added on a dose of COVID I might be dead now, instead of back at home.
Thank goodness for Canadian health care!
That’s rock solid terfy. Harriet Hall has been problematic for quite some time.
People who advocate for their own supposed rights at the demonstrable cost of everyone else and promulgate harmful ideas? We need to listen to them.
George Floyd? He’s worth less.
But of course we need to not dehumanize conservatives.
I’ll give to Silverman, he’s managed to be just a bit better than his new buddies on the right and alt-right at hiding the hypocrisy. But it’s still there. These people exhort us to listen to dangerous people spouting what they heard from FOX News because it agrees with a paranoid, bigoted worldview, but the Left should be viewed as dangerous terrorists and “wokists”.
“Is it possible”
What’s relevant is whether it’s true, and it obviously isn’t. That judgment isn’t based on tribalism, not listening, or a priori dismissal–thanks a lot for all those ad hominems, David–but rather on a rational evaluation of the facts.
FossilFishy @ #6:
That piece is ridiculous. At least the commenters seem to be having none of it.
PZ @ #8:
Yes. I have a vague memory of her wearing some stupid t-shirt to a conference years ago and cringing in vicarious embarrassment.
“Is it possible that she has a valid point to make…?” is especially amusing when not followed by even a wisp of a hint of a clue of what that valid point is supposed to be.
That woman is a common feature of this pandemic.
She is just another Plague Rat.
Ian Harris asks some easy questions.
Is she uneducated and/or stupid. Yes.
Trolling for tribalism Yes.
Looking for attention Yes.
She is also risking death or permanent disability.
Today (7 day moving average) 347 people died from Covid-19 virus.
Today there are 14,000 people in the hospital, 10% of which will die.
99% of these patients are unvaccinated and almost all of them are antivaxxers and/or Covid-19 virus deniers.
She will eventually get Covid-19 virus.
ghod dam I hate that superficial thinking it makes me crazy and leads to disaster.
there is a degree of paranoia on the right and there is the truth that yes they are being lied to and cheated and manipulated.
the problem is the ignorant and the simple believers can’t tell who is telling the truth and who is not.
“the base ” since “The Actor” was president has been leaning working class or has self-identified as such and has been inundated with hot button issues which never seem to get resolved and none of the supposed “fixes” seem to work for anything else and their economic life just gets worse. So yah they do not trust why should they.
the ass hole silverman just puts out a superficial statement I thought he was supposed to be a thought leader an influencer.
nothing but the kind of noise that comes from the end of the bar
I think my fondest memories of David Silverman have to do with wishing he wasn’t such an asshole while he acted like he represented atheists on TV…. That and I guess some dumb billboards.
I guess I’m okay with “Less tribalism. More listening.” (It probably doesn’t need to fit on a bumper sticker though.) But don’t all of the tribes need to listen to each other, in order for this to help? When do you think was the last time that any right-wing conspiracy theorists, bullshitters, blowhards, etc. acted like good listeners? I mean, let’s just try to start with a single one, ever, and see if we can work our way up from there. Take all of the time you need.
I even agree that it’s possible that she has a valid point to make. But if so, she should make it, rather than a hot mess like that. So, just kind of brainstorming here … but how about we stick with the valid points for now and save the unhinged nonsense for later?
I used to think rather highly of David Silverman. I thought he did a great job, back in the day, when he administered the No God Blog for American Atheists. When he left, the whole thing just fell apart. However, for the past few years, he seems to have completely lost his mind. So disappointing.
I have a vague memory of her wearing some stupid t-shirt to a conference years ago and cringing in vicarious embarrassment.
To be clear, I wasn’t there – saw it online (as one does). It was as stupid as I remembered.
cr @ #15:
I mean, I suppose virtually everyone has a valid point to make on some subject at some time. But I don’t see a valid point on or underlying her sign.
For the record, my guess about her motives is that she’s in an anti-vax or other conspiracy bubble and also possibly trying to build her brand/grift.
This seems par for the course. I was just reading a right wing review of Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris that spent paragraph after paragraph bitching that Orwell was too concerned with food safety, that their is no reason not to serve food that has been dropped on a filthy kitchen floor or stored improperly in a foul storeroom. What’s food poisoning and bacterial infection when someone’s making money on it?
I’m amazed their isn’t a right wing anti-chlorination movement. Maybe if children were more likely to die, there would be fewer abortions or something.
Now he cares about a woman’s consent?
@16: I love your avatar. It reminds me of my old Meezer kitty Sammy. He was a good boy…
Uh, no, Dave. She doesn’t have a point. Other than to say that she’s a raging Karen and doesn’t give two Hershey squirts whether or not she infects someone with a communicable disease. -_-;
Looking at the image some more… Is she someone who’s known? (I’m not good with faces.) I could be completely wrong about this and it could just be a snap at some protest or something, but It appears to be more planned than it would seem. The composition. The pastel tones. The hand-made sign, but carefully held in pose. The #IDONOTCONSENT, with its echoes of feminism and other social justice movements….
Instagram aesthetics.
(And if she isn’t someone who’s well known, please don’t make any effort to discover or reveal her identity. I don’t care who it is – I’m interested in the phenomenon.)
Is it possible that religionists or gasp self-identified agnostics have valid points, Silverman?
The sign she is holding up is both loony, delusional, and just wrong.
“I won’t be masked, tested, tracked, poisoned, or chipped to support this orchestrated lie!”
No one can or will test here without her consent.
She isn’t being tracked. No one cares who she is or where she goes.
No one is trying to poison her either.
No one is going to insert a computer chip into her with or without her consent. Why would they bother?
The mask thing is the only one that has any slight basis in reality.
No one is going to force her to wear a mask either.
But she isn’t going to go very many places like stores or anywhere indoors in most jurisdictions.
Retail and public facilities don’t have to let unmasked Plague Rats in. They have their own freedoms as well.
She is perfectly free to catch the Covid-19 virus any day now and free to scream at the health care workers in the hospital as they try to save her life. Tens of thousands of American have done exactly this lately.
SC:
Possibly. Or they might not. Do they actually have one? Not necessarily. More often than not, the chances of it aren’t really that great.
Right. Exactly. But it’s not strictly speaking impossible that she has some other valid point, which isn’t on (or implied by) the sign.
But of course, we’re all too stupid to understand that. So Silverman is just doing God’s work to teach dogmatic tribalists like us that it is totally our fault for responding to what was actually there in the message, instead of anything else that could conceivably have been there in its place, such as a statement that puppies are warm and fuzzy for instance. The problem here is that we just don’t listen, obviously.
Anyway, I’m sure he was always just as generous in his dealings with religious zealots, whenever his income depended on that. Or I could have him confused with a completely different person. That is also possible.
A pretty good bet, I’d say. I’ll note that the hashtag in the image of the piece of paper is not of course a functional hashtag. It’s a prop in a piece of performance art, not something you could actually click on which leads somewhere else. Ceci n’est pas une pipe, although the internet certainly is a series of tubes, as we all know.
FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) @6:
She was looking pretty TERF-y three years ago. I can only imagine she’s gotten worse.
Sometimes, a picture says more than a thousand words.
In this case I see only a modern-day typhoid mary. All the plague-rats might reflect on how that story ended.
Is there no grift David Silverman won’t take part in? I wouldn’t be surprised if he announces being “born again” once the alt-right grift runs dry.
As a fan of SBM, I have to say that Hall’s article was really disappointing. I didn’t follow that site in 2018, but I followed some links to the previous article and found it equally awful. It’s probably (certainly) just my privilege talking, but it’s really painful to completely cut off such an otherwise good organization for this. I keep hoping that they’ll somehow address how awful this is. It’s just really sad because they’d never allow this kind of concern trolling on vaccines, but rabid right wing panics about the scary trans folk is AOK. Overall, I found the recent article downright offensive. I expected better of SBM. I was wrong
Hj Hornbeck #26
Yikes, missed that. Gives me no hope that Science Based Medicine will push back on this nonesense.
There is. E.g., Anti-chlorine campaigns want action over water (2018).
blf, heh.
“bleach good, chlorine bad”
On being tracked, I wonder if she has a smartphone or a credit card?
I agree there is a valid point here. And it’s that a large segment of our population have not obtained, or cannot retain, high school level education (in this case civics, biology, and physics). This makes them susceptible to misinformation and conspiratorial thinking.
What irks me personally, is that these people don’t even understand how electronics work at any level and assume no one else does. How is this microchip being powered? It has to be an active device to track you. It has to be sending out some signal which could easily identified. That’s a decent amount of power required which doesn’t magically exist. Seems like this simple rebuttal should break the spell of absolutely stupidity.
Re: augustpamplona @ #5…
I am not a number! I am a string variable.
Re: raven @ #24…
Odds are that she is tracked…and voluntarily, at that. Whether or not she understands that cell phones are tracked is another matter. But I’d bet she carries one, it’s turned on, and she hasn’t disabled any of the tracking “features”.
@34 donfelipe
“which doesn’t magically exist.” There’s the rub…they do believe in magic.
Whenever I encounter an antivax comments section, I enter snark such as this:
<<
In a pandemic, the virus is everywhere; therefore you have precisely two options; getting the vaccine or getting the virus. So there are two experiments going on: the vaccine exposure experiment and the virus exposure experiment.
The American death toll for the virus: 600,000. The American death toll for the vaccine: zero.
Many years from now, doctors will investigate effects of long covid. I thank in advance all virus-exposure volunteers for their sacrifice of health and longevity to advance medical science. Rest assured that Big Pharma will profit.
“Is it possible that she has a valid point to make…?”
No. That was easy to answer.
Ugh, I just got back from visiting my family in rural Idaho. Masks were a rare sight, and almost entirely on the elderly. I got a lot of stink-eye for wearing mine in public, but I wasn’t going to take it off in the midst of a horde of plague rats. You’d think there hasn’t been any kind of deadly pandemic going on, even though I know a lot of those people have lost their grandparents or friends. I and all my family have been fully vaccinated, BTW
@donfelipe
“How is this microchip being powered? It has to be an active device to track you. It has to be sending out some signal which could easily identified.”
Remember that the overlap is almost concentric with those who think wifi signals are giving them brain cancer. They have no understanding of EM waves, or the differences between any part of the spectrum they can’t see.
I think he is thinking with his other head. His ability to see her side was swayed by his desire to mate with her.