Don’t you just hate it when the answers aren’t clear-cut? And I’m not going to give you any.

Two recent cases bring up conflicts.

• Germaine Greer is a transphobic ass who demeans a whole group of people. Students at Cardiff University petition to have her banned from speaking there.

• Gamergaters are some of the most awful people on the internet — they represent a distillation of the lowest scumming trolls. SXSW responded to threats from gamergaters by shutting down a panel on online harassment.

My personal feeling is that Greer really is saying hateful crap, and my sentiment favors booting her antiquated butt off the campus. But the women speaking out against harassment are in the right, and SXSW shouldn’t boot their SJW butts out of the conference. Universities should take responsibility for what views are presented in official events, but also, SXSW is a commercial event and they should also have control over what they offer, and they have every right to be craven dipshits. The real arbiter of who should speak on a campus are the students, but students are often naive — they’re there to learn, and I wouldn’t stand for them dictating to me what I should teach. A commercial event like SXSW should follow the demands of the market if it expects to remain economically viable, but popularity for the masses is often a recipe for mediocrity, and also, market forces are biased against the underprivileged, so that would reinforce a discriminatory status quo.

Universities should encourage open discussion of a wide range of views, but maybe we should recognize that some views have fallen completely off the map of reasonable positions, despite the fact that some people continue to hold them, sometimes fiercely. Does the university have an obligation to let students hear advocates for the idea that the earth was created in a week, 6000 years ago? Should we bring in representatives of the KKK to explain how our black students are subhuman? I don’t think so. But universities, as public institutions, do allow groups to rent an auditorium for an evening, and the kooks do take advantage…so they should allow, but not endorse, lunacy and nastiness, as long as they aren’t expected to pay for it (and actually, if the loons have to pay for the privilege).

We should be open to good ideas, but not to wrong ones. The hard part is deciding which ideas are wrong enough that they should be excluded.

Universities have ideals and goals, and we should be able to say that some things are not at all conducive to learning or social progress. SxSW is a different beast: it’s a music festival which has branched out to cover all kinds of completely unrelated phenomena. Is there even a coherent mission that could be used to guide what kinds of events are appropriate to their program? How does anyone justify a statement that SxSW ought to have a panel on online harassment? Shouldn’t the ultimate argument be that they will do whatever appeases the sponsors?

So no, I don’t have a pat answer. I might give different answers to different situations, too. I think what I’d want is a clear statement of the long term goals of the institution, so that we could judge whether a specific action is likely to serve that goal or not. In the case of SxSW, I think they’ve betrayed the attendees vision of what the conference is all about, but they could be wrong — maybe the conference organizers’ vision is one where Monster Energy Drinks and McDonald’s continues to give them lots of money.

Similarly, I have rather idealistic views on the purpose of the university, but I suspect it would often be at odds with the views of the regents, who, as recent cases in Iowa and North Carolina show, might be more business-oriented and regressive than I’d like.

Sweden had a mass murder attempt and school killing! The killer, Anton Lundin-Pettersson, walked into a school with a sword and managed to kill two people and wound another two. If only he’d been armed with rifles and handguns, he might have gotten a better score.

Horrible as this person was (he was shot by the Swedish police), he has another distinction: he’s another godless heathen. In fact, his favorite youtuber seems to have been that lovely fellow, The Amazing Atheist.

Indeed, it’s telling that the Trollhattan killer’s favorite YouTuber (if the account attributed to him is really his) was the noxious rager who calls himself TheAmazingAtheist. Lundin-Pettersson subscribed not only to TAA’s main channel but to his personal channel as well, and he favorited dozens if not hundreds of TAA’s videos (I stopped counting). Unlike some atheist activists, TAA doesn’t devote much time to trashing Islam; he’s far more interested in bashing Anita Sarkeesian and other supposed SJWs.

But TAA affects a hyperbolic “mad as hell” persona that, despite its obvious theatricality, seems to be rooted in a good deal of real anger. I can barely make it through a single video of his, and can only imagine the corrosive effect that watching dozens of his rage-filled videos would have on someone’s soul.

Remember when we used to tell ourselves that atheists were such mild, harmless people, unlike those religious fanatics? It was quite a long time ago — maybe a whole year or two — so it might be understandable if you’d forgotten.

Don’t worry! I’m sure someone will be along soon to explain that he couldn’t have been a True Atheist™ because he once babbled something about spirituality or linked to an Asatru web page, or because he was ideologically fascist or whatever excuse someone can come up with — odds on favorite is that he might have been an atheist, but he was “mentally ill”. One thing I’ve learned is that atheists are getting really good at padding the statistics, but somehow the tally always manages to exclude the bad people.

Since you’ve all already made your travel arrangements (or wished longingly that you could make those arrangements), you all know that Skepticon is less than a month away. I’ll be there, taking it easy and just enjoying other people’s efforts…although Lauren made some noises about drafting me to do a workshop. But no! I shall be lazy!

One thing I wanted to mention, though, because it’s important, is that Skepticon is totally transparent about their financials. When you donate to Skepticon, you can see where every dollar goes — and it’s all plowed right back into the conference. It’s not a profitable fundraiser for an organization or an individual who’s up to something else, it’s entirely for the purpose of educating the public at a yearly event.

It’s a good cause, and if you can’t go this year, you should drop them a few dollars (only if you can afford it!) and try to go next year. It’s always worth it.

Even skeptics do them. Brian Dunning is out of prison, and he’s written a lengthy rationalization to explain that he wasn’t really a criminal. His excuses: he’d been suspicious, his partner in the scheme was the shady one, he hadn’t been scamming eBay at all, he was just a scapegoat, he was only sentenced to 29 months, not 20 years. He just explains that all he did was imbed 1×1 invisible pixels in his site that got eBay to willingly plant cookies on visitor’s sites, that allowed him then to reap rewards every time that visitor bought something through eBay. Not his fault!

Of course he also reveals that the 1×1 invisible pixel publishing business was astonishingly lucrative, bringing him an income of $1.1 million. But hey, that’s just about what a good corporate job would pay. So it must have been all right!

I make nowhere near that amount at the education business, and even less at the blogging game. Maybe my mistake is that I need to make my efforts very tiny and invisible, and then I’d get rich?

YouTube is generally a blighted mess for atheism — but I’m seeing more people pushing back (but the comments there are still full of fulminating argle-bargle from the usual noisemakers). Here’s an example:

I do want to mention one thing I see a lot. You’ve heard it: tell a self-labeled proud atheist that they should value equality and other progressive ideals, and the immediate rebuttal is “Atheism just means I don’t believe in god. Go be a humanist if social justice is your thing.”

Humanism is not your get-out-of-jail-free card. The existence of humanism does not mean that calling yourself an atheist exempts you from all responsibilities to normal human concerns — you don’t get to foist off all the obligations involved in being a functional member of a healthy society on those humanists over there.

It’s as if they’ve carried the negativity of the minimal definition one step further: atheism means disbelief in god, and disbelief in any concept of social justice. We’ve been making some great strides in improving the cultural perception of atheism over the last decade, but there are still way too many atheists who are committed to associating atheism with sociopathy.

And they all seem to be hanging out on YouTube.

It’s nice to be able to sit back and let Mano take on Sam Harris. He’s laid out all the flaws in the standard Harris formula.

• Invent incredibly contrived scenario in which all that you love and hold dear is imperiled.

• Make the villain Muslim, especially a “Muslim jihadi”, who are especially dangerous because they look like all other Muslims, except that they are amoral fanatics who will die to kill you.

• Resolve the scenario with an otherwise morally reprehensible solution that we would not accept in any real-world situation.

• Sit back, preen a bit about how he is the only person brave enough to contemplate the unthinkable so coolly and objectively.

• When people point out the absurdity of his excuses and his perniciously vile efforts to justify amoral acts, fall back on accusations that his critics didn’t actually understand what he wrote. He didn’t mean “Muslims”, he really meant “People other than Jerry Seinfeld,” for instance.

• PROFIT.

He isn’t using reason at all. He’s making appeals to strong emotion (They’re going to murder your daughter!) and bigotry (They’re Muslims, so deranged by their evil religion that they will die for their wicked cause!). His fans accept those premises, and then fall all over themselves to condemn anyone who disagrees with the Harris Formula of wanting to help Muslims kill little girls.