The contradictions of anti-SJW atheists laid bare

The latest atheist scandal: Michael Sherlock, executive director of Atheist Alliance International, was a bit less than professional on Twitter. He called religion “retarded”, and when told that word has a lot of baggage, escalated the argument and ended up calling a woman a “cunt”. This has led to the organization suspending him without pay for one month, which seems like a reasonable rebuke to me, and the process leading to that punishment seems fair, as well. Atheist organizations have had a bit of trouble with poorly behaved leaders lately, so it’s a good idea to set standards and enforce them. If anything, the punishment was too light for an action that led to three board members announcing their resignation, and the Atheist Foundation of Australia severing their ties to AAI. I get the impression that Sherlock has been an antagonizing figure at AAI, especially given that they had recently appointed and then fired David Silverman.

Except…now Sherlock has become the newest cause célèbre for all those anti-SJW folks who are outraged at consequences — you know, what they’re calling “cancel culture”. Any effort to clean their room and tell the paid professionals who are supposed to be running the show to stand up straight is met with petulant whining from the spoiled children who otherwise adore people like Jordan Peterson. How dare you expect them to behave?

The funniest reaction comes from Atheists for Liberty, which claims that social justice is destroying atheist groups. To which I have to say, if they oppose social justice, let them be destroyed, along with the Catholic church and Islamic fundamentalism, two things they typically oppose for their lack of justice. Their rant is written by Justin Vacula, a terrible person with the same sensibilities as Sherlock, apparently, and he is mad about everything.

David Silverman was innocent, he suggests, his accuser was “screaming”, and the #metoo movement opposes due process. He takes a few swipes at me, too, calling me social justice warrior PZ Myers who remains out of favor (wait, what? I was “cancelled”, and he’s fine with that?), citing a pair of wankers, Michael Nugent and Hemant Mehta, to justify that. So apparently women and PZ Myers can be cancelled, but no, not his regressive little buddies.

But here’s the real meat of the complaint:

The intrusion of social justice and woke ideology into atheist circles continues. To name just one example of many, Alex DiBranco spoke at the Secular Student Alliance’s 2020 National Convention, where she argued for “a feminist humanist approach” to “contest white, male, and cisgendered supremacism” saying, “the organized secular/atheist movement has over-emphasized opposition to religion or the belief in a god for its own sake, rather than prioritizing the problem of harm posed to social justice from any direction.”

Atheists for Liberty stands against destructive social justice entryism and the overblown response to an atheist activist calling religion a “retarded relic.” Atheists for Liberty instead prioritizes the free exchange of ideas, individual liberties, religious freedom (including non-belief), Enlightenment values, and secular government.

I think I like this Alex DiBranco. Yes, any atheist movement should fully embrace feminism and humanism, and seek to expand their remit to embrace human social values. Anything less and you collapse into the black hole of conservative insularity and a mob of smug men patting themselves on the back for being enlightened. You get creatures like Trump and Boris Johnson, amoral exploiters and abusers. Any movement that seeks to make fundamental changes in society, like the removal of the influence of religion, is fundamentally not conservative, and to succeed and gather influence must adopt a progressive stance — these libertarian, right-wing atheists are doomed to implode in contradictions. Social justice is the only thing that can save atheism, while it’s people like those at Atheists for Liberty that are destroying it.

To quote Amanda Marcotte:

The moral is there is no leftism that can function coherently without anti-racism and feminism at its center. What is obvious now — anti-government sentiment was just opposition to government showing any interest in equality — was always obvious to “social justice warriors”.

You’re saying now that atheism is not leftism, but I’ll reply that it should be. In this era when western civilization is clearly sick and capitalism has exposed itself as a Ponzi scheme, no viable philosophy can afford to ignore reality and pretend that these right-wing sympathizers are anything but a poison pill for progress.

If only he’d shot himself a day earlier

I can’t imagine working at home, and having one of my kids getting murdered for answering the door by some angry asshole who was gunning for me. That’s what happened to federal judge Esther Salas, whose 20 year old son Daniel Anderl was shot through the heart by a men’s rights coward, Roy Den Hollander, who had a long history of anti-feminist bullshit. I suppose I should say “alleged” murderer, but he had recently written hate-filled screeds against Salas, and his dead body (by suicide) was found with a package addressed to Salas. He has been featured on We Hunted the Mammoth several times for his irrational MRA obsession.

Anyone who rages against women generically is a danger to the world. The pain they cause with their self-righteous bigotry is intolerable.

Matt Taibbi and the disappointing lack of cultural awareness

Matt Taibbi used to be one of my favorite writers, but then I learned about his ugly misogyny (which he unconvincingly claimed was made up), and I was never able to look at his work in the same way. So I cancelled him. By which I mean I stopped reading him. Apparently he has sensed the declining number of eyeballs gazing at his writing, and the fading number of tongues wagging his praises, because he is mad about it, and I had to read something new of his. I am disappointed even more.

It’s the usual spittle-flecked screed we usually see from disgruntled right-wingers, with but one message: the Left is just as bad as the Right! They’re all prudish, finger-wagging authoritarians at heart, but the Lefties are just the worst! We can’t even discuss how stupid the Left is, he says as he writes about how stupid the Left is, because they’ll descend on us with great force and crush us!

Doing so would have meant opening the floodgates on a story most everyone in media sees but no one is allowed to comment upon: that the political right and left in America have traded villainous cultural pathologies. Things we once despised about the right have been amplified a thousand-fold on the flip.

That he can claim this in the era of Trump, when badgeless cops in unmarked cars are grabbing civilians off the street, when cops are maiming citizens with rubber bullets and truncheons and pepper guns, when our president openly considers not respecting the outcome of the next election, is weird and dumb. The old Taibbi had sharp perceptions; this one seems blinded with resentment that his good ol’ boy rape fictions have damaged his reputation.

The centerpiece of his gripe with the Left is a tweet by Byron York (yeah, NRO York, far right apologist for every one of Trump’s excesses), which mocked the National Museum of African American History and Culture for producing this graphic:

Personally, I think it aimed at a bad target. It’s not about “whiteness” itself, it’s about the assumptions of the dominant culture of modern America, and as an exercise at looking at ourselves, it’s useful and insightful. Of course, it doesn’t matter anymore, because the right-wingers were so outraged and expressed the same attitude as Taibbi and the graphic was “cancelled”. Oops. They keep self-owning themselves.

Take the Smithsonian story. The museum became the latest institution to attempt to combat racism by pledging itself to “antiracism,” a quack sub-theology that in a self-clowning trick straight out of Catch-22 seeks to raise awareness about ignorant race stereotypes by reviving and amplifying them.

Oh? And how will you propose combating racism, by pretending it doesn’t exist?

It’s a shame, because look at what it highlights. This is not examining the obvious or necessary components of a successful culture, it’s pointing out unconsidered values we hold and asking us to think about them. Consider alternatives.

For instance, “rugged individualism”. You can’t doubt that this is an implicit value in American culture, and in fact many of the comments responding to York are aghast that we could even question this. But what if an alternative were “cooperative communities and mutual aid”? That would be a better solution to America’s problems, but no, we’re supposed to love the cowboy myth.

Or “family structure”, the heterosexual pairing of a dominant male breadwinner with a subservient female marital aid and housecleaner. Why is that assumed by the American culture at large to be an ideal? It has oppressed more than half our population for centuries and has done us nothing but harm.

Or take “emphasis on the scientific method”. I love the scientific method, I’m a scientist, I apply it all the time. But linear thinking often fails in complex issues with multiple contributing causes, and people are emotional animals who rarely make purely objective decisions. When you limit yourself to only one path to a solution, you’re circumscribing the range of possibilities to such a terrible degree you’re going to miss equally good or better alternatives.

“History”: oh sweet jesus, spare me the monstrous chimera of the “judeo-christian tradition”. All they have in common is the Old Testament, which is a compendium of barbarities and superstitious evils. There are more than 7 billion people on the planet, and they are making a legitimate complaint that our version of “history” is a biased collection of rationalizations for the oppression of the majority by a minority.

Or the “Protestant work ethic”, which is simply an awful way to indoctrinate labor to serve the needs of their bosses. How about work/life balance? How about about recognizing that “hard work” is usually unrewarded with anything but the bare minimum of necessities (sometimes not even that), and that the true path to riches is theft and inheritance, under our current system?

None of these are actually “white” values, although they do serve to maintain the status quo and benefit the majority, who are mostly white, and it’s unsurprising that a museum of African American history and culture would find it worthwhile to point out our biases…and for an angry mob of far-right conservative assholes to squash it. Yet somehow Taibbi finds the African American side to be the one that must be deplored and chastised, while the lunatic right-winger is his ally, and thinks this is a great example of the Left being more evil than the Right? Does he even realize that the graphic is intended to demonstrate the unthinking, implicit assumptions of the American public? This is Anthropology 101 stuff, nothing radical, it doesn’t even make any judgments on whether these are good or bad values, it simply describes the traditions of American culture. People commenting on it are all saying “great values!” and “this is the way to succeed!”, etc., etc., not even aware that they are all confirming the accuracy of the graphic.

But no, to Taibbi this just confirms that the Left (it’s not even written from a leftist perspective!) has gone insane and is worse than the Right. Apparently, questioning your values is not something anyone is supposed to do in Matt Taibbi’s America.

OK, Taibbi, this is going to hurt you a lot worse than it will me — I shall resume the cruel torture of not reading your work any more.

Setting records in Minnesota

Dismal news from the Minnesota wing of the American pandemic ward: our youngest death so far.

Minnesota has reported its first COVID-19 death in a child amid a rise in cases of the infectious disease among children and young adults.

The death of a 9-month-old baby from Clay County is one of the youngest reported in the U.S. in the pandemic.

The child had no underlying health conditions and was not hospitalized. State Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm described it as an “isolated incident related to this infant’s very specific situation.”

Details and lab samples are being sent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for further investigation of why this infant died with an infectious disease that has taken a much harsher toll on the elderly. Of the 1,545 COVID-19 deaths so far in the pandemic in Minnesota, two have involved people in the 20 to 29 age range. But none until now had involved anyone 19 or younger.

We also added 922 new reported cases on Monday, the highest single-day total since the start of the pandemic. Stevens County, where I’m located, is holding steady at a total of 13 cases, but we’re less than a month away from a big influx of students. Maybe we’ll set some more records! How exciting!

I need to add one other detail to our situation. Relatively few young people are dying of COVID-19 around here, but one of the features of the rural landscape is that every town has an aging population and features at least one retirement home. Morris has four: Skyview Plaza, Skyview Court, West Wind Village, and Prairie Community Services. That’s where the pandemic will hit hardest, and that got me wondering. I’ve been selfish and worrying about what will happen to staff and students when classes resume, but will the university close down if the old folks start dying?