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f you’ve spent any time on the internet eventually you’ll run across a perfectly horrible subsection of the online community known as Men’s Rights Activists. These brave warrior souls have taken up the mighty struggle of the oppressed dominant majority and are serving as the tip of the spear against the root cause of all evil in society, namely feminism. MRA ‘activists’ spend their time trolling and threatening women online and off, causing a stir when they can for their 15 minutes of infamy, and generally just whinging about how unfair life as a privileged middle class white dude actually is. The misogyny laced whinging gets really old, really fast as one quickly realize how crass and superficial the MRA movement is as their ideology is simply the polar opposite of what feminism advocates on pretty much every issue.
Being the stupid, whingy-creeptastic counterpoint to feminism isn’t exactly the pinnacle of awesome and given some time and self-awareness most MRA’s should come to realize that. But more importantly it is what the MRA’s don’t do, they don’t organize, they don’t create social structures to help men, they don’t have an ideology that is coherent past a furious fap-fest longing for the 1950’s or earlier when men could be men and women could serve them, or some shit like that.
The current MRA lobby is currently punching far above their weight, given that they are a bitter house divided, and only gain notoriety for doing really asinine stunts which usually involve behaving like sexist bags of douche toward women. Rally on Brave Manosphere Warriors! Continue on your manly pursuit of pissing up that rope and yelling forcefully into the wind. No one with a even the smallest wit of sense cares and rightfully dismisses MRA tomfoolery as soon as it rears its ugly little head.
Now take a look internet Atheism. How different is it from what our courageous manospherians are doing? Oh certainly we’re on the thin edge of the wedge in the online battle against the religious. Take a step back though and look at what you’re accomplishing and keep your dry rope handy (dry rope wicks moisture better).
Without the social organization and structures in place i.e. the stuff that actually changes society, how different are we from the the ill-lauded MRA camp. Nothing changes because you (again) adroitly illustrate how christian fop #2342346 believes in magic and how irrational that stance is in the first place. Did you want a cookie for proving, mostly to yourself, that you are on the side of right and they are on the side of wrong. Piss meet rope.
Brave Atheist warrior what are you accomplishing by smugly publishing article #23098340 on how goofy religious belief is? Most rational people get it, we really do so then past preaching to the choir what is the point? Do we honestly think the deluded are going to one day browse to our carefully laid out arguments and proofs against their mumbo-jumbo and go, “holy-fuck batman! I’ve been wrong all this time, let the good times deconversion begin!”
*party officially started, commence roof raising*.
Said no serious religious person ever.
They have history on their side, they have social structures on their side and they have fear on their side. Do you honestly believe that shouting( cogently mind you) into the wind is going to have a measurable effect on the current state of affairs. Full marks if you do, but my optimism tank is out of fucks to give about the perceived importance of shouting into the wind, even if it is for a good cause.
Did you want to change society for the better? Start organizing in meatspace, start putting together the organizations that have the social power to change societies path – our opponents already have the organizations, the traditions, and the fear working for them. We need to do better than mere online activism because it can only go so far when pitted against the organized opposition of the religious faith/lifestyle.
When actual science is involved, WLC loses. Dispensing the boots to the head is Sean Carroll.
A jesus I can get behind. :)
Gore and silliness warning.
Browsing the time sink known as Reddit today I came across a very cool comic showing someone building a chat-bot to debate a theist. I googled the title of the comic and found the original as well a very awesome comic called Bag of Toast. I highly recommend checking it out.
The comic in question:
This made me think that I would love a chat bot to debate the theists, global warming deniers, anti-vaccine advocates, scumbags MRAs, or anyone I disagree with but constantly have to have 101 level discussions with. It would be wonderful. But then the Reddit community came through and proved there is such a thing already!
Christopher Mims at MIT Technology Review writes:
Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.
The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it.
Sadly this chat bot has since been suspended, but given how easy it is to create twitter accounts I’m sure it is out there somewhere, debating science deniers so that we don’t have to. Finding out this bot existed has made today a good day.
Religiously deluded, bigoted, right-wingnuts say the darndest things. Just the other day, Manitoban PC leader Brian Pallister wished the very best to “all you infidel atheists out there”.
Say again?
“All you infidel atheists”
He didn’t say that.
He really did. On camera. Check the vid.
Pretty amazing, right? But it gets even better. This video spurred an understandably unfavourable response from the secular community. Pallister did have some defenders though. They suggested that it was a joke, albeit in bad taste. Damn liberal media sheep, they whine that the poor conservatives are too uptight, but as soon as one delivers a little joke, they get all offended. Except that it wasn’t a joke – not that it would actually excuse this if it was.
Later, in a response to the fallout of his holiday greeting, Pallister defended his wording by stating that, according to the dictionary, ‘infidel’ means ‘non-believer’. He was just being inclusive. “I’m always disappointed when people misrepresent the meaning of the words. What I was trying to do there is include everyone in my best wishes over the holidays” Riiiiiiiight. Let’s explore why this is total bullshit.
First, no one identifies as an ‘infidel’. Quite a few non-believers don’t even identify as an ‘atheist’. I mean, sure, I’m also a non-stamp-collector, but it has no inherent meaning to me. However, if people were being ostracized, abused, discriminated against, and even killed because they didn’t collect stamps, I’d have to speak up as a non-stamp-collector too. So saying that he was trying to include ‘infidels’ when the only people who think the term means anything are non-infidels, is beyond suspicious. It is a blatant affirmation of the religious ‘us vs. them’ mentality.
Second, whereas ‘atheist’ is purely descriptive – absence of theism, ‘infidel’ is riddled with negative overtones. Sure one of the definitions listed in the dictionary is simply ‘one who doesn’t believe’, but dictionaries aren’t known for deep explorations into connotation or social context. ‘Infidel’ is the name that members of an in-group call members of the out-group. It is a term meant to belittle, demean, and undervalue. An atheist is a non believer, period. An infidel is a non believer, understood as an unworthy subhuman piece of filth. Pallister’s comment is analogous to someone attempting to be “racially inclusive” by using the word ‘nigger’ then defending the slur by saying that it just means ‘people with dark skin’. No, it’s offensive, divisive, and hateful, I don’t care how happy the surrounding message is. And Pallister knows it.
If he really thought ‘atheist’ and ‘infidel’ were as synonymous as he claims, then there would be no reason to use both words. Pallister’s defence is that all he meant to say was ‘non-believing non-believers’. There is no justification for such a redundancy. The negative hateful baggage is jammed right into the word ‘infidel’ and it is the only reason for Pallister to have used it. I am willing to concede that it may not have been a conscious decision, not that it would be a redeeming admission. It would mean that his religious elitism is so ingrained that he automatically demeans the irreligious without thinking about it.
If he was just some guy, Pallister’s words would just make him an asshole in need of good chewing out. But the standards for our elected officials is higher than that. Especially in a country that thankfully separates church and state, such a slur should be met with much harsher repercussions. Manitobans, please see too it he is not re-elected. Manitoban conservatives, get him evicted from your party. If you ever want to be in power in Manitoba again, step 1 would be to distance yourselves from ignorant jackasses like Brian Pallister.
Arb and I are now down to only one cat. This is how I’ll remember Lilith
Not long after her boneless lying in the sun picture, we started noticing Lilith was losing weight. And then her coat turned nasty like she wasn’t grooming herself properly, so it was vet time pronto. I assumed it was just worms again, since Lilith hunts and hunting cats tend to get whatever parasites infest their prey.
As it turns out, Lilith had lost a whole lot of weight, and it was only the last rapid bit we’d noticed. Read the rest of this entry »
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