Feb. 14, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
11:14
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hello everyone, welcome to This Week in Stupid for the 14th of February 2016. | |
| As usual, if you find anything you'd like to see in This Week in Stupid, please tweet using hashtag TWIS, or post it to our Sargon of ACAD, and I will find it. | |
| So it seems that despite having a copyright strike on my account from the last bastion of free speech, I can still post videos that are more than 15 minutes long. | |
| I don't know why this is, and I'm not going to question it, so let's begin. | |
| Apparently, brazen sexism is pushing women out of America's atheism movement. | |
| Our author usefully begins by telling us how her atheism intersects with her feminism. | |
| I do not believe in a god and I do not live by dictates ascribed to any god figure. | |
| I do not need a paternal figure to tell me how to act like a moral human. | |
| Well done. | |
| Rather, I cultivate an ethics of interpersonal and community engagement with other people based on principles of civic-mindedness. | |
| Okay, to start with, morals and ethics are not the same thing, so don't use them interchangeably. | |
| But your principles of civic-mindedness and community engagement rather require the consent of other people, which of course you do not have. | |
| You haven't considered that other people might not want you to engage with them. | |
| Given that we are dealing with personal morality, don't expropriate it into a form of ethics. | |
| It's not for everyone else to live by your moral code. | |
| It is for you to live by your moral code. | |
| In this way, my atheism directly informs my feminism. | |
| Oh god, this is so dumb. | |
| I reject society's demand that I submit to men. | |
| Society isn't demanding that. | |
| I reject the objectification of women. | |
| Well, that's your personal choice. | |
| The ethics of choice, a person's right to decide what they believe in and what they do with their body, unites the two philosophies. | |
| Belief in a deity is not the same thing as religion. | |
| A religion is a cultural system of behaviors and practices. | |
| One can be religious without believing in a god. | |
| Atheism is specifically a lack of belief in a god or gods. | |
| It doesn't actually have anything to say about religion. | |
| If you want to be anti-religious, then that's fine, that's entirely your choice. | |
| But that isn't the same thing as being an atheist. | |
| And unsurprisingly, that means there is no intersection between feminism and atheism, as feminism does not hold a position on the existence of deities. | |
| But it's this correlation between atheism and feminism, for me. | |
| I like the way you put that in there, the subjective for me. | |
| It's not that there's an objective correlation between atheism and feminism, because you know that there isn't. | |
| Well, you probably, you probably don't know, you're probably fucking idiot. | |
| But we know there isn't. | |
| And for many other women, apparently, is why they're so dismayed by the misogyny rampant in today's atheist movement. | |
| Well, the great thing about atheism is that it's just one point of belief. | |
| If you don't like it, you can go and make your own atheist movement that is, oh, I don't know, atheism and feminism. | |
| Maybe plus social justice. | |
| I don't know. | |
| It's not been done. | |
| You can go make it up for yourself. | |
| I mean, it's not like anyone's tried doing this before and failed horribly. | |
| Writing in Salon, okay, I think I've identified the problem. | |
| Katie Engelhart ascribes the misogyny in New Atheism to the movement's exclusively male leadership, who also happen to be men notorious for their sexism. | |
| You mean people who aren't feminists. | |
| Is that what we're saying? | |
| Despite their supposed love of science and rationality, Amanda Marcotte, okay, I can see the second problem here, agreed in a post for Alternet. | |
| Many of them are nearly as quick as their religious counterparts to abandon reason in order to justify regressive views about women. | |
| Well, you know, that sounds very convincing, except I have long experience with feminism, and I'm not even going to look it up. | |
| I'm not even going to go and prove you wrong. | |
| I don't believe you. | |
| It's not that I don't believe that these people have views on women you don't approve of, I'm sure they absolutely do. | |
| I don't believe they abandoned reason, because I have yet to meet someone who is actually in favour of reason that is also one of these crazy third-wave feminists. | |
| Most of you are so anti-reason, it scares me, frankly. | |
| The latest high-profile example of this hypocrisy is Richard Dawkins' recent Twitter debacle, which I'm going to call Dawkinsgate. | |
| Anyway, this is not hypocrisy. | |
| Richard Dawkins does not profess the same views as these crazy feminists do. | |
| Therefore, he is not being a hypocrite when he says he is not in favour of the way that batshit crazy feminists are acting. | |
| So when he tweeted a video mocking feminists and Muslims and then got called out by an obese Twitter activist, it's not hypocrisy. | |
| Dawkins was not in favour of the sort of feminazi school of feminism that insists that men are the problem in the same way that Islamists insist that Jews are the problem. | |
| While there has been a fair amount of online discussion about the fact of the movement's misogyny, few have attempted to explain why it exists. | |
| I'm just going to sum up the first point, which is apparently that sexual harassment and violence is just what men do, and it's the 21st century atheist's interpretation of the Laddist maxim that boys will be boys. | |
| The same logic that is manifested in statements that justify sexual violence in a woman's behaviour or style of dress. | |
| Oh my god, shut up. | |
| Just shut up. | |
| There hasn't been a rape trial in all of history where the accused got off on the defense that boys will be boys. | |
| That is something that is used to excuse two boys roughhousing and breaking an ornament or something. | |
| Not sexual violence, you fucking liar. | |
| This is the bit I want to focus on. | |
| The second explanation for why the atheism movement foments sexism can be found in what Dawkins himself said in a 2002 TED Talk called Militant Atheism. | |
| Instead of practicing atheism as a kind of absenteeism from religion, which is how she approaches it, Dawkins presents the case for an atheism that aggressively attacks other religions. | |
| Even more pernicious is the way he argues for a moral and organizational structure on par with orthodox religions. | |
| I haven't actually watched this TED Talk, so I'm just going to make the assumption that Dawkins is literally saying, I want a church of atheism, just to really bolster her argument. | |
| The reason I spend so much time on this article is A, because it's fucking stupid, but B, but B, it is the latest in a long series of articles vilifying Richard Dawkins for tweeting out a video on my channel. | |
| Criticizing insane militant feminists brought all of the insane militant feminists out of the woodwork to attack Dawkins. | |
| Even after Richard Dawkins had a stroke this week, atheism plus fembot Rebecca Watson just couldn't resist. | |
| While we here at Skeptic have been very critical of Dawkins' recent spate of bigoted comments, we hope that he recovers quickly. | |
| Oh yeah yeah, that sounds genuine. | |
| That sounds really fucking genuine. | |
| You're not using this tragic occurrence to have a dig at the man in virtue signal to your other feminist lackeys, are you? | |
| As disingenuous as it is for these harpies to say things like, oh we hope he recovers quickly, Richard Dawkins is in his 70s and clearly in ill health. | |
| Until he had a stroke not one of the feminist lynch mob showed any kind of sympathy for his position or even why he may have done this. | |
| Instead, they simply said, we resemble that remark, and here's a lot of Twitter hate. | |
| It's the 13th of February, between Darwin Day and St Valentine's Day. | |
| I'm at home, having been four days in hospital, and I'm told I'm getting much better. | |
| What happened was that on Friday, the 5th of February, I was at home alone, and I suddenly became aware that my left arm was not behaving properly. | |
| I couldn't coordinate it properly. | |
| And when I tried to stand up, I staggered about in a rather alarming way. | |
| I must have fallen because I later discovered a large bruise on my elbow. | |
| I was immediately sure that I must be having a stroke. | |
| I managed to telephone Lala, who was in London. | |
| She telephoned a friend and neighbour who has a key to the house, and she also telephoned the ambulance. | |
| And between them, they got me into the ambulance. | |
| The paramedics were very good, gave me various tests, drove me to the John Radcliffe Hospital, where I had a scan, and I had indeed had a stroke. | |
| You can tell how frail he sounds there. | |
| Now, I'm not trying to blame Watson and the rest for standing on Dawkins while he is in hospital to score cheap points on the internet. | |
| As shitty as a thing that is to do, they weren't really aware of what was going on with him personally. | |
| I mean, this statement came out after the sketching blog post was made. | |
| But listen to this. | |
| The doctors obviously were worried about what caused it. | |
| I've been having chronic blood pressure problems for a while, which the GP and I thought were under control with Candace Sartan, but apparently not. | |
| The doctors asked me whether I'd been suffering from stress, and I had to say yes, I had. | |
| They keep advising me not to get involved in controversy. | |
| And I'm afraid I had to tell them that not getting involved in controversies is one of those things I'm not particularly talented at. | |
| I told them that I had been having a certain amount of controversy and was very distressed when on the 28th of January I was disinvited from a conference in America to which I had previously been asked. | |
| This upset me very much. | |
| I'm used to getting hate from religious nuts and creationists, but when I get hate from what I think of as my own people, the left liberal feminists and so on, that does actually hurt me. | |
| And I might have been expected to get a stroke after that, if ever, but paradoxically, the stroke came after. | |
| I got a bit of good news. | |
| On the morning of February the 5th, I had a very gracious letter from the conference organisers, the committee, graciously apologising for disinviting me and re-inviting me. | |
| And I was overjoyed at that. | |
| And you might think that's the last time I'd got a stroke, but actually it was the evening of that same day that I got the stroke. | |
| I know I'm spending an awful lot of time on this story, but I really, really think it's important. | |
| Richard Dawkins, an old man, tweets out a satirical video lambasting people who really need to stop and take a look at themselves. |
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