Sam Harris is another atheist racist asshole. Who knew? Recently, on Bill Maher's show - I've known Maher to be a toad for a while now, pretty much the distilled essence of everything I loathe about liberalism in America - Harris got into it with Ben Affleck about Muslims. One of the things Harris said is that you can blame all Muslims, more or less, because they support the radicals who support the terrorist.
He said imagine a series of concentric circles. (He's used this "argument" a number of times.) In the innermost circle, you've got terrorists. In the second circle, you've got radicals who give intellectual, material and moral support to terrorists. In the third circle, you've got run of the mill Muslims who give intellectual, material and moral support to the radicals - and through them, to the terrorists. THEREFORE, it's okay to hate all Muslims.
Okay, I'm going to mention, first, that in that second circle you've got to include the US government. The US government gives tremendous, incredible support to the Wahabbist absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia. In turn, Wahabbists give tremendous support to terrorists (including the 9/11 terrorists, I should add). In turn, that puts American citizens in the third circle, since we give support (through taxes, if not ideologically) to the US government that supports the regime in Saudi Arabia! (Further, in the past, we have directly supported guys like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Really, the US government is in Harris's second circle and we are in the third!)
But put that aside for the next bit of reasoning, which is: it's possible to use this technique in a lot of different ways.
So, let's imagine those same three concentric circles. In the first circle are "people who engage in illegal military actions" - the US government. The second circle is, then, "people who give material, intellectual and moral support to those illegal military actions". Let's call them the politicians, businesses, writers and such who have supported illegal military action abroad. Sam Harris, for instance, falls in this group. The third circle is everyone who gives support by association to the second circle - which would be pretty much everyone in the United States as well as the citizens of countries like Great Britain and Denmark.
Some Americans who object to the war might also object to being in the third circle. They might go, "Hey, I'm against these illegal wars and bombing campaigns!" Absolutely, sure. But Harris's reasoning doesn't allow for that from Muslims, so why should anyone allow it for you? That you're an American of principled conscious is utterly irrelevant to why people should hate you!
Some people might also go, "Chris, those categories seem awful arbitrary and really broad." Again, true, but so what? If you accept Harris's reasoning, then you accept arbitrary creation of sweeping categories for the purpose of condemning people.
Another person might also go, "Why stop there? Draw more circles! In Harris's diagram, add a fourth circle where religious people support religious expression and say kill all religious people, too! Draw a fifth circle for agnostics and atheists who support Christmas give material support to religion and kill them, too!"
Harris's reasoning (insofar as one might call it that) is deeply, profoundly specious. I mean, from his tete-a-tete with Affleck, at one point he said that 78% percent of British Muslims thought that the guys in Denmark who published those racist cartoons should be prosecuted. Harris goes on, in the same breath, to suggest that 78% of British Muslims therefore support terrorism! I think it is important to point out, here, that both GB and Denmark have anti-hate speech laws. So in Harris's mind, British Muslims who objected to the racist caricature of Islam and considered it hate speech THEREFORE support terrorism. This is intensely silly reasoning. It's so silly that it baffles me how an intelligent person could say it in public, excepting racism. When you add in racism, it makes perfect fucking sense.
So then this same dude goes on to create these broad, ignorant categories as if they were some kind of PROOF, objective proof, that people should discriminate against Muslims. And this isn't racist because . . . he drew a chart?
(At one point, he also said Affleck didn't understand his reasoning. Well, duh. Ben's a bright, not racist, principled man. Harris's reasoning makes no fucking sense so of course Affleck didn't understand it! I'm sure it would have been much clearer if Affleck spoke racist.)
But this guy, who thinks that 78% of British Muslims support terrorism because they were offended by racist cartoons, is making these arbitrary categories, ignoring how he participates in the very categories he draws, for the purpose of further discrimination and military action against Muslims. He equally stops drawing those arbitrary circles when they might effect him is simply icing on his racist cake - they are drawn and interpreted to keep his own hands clean!
What I'm saying here is that Harris full of shit and a racist asshole.
Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Monday, October 6, 2014
Short critique of modern atheism
I was recently asked to write a critique of atheism, so here it is. This post applies to atheism in the Anglophone world. I don't think I have enough understanding of global atheism to say anything meaningful about it.
There are two major problems with atheism in the English-speaking world that I can see - the first is that it is a club run for and by middle-class white people, mostly men, who are wedded to a very trivial view of scientific reductionism and the second is that there isn't much of a difference in attitude and action between atheists and religious people.
That atheism is a club for middle class white boys is almost transparently obvious. Almost all the big shot atheist writers - Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens - are well-to-do white men. When I was in Miami, almost all of the people who belonged to the atheist group I briefly attended were white men - and that's really saying something in Miami - and I saw a grand total of zero non-white people in the seven events I attended in Freethought Dayton. In Freethought Dayton, seven of the eight board members were white men with one white woman. It is my understanding this is pretty generally true.
And why not! All the "serious" atheist thinkers from Diderot forward are well-to-do white men! It is a culture that was created and has been fostered by the most privileged sector of humans that has ever existed! While there are other brands of atheism - Marx springs to mind - it is the atheism of white prestige and privilege that is the foundation of modern atheism, I think.
They don't generally think this. They give lip service to various liberal platitudes, but they are about as serious as the dudes who wrote The Bell Curve. They are almost entirely wedded to a culture of material acquisition that is shocking in its breadth - but that's the well-to-do white person thing, right? It's no different than any other group of rich white people from college frats to the World Bank, regardless of religious affiliation.
They also have a kind of profound love of scientific reductionism that rationalizes everything they say and do. So, in Freethought Dayton, when they were initially writing their statement about inclusion, it was littered with phrases like, "Scientific research shows that racism isn't real" and "Current scientific understanding about gender issues . . ." I'm pretty sure that kind of language would have made it into the final draft if I hadn't said that I would be against racism even if a bunch of scientists were for it, and ditto discrimination on gender issues. I also pointed out that scientific racism is totally a thing.
The last meeting I was at in a Freethought Dayton group, likewise, included a long and grueling conversation where people were really digging into me saying "science says this" and "science says that", which seems to me to ignore two of the things about "science" - first is that science does not often speak with one voice. So what a quantum physicist says about gravity is currently totally different than what an astrophysicist says about gravity. And what an environmentalist says about the world has little to do with anything either of those other dudes say. Science is a rambling, often chaotic enterprise and while there is sometimes a unified theory within a field to guide it, often there is not, and there is little to no unification of theories between fields. No one can really speak for "science" and the field is so vast that I would seriously question anyone's qualifications for doing so. Yet it is my experience that atheists are very quick to say what "science" says.
Second in this regard is that science speaks about matters of science alone. Science tells us very little about ethics or beauty, though both are very important to us. Many very important fields - government and law, for example - are not scientific. Attempts to jam these fields into scientific reasoning exhibits a faith in science I find frankly religious in dimensions. It is just as bizarre, to me, as when Bible-believing Christians say that the answers to all questions are found in a book compiled 1600 years ago. I think that science is a highly productive epistemology, but it doesn't even try to answer all questions and to believe it does is where the religious canard that "science is like religion" becomes true.
(As I have said elsewhere, science isn't much like religion, but I'm not talking about science, here, but the crazy way many atheists believe in science.)
The second big problem with religion is that the attitudes and believes of atheists aren't different than religious people of their race and class, really. There is this atheist saw: the difference between an atheist and a Christian is that the atheist believes in one fewer god than the Christian. Yes. Exactly. It isn't much of a difference at all!
So the behavior of atheists is almost identical to that of rich white men. Part of this - and you see it all the time with assholes like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris - is that they feel very free to attack in grotesque terms the same people that Christians in their society attack in the same ways.
So Richard Dawkins is this sexist pig. Sam Harris can go on a TV show and say, seriously, that Muslims are extra special kinds of murderers and liberals need to really crack down on them. This gets reflected on down, so at Freethought Dayton they were equally comfortable saying grotesque, racist crap about Muslims - they only study technology to murder Americans, they stopped thinking after 1500, stuff like that. And going hand-in-hand with the first point, the only thing that mattered was their developments in science and technology. I can find this kind of talk in after church social in America.
I contend that atheist culture is broadly like this. They might have rejected the existence of supernatural entities like gods and devils, but their attitudes about many, many things are the exact same as religious people and driven by our culture of religion. If the only thing you've abandoned is the belief in a supernatural god, that isn't such a big deal if you continue to perpetrate the patterns of thought and behavior created by religion. I contend that atheists do precisely that. They don't hate Muslims, all Muslims, for any reason - it is easy to tear apart the idea that Muslims are somehow more irrationally violent than people in the West, as I've done again and again on this very blog - but because people in the Christian West have hated Muslims for 1400 years. As a result, they do precisely what Christians do - rather than trying to build bridges between the West and the Middle East, they attack them as backwards and needing a brutal lesson in violence for their own good.
Specifically on terms of race, atheists merely perpetrate the cultural misconceptions of our society, and from the same religious sources. So, for instance, almost all atheists believe in a radical kind of free will - that we are absolutely free. This isn't scientific. Almost no one in psychiatry, psychology or neurology believes in a strong free will - many don't believe in free will at all. Yet, I have met blessed few atheists that don't believe in an extreme form of free will - which has its origins in Christian dogma. Christianity requires an extreme definition of free will in order to rationalize their beliefs about sin, heaven and hell. I could go on about this, but I hope to have made my point - much of what atheists believe derives almost entirely from religion.
I also think that atheists who are in groups and sitting next to atheists who say these things are no different than Christians or Muslims who sit next to their coreligionists and tolerate their racist, sexist bullshit in church. I understand the need to belong to something is very strong, but you're doing exactly what Christopher Hitchens said that moderate Christians do when they don't stand up to their racist and sexist peers - they give tacit support and approval to the atheists who do think and say such things.
One of the net results of this is it makes it very hard for religious people, particularly if they're not rich or white, to take atheism seriously. If I'm a poor black person and I'm listening to that racist fuckwit Sam Harris talk about how liberals need to attack Muslims more, and I'm looking down at the local mosque and how they spend a bunch of their time improving the self-image of black people, doing community service and creating a safe space for black culture to flourish, I'm not likely to be very impressed. Wearing a headscarf doesn't seem so unreasonable in the face of all that empowerment. Harris is going to sound a whole lot like another self-indulgent rich white racist telling non-white people how they should act and behave . . . which is precisely what he is! So I guess that's okay!
And if I'm some poor white person, it's the same thing! Rich white people don't give a damn about the social and culture aspects of religion - how when people like Sam Harris either contemptuously dismiss or flatly ignore the poor, it's often the churches that are there to pick up the slack. A sermon seems a small price to pay for the kind of cultural interconnectedness that churches in poor communities bring!
This isn't me saying that religion is good, broadly speaking. I think there are a lot of problems with religion. That teaching children that they'll go to hell unless they behave a certain way is psychological abuse, that religion teaches an inability to correctly determine what is true and what is not that has multifaceted and serious consequences for everyone, everywhere (climate change deniers are at the top of this list). I think religion normalizes racism and sexism, it creates an us-against-them attitude that is unhealthy for the body politic and a bunch of stuff besides. Unfortunately, atheists have inherited a lot of that, often wedded to the arrogant superiority of rich white people looking down at everyone else.
None of this is structural in believing there are no gods. There are plenty of skeptical traditions from antiquity to the modern day that have little or no overlap with modern Anglophone atheism. I think one of the reasons I'm relatively sympathetic to critique of atheism, for instance, is that I got into it through Marx. To me, criticism of religion is inextricably bound up with that of class - and the bigger problem is and always has been that a certain group of people have cheated, lied and killed in order to command other people. To me, that's atheism. Most Anglophone atheists are far more in tune with Ayn Rand and Adam Smith than Karl Marx, though. Still, that's where I think this comes from, even though I no longer regard myself as a socialist. Religion is a way that a certain segment of the ruling class keeps everyone else in line; modern Anglophone atheists are almost uniformly from that class, they just think that neo-liberal capitalist democracy and a scientific bureaucracy are better at it than religion.
I give the caveats that I am not condemning everyone who is an atheist or religious. Many atheists are good people; so are many religious people. But insofar as I'm talking about broad cultural trends, I think what I've said is true.
For my own part, while I do not believe in god, I am finding it increasingly hard to call myself an atheist because it identifies me with a social movement I find increasing abhorrent. And not just some of the talking heads on TV, but that the whole movement - in my experience - does reflect those values. I prefer secular humanist, these days, with an emphasis on the humanist. In the end, I'd rather spend time with a Muslim, Christian, Buddhist or whatever that believes in reducing the misery in the world with an bunch of fucking sexist, racist assholes who happen to agree with me that gods don't exist.
There are two major problems with atheism in the English-speaking world that I can see - the first is that it is a club run for and by middle-class white people, mostly men, who are wedded to a very trivial view of scientific reductionism and the second is that there isn't much of a difference in attitude and action between atheists and religious people.
That atheism is a club for middle class white boys is almost transparently obvious. Almost all the big shot atheist writers - Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens - are well-to-do white men. When I was in Miami, almost all of the people who belonged to the atheist group I briefly attended were white men - and that's really saying something in Miami - and I saw a grand total of zero non-white people in the seven events I attended in Freethought Dayton. In Freethought Dayton, seven of the eight board members were white men with one white woman. It is my understanding this is pretty generally true.
And why not! All the "serious" atheist thinkers from Diderot forward are well-to-do white men! It is a culture that was created and has been fostered by the most privileged sector of humans that has ever existed! While there are other brands of atheism - Marx springs to mind - it is the atheism of white prestige and privilege that is the foundation of modern atheism, I think.
They don't generally think this. They give lip service to various liberal platitudes, but they are about as serious as the dudes who wrote The Bell Curve. They are almost entirely wedded to a culture of material acquisition that is shocking in its breadth - but that's the well-to-do white person thing, right? It's no different than any other group of rich white people from college frats to the World Bank, regardless of religious affiliation.
They also have a kind of profound love of scientific reductionism that rationalizes everything they say and do. So, in Freethought Dayton, when they were initially writing their statement about inclusion, it was littered with phrases like, "Scientific research shows that racism isn't real" and "Current scientific understanding about gender issues . . ." I'm pretty sure that kind of language would have made it into the final draft if I hadn't said that I would be against racism even if a bunch of scientists were for it, and ditto discrimination on gender issues. I also pointed out that scientific racism is totally a thing.
The last meeting I was at in a Freethought Dayton group, likewise, included a long and grueling conversation where people were really digging into me saying "science says this" and "science says that", which seems to me to ignore two of the things about "science" - first is that science does not often speak with one voice. So what a quantum physicist says about gravity is currently totally different than what an astrophysicist says about gravity. And what an environmentalist says about the world has little to do with anything either of those other dudes say. Science is a rambling, often chaotic enterprise and while there is sometimes a unified theory within a field to guide it, often there is not, and there is little to no unification of theories between fields. No one can really speak for "science" and the field is so vast that I would seriously question anyone's qualifications for doing so. Yet it is my experience that atheists are very quick to say what "science" says.
Second in this regard is that science speaks about matters of science alone. Science tells us very little about ethics or beauty, though both are very important to us. Many very important fields - government and law, for example - are not scientific. Attempts to jam these fields into scientific reasoning exhibits a faith in science I find frankly religious in dimensions. It is just as bizarre, to me, as when Bible-believing Christians say that the answers to all questions are found in a book compiled 1600 years ago. I think that science is a highly productive epistemology, but it doesn't even try to answer all questions and to believe it does is where the religious canard that "science is like religion" becomes true.
(As I have said elsewhere, science isn't much like religion, but I'm not talking about science, here, but the crazy way many atheists believe in science.)
The second big problem with religion is that the attitudes and believes of atheists aren't different than religious people of their race and class, really. There is this atheist saw: the difference between an atheist and a Christian is that the atheist believes in one fewer god than the Christian. Yes. Exactly. It isn't much of a difference at all!
So the behavior of atheists is almost identical to that of rich white men. Part of this - and you see it all the time with assholes like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris - is that they feel very free to attack in grotesque terms the same people that Christians in their society attack in the same ways.
So Richard Dawkins is this sexist pig. Sam Harris can go on a TV show and say, seriously, that Muslims are extra special kinds of murderers and liberals need to really crack down on them. This gets reflected on down, so at Freethought Dayton they were equally comfortable saying grotesque, racist crap about Muslims - they only study technology to murder Americans, they stopped thinking after 1500, stuff like that. And going hand-in-hand with the first point, the only thing that mattered was their developments in science and technology. I can find this kind of talk in after church social in America.
I contend that atheist culture is broadly like this. They might have rejected the existence of supernatural entities like gods and devils, but their attitudes about many, many things are the exact same as religious people and driven by our culture of religion. If the only thing you've abandoned is the belief in a supernatural god, that isn't such a big deal if you continue to perpetrate the patterns of thought and behavior created by religion. I contend that atheists do precisely that. They don't hate Muslims, all Muslims, for any reason - it is easy to tear apart the idea that Muslims are somehow more irrationally violent than people in the West, as I've done again and again on this very blog - but because people in the Christian West have hated Muslims for 1400 years. As a result, they do precisely what Christians do - rather than trying to build bridges between the West and the Middle East, they attack them as backwards and needing a brutal lesson in violence for their own good.
Specifically on terms of race, atheists merely perpetrate the cultural misconceptions of our society, and from the same religious sources. So, for instance, almost all atheists believe in a radical kind of free will - that we are absolutely free. This isn't scientific. Almost no one in psychiatry, psychology or neurology believes in a strong free will - many don't believe in free will at all. Yet, I have met blessed few atheists that don't believe in an extreme form of free will - which has its origins in Christian dogma. Christianity requires an extreme definition of free will in order to rationalize their beliefs about sin, heaven and hell. I could go on about this, but I hope to have made my point - much of what atheists believe derives almost entirely from religion.
I also think that atheists who are in groups and sitting next to atheists who say these things are no different than Christians or Muslims who sit next to their coreligionists and tolerate their racist, sexist bullshit in church. I understand the need to belong to something is very strong, but you're doing exactly what Christopher Hitchens said that moderate Christians do when they don't stand up to their racist and sexist peers - they give tacit support and approval to the atheists who do think and say such things.
One of the net results of this is it makes it very hard for religious people, particularly if they're not rich or white, to take atheism seriously. If I'm a poor black person and I'm listening to that racist fuckwit Sam Harris talk about how liberals need to attack Muslims more, and I'm looking down at the local mosque and how they spend a bunch of their time improving the self-image of black people, doing community service and creating a safe space for black culture to flourish, I'm not likely to be very impressed. Wearing a headscarf doesn't seem so unreasonable in the face of all that empowerment. Harris is going to sound a whole lot like another self-indulgent rich white racist telling non-white people how they should act and behave . . . which is precisely what he is! So I guess that's okay!
And if I'm some poor white person, it's the same thing! Rich white people don't give a damn about the social and culture aspects of religion - how when people like Sam Harris either contemptuously dismiss or flatly ignore the poor, it's often the churches that are there to pick up the slack. A sermon seems a small price to pay for the kind of cultural interconnectedness that churches in poor communities bring!
This isn't me saying that religion is good, broadly speaking. I think there are a lot of problems with religion. That teaching children that they'll go to hell unless they behave a certain way is psychological abuse, that religion teaches an inability to correctly determine what is true and what is not that has multifaceted and serious consequences for everyone, everywhere (climate change deniers are at the top of this list). I think religion normalizes racism and sexism, it creates an us-against-them attitude that is unhealthy for the body politic and a bunch of stuff besides. Unfortunately, atheists have inherited a lot of that, often wedded to the arrogant superiority of rich white people looking down at everyone else.
None of this is structural in believing there are no gods. There are plenty of skeptical traditions from antiquity to the modern day that have little or no overlap with modern Anglophone atheism. I think one of the reasons I'm relatively sympathetic to critique of atheism, for instance, is that I got into it through Marx. To me, criticism of religion is inextricably bound up with that of class - and the bigger problem is and always has been that a certain group of people have cheated, lied and killed in order to command other people. To me, that's atheism. Most Anglophone atheists are far more in tune with Ayn Rand and Adam Smith than Karl Marx, though. Still, that's where I think this comes from, even though I no longer regard myself as a socialist. Religion is a way that a certain segment of the ruling class keeps everyone else in line; modern Anglophone atheists are almost uniformly from that class, they just think that neo-liberal capitalist democracy and a scientific bureaucracy are better at it than religion.
I give the caveats that I am not condemning everyone who is an atheist or religious. Many atheists are good people; so are many religious people. But insofar as I'm talking about broad cultural trends, I think what I've said is true.
For my own part, while I do not believe in god, I am finding it increasingly hard to call myself an atheist because it identifies me with a social movement I find increasing abhorrent. And not just some of the talking heads on TV, but that the whole movement - in my experience - does reflect those values. I prefer secular humanist, these days, with an emphasis on the humanist. In the end, I'd rather spend time with a Muslim, Christian, Buddhist or whatever that believes in reducing the misery in the world with an bunch of fucking sexist, racist assholes who happen to agree with me that gods don't exist.
Sunday, October 5, 2014
Ben Affleck is okay, Sam Harris and Bill Maher more atheist assholes
A lot of people have given Ben Affleck hassle over the years and I've never really understood why. Because he made bad movies? What actor in Hollywood hasn't? He's also made some good ones. Honestly, I think it is because he was in a lot interracial relationship with a pop star. I think that most of the hostility towards him is because he dared to be in love with Jennifer Lopez.
Anyway, he's really the kind of guy I like. He's a comic book geek and he's actually got principles. Which is why he was the only person on Bill Maher's show to defend Islam, with nasty atheist racist asshole Sam Harris there.
They brought up the old saws about how Muslims like to kill people who don't believe as they do. This is really just so . . . childish that I can't believe that any intelligent people believe it. While it is true that some Muslims kill people who disagree with them, it's also true of some Christians. And in the US, those Christians who believe in killing for their beliefs tend to reside in the White House and vote in the Senate.
Of course 9/11 was a tragedy, but the US military killed between 66,081 (as per a Wikileaks document by the US military) and an Opinion Research Business poll that has the number at over a million civilians.
Sixty-six thousand is the low number! Mind you, this isn't even combat casualties - these are civilian casualties! Between 66,000 and 1,000,000!
But, y'know, Muslims kill people who disagree with them!
This is in no way a defense of murderers of any religion. But, fuck, two wrongs do not make a right STILL.
Anyway, he's really the kind of guy I like. He's a comic book geek and he's actually got principles. Which is why he was the only person on Bill Maher's show to defend Islam, with nasty atheist racist asshole Sam Harris there.
They brought up the old saws about how Muslims like to kill people who don't believe as they do. This is really just so . . . childish that I can't believe that any intelligent people believe it. While it is true that some Muslims kill people who disagree with them, it's also true of some Christians. And in the US, those Christians who believe in killing for their beliefs tend to reside in the White House and vote in the Senate.
Of course 9/11 was a tragedy, but the US military killed between 66,081 (as per a Wikileaks document by the US military) and an Opinion Research Business poll that has the number at over a million civilians.
Sixty-six thousand is the low number! Mind you, this isn't even combat casualties - these are civilian casualties! Between 66,000 and 1,000,000!
But, y'know, Muslims kill people who disagree with them!
This is in no way a defense of murderers of any religion. But, fuck, two wrongs do not make a right STILL.
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Purging Freethought Dayton: why it's not okay that Richard Dawkins insults everyone
Since I'm purging Freethought Dayton, I want to say that the argument that it's okay to be a racist and sexist because you're a misanthrope is bullshit.
In the first place, the argument that it's okay to be racist and sexist because you're vile to everyone is just using one vice to defend another. "Richard Dawkins is a terrible human being generally so it's okay that he's also a racist and sexist!" Oh, that makes it much better . . . ? I don't think so. You can be a jerk and also be a racist and sexist. Being a jerk isn't somehow a defense.
Secondly, when a rich white man attacks another rich white man it has different significance if that same rich white man attacks a poor black woman. The structure of society matters. There is considerable difference in meaning depending on the context. We all know this. Something your friends might say - "You suck at your job" - has a different significance when you boss says it. The social influence that a rich white man has is extraordinary and, to them, almost altogether invisible. Which is why sexist and racist pigdogs like Richard Dawkins say those kinds of things - he isn't even aware of significance of his status in many ways. It is also the reason why so many people defend him - they share in his status and like exercising it, too.
Anyway, that's what I think about the argument that it's okay to discriminate so long as you're also a jerk.
In the first place, the argument that it's okay to be racist and sexist because you're vile to everyone is just using one vice to defend another. "Richard Dawkins is a terrible human being generally so it's okay that he's also a racist and sexist!" Oh, that makes it much better . . . ? I don't think so. You can be a jerk and also be a racist and sexist. Being a jerk isn't somehow a defense.
Secondly, when a rich white man attacks another rich white man it has different significance if that same rich white man attacks a poor black woman. The structure of society matters. There is considerable difference in meaning depending on the context. We all know this. Something your friends might say - "You suck at your job" - has a different significance when you boss says it. The social influence that a rich white man has is extraordinary and, to them, almost altogether invisible. Which is why sexist and racist pigdogs like Richard Dawkins say those kinds of things - he isn't even aware of significance of his status in many ways. It is also the reason why so many people defend him - they share in his status and like exercising it, too.
Anyway, that's what I think about the argument that it's okay to discriminate so long as you're also a jerk.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Leaving Dayton Freethought and the reasons why I left
Yesterday, I quit the atheist group Freethought Dayton. As I often do with this sort of thing, I'm going to recap why.
Alas, none of it will have the . . . vigor of my debacles in Miami! No guy lying about how he had seventy bachelor's degrees and the government had to "bring him back" because of what was in his head. No stories of murder-suicide. It was much more pedestrian than that - plain old-fashioned racism.
I will admit I am quite intolerant of racism. Fairly normal, acceptable levels of racism leave me sick to my soul. I think no racism should be acceptable! Broadly speaking, I live up to this.
In particular, I was at an event and people were tossing out bullshit, racist comments about Muslims (which is the most acceptable form of racism allowed in the US, right now). One person said that Muslims were only interested in technology if it could be used to kill . . . this infuriated me. He was talking about people whose homes were invaded who have cobbled together a few bombs . . . fighting the most comprehensive and technologically advanced military that has ever existed. The US spends about half the world's military budget every year but it's Muslims who are in love with weapons technology! It was absurd.
Another dude said that Muslims stopped thinking after the year 1500 and all intellectual and moral virtues passed to the West (which they also asserted was somehow different than "the Christian world" . . . it made no sense to me, either). Again, infuriating. We think of Muslims as racist . . . but this dude is German. There are people who are still living who remember being locked in concentration camps. For Westerns, with our elaborate, multi-century history of genocide, conquest and colonization to believe that we are in some fashion morally superior to Muslims since 1500 is the intellectual position of a . . . well, racist. Indeed, I find it very hard to assert that we're morally superior now, given how many missiles we fire into whatever country we want and how often we get into wars based on thin lies.
That same guy had mentioned something nasty about Muslims every time I saw him. He seemed to be looking for the chance to talk shit about them.
When I mentioned that was racism, they asserted "Islam isn't a race!" Since one of the common definitions of race is a group of people united by culture, language and religion, I beg to differ. I mean, right then, I said, "It is common to refer to Islamophobia as a form of racism." I further said that I had no interest in arguing the semantics of bigotry - even if Islamophobia isn't according-to-Hoyle racism (hint: it is, this is particularly true because almost all Muslims aren't white), it's a vicious form of bigotry - which is the problem regardless of the name, that they were telling ignorant lies about a huge, diverse group of people in order to smear them and make it easier to hate them.
They also asserted that Richard Dawkins isn't racist, despite his support for guys like Geert Wilder and his numerous examples of hate speech against Muslims.
Taken together, the group is racist. Of course, they will deny that - "Islam isn't a race!" they will chant, covering their ears in case some information slips inside - but all racists deny it! The KKK denies it! Nazis deny it! While they're not as bad as the KKK, they're still pretty darn racist.
It is also somewhat ironic, as Islamophobia is derived and sustained primarily by reactionary Christians! Nietzsche said that god is dead but we will live for centuries in his shadow - this is what it looks like. It looks like atheists, without consideration, enacting the principles of the very people they claim to reject. (Pro tip: the reason why you want to acknowledge that the West is also the Christian world is that it helps you to see where your thinking is influenced by religious biases you consciously reject. It's the same reason you should acknowledge that advertising works on you, so you can better observe its action on you with a mind to preventing it.)
(I didn't stay in the group to see what I figure will be a pretty big splurge of racism this coming weekend. Freethought Dayton - which is run altogether by white people, which is almost entirely white - has a table at a local African-American cultural festival. A bunch of white dudes will be trying to convince black people to be more like them! As far as I could tell, none of them understood the cultural history of African-Americans and their relationship with churches - that from slave days, the church was the one place where they could go and NOT be watched by their overseers and masters. It was the one place in all the world they could go to be safely black. Lacking this kind of historical context - and it's not like I'm going to be there to tell it to them, now - I can only imagine that they'll come off as a bunch of patronizing crackers telling the Negroes how they're getting it all wrong. It is my understanding that black people in America have seen quite a lot of this.)
Additionally, man, atheists are assholes. I've noticed this whenever they get together - almost all of them seem bound and determined to prove they're the smartest person in the room. Since no one knows everything, they often come off as real tools, speaking about things about which they have no knowledge because they can't stand the idea that someone, somewhere knows something they don't. It's tedious.
It is also one of my bigger problems with a lot of religions - that show of utterly certainty, the inability to admit that maybe your book written in the Iron Age isn't 100% up to the challenges of the modern world, and the constant assertions that they're right and everyone else is wrong. It's another way atheists are living in the shadow of god. Until they learn to say "I dunno", they'll be perpetrating the same kinds of intellectual mummery as Christians. Admittedly, about somewhat fewer things, but it'll still be there, poisoning the well for people like me. I could have tolerated that if not for the racism, though.
Anyway, that's my review of Dayton Freethought. While there are some good people there, there are too many racists for my taste - a culture that tolerates xenophobia and Islamophobia, and many members who express both.
Alas, none of it will have the . . . vigor of my debacles in Miami! No guy lying about how he had seventy bachelor's degrees and the government had to "bring him back" because of what was in his head. No stories of murder-suicide. It was much more pedestrian than that - plain old-fashioned racism.
I will admit I am quite intolerant of racism. Fairly normal, acceptable levels of racism leave me sick to my soul. I think no racism should be acceptable! Broadly speaking, I live up to this.
In particular, I was at an event and people were tossing out bullshit, racist comments about Muslims (which is the most acceptable form of racism allowed in the US, right now). One person said that Muslims were only interested in technology if it could be used to kill . . . this infuriated me. He was talking about people whose homes were invaded who have cobbled together a few bombs . . . fighting the most comprehensive and technologically advanced military that has ever existed. The US spends about half the world's military budget every year but it's Muslims who are in love with weapons technology! It was absurd.
Another dude said that Muslims stopped thinking after the year 1500 and all intellectual and moral virtues passed to the West (which they also asserted was somehow different than "the Christian world" . . . it made no sense to me, either). Again, infuriating. We think of Muslims as racist . . . but this dude is German. There are people who are still living who remember being locked in concentration camps. For Westerns, with our elaborate, multi-century history of genocide, conquest and colonization to believe that we are in some fashion morally superior to Muslims since 1500 is the intellectual position of a . . . well, racist. Indeed, I find it very hard to assert that we're morally superior now, given how many missiles we fire into whatever country we want and how often we get into wars based on thin lies.
That same guy had mentioned something nasty about Muslims every time I saw him. He seemed to be looking for the chance to talk shit about them.
When I mentioned that was racism, they asserted "Islam isn't a race!" Since one of the common definitions of race is a group of people united by culture, language and religion, I beg to differ. I mean, right then, I said, "It is common to refer to Islamophobia as a form of racism." I further said that I had no interest in arguing the semantics of bigotry - even if Islamophobia isn't according-to-Hoyle racism (hint: it is, this is particularly true because almost all Muslims aren't white), it's a vicious form of bigotry - which is the problem regardless of the name, that they were telling ignorant lies about a huge, diverse group of people in order to smear them and make it easier to hate them.
They also asserted that Richard Dawkins isn't racist, despite his support for guys like Geert Wilder and his numerous examples of hate speech against Muslims.
Taken together, the group is racist. Of course, they will deny that - "Islam isn't a race!" they will chant, covering their ears in case some information slips inside - but all racists deny it! The KKK denies it! Nazis deny it! While they're not as bad as the KKK, they're still pretty darn racist.
It is also somewhat ironic, as Islamophobia is derived and sustained primarily by reactionary Christians! Nietzsche said that god is dead but we will live for centuries in his shadow - this is what it looks like. It looks like atheists, without consideration, enacting the principles of the very people they claim to reject. (Pro tip: the reason why you want to acknowledge that the West is also the Christian world is that it helps you to see where your thinking is influenced by religious biases you consciously reject. It's the same reason you should acknowledge that advertising works on you, so you can better observe its action on you with a mind to preventing it.)
(I didn't stay in the group to see what I figure will be a pretty big splurge of racism this coming weekend. Freethought Dayton - which is run altogether by white people, which is almost entirely white - has a table at a local African-American cultural festival. A bunch of white dudes will be trying to convince black people to be more like them! As far as I could tell, none of them understood the cultural history of African-Americans and their relationship with churches - that from slave days, the church was the one place where they could go and NOT be watched by their overseers and masters. It was the one place in all the world they could go to be safely black. Lacking this kind of historical context - and it's not like I'm going to be there to tell it to them, now - I can only imagine that they'll come off as a bunch of patronizing crackers telling the Negroes how they're getting it all wrong. It is my understanding that black people in America have seen quite a lot of this.)
Additionally, man, atheists are assholes. I've noticed this whenever they get together - almost all of them seem bound and determined to prove they're the smartest person in the room. Since no one knows everything, they often come off as real tools, speaking about things about which they have no knowledge because they can't stand the idea that someone, somewhere knows something they don't. It's tedious.
It is also one of my bigger problems with a lot of religions - that show of utterly certainty, the inability to admit that maybe your book written in the Iron Age isn't 100% up to the challenges of the modern world, and the constant assertions that they're right and everyone else is wrong. It's another way atheists are living in the shadow of god. Until they learn to say "I dunno", they'll be perpetrating the same kinds of intellectual mummery as Christians. Admittedly, about somewhat fewer things, but it'll still be there, poisoning the well for people like me. I could have tolerated that if not for the racism, though.
Anyway, that's my review of Dayton Freethought. While there are some good people there, there are too many racists for my taste - a culture that tolerates xenophobia and Islamophobia, and many members who express both.
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Richard Dawkins seems to be a sexist and racist asshole
I've never really liked Richard Dawkins. At first, my dislike was merely philosophical - I think saying there probably isn't a god is wishy-washy. The reasons he says there probably isn't a god amount to a repetition of the epistemological uncertainty into which the god of the gaps lives. Since we can't be certain of anything, we can't be certain god doesn't really exist.
Or anything else! So he should say, y'know, nothing exists, that it all is probably this and probably that - or we can live with the epistemological uncertainty and speak with conviction. God does not exist any more that teapots whirling around the sun exist.
Then, when I heard him on some show or another . . . I was overwhelmed by the sense of class. Here's a dude who is that upper crust British asshole - almost a parody. He's everything that Monty Python has ever made fun of. I just assume he has a stupid walk.
He is also a sexist asshole, to get to the thrust of this post. He tweeted, recently "Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse."
Is it? I'm not sure that getting raped by someone you know is better than being raped by a stranger, myself. And I also know that date rape often includes threats of violence. So, it was really just a stupid fucking thing to say, ignorant and nasty.
But here's the thing - why say it at all? What would prompt a guy to, out of the blue, say something like that?
In short, it's that comic upper class English-ness. He's an important rich white man. He speaks with the confidence of being master of the world. He knows his opinions are the opinions that count. So he can dismiss anyone he wants who isn't an important rich white man. Like, say, women.
(He also added, "If you think that's an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think." Indeed, he is endorsing nothing, but he was definitely speaking out of turn - arrogantly, hurtfully and he was wrong, to boot. But that's something arrogant rich white men do, too - they can throw out any rationalization to make themselves feel good about the shitty thing they just did. No one has the status - and everything about Dawkins screams that he's obsessed with status, that he really, really likes being an important rich white man - to seriously gainsay him. He can dismiss them, as he did, and does. Learn to think! It is you who is clearly the problem!)
A couple years back, he told a woman who dared talk about sexism in the atheist conventions that because she wasn't being beaten up by her husband that she should shut up. He tells other people that they should think, but he often fails to do it, himself - two wrongs don't make a right. Beating women - beating anyone - is wrong. But so is sexual harassment that occurs at atheist conferences. A person who bothered to think would recognize that . . . but this is Richard Dawkins. He's an important rich white man! He's got TITLES! So women who aren't beating beaten by their husbands need to shut up.
He is also a racist. He said that Cambridge has produced more Nobel laureates than the whole of the Middle East. Should we be stunned that a prize created by a northerwestern European is mostly given out to other northwestern Europeans? But he has the bigotry of a Englishman, including the arrogant belief that they are really the best at everything.
So, he's a pig. There, I said it. Fuck that racist, sexist asshole.
Or anything else! So he should say, y'know, nothing exists, that it all is probably this and probably that - or we can live with the epistemological uncertainty and speak with conviction. God does not exist any more that teapots whirling around the sun exist.
Then, when I heard him on some show or another . . . I was overwhelmed by the sense of class. Here's a dude who is that upper crust British asshole - almost a parody. He's everything that Monty Python has ever made fun of. I just assume he has a stupid walk.
He is also a sexist asshole, to get to the thrust of this post. He tweeted, recently "Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse."
Is it? I'm not sure that getting raped by someone you know is better than being raped by a stranger, myself. And I also know that date rape often includes threats of violence. So, it was really just a stupid fucking thing to say, ignorant and nasty.
But here's the thing - why say it at all? What would prompt a guy to, out of the blue, say something like that?
In short, it's that comic upper class English-ness. He's an important rich white man. He speaks with the confidence of being master of the world. He knows his opinions are the opinions that count. So he can dismiss anyone he wants who isn't an important rich white man. Like, say, women.
(He also added, "If you think that's an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think." Indeed, he is endorsing nothing, but he was definitely speaking out of turn - arrogantly, hurtfully and he was wrong, to boot. But that's something arrogant rich white men do, too - they can throw out any rationalization to make themselves feel good about the shitty thing they just did. No one has the status - and everything about Dawkins screams that he's obsessed with status, that he really, really likes being an important rich white man - to seriously gainsay him. He can dismiss them, as he did, and does. Learn to think! It is you who is clearly the problem!)
A couple years back, he told a woman who dared talk about sexism in the atheist conventions that because she wasn't being beaten up by her husband that she should shut up. He tells other people that they should think, but he often fails to do it, himself - two wrongs don't make a right. Beating women - beating anyone - is wrong. But so is sexual harassment that occurs at atheist conferences. A person who bothered to think would recognize that . . . but this is Richard Dawkins. He's an important rich white man! He's got TITLES! So women who aren't beating beaten by their husbands need to shut up.
He is also a racist. He said that Cambridge has produced more Nobel laureates than the whole of the Middle East. Should we be stunned that a prize created by a northerwestern European is mostly given out to other northwestern Europeans? But he has the bigotry of a Englishman, including the arrogant belief that they are really the best at everything.
So, he's a pig. There, I said it. Fuck that racist, sexist asshole.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Bad time with the Secular Humanist Meetup
I had a poor showing at the Secular Humanist Meetup dinner this month. At the beginning, everything was going fine. But then one of the leaders of the meetup, an elderly man, decided to speak to us all.
Now, it struck me as paternalistic bullshit from the get-go. The daddy figure getting up to address us all, at whatever length he desired, about whatever topic he desired. The only reason I didn't leave the room, if not the meeting, is because I hadn't settled up my check. In retrospect, that's what I should have done. Ah, the clarity of vision of hindsight!
Then he talked a bit about a friend of his, the punchline being that this friend was insane, murdered his wife and then killed himself. Also in retrospect, that was just nuts to be talking about in that forum, anyway. It showed a complete lack of respect for the boundaries of the people at the meeting. No one there came to hear about this dude's crazy murder/suicide. I was a total stranger, as were several of the other people at the meeting, and burdening us with his horrific story was extraordinarily rude. I understand that a grieving person needs to get it out - I've had friends kill themselves, myself, though never along with a murder which is clearly a higher level of horror - but a meeting full of raw acquaintences, total strangers and a few friends is not the forum for that grief.
But what got me riled up in the moment was how he talked about mental illness - and I think we'll all agree a murderer/suicide had some pretty serious mental problems - "wasn't the man he knew" and he "made choices". I said, with considerable anger in my voice, that, no, that is not true. I said that I suffer from mental illness - which, of course, first drew jokes, because, hey, I guess it was a funny topic and is part of the problem of talking about mental illness, haha, it's funny, fuck you - and people with mental illness have a disease, about which they are no more responsible for than people who have cancer or birth defects. I said that I was deeply offended that the insinuation that people with serious mental problems "made choices".
Rather than apologize for his ignorance, this old man said that "he understood mental illness". Which, clearly, he did not. After all, he was a trial lawyer and his association with mentally ill people somehow gave him insight into their feelings. Which, like I said, was obviously untrue because he was repeating one of the biggest canards used to diminish the seriousness of mental illness: that we somehow have a choice. I found his assertion that he was a trial lawyer and thus understood mental illness to be akin to a racist saying he has some black friends.
(Oh, for the record, also he was a touch of a racist. Talking about those "Latins" are, about how they had gay family members and didn't talk about it because they were "Latin". Like Anglo families don't have that kind of idiotic dysfunction? We live in FLORIDA for crying out loud, one of the most generally homophobic states in the Union! You don't have to go down to Latin American countries to find homophobia!)
Well, the old dude wasn't buying what I was saying, he was dismissive and verbally bullying, which never, ever works on me. So we were going at it.
Then one of the other people, one of the long timers at the meetup, said that he had been in an institution for about a week and, hey, I was out of line.
No, no, I wasn't. The old guy shouldn't have been talking about this subject in the first place. He surprised and burdened strangers and people who barely knew him with disturbing and uncomfortable things. And in so doing, he repeated one of the most vicious canards used to justify bad treatment of the mentally ill - the idea we have a choice, a position that he repeated, I will note. He was rude from the onset, he took the position of a verbal bully, and was wholly unapologetic about it. Friends, however, support friends, I get that - but I wasn't this man's friend. If he had kept his grief among his friends, well, we would have never had the opportunity to argue, right? But, no, he decided that it was appropriate to surprise total strangers with his tale of horror, grief and madness, and in so doing he insulted me, personally, with one of the most terrible lies repeated about mental illness. So, yeah, taking that altogether, I figure I was totally in line.
However, at that point, I said, "Fuck you" and left. Which, again, I found appropriate because when the old guard start forming up the wagons around themselves, well, the conversation was over.
When I was settling the check, another new guy came out and tried to talk me down. He said he wanted me to come back. I'd given the old man something to think about, right? I said I wouldn't unless the older man apologized. I was so cute! I have done this sort of thing before and I knew what was going on. They weren't talking about how trenchant my observations were in the meeting; they were either trying to put it behind them or confirming to themselves that I was the unjustified aggressor. Again, this is common. Either way, the idea that I had somehow enlightened anyone was cute in its optimism, but I'd bet money it was not reflective of the general attitude in the room - which was probably relief I was gone.
So, I guess I'm done with that group of secular humanists. I don't see myself going back unless I get an apology and . . . I don't see that coming. I mean, if the group understood that what the guy was saying was out of line, they would have probably told him, "Hey, uh, maybe this isn't the place for you to talk about your murderer/suicide friend. Maybe that's wildly inappropriate to do in front of people you largely don't know, and you should seek support from your friends, family and perhaps a grief therapist." But when I left, he was being supported, so I doubt they even understand the inappropriateness of his remarks. Perhaps I am being uncharitable, though.
Anyway, that's the end of my story. Unlike the elderly man at the meetup, I am not going to hold anyone captive with my story and feelings. But I did feel the urge to get them out, and I'm writing this so I can post it to the meetup group so that they can understand my position. And I'm posting it publicly, because I want to be open about the difficulties of having mental illness and the hurdles that people face when trying to discuss it - how we are subject to bullying, or laughter, when we defend our rights to dignity.
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