Urgh, bloody Atheism Plus...

If you've been following the whole Atheism Plus mess, you probably know that Jen McCreight, its creator (or one of them, anyway, she seems to be the most senior of the leaders they keep assuring us they don't have), has - for the time being - stepped back from blogging.  Her reasons can be found here; that link to her own words, by the way, is a courtesy she did not extend to me when she and someone called Veronica chose to assume I was five years old for having the temerity to say something an "old, white man" happened to agree with, seen here.

(This is a tweet posted some time ago by a woman now complaining bitterly that her attempt to make atheism more inclusive has been poorly received.  I wonder at what age she loses the right to an opinion - or does the age qualifier only apply to (white) men?)  I was amused to learn that apparently the way to deal with a woman who disagrees with you is to pat her on the head and explain to her very gently why she might be just a little bit silly to think she doesn't need defending from all the big nasty men out there.  But I digress.

The other day Rebecca Watson posted a Tweet saying... ah.  Oh.  Well, I was going to quote it exactly but I appear to have been blocked by the "fearless" leader of SkepChic (a fact I submit without comment).  If anyone can find the tweet itself please let me know and I'll edit, but essentially it was words to the effect of "Don't feel too smug, misogynists, you may have forced one woman blogger off the internet but I'm going to be twice as gobby now to make up for it!".  Anyway, last night after another tweet (which, of course, I also now can't quote directly) along the lines of "Idiots are having a go at me about A+ but it's nothing to do with me. Must have been a new feature in the Harass Rebecca Daily" I must confess I momentarily lost patience and replied telling her to get over herself.  Within a couple of hours - and again, I report events as they happened without speculation on causal links - I received a tweet from a follower telling me that I've now been screencapped on Watson's blog, too, which you can see here.  (If you haven't come here from Twitter, I'm @Whoozley so I'm the one who said "I'm a woman & an atheist blogger, & never experienced sexist abuse from fellow atheists. Maybe because I don't assume they're misogynists?".)

Now, that tweet that Richard Dawkins RT'd the other week has got me a fair bit of shit, which is a little ridiculous when you bear in mind that all I actually did was effectively to say that I hadn't experienced the problem they were all talking about (still haven't, incidentally) and suggest a possible reason for this perceived disparity in experience.  I wouldn't call the tweets I've been getting "abusive" because that would be pretty demeaning to people who actually are being or have been abused - but some of it's been fairly hysterical and distinctly disproportionate to what I actually said. (N.B.: Please don't read any of this as an attack of the "poor me"s. I said what I said, I stand by it, and if people wish to disagree with it whether rationally or frothingly they have every right to do so. If you don't like taking shit for what you say in a public forum, don't fucking say it.)

On Watson's post, now, I find myself screencapped along with a number of individuals I would be inclined to describe as significantly nastier than I have been.  There's a bit of a contrast between me saying what I said - to the world at large, by the way, it wasn't addressed to anyone in particular - and a person who instructs Watson to kill herself, or expresses hope that she will be raped.

What conclusion can I draw from this?  Well, let's see; I haven't used language anyone might consider objectionable, I haven't called anyone names, I didn't even aim that comment at an individual. So how have I been elevated to the ranks of those who call Watson a cunt and suggest it would do her good to be raped?

As far as I can see, all I have done wrong in the eyes of the feminist bloggers behind Atheism Plus (and Watson's post is itself evidence that she is not uninvolved in it, by the way) has been to disagree with them. Does that truly warrant stacking me up with the genuinely nasty commentators?  I can't stop it happening and wouldn't have the right even if I could, but certainly I think her doing so belies the claim the A+ers have been making ever since Richard Carrier's hilariously jingoistic post (outlined and linked here) that they don't have a "with us or against us" mentality.

There are some points I would like to make to Atheism Plusers, should any happen to read this:

1: A person who objects to the solution you propose is not automatically part of the problem.

2: It is possible do be described as a whiny twat, a brainless cunt or whatever else without having been the victim of misogyny.  Possibly the person saying it is just a dick (oops - is that misandrist?), or possibly - just possibly - you should consider the possibility that you are actually speaking or acting like a whiny twat/brainless cunt. Ownership of a vagina doesn't confer immunity against being a wassock, and it doesn't mean  you can't be a twat any more than ownership of a penis means you can't be a dick.

3: All over the world, right now, millions of women are directly experiencing abuse, oppression, rape, mutilation, even murder. An email telling you to kill yourself is not cool, but it doesn't put you on the same level of victimhood as someone who's been raped or a woman who's had her clitoris hacked off with a stone, either. I'm sort of revolted to find I actually feel an impulse to apologise to you for pointing that out.

4: I don't need protecting, thank you. Nor do lots of other women. I don't feel even slightly threatened by the atheist community, and I'm not going to lie about that just to avoid upsetting you.

5: Our feminist ancestors didn't spend centuries fighting against the constraints of a male-dominated society so that we, their daughters and granddaughters, could be free to conform to the expectations of a group of feminists instead of to those of men. That is not how this works. Furthermore, if you expected me to join your club because I'm a woman too, that doesn't make me the sexist when I refuse.

6: You might be oversensitive. No, really. It is entirely possible for someone to think you're an idiot - or even a twat or a dick - without that opinion being in any way related to your sex.  It is entirely possibly for someone to think you're wrong without it automatically being the case that they think you're wrong because you're a woman. On the plus side, though, this also means it is possible to defend yourself when someone tells you you're wrong by means more sophisticated than calling them a misogynist.  You could actually, you know, explain how their reasoning is at fault instead of making an unfair assumption and making them feel wronged.  As you are now experiencing first-hand, causing someone to feel unjustly maligned does not make them inclined to value your opinion.

7: You can't market yourself as an inclusive movement if you're going to deliberately exclude people, whether that's by directly attacking "old, white men" or more duplicitously by holding yourselves apart from "humanists" (and importantly, if you're going to try to be sneaky about it in that way, don't be dumb enough to actually point out that the two groups have a significant overlap). You also can't claim to speak for gay people, black people, disabled people, transgendered people, Latino people or any other group you describe (rightly or wrongly) as "marginalised" if all the world's going to hear from you is endless bitching because you're a woman and you got called a nasty name.

8: Yes, there are sexist twats out there, both male and female. We know that, they're everywhere, and any person who says they've never experienced sexism hasn't been paying attention.  But just as "nasty email" =/= "rape", so "inadvertently sexist statement" =/= "woman hater".  Intentions matter, and believe me - at this stage, Atheism Plus cannot afford to be disputing that point.

Edit: Snowrunner has very kindly provided me with a link to the Watson tweet I couldn't get for myself - I had the gist right but not the exact words, so if you want to see for yourself it's here. Thanks, Snowrunner!

One more post about Atheism Plus, then I'm going to try to leave it alone.

Hello again everyone.

If you've followed me here from Twitter, you probably know that I've been coming down pretty hard against Atheism Plus - in fact, the more I learn about it and the more I talk with its proponents, the more against it I become. Yes, I am deeply ornery and prone to fighting against things that demand my complicity just on principle. Ask my boss. It's more than likely that's part of my problem with the whole idea, I won't deny that - but that in itself is kind of the final point I want to make.

(Just a note before I continue, to clear up something I've been hearing a lot from people who don't like my anti-A+ stance. Do I think there is a problem with sexism (and racism and homophobia and transphobia, although sexism has been mentioned far more) within the atheist community? Absolutely; if it's happening at all - and it is - it's a problem. But in case you hadn't noticed, it's a problem fucking everywhere, among all communities. People are still being killed for being the "wrong" of the wrong race, gender or sexuality. This - rather obviously - is not OK. When I object to A+, I object to their methods, not the the ideology behind them.)

My partner has a career that has made him supremely talented at managing people (or has just revealed the talent. Either way.). Dwight Eisenhower described good leadership as "[t]he art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it". That's my partner; he's a genius in the specialised field of making people feel invested in what HE wants them to do, and therefore inclined to make a greater effort.

When I've asked him how he does it (there are occasions when I think it would be a useful skill, such as when I'm talking my way out of getting sacked for being an unmanageable bastard), I've got the impression most of it is just instinctive and probably related to being one of those special people who just like other people. One thing about it that he has been able to distill and articulate for me, though, is that people respond best when they're made to feel good about themselves.

This, in a nutshell, is why Atheism Plus is getting shot to shit on Twitter and elsewhere.  The fact is that you cannot label your group new and improved without by extension labeling everyone else old and inferior. You cannot call yourself morally superior without telling everyone else they're morally inferior. You can't pronounce yourself moral arbiter without telling everyone else their opinion matters less than your own (or not at all, if you're Richard Carrier). Thus - INSTANTLY - Atheism Plus has made everyone who wasn't involved from the very beginning feel misjudged, wronged and vilified. At this point, it barely matters what your intentions were (although I'm astonished that no one behind this little clique realised just how insulting is was to every other non-believer, secularist and humanist in the world); you're asking people to join a movement whose opening gambit is to tell them they're not good enough. Very few people are going to respond favourably to that.

There's one other problem with assuming someone is a tosser until they prove themselves otherwise (and it's multiplied when the only criteria you'll accept is to be exactly the same as you and willing to submit to your definition of a decent person).  You are making an unfavourable assumption about another person based on no information. If you are right, you are as unfair and prejudiced as they are. If you are wrong, you are worse than they are. There is no way in which this can be said NOT to make you unjustifiably judgmental and prejudiced.

So that's my piece. I've been tweeting vociferously about this over the last week or so, and long since reached the stage where I physically cannot respond to every question and shriek of indignation I receive.  Apologies to anyone who's tweeted a question and not received a reply (if you've tweeted to call me a bigot for refusing to presumptively label other people bigots - well, up yours, quite frankly. Are you seeing how this works yet? Note though; I WILL NOT block someone for giving me stick, disagreeing with me or calling me names.  That's both cowardly and unbearably self-important coming from an internet nobody with a blog. I don't have any sort of right not to hear opinions I don't like.).

If you like this post or any other I've written about Atheism Plus, please feel free to refer people to it; however, I'm going to take on my own combative (read argumentative tosspot) nature and try very hard not to get involved any further in this particular argument - I will still be blogging and tweeting about other stuff, though.  It's just that I kind of need to eat, sleep and earn money occasionally!

Peace, yawl. Chill your beans.

Update on Atheism Plus - I think I've identified the problem

Since my last post, I've had conversations with Greta Christina, Jen McCreight and a couple of others on the subject of Atheism Plus.  These conversations took me through even-more-confused-about-it territory, but I think I've now grasped it enough to form my opinion on it.

There are two main problems with A+ as I see it; one I can overlook and one I can't.

The problem I can get over is an issue with communication.  Richard Carrier's representation of A+ - linked in my last post - does seem to be genuinely a misrepresentation of the movement. What started as a move to more actively exclude sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and other nastinesses (which violates my value for free speech on the surface, but is necessary - as Greta points out - when the alternative is tacitly excluding the groups of people targeted by those nastinesses) seems to have been seized by Carrier as a pretext to exclude anyone he doesn't like. Worse, "people Carrier doesn't like" can apparently be defined as anyone not willing to gang up on and exclude non-A+ers even when they've done nothing objectionable.

It would be nice to see McCreight and others disavow Carrier's sentiments, because having seen the contrast between what he means by A+ and what everyone else seems to mean, they've got more reason to be furious with him than anyone else.  However, even if they won't do that it is possible that he could simply be left behind by a more reasonable A+ movement - if that happened, it would be possible to get on board with it even given its inauspicious beginning.

However, I said there was a problem I couldn't get around, and that hasn't been shifted.  After reading McCreight's clarification post (which can be found here: http://freethoughtblogs.com/blaghag/2012/08/responding-to-common-misconceptions-about-atheism/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+freethoughtblogs%2Fblaghag+%28FTB%3A+Blag+Hag%29) I tweeted her with what, to me, was the most important question: "Is it the label or the values that matter?"

The reply I received was "The values", which is in one way the better answer of the two options I offered. However, it did - finally! - help me to identify why I've been feeling so insulted by the whole A+ thing.

What it amounts to for me is this; I AM an A+, in values.  I AM opposed to sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and all that stuff (in principle, at least; I don't claim to know everything, so I'm sure I fall short of perfection at times).

I resent the requirement that's been imposed on me by some random atheists on the internet to effectively adopt a label that - from my POV - says nothing more significant than "not a dick", which really shouldn't need saying.  I resent the idea that these principles that I consider merely part of being "not a dick" are something novel, noteworthy, deserving of everybody's attention.  I resent the implication that I needed some random atheist bloggers to teach me how to be "not a dick".  And most of all, I resent the way I'm being emotionally blackmailed with it; according to the proponents of Atheism Plus, I can either identify myself as something that ought to go without saying OR be assumed to be a dick.  What the A+ movement has given me is a choice between allying myself with them and crediting them with my being "not a dick", or losing the right to be assumed to be "not a dick", a right I had enjoyed for free until now.

Gee, thanks guys. I can see why THIS idea's been a big hit so far.

Time to weigh in on Atheism Plus

For a few days now I've been seeing comments about something called "Atheism Plus" or "A+" all over Twitter.  I didn't know what it was but I could see it was generating strong feeling, so I googled it earlier.  The first post I found on the subject was at Greta Christina's blog, which can be found here: http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2012/08/21/why-atheism-plus-is-good-for-atheism/

Now, I have to say that when I read this my initial reaction was to wonder what on earth the problem was; I've seen some people come down pretty hard against A+, but based on what I read here I couldn't see why.  Much as I admire thinkers like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Dan Dennett and other names typically associated with "New Atheism", I've thought for a while now that it would be good to let people see that not all atheists are posh, uber-educated, straight white dudes aged forty to eighty - they're not actually all that representative.

Atheists and secularists, in my experience, do tend to be more progressive in terms of promoting social equality.  I'm sure there are exceptions, but I think as a rule we're pretty consistently ahead of the curve.  And I want to make this clear right now; I am totally, totally, in favour of improving the culture of atheism such that it is more welcoming, more supportive and more inclusive to everyone.  If we have been guilty of making people feel excluded, I consider that something that should be addressed.

But after reading Greta's comments, I read around a bit further and was increasingly horrified by what I found. Now, it's rare for me to disagree with Greta, and in fact I can't help thinking that maybe the A+ movement's spun out of control since she registered her approval of it, that maybe it started out far more sensibly. In fact, from looking at Jen McCreight's blog where the whole thing seems to have started, I think it probably WAS quite laudable at first: http://freethoughtblogs.com/blaghag/2012/08/atheism/

But then the problems start to creep in. Notable among them is Richard Carrier's particularly charmless post which can be seen here: http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/2207/  You know you're on dodgy territory when the opening sentence reads "There is a new atheism brewing, and it’s the rift we need, to cut free the dead weight so we can kick the C.H.U.D.’s back into the sewers and finally disown them, once and for all."  It doesn't bode well, does it?  What that essentially amounts to is "I'm sick of hearing opposing opinions, it's time to brand dissenters subhuman, generate a bit of mob mentality and forcibly eject them from our movement".  With that kind of mentality, your reasons for trying to exclude the given group/s are all but irrelevant - you've become at least as scary as they are.  From that beginning, it's not a huge surprise to end with "I call everyone now to pick sides (not in comments here, but publicly, via Facebook or other social media): are you with us, or with them; are you now a part of the Atheism+ movement, or are you going to stick with Atheism Less?  Then at least we’ll know who to work with. And who to avoid."

In practical terms, what this seems to have led to is an assumption that only people willing to sign up to the A+ movement are in favour of social equality.  When I registered the irony of this - that based on my refusal to label myself according to other people's definition of an acceptable person, I am assumed to be a bigot - on Twitter, I was met with comments like this:

@Jitterysquirrel: "When you fight against social progress and equality, you are a bigot. When you shit on those who don't, you're an asshole too."

What?! I'm not fighting against social progress, that's just ridiculous! All I'm doing is arguing that A+ does not equal good person, and that good person does not equal A+.  I'm in favour of equality and progress as I hope other posts in this blog illustrate; I'm just not going to buy into the mentality that one must wordlessly submit to the A+ movement and promise never to disagree with any other member ever again in order to be a decent person. You know, because that's ridiculous.

I think the thing that bothers me most about the A+ movement, though, is how needlessly pessimistic - even plain cynical - it is.  When I meet a new person, be it online or IRL, I assume they're NOT a dick until they give me reason to think otherwise (and occasionally, they do, of course). I would like to have the same courtesy extended to me, that's all.  If I say something that betrays prejudice, bigotry or even just thoughtlessness, by all means call me on that because I don't want to be that kind of person - I want to know about my mistake and learn from it... but at least wait until I've actually cocked up before you start calling me an arsehole.

Atheism Plus is in many ways very deserving of praise. I am completely behind most of its values and aims. But by adopting the attitude of "if you're not with us, you're against us, against our values and therefore a bigot", they've shot themselves in the - well, not even in the foot. They've shot themselves in the head. I'm an A+ by everything except the label - but give me a ridiculously unnecessary (and hilariously melodramatic) ultimatum like that, and I'm out on principle.  If that kind of bullying mob mentality worked, I'd still be a christian.