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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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Those guys get a bad reputation thanks to the activity of those on Reddit etc., but they're not irrational crazed anti-Christians. 

It doesn't help that the face of the movement is Richard Dawkins who is kind of a garbage fire

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Really, of all the "four horsemen" of atheism, Daniel Dennett was (is?) the only one who was kind of nice about it, possibly because (as far as I know) he didn't tend to stray off-topic. The other three just had the uncanny ability to sound reasonable and level-headed even when they were wading into topics well out of their depth, like women or muslims (seriously, always one or the other).

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It doesn't help that the face of the movement is Richard Dawkins who is kind of a garbage fire

 

I've not really paid much attention to him other than reading one of his books, which was pretty good.

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I've not really paid much attention to him other than reading one of his books, which was pretty good.

Ready to have your perception of a person SMASHED by that person himself? Because here's his Twitter account. Trigger Warning: Hate, bigotry, stupid.

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins

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I don't mind Richard Dawkins so much, though I am sometimes appalled at the things he suggests.  To me he's kind of like the Ron Paul of pop culture (for those that don't know, Ron Paul is Rand Paul's father, a staunch libertarian and has a lot of good ideas like ending the war on drugs, ending private prisons, and reduced military spending, but also wants to do crazy things like go back on the gold standard).  I don't think his treatment of Mulsims is any worse than his treatment of really any religious group, though he does represent a version of Atheism that seems to have adopted the same religious zealotry it is so against..  He makes claims like parents who know their child will be disabled should abort, but this all seems to be based on an idea that anything that doesn't absolutely hold empirical data above everything else is bad, and that everything should be treated as though it were some kind of math equation.

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Glancing through his recent posts, all I saw was that Venkataraman Ramakrishnan is going to be president of the Royal Society, nothing particularly hateful. I kinda agree with him on the whole X being worse than Y, is not an endorsement of Y, but he expressed it in a profoundly inflammatory way. 

 

I'm not going to wade through mountains of old posts to find out if he is indeed an asshat (I'm sure he is, no reason for me to not believe you guys), but sometimes it's good to separate the science from the person who did the science. His work on evolution is pretty darn good, and he's been great at getting that message out to the public, something many high profile scientists don't bother with in the slightest.

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I don't have a problem with his science, I just said he's a shitty face for new atheism and he popularity is a big part of the reason why that movement is perceived as shitty, as well as probably a substantial part of the reason it is shitty in such ways as it is. I think this handy chart says it all:


post-26188-0-19393300-1449445500_thumb.jpg

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Dude is still harping on about Ahmed Mohamed (I'm sorry, "asking questions" rather) months after the whole ordeal with the clock. Dawkins is a great scientist, but also a bloody Clock Boy Truther.

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I really liked PZ Meyers' put-down that condemning Ahmed Mohamed's clock for being basically from a kit is like claiming that The Selfish Gene wasn’t a real contribution to science because it just repackages the work of Maynard Smith and Hamilton.

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I don't have a problem with his science, I just said he's a shitty face for new atheism and he popularity is a big part of the reason why that movement is perceived as shitty, as well as probably a substantial part of the reason it is shitty in such ways as it is. I think this handy chart says it all:

attachicon.gifdawkinschart.jpg

 

Ha! That's awesome.

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Yup. Death threats for Jim Sterling. I wonder why...?

 

Honest question, why? I mean this time in particular, I get it in general.

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Does it even matter? Death threats have become the new hatemail. Where a certain type of person would have made an angry "You suck and your content sucks" post a decade ago, now they make an angry "You suck and I'm going to kill you" tweet. At this point it would be more remarkable if an internet personality with a six-digit audience didn't get death threats.

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Shots have been fired; The Washington Post, in the wake of Donald Trump declaring he wants to ban Muslim entry to the USA, put up an article that managed to tie Trump in via references to Gamergate. By name.

 

"Donald Trump is the Gamergate of Republican politics"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2015/12/07/donald-trump-is-the-gamergate-of-republican-politics/?postshare=9491449534895592&tid=ss_tw

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Bummer that Dawkins is such a turd. I liked The God Delusion and have a very strong distaste for religion so he resonated with me on that level.

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The death threats thing for JFSS is probably still tied to that group of early access devs he's been talking about in passing for the past few months.

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Shots have been fired; The Washington Post, in the wake of Donald Trump declaring he wants to ban Muslim entry to the USA, put up an article that managed to tie Trump in via references to Gamergate. By name.

 

"Donald Trump is the Gamergate of Republican politics"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2015/12/07/donald-trump-is-the-gamergate-of-republican-politics/?postshare=9491449534895592&tid=ss_tw

 

I a big fan of Alyssa Rosenberg, but I also think it's more accurate to describe that as what it is: A blog post by Alyssa Rosenberg. She is a pop-culture writer who has been doing thoughtful analysis of media for years. I feel like there's a big gap from Alyssa Rosenberg making yet another excellent blog post on her blog that is currently hosted by The Washington Post and "The Washington Post . . . put[ting] up an article." Here are some of her previous blog posts on Gamergate.

 

She also writes some of my favorite Game of Thrones episode recaps!

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I think what's been better is the image the Israel Post ran of Trump: him holding his arm out at a podium, at a 45 degree angle. It's a great photo of him that just so happens to also depict him as Hitler, so I think it's going to be one for the ages.

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The political perspective on gamergate means nothing to me, really. In these aspects of games media, narratology and sociology, changes don't happen via legislation. They happen in the heads of people. Same goes for the things we can and should do against harassment. In that sense, I spend a lot of time arguing that opposition to gamergate has nothing to do with political ideas, strictly speaking (especially not when those political ideas are explained within the US political spectrum). Gamergate, I hope and think, is less a left vs. right issue and more a science vs. conspiracy theory one. Rosenberg isn't helping to keep that distinction clear here. Instead, it seems to me that essentially apolitical, international proceedings are compared to political and national ones. I'll... think about that article for another bit. :mellow:

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I disagree. Gamergate's champions - Adam Baldwin and Milo, for example - are extremely conservative personalities who do as much as they can to promote conservative values, even down to the level of the shitty conspiracy theories.

 

Remember, conservatism over the last decade has been hijacked by nutcases. In turn, Gamergate got co-opted by those conservative elements / parties (which I was saying when this all started would happen; and it did). It may not be at the legislative level yet, but a big part of politics that happens these days is at the social level, which is where GG is at.

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I wouldn't say it got co-opted, since it was Baldwin himself who coined the term. And the very core of the movement is step for step with a lot of the bullshit in those circles, so it was basically the same thing from the start, if not in name, then at least in spirit.

 

But otherwise, yeah, I completely agree with Henroid.

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