I must dispute the implication put forward by Stephanie Zvan in this post:
A bunch of lay people whose hobby seems to be talking about how bad Rebecca and her friends are decided without seeing her talk what it was about. Then they recruited someone to be the mouthpiece for their complaints.
The alleged hobbyists complained of here are myself, my fellow SIN author Notung, and my fellow AOK blogger Chas. If you read our respective blogs or Twitter streams, you’ll find that Rebecca isn’t generally a central topic of conversation. My post from earlier this morning is one of only two mentioning her, and it was mainly to lament how central she has become as a topic of conversation.
As to whether we’d already seen the video, Chas was in the live audience and I was watching the live stream, which sort of should be obvious from the fact that I gave Ed the livestream link on the spot, days before Hambone’s YouTube video went up.
As to the claim of recruitment, we certainly didn’t commission Ed Clint to write anything in particular, but simply pointed him to the video and asked if he’d like to comment, knowing that he is far more well-read in the field than either ourselves or Rebecca. For my part there was no priming (one way or the other) and I cannot think of a better “hobby” for skeptics to take up than seeking out highly qualified sources and trying to learn from them.
Finally, I have to relish the humor here in that Chas prophesied well in advance that Ed’s forthcoming post would be written off as harassment or, as Zvan puts it, targeting. In truth, the only thing that we hope to see targeted are bad ideas.
