Once again, for what feels like the nth time, my favorite blogger over at Freethought Blogs has left the network. This time, they weren’t recruited by Patheos, like James Croft or Justin Griffith or Kaveh Mousavi, but rather discharged over a clear breach of ethics. Apparently, gamers aren’t the only constituency demanding more rigorous attention to ethics in journalism these days, Hemant Mehta has been doing so on behalf of the atheist community, in this case as in others.
I have a handful of comments on recent events. Firstly, I’m sad to see Avi go. He was always up for debate, both in his comment sections and on Twitter, and I almost invariably found our interactions enjoyable. Of all the social justice bloggers, he was one of the few who were willing to directly engage non-SJW skeptics in that way. Sadly, the circumstances of his departure will likely make him into a cautionary example in this respect, leading to even fewer lines of communication across the Great Rift.
I am still having some trouble adjusting my mental picture of who Avi really is as a person. I still believe that he is a doctor who volunteers his skills in a part of world that desperately needs to build up its medical infrastructure, when he could be back in the UK making bank. It’s damn hard not to admire someone who does that, even if they are prone to unattributed borrowing and probable fabulation. I find myself wondering whether all the stories that I’ve read are really true, in retrospect. I’d link to many more examples, but the whole site got pulled down over the weekend.
Unlike most of his critics, I desire to see Avicenna fully rehabilitated and brought back into the fold of reputable writers. (Parenthetically, I’ve always found “Fuck him to the ground, let him be a lesson to others” to be a distastefully anti-humanistic approach.) However, the process of rehabilitation is bound to require enormous effort on his part. It is not enough to apologize for plagiarism and move forward, Avi has to admit to himself and others which particular stories were made up and apologize sincerely for every instance in which fantasy was put forward in lieu of truth. If no one actually e-mailed him to privately accuse him of sexual misconduct at a skeptics conference some 8,900 miles distant, he needs to own up to that and apologize to those who have been implicated. If he was not called in to perform an autopsy over 2,000 km north of where he was living and working, then he needs to own up to that as well. Fabulation is the perfect antithesis of skepticism, we must strive to discover and destroy fabulous tales masquerading as truth no matter where we find them. However, I’m not saying this merely as a skeptic, but rather as someone sincerely concerned for Avi’s personal well-being. I’ve lived just long enough to witness that an edifice build upon lies, however elaborate and beautiful, will invariably come crashing down upon the heads of those who live therein. Better far to tear it down yourself and begin again from firm foundations.
Finally, I’d like to credit “Honest Jim” for initially breaking the plagiarism story on Twitter. To my knowledge, he was the first person to spot it, and I’d hate not to give credit where due in a post about the importance of giving credit where due. Prior to Jim, someone known as “The Yeti” was the first person to start seriously questioning whether Avicenna was playing fast and loose with copypasta. Whatever their motivations, Jim and Yeti have made the world a less untruthful place, and they deserve praise for doing so.
Your thoughts?
