It is not remotely difficult to find people who destroy others for sport on the internet. Scanning quickly through the contents of Ophelia’s blog for examples, one may quite easily find people saying really nasty things about my old friend Justin Vacula:
Exactly how does letting a deranged misogynist in making women want to be part of this movement, exactly?
…stop acting like there is no history of Vacula being a misogynist shit stain.
Vacula’s “advice” strikes me as almost saying: “shut up, lie down, and take it!”
Does Justin teach Victim Blaming / Rape Apologetics classes? Because he could.
They are fucking evil shits who will get people hurt.
But maybe Justin is a special case, a relatively low-profile writer who is easy to target. What do Ophelia’s readers have to say about someone at the high end of the atheist fame spectrum, such as Richard Dawkins?
Dawkins is a really shitty liar. He’s a shitty alot of things. . . . He’s a misogynist to the bone.
It’s not so much that Dawkins has spend too much time hanging around creationists as that he is, in the end, just another libertarian shithead who has managed to come to the right conclusion about gods for all the wrong reasons…
Dawkins would be right at home on Mad Men. Yeah. Really. He’s not a progressive at all, he’s a reactionary.
He’s lying. I’m quite comfortable making that call, at this point. He may, by now, be lying to himself as well, but he’s full of shit and I have to think that at some level he knows it.
42% of Americans still don’t accept evolution. I blame Richard Dawkins myself. Harsh, but perhaps the number would be less if he wasn’t such a dick.
How much for the privilege of licking Dawkins’ butt? Is it half-off just to watch an RDRFS Personality do it for you?
I’ve barely even scratched the surface here, having waded through maybe half a dozen posts out of dozens directed at Professor Dawkins. And I’m not even going to try grepping through the comment threads filled with people inveighing against Abbie Smith, Michael Nugent, Matt Taylor, Tim Hunt, Jaclyn Glenn, Sam Harris, Christina Hoff Sommers, and who knows how many others. Ophelia even took the time to set up a thread just for saying nasty things about me and my bro Chas, who are evidently “slimy über-creeps of the misogyny movement,” whatever that is supposed to be.
I could make a full-time hobby of cutting-and-pasting the demonization and invective hosted and encouraged at Butterflies and Wheels, but you probably get the idea. Ms. Benson had no problem whatsoever “destroying others for sport” when she was the one leading the cybermob in an effort to tarnish the reputation of others.
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name,
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.— Othello Act 3, Scene 3, 155–161
Having rejected civility and restraint in attacking her fellow freethinkers, Ophelia has carved out her own paradise for Iago. Heaven forfend that she must now abide therein.
