{"id":767,"date":"2013-04-22T10:41:27","date_gmt":"2013-04-22T00:41:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/?p=767"},"modified":"2013-04-22T12:19:58","modified_gmt":"2013-04-22T02:19:58","slug":"melissa-thompson-and-flavia-dzodan-on-call-out-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/2013\/04\/22\/melissa-thompson-and-flavia-dzodan-on-call-out-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Melissa Thompson and Flavia Dzodan on call-out culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Melissa Thompson has a very good post about the brutality and irrationality of call-out culture<\/a>.\u00a0See also\u00a0this\u00a0older post <\/a>by Flavia Dzodan.<\/p>\n

Call-out culture – in which people who’d expect\u00a0to be treated\u00a0as\u00a0colleagues,\u00a0allies, or even friends\u00a0are held up for\u00a0public shaming\u00a0over\u00a0trivial\u00a0or imaginary wrongdoings – has\u00a0become\u00a0a cancer on the atheist\/skeptic movement. Good people have been hurt and\/or had their reputations harmed, friendships have been destroyed, time and energy that could been used in opposing the real enemies have been wasted, the movement has been\u00a0divided, and (let’s be clear about this)\u00a0the backlash against call-out culture and its leading practitioners\u00a0has often been vulgar and unnecessarily\u00a0destructive in its own right.<\/p>\n

In this environment, many of us\u00a0remain\u00a0silent either because we\u00a0feel intimidated or because we fear that anything we\u00a0say will simply\u00a0make matters worse. I’ve often kept my silence\u00a0out of one or other feeling, or a combination, but I now wish I’d shown more courage and clarity from the beginning\u00a0in opposing call-out culture. Wishing it would go away doesn’t help. In my own partial defence, and that of others, I don’t think we knew what hit us when the whole thing began – when some individuals associated with the atheist and skeptic movements\u00a0began using their public platforms to “call out” colleagues\u00a0and allies for public shaming and excoriation. This was something very alien to the rational spirit of organised atheism and secularism.<\/p>\n

In the environment that has been created, some topics cannot be discussed reasonably. We all feel as if we’re constantly walking on eggshells, and the spirit of honest, open, mutually charitable inquiry\u00a0is lost.<\/p>\n

What I didn’t realise until recently was how far this call-out culture has become prevalent in other corners of the blogosphere and the general culture, especially in forums of people who perceive themselves as fighting for social justice. Nor did I know how much critique call-out culture\u00a0was receiving around the internet. That’s something to be grateful for. Posts such as those by Dzodan and (most recently) Thompson are very\u00a0valuable and deserve wide reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Melissa Thompson has a very good post about the brutality and irrationality of call-out culture.\u00a0See also\u00a0this\u00a0older post by Flavia Dzodan. Call-out culture – in which people who’d expect\u00a0to be treated\u00a0as\u00a0colleagues,\u00a0allies, or even friends\u00a0are held up for\u00a0public shaming\u00a0over\u00a0trivial\u00a0or imaginary wrongdoings – has\u00a0become\u00a0a cancer on the atheist\/skeptic movement. Good people have been hurt and\/or had their reputations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,19],"tags":[284],"class_list":["post-767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-debate","tag-call-out-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}