{"id":795,"date":"2015-04-09T14:27:22","date_gmt":"2015-04-09T21:27:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/?p=795"},"modified":"2015-04-09T14:27:22","modified_gmt":"2015-04-09T21:27:22","slug":"confessions-of-a-tone-troll-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/2015\/04\/09\/confessions-of-a-tone-troll-redux\/","title":{"rendered":"Confessions of a Tone Troll, Redux"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tonetroll3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So a selection of\u00a0snakes has again been pushed out of the Emerald Isle. \u00a0Atheist Ireland<\/a> has dissociated itself from PZ Myers of FreethoughtBlogs, on the grounds, essentially, that Myers is a shrill, foul-mouthed demagogue with a rabid cult following, whose toxic shenanigans have damaged the atheist\/humanist community both internally and externally. \u00a0Good on you, Atheist Ireland, and on those who have come out in your support.<\/p>\n

Some of us, though, have been saying this sort of thing for years. \u00a0 For example, there is the much-maligned Slymepit<\/a>, demonized by Myers and Co as a cesspool of misogyny, racism, hate speech, and all the other sins in the SJW playbook. \u00a0In fact, it is raunchy, irreverent, zealous\u00a0in its skewering of SJW fools and\u00a0follies, and occasionally OTT–but it is also a diverse community engaged in fast-moving free discussion, and anything BUT misogynistic, racist, etc. \u00a0Many of its denizens reached the ‘Pit by roughly the same path I took, via shock at and disenchantment with the burgeoning toxicity at Pharyngula and related sites. \u00a0The same story, indeed, is being told over and over again in the comments on, for example, Hemant Mehta’s endorsement<\/a> of AI’s stand.<\/p>\n

So I’m going to revisit my own words<\/a> of a couple of years back, having reviewed what I said then, and thinking it is probably worth saying again:<\/p>\n

[19 November 2012]” What a difference a year makes.\u00a0 Twelve short months ago, I was an admirer of PZ Myers\u2019 blog Pharyngula, and a happy dipper of my toe into some of the other Freethought pools.\u00a0 I went there for news and views, mainly, always ready to chortle at the latest YEC comedy routine, pharyngulate a silly poll, or follow links to cool science sites or skeptical tidbits.\u00a0 Oh, there was the odd post that gave me pause: posts where PZ was hoodwinked by a hoax, or snarked with excessive harshness on things like, say, being too nice to one\u2019s Christian relatives. It was mildly embarrassing to learn I\u2019d be considered a borderline accommodationist and a milksoppy dictionary atheist, but hey – FtB did not loom very large on my horizon.<\/p>\n

What I almost never did, however, was read more than few inches into the comments, largely on the grounds that life is too short.\u00a0 And since I did not find Elevatorgate very interesting while the crisis was on, I either skipped or skimmed any discussion of it.\u00a0 Just another overblown internet flap, I thought.\u00a0 Anyway, I remembered Rebecca Watson from her pre-banning days on JREF, and considered her a lightweight then, a kind of frat-girl given to not terribly witty jokes.\u00a0 My skimming, though, left me with the vague impression that Watson had morphed into a brave martyr for women\u2019s rights, that the lovely Richard Dawkins had blotted his copybook, and that an evil troll blog-nymmed ERV was flapping her leathery wings around the edge of the lighted space, along with legions of her slimy minions. \u00a0It appears I was wrong on all counts.<\/p>\n

My epiphany did not come via Pharyngula.\u00a0 Evidently some vile sexist misogynistic douchebag had polluted the pages of Nature<\/em> with a piece of truly egregious asshattery, and one of the other Freethought bloggers<\/a> was fearlessly calling him and the editor to account.\u00a0 Crikey, thought I, and followed the link. It led to \u201cWomanspace<\/a>\u201d, a very short story by a South African virologist named Ed Rybicki: a lighthearted bit of fictional fluff built on a whimsical quantum-type theory to account for women\u2019s general superiority in the shopping arena. \u00a0Not great literature, but light, funny, and competently written. \u00a0I wondered if I had followed the wrong link. \u00a0I thought one would really have to work hard to find that story offensive, but it seemed that a lot of people across the internet were willing to make the effort.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the short version.\u00a0 I went back and read not just the OP, in all its self-righteous pettifogging detail, but also the comments – a chorus of playground jeers and insults that went beyond Rybicki to smear his wife and family members as well.\u00a0 Rybicki personally came on the thread in a doomed effort to defend himself, with a comment that was written partly in a kind of rhetorical third-person, and was thus seized upon as sockpuppetry.\u00a0 Anyone not joining in the chorus was assumed to be another sockpuppet, or else there at Rybicki\u2019s instigation.\u00a0 Then the fearless blogger opened up an entirely gratuitous second thread<\/a> – a gleeful invitation to a pitchfork party, an online version of a stoning.\u00a0 I was disgusted enough to wade into that one myself, bringing on all the predictable accusations of tone-trolling and toxic socks – so I said my bit, and stuck my flounce.<\/p>\n

Now, what disgusted me even more than the infantile vulgarity of the comments (and the OP, for that matter) was their pointlessness.\u00a0 What were these people trying to accomplish?\u00a0 What did they actually want Rybicki to do?\u00a0 From the sound of it, they\u2019d be happy with nothing short of public confession and a grovelling apology, followed by Rybicki burning himself alive on a bonfire made from that entire issue of Nature<\/em>.\u00a0 Or was he just supposed to accept his role as a kind of human sacrifice, pour discourager les autres<\/em>?\u00a0 The immaturity of it was breathtaking.\u00a0 Which led to a question of equally breathtaking naivet\u00e9 on my part: did the grownups know<\/em>?\u00a0 If PZ, who was almost my age, could see what was happening, would he not be disgusted as well?<\/p>\n

Silly me.\u00a0 I went over to Pharyngula and at last began reading the comments.\u00a0 Went back and read up on Elevatorgate, paying attention this time.\u00a0 In the next few days, PZ more than answered my question, and in the negative – first with his hard line on the hapless Gelato Guy<\/a>, and then with the amazing clusterfuck of Bunnygate<\/a>, where he caved in to the pressure of his own commentariat.\u00a0 I shifted into lurking anthropologist mode, and kept watching.\u00a0 Over the next few months, I watched Ryan Grant Long undergo a version of the Rybicki treatment, followed by DJ Grothe being pilloried for trying to show how Ryan had been misrepresented.\u00a0 I watched John Loftus, whom I like and respect, pulling out of FtB in protest.\u00a0 I came out of lurkage once more, in January, when the dogpack\u2019s savaging of Edwin Kagin<\/em><\/a>, of all people, was too agonizing to watch from the sidelines.\u00a0 Etc.\u00a0 But even a lurking anthropologist can get bored when the data simply repeat themselves.\u00a0 I\u2019ll cut to the chase: my informal observations, for what they\u2019re worth.<\/p>\n

Those involved in this bizarre behavior included about half of the Freethought bloggers, their Skepchick buds, and a shifting population of faithful commenters.\u00a0 Their demons – the targets chosen for pelting in the stocks – were increasingly men and women who might otherwise be regarded as allies and even heroes, including prominent atheists and skeptics. The concentration of vitriol, the insularity, the attacks on newcomers, chimp-style grooming of insiders, demonization of dissidents, and shrill adherence to a tight-lipped, zero-tolerance creed of \u201csocial justice,\u201d were all ways to bind a community.\u00a0 It was, moreover, a community based not on reason and the examination of ideas, but on the knee-jerk application of a peculiar bigotry – any of us who was deemed to fall short was offered no empathy and no quarter, and attempts at self-defence or even rational discourse just compounded our douchebaggery in their eyes. The phenomenon began to look more and more like either a mass case of borderline personality disorder, or a cult.\u00a0 In fact, the recent spinoff into Atheism+ looks like a cult with a mass case of borderline personality disorder.”<\/p>\n

Back to 2015. \u00a0Nothing much has changed, except the levels of virulence and attacks on prominent atheists have been ramped up, the Myers bloc is spinning ever faster in full moral-panic mode, and the rifts are ever deeper. \u00a0Oh, and the pushback has begun. \u00a0Atheist Ireland, may the road ever rise to meet your feet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So a selection of\u00a0snakes has again been pushed out of the Emerald Isle. \u00a0Atheist Ireland has dissociated itself from PZ…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}