A+ to Ashes
In the wake of a certain female blogger’s protest over pro-equality t-shirts, another feminist blogger’s sudden hiatus immediately after expressing the need for Atheism Plus, and a real tragedy in the life of a third female Atheism Plus leader, the movement was dead almost on arrival. Its fate was sealed when optimistic supporter, Matt Dillahunty, President of the Atheist Community of Austin and Host of Non-Prophet Radio got banned from the A+ forums in an attempt to show that those forums were fair to outsiders. To make a long story short, he quickly found out that they weren’t. Around the same time, another female Freethought Blogs (FTB) blogger wrote about the possibility of reproduction without males, while feminists in the Rad Fem Hub* gleefully speculated about the submission and demise of the male gender. Shortly after that, the now infamous PZ Myers wrote a blog post where he mourned the death of an octopus over the death of a woman, while denouncing Korean culture in the process, and aptly demonstrating that when you keep turning left unquestioningly, you end up on the far, far right. Last I checked, even some of his most loyal acolytes seemed a bit queasy.
In the meantime, three of the FTB network’s best bloggers deserted Freethought Blogs for more fertile pastures, with at least one of the cited reasons for the departures being that civil discourse had become impossible due to the behavior of the commentariat. But there may have been other reasons as well. I mean, what would I know? In any case, you can now find two of these blogs by following the links below, where your comments will hopefully be welcome, or at least fairly addressed:
As for A+, all that’s left are a few persistent embers glowing angrily in the heart of the largely deserted A+ forums, where a few people feeling sorry for themselves are battling angry trolls and waiting for the next big conflagration. And so I wonder, what, if anything, have we learned?
Hopefully, at least some of us learned that intentionally trying to cause “deep rifts” and fighting against inclusiveness, even in the name of social justice, is not a good idea after all. In the end, it doesn’t matter what we call ourselves; it matters what we do and how we treat each other.
*It’s important for people to understand that most of the writers at Freethought Blogs are not radical feminists and neither are the A-Plussers, though their inconsistent feminist ideology is loosely based on radical feminist theory, which has slowly crept into mainstream feminist thought.
