Are Atheism+ and Occupy Wall Street examples “where the target becomes a feminist institution that no longer functions in its original capacity”? Could you spell out what you mean or point to discussion of their changes?
The Occupy Wall Street example in particular was talking about their use of what they call “the Progressive Stack” to organize meetings. The general idea was this—people want to speak up, but not everyone can talk at the same time, so we need some sort of system for choosing who gets to speak when. First in first out isn’t fair enough when you factor in things like minorities or women feeling more inhibited about speaking, so let’s let them jump the queue and speak before people who are white and/or male.
It’s an idea that sounds just fair enough to be considered, and has the benefit of both having passionate supporters on the left and of having an obvious path to paint opponents as sexist racists that want to silence women and minorities. The left won on this point at the cost of driving off much of their popular support, and the movement has been marginalized since.
The above is my understanding of what happened with this, synthesized over a fair amount of reading and research. It may well be wrong, and the situation may well be more complicated than I described. As far as I understand it, though, it’s the major mistake that the movement made—it let itself be co-opted into caring about social justice at the cost of their other goals.
As far as Atheism+ goes, it’s an organized group spearheaded by people like Rebecca Watson who are outraged—outraged—at the behavior of atheists being insufficiently pro-woman and pro-social justice. Rebecca Watson in particular has a laser-like focus on sexism within the atheist and skeptic community, at the expense of the larger groups’ nominal goals. She’s responsible for the whole “elevatorgate” debacle, and responded to Richard Dawkins’ claim that she was overreacting by going after Dawkins personally with this piece of loveliness. It says it’s not a call for a boycott, but it’s a call for a boycott (“Nope, I didn’t call for a boycott. I’m relaying the fact that I have no interest in giving this person any more of my money or attention.” I read that as “I want to hurt Dawkins personally but realize that I don’t have the social capital to carry off leading a boycott, so I’m going to encourage people to boycott Dawkins while saying that I’m not doing so)
I actually haven’t done all that much analysis of Atheism+. I pretty much have discarded it as a group of people who have been successfully derailed by people like Rebecca Watson talking about sexism constantly within the atheist and skeptical community, and want to do the same. Just look at the first sentence of their FAQ
Atheism Plus is a term used to designate spaces, persons, and groups dedicated to promoting social justice and countering misogyny, racism, homo/bi/transphobia, ableism and other such bigotry inside and outside of the atheist community.
They are essentially policing the atheist community for compliance with social justice ideas. Their own website is saying the same things I am about them with different wording and connotations.
[Occupy Wall Street] let itself be co-opted into caring about social justice at the cost of their other goals.
When discussing OWS and similar political movements, the term “social justice” gets quite ambiguous. OWS has always been about social justice, by any reasonable meaning of the term. To be clear, you obviously mean identity politics, the notion that self-styled “minority” groups are more equal than everyone else.
Yeah, I’m talking about the more narrow definition that gets made fun of in /r/tumblrinaction. As opposed to what I think of as “economic justice”, which involves things like banking reform, fairness in income distribution, taking care of the poor and homeless, etc.
As far as Atheism+ goes, it’s an organized group spearheaded by people like Rebecca Watson who are outraged—outraged—at the behavior of atheists being insufficiently pro-woman and pro-social justice. Rebecca Watson in particular has a laser-like focus on sexism within the atheist and skeptic community, at the expense of the larger groups’ nominal goals. She’s responsible for the whole “elevatorgate” debacle, and responded to Richard Dawkins’ claim that she was overreacting by going after Dawkins personally with this piece of loveliness.
It got worse.
Jen McCreight and PZ Myers have been circulating unverifiable accusations of rape, allegedly relied from anonymous sources, against big-name activists in the Skeptics movement, including Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer, who didn’t happen to have jumped on the Atheism+ bandwagon.
Knowing nothing about this, “who didn’t happen to have” looks unfair. Membership in Atheism+ wasn’t distributed randomly, so it’s possible people who chose not to join have different views on women.
As far as Atheism+ goes, it’s an organized group spearheaded by people like Rebecca Watson who are outraged—outraged—at the behavior of atheists being insufficiently pro-woman and pro-social justice.
When women in the atheist movement still get sexually harassed by public figures, get rape and death threats, and when having a “no sexual harassment” policy creates a firestorm, all from other people within the atheist movement, the movement does need to be more pro-women and more pro-social justice.
Watson’s response to Dawkins comes after he gave a response to her ridiculing her for feeling uncomfortable about getting asked out on an elevator.
And as for the mission statement, I don’t think there’s a problem with countering misogyny, racism, homo/bi/transphobia, or ableism. That sounds like a good thing. You may disagree with what they label as x-phobia, but the discussion should be about what is x-phobic, not whether we should care about x-phobia.
When women in the atheist movement still get sexually harassed by public figures, get rape and death threats, and when having a “no sexual harassment” policy creates a firestorm, all from other people within the atheist movement, the movement does need to be more pro-women and more pro-social justice.
False dilemma.
Social justice warriors are not the only kind of people on this planet who care about safety and well-being of other people. Also, feminists sometimes send death threats, too.
The sexual harassment by public figures certainly has to stop, the perpetrators have to be punished: legally when possible, and removed from positions of power within the community.
Giving more power to feminists and social justice warriors is not the only way to do this. It is one of the possible solutions, but not the only possible solution.
As Nancy said, what other movement that you could see becoming active in the atheist movement that supports this?
And yes, they send death threats too. But at a ridiculously lower rate than is currently done, considering many popular female bloggers say they get death/rape threats every time they say something controversial.
The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a strong movement for Maintaining Decent Treatment for All People.
Well, usually that doesn’t fall under the rubric of a political movement at all. We just call it civility—a core moral value of any physical community where people seek to be protected from bodily harm and thrive in a nurturing environment.
If there is any political question here, it’s who or what should be included under “people”. Folks who are similar enough to you in e.g. culture that you can intuitively trust them? Any Homosapien’s? Any Hominidae (i.e. including other Great Apes)? Other animal species on a case-by-case basis, such as dolphins and whales? Robots and other man-made intelligences? Corporations?
But it’s quite unclear how deferring to the so-called “social justice movement” would be helpful in approaching these hard questions. It seems that their “politics” is much too simplistic, so they just ignore them.
You’ve underestimated what a Maintaining Decent Treatment for All People Movement would cover.
It might be pacifist. It would certainly be very cautious about war. It would be pro-refugee.
And push for a rational justice system. civil behavior by police, and good prison conditions.
Oppose domestic violence, and be emphatic that this applies to men, women, and children.
Oppose bullying, both in schools and workplaces.
I’m not sure I’ve included all the major categories.
A lot of this isn’t being done reliably, and some of it faces a lot of opposition
I’m not going to say that the social justice movement is the only source of valuable information, but it’s done some good work in pointing out that there’s violence which isn’t taken seriously—for example, violence against trans people.
For another source (overlapping SJ, I think), check out work being done by whores for them to be treated as normal parts of civil society.
There’s a lot of work to be done even if you aren’t worried about apes and dolphins.
Sure, and political/social movements exist which pursue all of these goals. But the underlying moral principle is very much not a matter of ideology or any political “plank”, even though ‘left-wing’- or ‘progressive’- leaning folks are perhaps more likely to care about it in a political sense. Jonathan Haidt is of course very clear on this, and the general idea is older than Haidt’s work—check out George Lakoff’s Moral Politics or Jane Jacobs’s Systems of Survival.
This is probably one reason why the so-called “SJ movement” went so clearly astray in trying to piggyback on any and all of these quite diverse causes, and somehow join them all in some kind of ‘big tent’ movement. It doesn’t work like that - ‘big tent’ organizations are always a result of coalition-forming within existing civic institutions and processes. Movements need more flexibility, as well as a stronger commitment from their participants.
I don’t know whether anyone noticed my list is basically libertarian. It’s a very challenging agenda, but it just covers allowing freedom and protection from violence. It doesn’t cover ongoing help for people who can’t fully take care of themselves.
A meta solution would be to start this movement. Which would be extremely difficult on a scale of society, but perhaps easier within a community.
As an outsider, I have no idea how large the “people who frequently go to atheist meetups and already mostly know each other” group is. Perhaps five or ten of them could start this kind of a movement inside that community.
and when having a “no sexual harassment” policy creates a firestorm
Wasn’t it rather the adoption of this as an explicit policy that created trouble? And that’s not surprising, because it suggests that the problem is prevalent in the group to an extent that makes the explicit policy needed, which insinuation will naturally offend some members of the group.
I don’t think there’s a problem with countering misogyny, racism, homo/bi/transphobia, or ableism. That sounds like a good thing. You may disagree with what they label as x-phobia, but the discussion should be about what is x-phobic, not whether we should care about x-phobia.
The problem is that this derails the discussion into arguing whether Y is x-phobic rather than whether Y is bad.
I think the mission statement is a good thing. But, I agree how the policy is carried out (e.g. crying “That’s racist!” and nothing more) is ineffective.
Alternative: If somebody says something x-phobic, the response should be something along the lines of “Saying X is harmful to group Y because....”
[Retracted] You’re citing a blogpost from August 2012 for the claim that these bad things “still occur today”? I’m no fan of the atheist movement, and I agree that its proponents can be occasionally lacking in basic kindness and social graces (as do many others, who refuse to self-identify as ‘atheists’ for this very reason). But still, you’re not providing much evidence for your claim here. [/Retracted]
Edited to add: Apparently you only meant to refer to the time ‘Atheism+’ was actually getting off the ground—the “elevatorgate” controversy and whatnot. If so, I misinterpreted your comment, for which I apologize—but that would make your point rather trivial, since ThrustVectoring was clearly objecting to “Atheism+”’s continued [assumed to be detrimental] influence on the atheist movement.
That was an article justifying the creation of atheism+. This was a discussion of why there was a problem in the atheist movement that lead to its creation.
Is the quoted “still occur today” in bogus’s comment a fabricated quotation, a quotation of something you’ve since edited away, or a quotation of something I’m being too blind to see?
(If it’s the second of those, you probably ought to indicate the fact somehow.)
I definitely think it still does, but I haven’t said anything about that in this thread so far.
I guess you could interpret my use of the present tense in the first post I made as still happening today? But that was supposed to be talking about when Atheism+ was created.
EDIT: Having a sexual harassment policy is standard now. The other two I mentioned...still a problem.
The above is my understanding of what happened with this, synthesized over a fair amount of reading and research. It may well be wrong, and the situation may well be more complicated than I described.
I would be very interested in any references or notes on this you might be willing to share! Also on the history of any other such movements, because it seems very much directly relevant to the research I’m doing for my blog.
I’ve nothing to say about OWS, but as an ex-member of Freethought Blogs and I’ve written a bit about the problems with that clique, for example here. (PZ Myers is the most popular blogger on the FTB network, and not all bloggers do the kind of shit he does but quite a few do.)
Are Atheism+ and Occupy Wall Street examples “where the target becomes a feminist institution that no longer functions in its original capacity”? Could you spell out what you mean or point to discussion of their changes?
The Occupy Wall Street example in particular was talking about their use of what they call “the Progressive Stack” to organize meetings. The general idea was this—people want to speak up, but not everyone can talk at the same time, so we need some sort of system for choosing who gets to speak when. First in first out isn’t fair enough when you factor in things like minorities or women feeling more inhibited about speaking, so let’s let them jump the queue and speak before people who are white and/or male.
It’s an idea that sounds just fair enough to be considered, and has the benefit of both having passionate supporters on the left and of having an obvious path to paint opponents as sexist racists that want to silence women and minorities. The left won on this point at the cost of driving off much of their popular support, and the movement has been marginalized since.
The above is my understanding of what happened with this, synthesized over a fair amount of reading and research. It may well be wrong, and the situation may well be more complicated than I described. As far as I understand it, though, it’s the major mistake that the movement made—it let itself be co-opted into caring about social justice at the cost of their other goals.
As far as Atheism+ goes, it’s an organized group spearheaded by people like Rebecca Watson who are outraged—outraged—at the behavior of atheists being insufficiently pro-woman and pro-social justice. Rebecca Watson in particular has a laser-like focus on sexism within the atheist and skeptic community, at the expense of the larger groups’ nominal goals. She’s responsible for the whole “elevatorgate” debacle, and responded to Richard Dawkins’ claim that she was overreacting by going after Dawkins personally with this piece of loveliness. It says it’s not a call for a boycott, but it’s a call for a boycott (“Nope, I didn’t call for a boycott. I’m relaying the fact that I have no interest in giving this person any more of my money or attention.” I read that as “I want to hurt Dawkins personally but realize that I don’t have the social capital to carry off leading a boycott, so I’m going to encourage people to boycott Dawkins while saying that I’m not doing so)
I actually haven’t done all that much analysis of Atheism+. I pretty much have discarded it as a group of people who have been successfully derailed by people like Rebecca Watson talking about sexism constantly within the atheist and skeptical community, and want to do the same. Just look at the first sentence of their FAQ
They are essentially policing the atheist community for compliance with social justice ideas. Their own website is saying the same things I am about them with different wording and connotations.
When discussing OWS and similar political movements, the term “social justice” gets quite ambiguous. OWS has always been about social justice, by any reasonable meaning of the term. To be clear, you obviously mean identity politics, the notion that self-styled “minority” groups are more equal than everyone else.
Yeah, I’m talking about the more narrow definition that gets made fun of in /r/tumblrinaction. As opposed to what I think of as “economic justice”, which involves things like banking reform, fairness in income distribution, taking care of the poor and homeless, etc.
Using words like this to describe ideas you don’t like seems distasteful, and in fact similar to what the blogger was originally complaining about.
It got worse.
Jen McCreight and PZ Myers have been circulating unverifiable accusations of rape, allegedly relied from anonymous sources, against big-name activists in the Skeptics movement, including Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer, who didn’t happen to have jumped on the Atheism+ bandwagon.
Link
Knowing nothing about this, “who didn’t happen to have” looks unfair. Membership in Atheism+ wasn’t distributed randomly, so it’s possible people who chose not to join have different views on women.
When women in the atheist movement still get sexually harassed by public figures, get rape and death threats, and when having a “no sexual harassment” policy creates a firestorm, all from other people within the atheist movement, the movement does need to be more pro-women and more pro-social justice.
(Link to a blog that has a source for all the incidents I’m talking about, plus a few more http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2012/08/30/atheism-plus-and-some-thoughts-on-divisiveness/)
Watson’s response to Dawkins comes after he gave a response to her ridiculing her for feeling uncomfortable about getting asked out on an elevator.
And as for the mission statement, I don’t think there’s a problem with countering misogyny, racism, homo/bi/transphobia, or ableism. That sounds like a good thing. You may disagree with what they label as x-phobia, but the discussion should be about what is x-phobic, not whether we should care about x-phobia.
False dilemma.
Social justice warriors are not the only kind of people on this planet who care about safety and well-being of other people. Also, feminists sometimes send death threats, too.
The sexual harassment by public figures certainly has to stop, the perpetrators have to be punished: legally when possible, and removed from positions of power within the community.
Giving more power to feminists and social justice warriors is not the only way to do this. It is one of the possible solutions, but not the only possible solution.
As Nancy said, what other movement that you could see becoming active in the atheist movement that supports this?
And yes, they send death threats too. But at a ridiculously lower rate than is currently done, considering many popular female bloggers say they get death/rape threats every time they say something controversial.
The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a strong movement for Maintaining Decent Treatment for All People.
I’m concerned that it’s really hard to get people to do political things unless there’s some excessive opposition to a defined group.
Well, usually that doesn’t fall under the rubric of a political movement at all. We just call it civility—a core moral value of any physical community where people seek to be protected from bodily harm and thrive in a nurturing environment.
If there is any political question here, it’s who or what should be included under “people”. Folks who are similar enough to you in e.g. culture that you can intuitively trust them? Any Homosapien’s? Any Hominidae (i.e. including other Great Apes)? Other animal species on a case-by-case basis, such as dolphins and whales? Robots and other man-made intelligences? Corporations?
But it’s quite unclear how deferring to the so-called “social justice movement” would be helpful in approaching these hard questions. It seems that their “politics” is much too simplistic, so they just ignore them.
You’ve underestimated what a Maintaining Decent Treatment for All People Movement would cover.
It might be pacifist. It would certainly be very cautious about war. It would be pro-refugee.
And push for a rational justice system. civil behavior by police, and good prison conditions.
Oppose domestic violence, and be emphatic that this applies to men, women, and children.
Oppose bullying, both in schools and workplaces.
I’m not sure I’ve included all the major categories.
A lot of this isn’t being done reliably, and some of it faces a lot of opposition
I’m not going to say that the social justice movement is the only source of valuable information, but it’s done some good work in pointing out that there’s violence which isn’t taken seriously—for example, violence against trans people.
For another source (overlapping SJ, I think), check out work being done by whores for them to be treated as normal parts of civil society.
There’s a lot of work to be done even if you aren’t worried about apes and dolphins.
Sure, and political/social movements exist which pursue all of these goals. But the underlying moral principle is very much not a matter of ideology or any political “plank”, even though ‘left-wing’- or ‘progressive’- leaning folks are perhaps more likely to care about it in a political sense. Jonathan Haidt is of course very clear on this, and the general idea is older than Haidt’s work—check out George Lakoff’s Moral Politics or Jane Jacobs’s Systems of Survival.
This is probably one reason why the so-called “SJ movement” went so clearly astray in trying to piggyback on any and all of these quite diverse causes, and somehow join them all in some kind of ‘big tent’ movement. It doesn’t work like that - ‘big tent’ organizations are always a result of coalition-forming within existing civic institutions and processes. Movements need more flexibility, as well as a stronger commitment from their participants.
I don’t know whether anyone noticed my list is basically libertarian. It’s a very challenging agenda, but it just covers allowing freedom and protection from violence. It doesn’t cover ongoing help for people who can’t fully take care of themselves.
A meta solution would be to start this movement. Which would be extremely difficult on a scale of society, but perhaps easier within a community.
As an outsider, I have no idea how large the “people who frequently go to atheist meetups and already mostly know each other” group is. Perhaps five or ten of them could start this kind of a movement inside that community.
Wasn’t it rather the adoption of this as an explicit policy that created trouble? And that’s not surprising, because it suggests that the problem is prevalent in the group to an extent that makes the explicit policy needed, which insinuation will naturally offend some members of the group.
Asked into someone’s hotel room, actually.
The problem is that this derails the discussion into arguing whether Y is x-phobic rather than whether Y is bad.
That’s true, let me add to my statements:
I think the mission statement is a good thing. But, I agree how the policy is carried out (e.g. crying “That’s racist!” and nothing more) is ineffective.
Alternative: If somebody says something x-phobic, the response should be something along the lines of “Saying X is harmful to group Y because....”
[Retracted] You’re citing a blogpost from August 2012 for the claim that these bad things “still occur today”? I’m no fan of the atheist movement, and I agree that its proponents can be occasionally lacking in basic kindness and social graces (as do many others, who refuse to self-identify as ‘atheists’ for this very reason). But still, you’re not providing much evidence for your claim here. [/Retracted]
Edited to add: Apparently you only meant to refer to the time ‘Atheism+’ was actually getting off the ground—the “elevatorgate” controversy and whatnot. If so, I misinterpreted your comment, for which I apologize—but that would make your point rather trivial, since ThrustVectoring was clearly objecting to “Atheism+”’s continued [assumed to be detrimental] influence on the atheist movement.
That was an article justifying the creation of atheism+. This was a discussion of why there was a problem in the atheist movement that lead to its creation.
Is the quoted “still occur today” in bogus’s comment a fabricated quotation, a quotation of something you’ve since edited away, or a quotation of something I’m being too blind to see?
(If it’s the second of those, you probably ought to indicate the fact somehow.)
I definitely think it still does, but I haven’t said anything about that in this thread so far.
I guess you could interpret my use of the present tense in the first post I made as still happening today? But that was supposed to be talking about when Atheism+ was created.
EDIT: Having a sexual harassment policy is standard now. The other two I mentioned...still a problem.
I would be very interested in any references or notes on this you might be willing to share! Also on the history of any other such movements, because it seems very much directly relevant to the research I’m doing for my blog.
I’ve nothing to say about OWS, but as an ex-member of Freethought Blogs and I’ve written a bit about the problems with that clique, for example here. (PZ Myers is the most popular blogger on the FTB network, and not all bloggers do the kind of shit he does but quite a few do.)