Jezebel's "Atheists: Don't be dicks" and rebuttal

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Two interesting articles you may want to see.

The original is by Lindy West, who is an atheist who basically says that atheists "shouldn't be dicks" about being atheists. The FreeThoughtBlogs article challenges her comments.

The Jezebel article by Lindy West:

And the rebuttal by Matt Dilahunty on FreeThoughtBlogs:



Comments?

... err ... umm ... no one has a monopoly in Dickish behavior ... ?

I'd bet a lot of atheists are dicks, but I don't think this is radically different than any other case where we have people who strongly believe a certain view of the world.

As an atheist it is my God-given right to be as huge a dick as possible

Looking at the theists around me, it seems that as long as I'm a dick in G^D's name, it is neither a sin nor a crime.

Its okay if you're a dick... so long as you're God's dick

Jezebel is probably the most 'dickish' website on the internet ironically enough, Lindy West in particular. She made a big fool of herself a month or two ago when there was their controversy over 'rape culture' in the stand up comedy world and what should be considered funny and not. What's 'dickish' are uppity weirdo bloggers that appoint themselves the grand arbitrator of all that that is right and wrong, they are quite literally the PC police. They blog about something and sick their deluded followers on them in an attempt to destroy them and enforce their world view on everyone else. They don't care who's life they destroy and how petty and insignificant their 'crimes against muh feelings' are. They do this and then when people take notice and start responding in kind they play the victim of those crazy evil mean sexist internet people, it's a self fulfilling prophecy.

I think people should be given fair warning about certain acts that tell jokes that might be very offensive, or feel threatening or triggering. They can then choose for themselves if being exposed to this stuff will harm them. So, for instance, if you've lost a child and you can't take nasty, prurient humour over dead babies, avoid that comedian. A lot of it's common sense.

If people go to these acts - like Frankie Boyle, say - knowing already that they are known for material that is sick and would probably massively trigger and upset them, then I can't have too much sympathy for them when people end up being upset.

Atheists who speak out against religion are going to come off as dicks to such people, no matter what/how they say things. Problem is not generally with the atheists.

There's an exception for me though, amirite?

Not really. You're quite mild (in attitude) compared to some of the other members here.

There is a certain subset of people that walk around permanently offended, they can be offended at anything real or imagined regardless of the context. The internet has given this permanently offended class of people a forum to be taken seriously and somewhere along the line in the last few years they've actually been able to gain some amount of power over our culture. Feminist, racism, atheist, and LGBT issues seem to be the main source of their being offended and a lot of the time the people being offended aren't even part of these 'protected groups' and are getting offended on their behalf. There is significant crossover, they all seem to share the same ideology. They are totalitarians who think everyone and everything should bend to their will, they believe in censorship and silencing anybody that they can perceive as going against their world view.

Now if you make an off-color(THAT SOUNDS ALMOST RACIST) joke you can be fired from your job. These are the type of people that want to remove the word 'n****r' from Huck Finn and get offended by words like 'blackhole' and 'tar baby'. This doesn't just apply to public figures, earlier this year there was this big controversy about some woman that complained on twitter to her 10k folllowers about OVERHEARING 2 guys behind her making jokes(and to clear, they were not directed at her) about "big dongles" and "forking somebody's repo" at some computer code programming conference. Their employer saw this and then fired both of them and in the resulting controversy she ended up getting fired herself. Three people got fired because this woman couldn't mind her own business.

I'm not saying there aren't real things to be offended about either, these people do a disservice to people facing real oppression.

I remember the story a couple of weeks ago here in the UK, where a non-Muslim child was denied any water by his school on a boiling hot day because it was Ramadan and the school/governing body thought that Muslims might be offended.

They did this on their own for ludicrous political correctness reasons.

Muslims weren't offended; not a single Muslim asked for this special treatment (not that it should have been given even if they asked for it), and I'd imagine that many of them were pretty annoyed when they found out that they had been infantilised like this. If I was Muslim, I'd be absolutely outraged at this political correctness, as it brings hostility to my community that I don't need.

Grotesquely politically correct schools and councils often cause division by claiming to represent the interests of minority groups, when in fact the minorities were never even consulted or asked in the first place.

It's the politically correct, the people that take offence on other people's behalf, that cause ten times as many problems as they solve with their attitude, and often hurt the groups they claim to be aiding.



My favourite: "niggard".

And as for Huck Finn or any historical novel, period piece or documentary - things must be reflected as they were. So, plenty of pipe smoking in early 20th century period dramas please. Pints of mild on the bar in dramas set in pubs in the 1950s.



That sounds stupid.

If they were making comments specifically about her, then I would understand her turning round and having a go...

...but I do wonder what planet some people live on.

I do tend to find though that with people facing real oppression that these people don't really want to know then, because real life is sort of messy like that.

Public atheists can say all kinds of things; some of them may or may not offend (depending on the subject matter and the listener).

I'm an atheist, I'm not part of an "atheist movement".

I guess what is embarrassing is logical fallacies and silly assumptions, whether they be from atheist or not.

One of them is "religion is the reason for conflict in the world" or "if religion went away we would be a lot less violent".

This is wrong for two reasons:

1. Although religion may be a very effective means of mobilizing people to a violent end, it by not means has a monopoly on this. Religion itself is a meme, it is a reflection of part of our nature. Even in cited examples such as WWII, often religion is only part of the equation, ultimately it come down to human behaviour. The root of the violent behavior fundamentally biological, it is from our animal nature, and biological mechanism such as testosterone are primary mechanisms. Chimps are extremely violent, Bonobos moderate their aggression with sex. We have a very complex group behaviour and relationships, we have traits of both of the cousins at different times, as well as different behavior.
2. There is no reason to assume that if religion went away there would be less conflict, it may be that some other meme will be a prime mechanism of genocide.

The good news is we are actually a lot less violent overall that we used to be. Conflict in the past killed far, far more people. That is not to say we aren't still violent. But the long term trend is it is reducing, and we are less tolerant of it. We also have ways of challenging our aggression.