The Devil Rides Out
Hello. Once again, it is I – the Great American Satan. In this post, I will plan out where to go from here as a blogger. I have some general thoughts and some specific goals.
In a sense I came by involvement in Atheism Plus on a whim. I don’t have many opportunities to sit down at set times for TV shows, so I have a habit of reading blogs for passive entertainment. Sometimes I get too invested in that and it detracts from time that should be spent on other efforts, and I have to quit. First I followed my local weekly’s blog, then I followed The Panda’s Thumb, then Pharyngula, then other Freethought Blogs, and at last the Atheism Plus forum.
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When reading Freethought Blogs, I kept coming across articles documenting a creepy campaign of abuse that had its origins on Scienceblogs.com, when a disagreement among bloggers there and elsewhere had spooled out into some very strange and cruel behavior from one camp. One of the targets of the abusive faction was a fledgling project called Atheism Plus, so in a sense, the hate of its self-appointed enemies drove me into the A+ fold...
And what exactly do they hate about Atheism Plus? Let’s look a A+’s description:
“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.”
Their complaints are many and at times self-contradictory, but mostly they want the freedom to hurl misogynist abuse at women anywhere and everywhere they choose, because preventing them from hounding people into silence is a vile infringement on their own freedom of speech. I disagree with them, and so they have let me know where I belong. Here.
As a brief aside, let me state that I do not speak for Atheism Plus as a whole – only for myself. I am interested in helping everyone who wants peace in the community to live in peace, to the extent that is possible. So if in my blogging I offend, let me know and I’ll try to accommodate you. But only if your complaint is in the spirit of A+. I’m not about to make concessions to haters.
So what will I do with my blogging? What are my grand lofty goals?
- GET IT RIGHT THIS TIME – like Janet Jackson in Rhythm Nation.
- BRING ATHEISM PLUS TO THE PEOPLE – Make the concept easy to understand and implement.
- FIGHT FATPHOBIA – This cause doesn’t get nearly enough love.
GETTING IT RIGHT
Almost every last progressive movement from the past up to the present has fucked up, and badly. I was certainly on a path to making this same shopworn mistake before very recently, when I started training up for my first level as a Social Justice Warrior. The mistake? IGNORING INTERSECTIONALITY. There’s a bit of “common wisdom” that getting progressives to agree about things is like herding cats, because we all have our pet causes and can’t put them on the shelf long enough to cooperate with others. I made this very argument as recently as a few years ago, in reference to the protest scene in Seattle.
This is a mistake. It isn’t the pet causes that divide, it’s the unwillingness to recognize their legitimacy from those with differing privileges. I want a progressive movement that will lift everybody and stop stepping on faces along the way. Everybody that has ever been pushed down and effed over by the injustice of the world as it is? You’re my people and if we can’t get into the better world of the future without you, we aren’t getting there at all.
An element of this is the science. Sociologists and others have done some amazing work revealing or at least hinting at the underpinnings of the injustices of the world. We can use that knowledge to change things – most importantly about the way we treat each other.
BRING A+ TO THE PEOPLE
There’s a lot of reading to do if you want to understand everything that people have been trying to do in Atheism Plus and it puts people off. But you don’t have to read everything. I know I haven’t. Nonetheless, I want to try. I am going to read all that good stuff on the Atheism Plus forums and elsewhere and try to distill it into a form you can easily digest, then do my best to disseminate that info the masses.
FIGHTING FATPHOBIA
This problem is unbelievably bad. Once you scratch the surface, you see it everywhere – like neon signs every five feet telling people they are unworthy of life and of happiness, and we accept this as normal. This an industrial-grade injustice that is so normalized we accept the smiling face of its tyranny even as it kills human beings dead, every goddamned day. It’s powerfully intersectional with feminism, so I’m bound to grind that axe some as well.
This is my mission statement. Let me know what you think.
At least in the beginning, I’m going to spend my time reading and responding to other texts – starting with the Atheism Plus forum rules and the many discussions there about how not to be a huge jerk, and also spending some time with books about eating disorders. I’ll post my thoughts about these things and more.
And because it’s a blog, it will not be complete without utterly frivolous posts about things that do not matter. Mostly, I think, role-playing games.
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