A loose end
So, as I mentioned, a late reply to Mooney’s post about me on July 12.
We stopped allowing Benson to comment here back in mid 2009, for very good reasons–among other things, she was sending us emails demanding to have other posters’ comments deleted. We had a better solution.
You can read the thread where they made this reasonable decision. My comments are numbers 35, 37, 90 and 92. They’re not flamey. Then at 104 we get TB:
When Ophelia Benson claims through her “questions” that Chris and Sheril have no evidence she is not telling the truth. It’s one thing for people who haven’t read the book to assert this – she has the book.
So let me say that again and more emphatically: She is lying…Benson doesn’t just disagree. She lies and asserts that they have nothing to back up their assertions…
Benson is a troll – she’s added nothing to the conversation and deliberately misleads people about the content of the book. She has her own site to do that on – ban her here.
I asked M&K to delete the assertions that I was lying – I didn’t “demand,” I asked – but they did what TB demanded instead, and banned me shortly after that. I think that’s disgusting. Today, on the other hand, Mooney deleted part of a comment by Hitch, that Hitch then posted elsewhere:
And how Jean used snide remarks against New Atheists throughout.
That’s it – that’s what Hitch wrote, that’s what Mooney deleted. His rules are somewhat arbitrary.
The whole of the rest of the post deals with the fact that I said it was “bilbo” who called me a liar; my mistake, it was TB. That makes M&K look even worse, actually, because TB (Tim Broderick) is still a valued commenter, who has just succeeded in bullying Hitch off the Intersection. “bilbo” was one of “Tom Johnson”‘s sock puppets, but TB is a real and trusted regular fan and commenter – who announces that people are lying when they’re not. I should have checked again, of course; I should have gotten the right name; but the defense of allowing their fans to call their critics liars while preventing the critics from replying is not convincing. It’s also distasteful that it is made on a post where the comments are closed. It was distasteful on the “new atheists are medieval witch hunters baying for blood” post at Talking Philosophy, it was distasteful on the “Believe Me” post at Kazez’s blog, and it’s distasteful in Mooney’s post about me.
Addendum: I was also banned, though more recently, when I tried to make the very same point you’re referring to above, about the paucity of evidence. These were short, three-sentence posts. No swearing, no accusations, just, “that chapter contains no relevant social scientific evidence to support the claims in question”.
Either Mr. Mooney or Ms. Kirshenbaum must have decided that this was beyond the pale. If this were the response of academics, I would have been quite upset.
Framing at work.
I think I’m banned too… for similar reasons. My posts just disappear without the “awaiting moderation” comment.
Of course, given the daftness of those allowed to post regularly and without restriction (Jon, Gurdur, Anthony Hall, the poor martyr– JK , JJRamsey, and TB)– compared to the intelligence of those they’ve banned, I feel I’m in good company.
What a sad group of “regulars”… what a sorry recommendation for “accommodationism”. Accommodation clearly makes the faitheist as dishonest as those s/he accommodates. The only “evidence” Mooney ever had for his silly “gnu atheists -hurt-the-cause” claim turned out to be a lie propagated and repeated by sock puppets. Chris Mooney is a liar who vilifies those who are much more honest than he is. Birds of a feather…
This is a disturbing story for a number of reasons. In the first place, of course, Ophelia (as well as a lot of other people) was slandered, and then, having been slandered, she was banned from a blog where the libel took place, and that ban continues. Clearly, the person or persons responsible (Mooney, and possibly Kirshenbaum) need to rectify and clarify a situation that was the creation, almost entirely, of Mooney’s self-interested view of the comments made on his blog.
What is more serious is that Mooney still has a platform with CFI, despite the fact that he has acted in disreputable ways, and is, from the evidence, not to be trusted. In response to Jerry Coyne’s exposure of TJ (or whoever he is), Mooney’s response has been inadequate, and largely circumlocutory. He does not come out and acknowledge his own failures, and he needs to do this. Failing this, he should be dropped by CFI like a hot potato. CFI is probably not going to do this, but Mooney’s credibility right now is at a very low point, and if he is not prepared to face honestly his failures as a journalist, as an impartial blog host at the Discovery Magazine site, and as a trustworthy commentator on the contemporary scene, then he should not be permitted to continue with an organisation like CFI, which is supposed to deal honestly and critically with contemporary issues of belief. Mooney has shown himself incapable of honest inquiry, and until he acknowledges this, people of good sense should steer clear of him. He needs to make his failures of judgement public, at least as public as he made his accusations about people whose reputations may reasonably be thought to have been harmed by those failures.
Michael De Dora, on the last thread, asked why this is still an issue. It’s an issue because it hasn’t been settled. Mooney has yet to come clean on it, and, to be honest, so has Jean Kazez. Jean was brought into the loop by Mooney, and effectively became a shill for Mooney’s position, despite the fact that that position was based on lies and misrepresentations. Jean said that she had been given the skinny on TJ, that the story was believeable and that, for good reasons, the identity of the person concerned could not be revealed. Mooney continues to temporise about this, writing as though there still is some truth in the claims that were originally made by TJ, when he knows by now that this is not true. The story was not believeable from the start, and was raised to blog post status despite reasonable warnings about its credibility, and, while there may be good reasons for not trashing a young person’s career, there is also no reason why it should now be intimated that there might be something in the story after all. Jean needs to be open about this as well, to acknowledge, perhaps, that she was connned by Mooney into believing a false story, and then go on from there. The claim, however, that Jean has been abused over this is, so far as I can tell, an exaggeration. People have a right to be concerned about Jean’s part in all this, because she actually confirmed Mooney’s story, the story that, in the end, turned out to be nothing more than a rather elaborate fiction.
I would like to see a honest acknowledgement from those concerned that they did fail badly, that they were hoodwinked by an implausible story, because that is what they wanted to believe, and that the whole thing has been kept spinning along merrily for the simple reason that the principals involved continue to prevaricate. Why don’t they just come out and admit their failures and say their apologies? What has Mooney to lose by being honest about his failures? And what does Jean stand to gain by refusing to say acknowledge that she was doubly fooled, both by TJ’s story itself, and then by Mooney’s successful attempt to suborn her and to make her a party — unwilling, I assueme — to a deception?
The frequent remarks by commenters that they have been banned from the Intersection, or that perfectly reasonable posts have been edited by Mooney/Kirshenbaum, despite their reasonable content, is a continuing sign of Mooney’s refusal to face up to his many failures of reason and good taste. Past time for him to come clean. We might all learn to respect him if he did so, but at the moment there is not one reason why this man should be respected.
I stopped reading them when, after banninb Ophelia, they posted snippets from one of her messages, not the whole message but just bits out of context, and allowed no discussion whatsoever. How unethical is that?
In fact, that’s pretty much what people did to Shirley Sherrod. Class act.
That was Kazez’s stated reason for thinking his identity should be kept secret, but it’s highly dubious. He threatened other young people’s careers by doing what he did. Just a couple of days ago the name of a colleague of his was suggested as the identity of TJ – he has implicated other people by 1) doing all this and 2) hiding his own identity. He also – in that much-cited email message to Mooney in October 2009 – implicated his university, some colleagues, and more. It’s not at all clear that his career should be protected at the expense of other people’s.
It’s not hard to figure out who he is. I know of at least three people who have done it already.
I’ve been lurking about here, over at WEIT, and The Intersection following this whole thing and finding it fascinating in a car crash kind of way. I’ve been doing my level best to give everyone a fair shake and the benefit of the doubt (except TJ/William I guess). Mooney regularly gives me just enough to think that maybe, just maybe he’ll do the right thing without undercutting himself in some egregious manner. I keep hoping he’ll come around to being a responsible, fair blogger who carefully and thoughtfully responds to criticism.
It’s clear to me now that this just isn’t going to happen. Chris Mooney does not deal with criticism. He either ignores it or tries to hide it.
I went back and read the thread that Mooney says was the cause of Ophelia’s banning. The comment thread he cites as the motivation for his “better solution” than answering critiques or chastising inflammatory commenters like TB is, for me, just so petty and even cowardly that I’m sort of astonished. That you would ban someone for making reasonable arguments with no harsh language is bad enough. To crow over doing so (or maybe he’s hoping we won’t go read it?) is just kind of stupid.
I was also surprised to find that I had posted into the early days of that very thread, voicing my own disappointment with UA and requesting he answer some of the more detailed critiques against the book. Of course I was ignored too. And if I’d kept asking, which I didn’t do because others were doing it for me, I’d probably have been banned as well.
What a disappointment he has turned out to be.
Well, yes, I agree, Ophelia. There is no obvious reason, if TJ (whoever that is) is a continuing source of harm, why this person should not be outed. If he is going to be outed – and if enough people guess who it is, he will be – then he’d be advised to do it first, and try to make some reasonable amends. However, Mooney, it seems to me, has more or less put himself beyond the pale. He seems, as Rick says, to be unable to accept criticism, and transparency about this is simply not going to happen, if we depend on Mooney. That’s why I think that CFI should drop him, now. His reputation is now in tatters, and he doesn’t seem prepared to do anything to stop the tatters from becoming shreds. That will result in transparency of another kind.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Geoff Robert, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: A loose end http://dlvr.it/3D6VX […]
Hi Rick.
It amuses me that your comment reads like a much more skilled version of a ploy that TJ used all the time at YNH (his sock-puppet-filled blog): a comment starts out with skepticism or disapproval then shifts to agreement. The basic pattern is: “I thought you were being unfair to Myers/Coyne/Benson at first but then I read the linked post and I have to say, you’re totally right.”
:- )
But you’re not a sock puppet. Eat your heart out, TJ – this is what unfaked discussion looks like.
Just to clarify, I’ve never thought you were being unfair to Mooney. I thought all the criticism of him from you, Coyne, and Rosenhouse (and others) was spot on and matched my own analysis of his book and behavior. My hope for Mooney was, seeing these reasoned critiques, he would respond seriously. He obviously did not. It reminds me a lot of Randy Olson’s terrible response to critiques of his film Sizzle. Randy also lost me as an admirer because of his muddled and defensive behavior (plus I think his book suffers many of the same deficits as UA).
For another amusing example of how defensiveness in the face of criticism can lead to disaster and loss of prestige, check out this wonderful analysis, “Forum Referee” from Jason Scott’s blog:
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1364
That’s from two years back, but I had it in my head the whole time I was watching Mooney’s behavior over the last year or so. I hoped he’d figure out that he was just making things worse, that it’s totally OK to say, “wow, I was wrong, thanks for pointing that out.” Isn’t that how scientifically minded folks are supposed to behave?
Rick, I know, that’s what I thought too. One reason I was so obnoxiously persistent was, ironically, precisely because I really did keep thinking he would respond. I started from the assumption that he is rational and reasonable, and it took me forever to grasp that he isn’t.
Now I just say stuff to get it on the record.
Is there anyway to change the “outing” frame that keeps being used in reference to this TJ person.
Calling it “outing” makes it sound like there is some kind of intrinsic right that he has to manipulate others and dissemble – and that by asking for the truth of this matter, the aggrieved are violating some right of his.
I’m not sure I’m right about this though. It seems like calling him a “source” instead of a “scammer” is another example of Mooney framing this, and others going along with it. Or not fully considering the meaning of the way we think about this bad actor.
Anyway, it just seems like another example of Gnu’s being way too nice and deferential. Gnus not only don’t go round doing unprovoked insults to nice religious people, they don’t even retaliate when attacked. They go a philosophical and consider the putative careers of their assailants when responding.
Nuts. If anything this guy is Mooney’s child soldier, the fruits of ammodationist zealotry. Scaring the faithful, and planting bombs to make it look like acts of enemy aggression.
Mooney’s a puppet master, with his own little cadre of operatives doing wet work in the name of accommodation, while the faithful and the non believers seem to be perfectly happy to have a principled and civil argument.
if it weren’t for Mooney, we’d all be just like BioLogos, various camps who are opposed to manifestations of religiously motivated bigotry and ignorance, who engage in philosophical banter.
Mooney however, singles us out because we use the term “moron” whereas BioLogos says “intellectual cul-de-sac”
Yes ok. Outing not the right word. I’ve been using it for shorthand. (What is the right word?)
No; my view is that he absolutely does not have any intrinsic right to use a fake anonymous blog (fake in that it was said to be four people not one, including one woman; partly scientists as opposed to grad students; near Cincinnati; etc) packed full of fake comments to dump ordure on non-anonymous non-fake people, and keep his own identity a secret. No right at all.
One of the more irritating aspects of the pro-Mooney anti-witch hunters baying for blood faction is their grotesque minimization of what TJ did. Maybe they don’t know what he did. Well but then they should stfu.
No, the only reason for not revealing TJ’s identity now is because he is being investigated. On the other hand, colleagues of his are coming under suspicion; the only way to make the innocent secure from suspicion is to reveal TJ’s identity. So that’s a consideration.
i hear you … I guess that we have to accept that, like cats, gnus don’t have a great ability to message, they think for themselves, and are very concerned that their most aggressive foes one day get tenure.
but calling it shorthand doesn’t mitigate anything, all language is shorthand, it is just that the “outing” frame carries distinct qualities. Because it means that here person has reasons for privacy.
“hold a scammer accountable”
prevent a person from continuing a demonstrated pattern of dishonesty
anyway, what kind of justice is ever served in private?
the only justice to protect the innocent. Who are the innocents in this situation?
justice can also be served in private to protect the victim.
does Coyne and PZ really want this protection?
I didn’t say it mitagated anything, I was just explaining. Sheesh! Should I go sit on the naughty stool for awhile?
I’m certainly not worrying about TJ’s ability to get tenure.
Mooney acting in any other way than self preserving and criticism deflecting is expecting a weasel to not be a weasel. He’s just a weasel.
Siamangs rock. They have the best call…
Just a quick flashback I had. Note how YNH’s thing was the exaggeration of numbers? The blog itself pretended that it was possibly run by more than one person. The socks in addition give the pretense of numbers. This notion of “size of opposition” just struck me. I wonder what that was about.
Hitch, I doubt he thought things through. He probably assumed that Echo Chamber equals persuasive power.
But the truth is that appeals to popularity primarily work on audiences that are uninvested in the subject under discussion. Audiences that really are invested in their subject won’t care as much about popular opinion, and will want more substantive discussion.
Mooney and Kirshenbaum fail in both categories. It’s like they aren’t quite sure who their audience is supposed to be.
Actually I would hypothesize, that they have picked an audience. And I think that the moderation move is very intentional and they know exactly what the outcome is.
It was all a Cunning Plan? I don’t buy it. I don’t think they’re cunning enough. (They could have done the same thing without pissing so many former allies off so thoroughly. Easily. And still have reached the desired audience.)
As far as I can tell, their audience is limited to think tanks, op-ed pages, and lecturing the academic circuit. That is, they’re talking to the quasi-Academy, the third culture. They target the points of contact between academia and the rest of the world.
To appeal to the third culture effectively, they have to maintain message coherence two fronts:
1. For the sake of reaching those in the audience who don’t really know/care that much about the topic — academic administrators and the like — Mooney and Kirshenbaum need to engage with popular and/or conventional opinion. (I would guess that conventional opinion on the subject of accommodationism is vaguely apathetic.)
2. For the sake of reaching those in the audience who do really care about the topic and are listening attentively, they need to preserve a sense of their own expertise.
You can perform (1) in at least two kinds of ways; consonance or dissonance. Like a quaint and old-fashioned approach to advertising, they only recognize consonance as a viable option. Invitational rhetoric and all that. Hence they’ve been quite good at being consonant with (1) popular apathy.
However, their approach to (2) expertise has not been effective when it comes to two of their chapters (one and eight). And enough of an uproar has been made about their work on the blogosphere and in book reviews that they can no longer credibly discount their critics, even though they visibly ignore them.
If they were playing a straight game, then the thing to do at this point would be to focus exclusively on appeals to real culture war stuff in such a way that they aren’t also undermining their aura of expertise. (i.e., if they were to focus just on their strongest material, and try to avoid talking about the weakest stuff.)
But the sticky thing about the aura of expertise is that their aloofness from argument and shoddy scholarship are red flag indicators. They’re in too deep at this point.
One way they could get out of this problem is if they were to reinvent their expertise by getting into a research project that shores up the arguments that their critics have found lacking. We all would like that.
But they seem to have chosen plan B instead, which is to embrace the popularity instinct full throttle, let the aura of expertise stand or fall wherever it may. And they can get away with it, with the support of Templeton. With enough clout, you can make enough of a dent on the lecture circuit to be relevant to audiences without ever really being seen as an expert.
I think you overvalue expertise. Some of the best-selling book authors thrive purely on controversy and expertise means very little, in fact negative expertise means nothing as far as I can tell on the public PR circus.
And what I am saying is that they know what was controversial in their book. If you read the blog discussion before, they had to know. Frankly I don’t buy what they say in the introduction of their paperback which gives the impression that they were surprised and “hit a nerve”. I don’t buy when Chris elevated TJ and then commenters reacted oh my, in his thank you note to TJ he states that his story apparently “hit a nerve”. You buy that? I do not buy that for one minute.
He knows exactly what nerve he is hitting. And that defines the audience. People who either agree with hitting that nerve, or who do not understand and can be swayed to believe the the narrative that is presented is true.
And for that reason I don’t by that “they didn’t mean to alienate former allies”. If they didn’t want to alienate them they could have gone a different route and they would have had ample time to repair the problem.
Take his latest Templeton post. It still the same scheme.
First he frames what his critics supposedly stand for:
“Critics depict the fellowship as a kind of Kumbaya love-fest in which journalists are taught that science and religion have always been and always will be best friends.”
Of course that’s not what critics say. Carroll, Kroto, Hogan or Dawkins say something very different. I have articulated criticism that says something very different.
But that’s how he wants to frame the issue. Critics (supposedly) have an extreme and unfair view of the agenda of Templeton. Done.
Then he goes to present supposed evidence that it isn’t so. We have to take his word for it and people who don’t understand the argument may even be convinced. After all the original (supposed) position of critics is extreme to begin with, and the evidence presented sounds sensible enough.
Leave along that nothing he lists gives any indication that Templeton funds any research into religion as a man-made phenomenon or would approve of such. But his list is vague enough that one can always backpaddle.
But that never was the criticism. A selection and confirmation bias was the criticism. That isn’t addressed in his post at all.
And you know what. He knows full well what the critics are saying. So I don’t buy it. That post is not to engage with criticism. It’s to frame the issue in a way to win with the audience he intends to have and intends to persuade. And there is a large audience in the US for that message.
Ah-ah Hitch, don’t do that thing of putting a made up quotation into quotation marks – I didn’t say ‘”they didn’t mean to alienate former allies”’ – I don’t know that, and I know I don’t know that. I said “They could have done the same thing without pissing so many former allies off so thoroughly.” That’s different. It doesn’t assume that they didn’t mean to do what they did. I really don’t know whether they meant to or not.
His latest Templeton post is…….stupid. As usual. And GM suggests that he should “come up with a post defending the case of philosophical compatibility between science and religion. Because you have yet to do that.” Mooney’s reply is – “i did do that. It is in my latest book (with Sheril).” Yet another “it’s in the book.” It isn’t!!
You’re right that he knows what critics are saying, but it doesn’t follow that what he’s doing is the result of calculation. It could be, but it doesn’t follow. I suspect that he’s just not smart enough to do anything but stubbornly repeat what he’s already said. That sounds very harsh, and it is, but…….I just haven’t seen anything like an intelligent argument out of him on this subject. Nothing.
I think there is a difference between stone-walling an issue and being not intelligent enough. To not engage in a losing argument is actually rather smart.
It is normative to defend a thesis extended in a major published book. It is highly unusual to draw ones own arguments into question. I don’t see the lack of interest to critically engage with the book as any evidence of intelligence. But I grant you I don’t know either.
I’m just operating on the hypothesis that even not super-intelligent people work towards the outcome they want. If there is a certain prolonged outcome and no sign of correctives, it does tell you something about intend. That’s how I arrive at what I say.
I’m astonished at how guilelessly (not to mention how frequently) he strikes back at various criticisms with something like (paraphrasing): “I already covered that in [my book]”. He did it when people were criticizing UA, dismissively plugging several of the major gaping holes in that publication with copies of TRWOS. He’s since used UA as a shield against any number of complaints about things that may or not even have much to do with the content of the book. More generally, does he really believe that publishing a book on some topic signifies that the topic has been so comprehensively dealt with that it’s futile to engage in further discussion about it? His opinion is out there! In print! Case closed! All of us who disagree should just publish our own books, I guess, and then we’d never have to talk about Gnus or Faitheists or Templetonians ever again. What a time saver!
No. I really disagree with that. Or I agree it may be smart, but add that it’s not intelligent.
It’s “smart” only in the sense that other cynical ploys are “smart.” It’s smart in the sense that gaining the whole world and losing your own soul is – using “soul” metaphorically, of course. It’s short term gain at the expense of long term loss. It’s smart the way political manipulation is smart. It’s smart the way McCain’s choice of Palin was smart.
In short it’s smart if all you want is popularity – but it’s idiotic if you want the respect of intelligent peers. I still think Mooney has always wanted that, and still does. I don’t know that he wants it more than anything else, but I still think he wants it.
Jen – same here. I’m astonished all over again every time I see it.
Hitch, sure — but which authors, what subjects, for what audiences?
The fact is, if you want to appeal to wonks, then you need to present yourself in a credible light. And if your audience is the third culture, then you can’t abandon the aura of expertise. You just can’t. On the other hand, if you’re just a cheerleader, then you’ll lie deliberately and call it “satire” or “entertainment”. But you can’t be JUST a cheerleader when you’re interested in scientific literacy.
It’s certainly true that they are shrewd in stonewalling; given the resources they have to work with, it’s the best option. But at the end of the day, given the subject and audience, it’s ultimately a losing stance.
I do think they’re trying to be consonant with what they think popular opinion is. And I think they’re right that popular opinion is something like an apathy towards science, reinforced by a muddled sense of the compatibility of science and religion. That doesn’t mean Mooney and Kirshenbaum weren’t confrontational towards the minority (outspoken atheists) — of course they were. But that’s the thing, the minority isn’t popular, and it’s not their audience.
I agree that Mooney probably sent it out and expected to be criticized by the people he directly criticizes — Dawkins, Myers, and Coyne. I don’t doubt that he did it in order to engineer drama that he could use as a selling point for the book. That’s to be expected. However, he also inadvertantly crossed the line into unfairness, which many otherwise sympathetic critics have noted disapprovingly. Initially, I think he was genuinely confused as to why the reaction was so negative.
Of course, unfairness in criticism is a fine PR policy if you have an audience of drunks, which is why it works very well for Ann Coulter. But it’s a devastatingly bad policy if you have a third culture audience, because if those criticisms are good enough, and pervasive enough, you stop getting invited to give lectures.
Now he’s in damage control, cut your losses mode. He has to give evidence that his critics are unreliable, angry, shrill, violent — not a hard case to make, given the popularity of atheist-bashing. But he can’t change the way that UA was received, and can’t mitigate the risk of negatively affecting his reputation among influential, serious-minded professionals.
Ophelia: His rules are somewhat arbitrary.
Quite the understatement. This post of mine was deleted and I then banned for it. :)
Actually, his rules might be rather straightforward: point out that he is clueless and/or a hypocrite about something, and that’s it for you. Apparently, that kind of thing is not ‘civil’.
Hmm, that ban is particularly shocking. A fair pointing out of Sagan’s view. And questioning the story that UA promotes on the supposed distinction between Sagan and Dawkins. Of course you are right. But it is direct criticism of the main theme of UA, namely that Sagan is the shining beacon (and Dawkins is the nasty bully).
Well, ‘shocking’ would be giving entirely too much credit to a supposed prior credibility. ;>
I think it’s comical, actually. It shows how completely delusional they are about their ‘rules’. And I’m rather disappointed that a potential intelligent counterpart in a discussion I think is important has so spectacularly imploded.
Peter, I noticed Jon’s post above yours was, well, his usual. And yet he posts freely. I guess he is the example of how others are supposed to be?! I consider the intersection a play pen for the people I don’t want to waste time reading.
Your view of Sagan was spot on; It peeves Mooney, because it undermines the “new-atheists-hurt-science-education” position he’s trying to sell.
When it comes to accommodationism, I’m not sure Mooney has an online audience. Mooney’s so-called “fans,” socks included, in the comments over the years aren’t really all that pro-Mooney. They rarely quote him or engage with his posts. Instead, they use his blog as an anti-NA platform. And now that a substantial volume of anti-NA comments are gone from his blog, Mooney is trying to maintain his sock-era ratio by silencing the critics.