Bad poll numbers
But now there isn’t.
It is with regret that we advise that the 2018 Global Atheist Convention has been cancelled. More details at www.atheistconvention.org.au.
Thank you to all ticket purchasers and supporters.
They didn’t sell enough tickets so they canceled.
It may be that New Atheism’s 15 minutes are up.
(OK, it was more like 15 years.)
If I had the money I would have bought tickets. There are some people on that list I would like to see.
But I agree that the “movement” may be dying as a movement.
Lady M:
I would say that it was more likely too far for most of the people likely to attend, who I guess would have to travel from home/wherever to the far side of the Earth.
The historian Geoffrey Blainey called it ‘the tyranny of distance’ in his book of the same title.
This is sad, because Melbourne is actually a delightful city in so many ways.
I wished I could go, but it’s a bit past my budgetary restrictions, not to mention I only get 3 days off during the school year, and I used one of them to go to the FFRF convention.
What a shame, Rod Quantock is a baffling delight that I have barely seen since his Good News Week appearences; it would have been nice to see him get a large stage again.
It’s definitely not only a matter or distance or money. There was a time when I would have given anything to attend such an event but wouldn’t be able to afford it. Now I could afford it if I really wanted to, but would rather flush my money down the toilet.
Why go? New atheism is dead.
@ 4 Omar
The problem with that theory is that this is the third GAC held in Melbourne. The first two (in 2010/12) were successful according to the organizers.
I remember the last one attracted some controversy because of a comedian making sexist jokes. Actually, downright misogynistic jokes. I expect Ophelia may remember that; search the term “Jefferies” in this post.
This latest one, apparently, was attacked by anti-feminists for being too close to gender parity, or too feminist, or too SJW, or some shit. I’m not kidding. Here’s a post at PZ’s by one or the organizers:
Ford is an outspoken feminist, in case you hadn’t figured it out.
And this is from an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Unfortunately, atheism seem to attract substantial numbers of reactionary, anti-feminist dickheads, so that may be why we can’t have nice things.
Wow. That’s depressing.
Fwoof… A lot to unpackage there.
Suffice to say, gender parity is not a bad thing at all, and there were a few people on that list I’d have liked to have seen – only I wasn’t going to go whether I could afford to or not.
It was around this time last year that I resigned my membership with the AFA – which didn’t stop them from seeking my renewal dues earlier this year. :P
Oh, and I resigned from the Humanist Society of Victoria a few weeks ago as well. One of their committee members was prattling on about how there was no evidence that it was atheists who were peddling misogyny in retaliation to Clementine Ford’s booking (but that’s hardly the only reason I up and left).
Charming bunch the lot of them.
Depressing, but totally expected. In fact, after everything that has happened since “Elevatorgate” I don’t expect anything but the kind of thing Silentbob describes from movement atheism. It’s all cancer and no healthy tissue.
Wherever people set up an organisation for whatever purpose: and political parties are particularly vulnerable on this score, it attracts blowflies just as surely as if it was a newly-minted cow turd.
I call that the Blowfly Theory of Political Economy, though it is not trademarked, patented or registered in any way to me. It has just been an inspiration following a study of the behaviour of politicians over the years.
I have good reason to believe that my own maternal grandfather, was one of the people at that meeting under what they called ‘The Tree of Knowledge’ in the Queensland town of Barcaldine in 1891 that founded the Australian Labor Party, (ALP) which went on to form the world’s first Labor government 1n 1910.
By the early 1920s, the most powerful state branch of the ALP had been captured by the blowflies of the Wren Machine.
You can read all about it in Frank Hardy’s novel, Power Without Glory, over which Hardy was hauled into court on a charge of ‘criminal libel’, under a now defunct piece of law.
Both the GAC and the ALP show vulnerability to becoming repeatedly fly-blown, and in need of a trip through the plunge-dip every now and then.