Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkad
Yesterday there was an atheoskeptic or skeptoatheist conference in Milwaukee that was the subject of a lot of ginned-up “controversy” beforehand because that’s what the organizers went for. They invited several notorious Twitter abusers, because Let All the Voices Be Heard; some people who didn’t want to share a stage with notorious Twitter abusers dropped out, and others went ahead anyway.
One who went ahead was Thomas Smith of Serious Inquiries Only, who did a conversation with one of the worst notorious Twitter abusers, Carl Benjamin who tweets as Sargon of Akkad. Friends of mine were talking about how badly that went yesterday.
Charone Frankel posted a clip of the worst moment on Facebook.
Editing to add: Here is a sharper and easier to hear version on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/KWintie/status/914264270740877314
Carl Benjamin is no surprise. The cheers from the audience are a surprise.
In late January 2016 Richard Dawkins retweeted a typically malicious and misogynist tweet by Carl Benjamin, one that mocks a specific woman who had long been a target of Twitter abuse. He was disinvited to speak at the Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism as a result, but there was more uproar over that so he was disdisinvited i.e. reinvited.
Things have not improved much since then.
Thomas Smith tries, he really tries. He’s young, and he’s learning, and he is sometimes shockingly ignorant of history, but he gives a damn about social justice. I applaud him for his efforts.
However, he is a naif. There was no way he could “win” in this situation. The best he could have done is, perhaps, lay out the following rule: with a moderator on hand to ensure discipline, Sargon is not to communicate in any form with anyone until and unless Smith makes an actual statement, nor may Sargon move about or leave the stage. Then, Smith simply sits and reads a book for the entire scheduled time, after which he walks off with no comment. Or something along those lines.
Smith has posted on his Twitter account his intention to stay away from that medium for the time being. Naturally, numerous pieces of shit have been swarming and hurling feces.
Twitter is such a foul hive.
Iirc, Dawkins apologized for the tweet; he hadn’t known it was a caricature of a real person who had consequently been subject to major harassment.
Not really. He did say he hadn’t realized the caricature was of a real person, and that he wouldn’t have RTd it if he’d known – but he then went on to say she should be mocked, “the more the merrier.” That’s not a real apology, especially since I had carefully explained to him while we were discussing the statement we published a few weeks before that his tweets often inspired his many fans to harass and abuse people.
And I don’t think he said “I’m sorry I did that” and I know he didn’t say “that was a rotten thing to do and I’m terribly sorry.”
Oh, I take it back about “a few weeks earlier” – I remembered the timing wrong, which is stupid since I said it in the post. The statement was a year and a half before the Sargon retweet.
I posted about it at the time.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2016/the-more-the-merrier/
His tweets are there. He didn’t apologize at all, he simply said he was deleting his tweets – and went on to say “Maybe I’m naive. Can’t believe anyone’s as nasty as her.”
Yeah. Not an apology.
Maybe I’m naive, too – I’d forgotten just how horribly he’d behaved.