Life is too short to put up with assholes
Dave Silverman has spoken out about the mess at Mythcon in Milwaukee last weekend.
I saw the video of the Mythcon event. I heard people laugh and cheer at a victim of sexual assault being taunted via Twitter with a shameful shitty tweet.
My blood boiled. My adrenaline flowed. My bile bubbled. If you’re one of the people who cheer when victims get taunted, you’re an asshole. And I don’t want to have anything to do with you. I want nothing to do with you until you figure out how to have some empathy.
When you’re organizing an event, the most important thing you can do is make sure that people feel welcomed. Celebrating the diversity of our community also means recognizing that we have work to do to make our events reflect the larger community of atheists. It’s something I strive for every time I sit down with my team to work on our events.
We can’t tolerate intolerance. We can’t abide elevating those who spend their time trolling, and harassing, and alienating the very people who we’re in this fight to help. We have serious work to do and we need serious conversations about how to do that. I don’t have time to waste on people whose only interest seems to be provocation for provocation’s sake and not on making the lives of our fellow atheists better.
Our convention next year is March 29 to April 1 in Oklahoma City. Like every year, we’re going to have new people you’ve never heard from. We’re going to talk about tough subjects. But we’re going to do it without making people feel unsafe at our event. We’re going to have a great time celebrating our community and the people in it. And we’re going to do it while working to help people.
I do what I do to make a positive change in this country. I’m 51 years old and I don’t have the time or patience to put up with assholes.
There are a lot of comments thanking him, and a few defending the harassers and complaining about “SJWs” blah blah blah. Like:
All the sanctimonious lecturing and white-knighting and rape hysteria and identity politics is why people like Sargon have an audience.
No, people like Sargon (Carl Benjamin) have an audience because there are a lot of mean assholes in the world.
Dave was speaking out four years ago, and I’m glad he still is.
I’ve had occasional problems with things Dave Silverman has said over the years but he’s spot on here. We can’t tolerate intolerance through action or inaction.
I’ve said it before, but in South Africa we just got through some shit stirred by a British PR firm known as Bell Pottinger. They were essentially pushing a whole bunch of BS around “White monopoly capital”, as well as a “political party” called Black First, Land First, basically increasing racial tensions within South Africa to boiling point.
Part of the campaign was paid twitter trolls from India who went on about “white owned media” as that media, of which I’m a proud though not exactly significant part, exposed corruption in the Gupta family’s dealings with our government. They also did fun things like lie about journalists who exposed their BS, claiming it was all Johann Rupert pulling the strings in the background. This was particularly funny, considering he was one of their clients up until he found out about their involvement.
Upshot of this being, I’ve noticed something with America’s rightwing “youth” media. I don’t call them “alt right” because honestly I think “alt right” is a bullshit term. There is no functional difference between Lauren Southern and Anne Coulter, Stephen Crowder is just reheated Glenn Beck, and Bannon was always just Bill O’Reilly 2.0 etc…
Anyway Sargon of Akkad is British, a lot of the voices I’ve seen mentioned have turned out to be Canadian, and… isn’t it kind of weird? I mean I follow US politics because I got my start in journalism working on the business pages, and the US effects the rest of our economies, but isn’t it strange how so many of the voices who are so keen on rightwing American politics are, well, not Americans?
And that leads me to think about something else, these figures, I’ve been taking a bit of time to listen to a few of them, and what I’m getting is, well, not much out of it. They aren’t all that interesting, they’re all pretty formulaic and sloppy and yet they seem to get these big audiences…
There is something profoundly off about this whole situation. It feels like some sort of propaganda campaign, and propagandists aren’t generally the types to turn their noses up at the chance to buy views.
That’s caused me to think it would be funny if Dawkins, Benjamin and Yiannopoulos formed a trio and went on the road.
They could do dramatic readings of each other’s books!
Actually, I’d quite like to see Dawkins read from Yiannopoulos’ reputedly terrible book. Whatever else Dawkins is, he’s a great writer and I suspect his discomfort at reading Yiannopoulos’ prose would be delicious.
He’s a great writer when he’s writing about his subject. I’m not sure about the rest of the time. Some of the posts he wrote for his website were not good. He is – obviously – terrible at Twitter.
Of course. I meant in the context of dramatic readings of one another’s books.
In my personal extension of your fantasy of the comedy troupe of Dawkins, Benjamin and Yiannopoulos, they come together because they so obviously share core values and are all Thought Leaders. They sign a contract to do readings of passages of each other’s books. Then on the eve of the tour, Dawkins finally gets a peek at Yiannopoulos’ text.
It’s cruel, I know, but his expression would be priceless. And he has it coming.