Venomous
I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkad, but now it seems of some interest to know what kind of prize package the Milwaukee people invited to their event.
I am one of the people who were trying to warn the Mythcon organizers as to the nature of their speakers, particularly Sargon of Akkad, a fellow I have unfortunately known for some time. When it became clear that the Mythcon people were not interested, my peers and I just tried to warn as many others in the community as possible. If they want to platform people like this, at the very least we would make sure they had to own their decision, and we were not going to let them say they weren’t warned.
Let me introduce you to the Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon) that I know.
Carl came to prominence on Youtube as the most public mouthpiece of the movement called GamerGate.
The most public? I always thought that was Milo.
Carl’s first video was regarding frequent GG target Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist critic of video games who received death and rape threats regularly. Carl made over 30 videos about her specifically and a great many others that discussed her.
When I say “discussed” that is somewhat euphemistic. Carl has referred to her over the years as a con artist (implying she either instigated or perhaps even fabricated her years of well-documented abuse), a cult leader, a bitch, an authoritarian bigot against white men, and many other interesting charges. The master of the mixed message, he would tell his followers not to harass her- as that would be ‘money in her pocket’, but also that her harassment was an inevitable consequence of her bigotry. He has stated numerous times that he and other “anti-sjw’s” are in a culture war against “regressives” and “cultural Marxists”.
Familiar stuff – familiar, wearying, depressing stuff.
Let’s review some highlights:
~ After mass shooter Elliot Rogers’ deadly rampage, Carl responded to feminist Laci Green’s video on the subject by – ever so rationally- blaming the event on her in particular and the “fucking feminist SYSTEM!!” in general. This was delivered in a histrionic rant that has to be heard to be properly appreciated.
~ Carl holds a grudge against my friend, atheist Youtuber Steve Shives, for his progressivism. Carl has tried some interesting (ok, fraudulent) tactics to get Steve to debate him but has been refused. So, of course, he called upon his rationality and wit to…attack Steve’s wife. He took a two-minute video she appeared in where Steve asks her if she finds his TV show preferences sexist and she admitted she did, and from that deduced that she was a vicious harpy, forcing her feminist ideas upon poor, emotionally abused Steve. This has caused her to be attacked and maligned by many online trolls for years.
And then an item that’s kind of breathtaking:
~ One day when Carl was out shopping, he encountered a retail worker who was wearing (gasp) a “Feminist” t-shirt. He took her picture without her permission and posted it online, along with the name of the shop and the location. After this doxing, she was so badly harassed at work and frightened for her safety the police had to be involved.
He told his fans exactly where to find her, and they did. Because she wore a feminist T shirt.
And that’s the guy the Milwaukee people thought it was worth importing all the way from Swindon to their conference.
Well Yiannopoulos was more Gamergate-adjacent than at the core. He was stirring shit up as usual but wasn’t obsessively involved 24 hours a day like many, many other idiots.
I think that’s what is meant here.
Also, it was frequently claimed by Gamergate people that she fraudulently used the original Kickstarter money she raised on personal stuff even though she clearly exceeded her goals by producing more videos than promised. This is particularly ironic since the Aurini and Owen’s The Sarkeesian Effect, which was supposed to be a damning expose of Sarkeesian, was such a spectacular and hilarious failure. One of those characters (I forget which) used some of the money to buy a car for himself and the two regularly begged for more and more money after they’d spent the original crowdsourced funding. The resulting videos (there are two of them because they fell out toward the end of the ‘project’) are of *hilariously* poor quality and significantly under-deliver on their promises.
And yet nobody seems to call them con-artists or point out that they misused the funds and failed to deliver.
Benjamin has that particular combination of being deeply horrible, not at all inclined to let facts get in the way of a rant and knowing how to deliver what his audience wants. As an atheist and a skeptic I was horrified that he was invited to speak at this conference.
And that’s the trouble with the terrible image that we have: it’s correct.
No, it’s not. It is, like most other prejudices, a generalization. While there are way too many public atheists who are horrible assholes, there are also large numbers who are very good people, unlike the image that we as a group are all untrustworthy and awful.
Every group has its share of awful people; unfortunately, we seem to attract a number of particularly nasty folks who love to attach the label “skeptic” or “freethinker” to their prejudices, and they are loud, proud, and nasty. They outshout the rest of us, so we begin to believe that “we” deserve the image we have, but it is still a generalization from a subset of the group to the entire group, and therefore not correct. If the statement were “some atheists are nasty people and can’t be trusted”, then it would be correct. Of course, then it would be relatively meaningless, because the word atheist could be changed for the name of any other group of people and would still be correct.
I think the problem we have is that we expected more of atheism, so finding out that it has the same failings as other groups (only in many cases louder and more vulgar) is disappointing. I never figured out why anyone thought atheism would be exempt from sexism. I think it comes from sort of tacitly accepting a “god wrote the bible” rendition of religion without thinking that. After all, it was humans who wrote all the nasty things in the bible to create religion; it wasn’t religion that created the nasty ideas.
@iknklast:
Well of course it’s a generalisation. I’m talking about an image. That’s what an image is.
Naturally there are good people in the atheistic and skeptical communities. That is beyond dispute. I’d like to hope that I myself am more on the side of nice than I am of shit and I’d include pretty much everyone else here in that category.
But that isn’t the issue because we’re talking about image and I’m sorry to say that the image our group has is largely the one it deserves because it is chock full of horrible people. When you have to zoom in to find the good people, the movement is toxic and its poor reputation deserved.
So it comes down to those of us who hate the nastiness to rescue the movement from the horrible people, right? Oh, wait, we tried that. It didn’t work out well. It didn’t work out well because the vast vocal majority of movement atheism and movement skepticism turned out to be pricks.
These movements deserve the bad rep they have. I’m still optimistic that we’ll eventually change that. But FUCK do our movements deserve the bad rep they have right now, despite the awesome people scattered throughout them.