I can haz viktimhood?
There is a view, however minority, that Chris Mooney is a man more sinned against than sinning – that he is a victim, the object of an unfair onslaught of criticism from a bunch of internet bullies. His co-author (not very surprisingly) takes that view.
Needless to say, while I was not surprised at the response to Chris’ announcement, I am extremely dismayed. Discussion of each post is anticipated, but baseless personal attacks demonstrate the trouble with blogging…In just the past few years, we’ve watched the number of science bloggers swell, while the tone of much of the commentary changed. Most disheartening, the relationships between bloggers fractured across once cohesive networks as small friendly communities chose sides in a growing culture war.
I’ve taken a robust (to put it one way) position on this particular war, so I am subject to the usual confirmation bias, so keep that in mind, but my view is that Chris is not a victim here. Here’s why.
It is because Chris picked a fight, and he picked it not just on The Intersection but also in Unscientific America and in many mainstream media outlets such as the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, and National Public Radio. He said some very harsh things, and some of them were incomplete or exaggerated or both. This by itself is enough to show that he is not a victim – the fact that he initiated the ‘culture war’ and the fact that he has access to major media, or at least he did for a few months after the book was released. It’s not really convincing to claim that he is a victim when he has far more access to major media than his putative victimizers do, and when he’s been using that access to say harsh and not entirely accurate things about his putative victimizers, in some cases before any of them had done any of this putative victimizing.
Now, he comes by the access honestly – he has it because he wrote a best-seller, and a good one. That’s fine. I don’t in the least begrudge him the access as such (I know, big of me); I begrudge the use he’s been making of it lately.
Sheril complains of ‘baseless personal attacks’ – but then she should address herself to Chris first of all, and indeed to herself, since she co-wrote Unscientific America. Or to put it another way, she should consider the possibility that the personal attacks are actually not baseless – that people accuse Chris of saying things that he really has been saying. She complains of a ‘culture war’ – but then she should ask herself why she and Chris elected to set one off. The ‘new’ atheists are not the Gavrilo Princip here – we didn’t shoot no Archduke.
And then, once the Archduke was shot, we’re not the ones who refused to discuss anything. We’re not the ones who kept just issuing unilateral declarations while steadily refusing to let the ambassadors come in and discuss. We’re not the ones who told some ambassadors they couldn’t even set foot across the frontier. So…all in all, I just don’t believe that Chris and Sheril are victims; I think they’re agents.
Horseshit from Kirshenbaum.
There are much more than “baseless personal attacks”. There are valid questions and valid opinions.
How about the baseless personal attack the she and Mooney made in their unscientific book?
Mooney and Kishenbaum censor their blog for no reason. They should be drummed off the internet.
Why is the language of personal offence even being used here? Mooney and Kirschenbaum in their book and in other writings launched a fairly harsh attack on scientists with whom they disagreed.
Both of them are what I think are called ‘science writers’, not scientists. In their book they tried to play the role of ‘honest broker’, but in the process forgot that, in order to be honest brokers, they can’t start off by attacking either side, and yet that is what they did. They did not think it appropriate to aim their heavy artillery at the religious enemies of science; instead, they weighed in (essentially on religion’s side) against atheist scientists who have had enough of the soft approach to religious bigotry.
What they seem not to have noticed is that the soft approach has not worked. In fact, the public acceptance of evolution in the US has declined in the last 20 years. So it’s at least an odds on chance that a hard approach may be just as likely to succeed. It would be hard to argue convincingly that it should not be tried.
On the other hand, it’s hard to miss the point that the soft approach has been very productive for Chris Mooney, though his future reputation may be in some doubt, now that he has received the pallium from Templeton. Under the circumstances, Sheril should not be surprised at the response that this news has received. She may pretend to dismay, but it would be disingenuous of her to suggest that she did not expect it. Nor should she imply that this is an honour whose value is not widely questioned amongst scientists. To play the victim now is almost beyond belief.
I’m going to bite my tongue, or my typing fingers, and not say anything bad about her … despite the fact that …
No, I’ll be nice.
This is basically a case of someone sticking up for her friend. Admirable in its way, I suppose: at least she’s personally loyal to him. But I put zero weight on her comments.
It is funny when someone takes sides and then complains about people taking sides….
Chris and Sheril have chosen one strategy to follow – which is fine – if it is shown to work. They could have defended that strategy, but instead they chose to attack individuals who have chosen other strategies. What little defense they have made of their strategy is anecdote, at best.
The best religious biologists have done is write apologetics in an attempt to prevent the faithful from losing their faith. I would be worried about siding with individuals who would rather a person give up science than give up religion.
Sheril’s complaint is a sub-category of the rampant misuse of the cry, “ad-hominem! ad-hominem!” She uses the phrase “personal attacks,” but she means the same thing.
She, and others who use this to cry foul, don’t seem to understand the difference between a relevant, justified critique, and an irrelevant personal snipe. The former is exactly what one does when one has a problem with the actual substance of what Person X said. If I criticize Person X for bad scholarship, disingenuous argumentation, etc., that is a personal criticism. But only in the trivial sense that I’m criticizing what Person X said, not what everyone at the conference said.
That’s not out of bounds, it’s not “inappropriate,” and it’s not an example of ad-hominem argumentation.
Sheril bleats about “personal attacks,” but that’s a feint. With the exception of commenters who just poke fun at Chris (something for which I have sympathy, since he’s earned it, but I’ll give her that), people are reacting to his Templeton grant for reasons. Not because Chris’s mother dresses him funny, not because he stepped on my toe at the last atheist get together, but because people genuinely think his work is flawed.
Benjamin Nelson wrote:
I would separate those two things out. Yes, anyone, regardless of what “side” they’re on, can throw out insults. Some of it’s over the top, but in my opinion, a lot of it is justified. There are only so many years of examples of Mooney’s biased, results-oriented formulations we should have to take before we say, “This guy’s not worth anything but mockery.” There really is a limit, Benjamin.
But I think you’re wasting your time with TB and Anthony McCarthy (I say this as someone who’s watched them for years, and stopped talking directly to them because it’s futile). They are partisan through and through, and you can expect the most contorted, contentious, and contradictory statements from them, so long as those serve to argue against the “new atheists.” They’re not good-faith conversational partners.
I submit that you think you’re on the verge of having a productive conversation with them, but you’re really not. I don’t say that to sound dismissive of you – it’s just that others have been there before and come to the same conclusion. Yes, even people with a much more tempered tongue than mine.
You guys are just a bunch of mean old poopy-heads. Whenever Mooney publishes one of his enlightening screeds, the only appropriate response is to send him bunches of flowers and Care Bears.
I concur with Josh’s verdict on TB and Anthony McCarthy. You are wasting your time if you think you are having a two way conversation with them. You are being lectured to – although you don’t see it at first. Refute any claim of theirs and see if they admit their error or see if they simply move the goalposts.
As for Chris I get the impression that he sees himself as the cowbell of science journalism. He seems to be of the opinion that there isn’t a single situation in scientific reporting that can’t be improved by the addition of “more Chris Mooney”.
Eric said that he thought Mooney and Kirshenbaum were science writers rather than scientists.
I would not even say they are science writers, in that they do not explain science to the public. What they write about is how science and politics interact. Certainly they are not science writers like Phil Plait or Carl Zimmer, both of whom share their blogging home with M & K.
Josh, yes, there are limits. That would be why my next sentence was “some of this is understandable, because it’s kind of easy to get acclimated to the histrionics that inevitably ensue when the conversation is so effectively one-sided.” I merely point out that random uninvolved ad hominems don’t help no matter what conversation you’re trying to have.
Maybe I don’t hope to convince either of those two gentlemen out of their views, but I do gain at least something when they explain the basis for those views. i.e., McCarthy harkens back to Dewey and James’s pragmatism. I make this point because it’s clear that this sort of minimally interesting dialogue is far more than Chris and Sheril are willing to do at the Intersection (though Chris is slightly more forthcoming in person).
It’s true enough about the repetitive sniping. I did some repetitive questioning at The Intersection myself before I was banned, and that’s probably why I was banned. That wasn’t all out of sheer irritation or malice though – I could just never seem to get it into my head that Chris was never going to address anything I said – not least because he emailed me early on, when his campaign had just started, and we had a (civil, even friendly) discussion of this very issue of Not Responding. (The gist of it was that he was taken aback at the er energetic tone of my comments, and I said I know, I’m sorry, but it’s this never replying, and he said comments always seem to go all beside the point. Alas, it was clear that he meant they disagreed with him, and I couldn’t think of a way to say that civilly, so we left it, but with that discussion in the background I just kept thinking…surely he’ll answer this one.)
The stonewalling just looks like an incredibly stupid approach – because if he (and they) had engaged with disagreement from the beginning, surely now there would be disagreement still, and some hostility (depending on what they’d gone on to say in the media, but then maybe that would have been different too if there had been engagment), but not this level of hostility.
Yet he’s always giving everyone politically-tinged strategic advice on how to communicate – yet he made and continues to make this basic, stupid, easily avoidable mistake.
“The ‘new’ atheists are not the Gavrilo Princip here – we didn’t shoot no Archduke.”
But you were in Sarajevo on the day it happened, so you’ve all got a lot to answer for.
Oh my, but the comments on Sheril’s post have been entertaining–pearls wrung within an inch of their very lives, I tell you. Truly, it has been a textbook display of the disingenuousness of the ‘Intersection’ regulars. Between guffaws I do wonder how people who dissemble so atrociously (by which I mean both that their tactics are disgraceful and that they really suck at it) can look themselves in the eye.
I wonder if Sheril has her answer?
She has it, but can she recognize it?
I’m just impressed with how their comments section is chiefly populated with resentful Pharyngula rejects. They’re people who couldn’t make a reasonable argument, or who were even self-admitted trolls out to cause trouble, who got laughed off the site and found a new accommodating* home at the Intersection.
*Word carefully chosen with malice aforethought.
It’s even weirder than PZ said. Even people that have no history of posting at Pharyngula, or people who were simply shunned and ignored go to The Intersection to tell of how they were banned, censored, and mistreated at Pharyngula. They collect old Pharyngula trolls, and other commenters go out of their way to sympathize with them and make up stories so that they fit in with the trolls.
Really disturbing.
Yes – I was amazed to see J J Ramsey there, rehearsing yet again the tragic story of how he was banned from Pharyngula merely because he chose to hassle the host’s daughter. That is one obsessive dude.
It is interesting how commenters there seem to think Myers’, Coyne’s and Dawkins’ atheism posts hurt science education, but religious posts on theistic evolution blogs don’t and are likely to help.
The mini-snafu over a post by Michael Barton at tDoD in which he discussed reshelving ID books in the religion section of a bookstore lead me to look at how the Library of Congress categorizes books. Both Francis Collins’ The Language of God and Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God are solidly in the religion category. Dawkin’s The God Delusion is shelved nearby, but Dawkins gets all of the criticism for being a scientist writing about religion?
It’s hard for me to understand why anyone could criticise a scientist for writing about religion. There are two kinds of views of religion: the gap-of-the-gaps view and the watchmaker view. The god of the gaps can be written about my anyone at all, but the scientist is in an especially good position to remark on the watchmaker god. So if a scientist wants to write about either, they’re at least on the same plane as Joe Shmoe.
And what ho! the NCSE has just announced the winner of its first annual Upchucky Award (“for the most noisome creationist”):
http://ncse.com/news/2010/03/announcing-first-annual-upchucky-award-005358
How curmudgeonly of them! How militant! How simply mean! Cue accommodationist outrage in 3…2…oh, wait, I’m confused.
Benjamin Nelson: “the gap-of-the-gaps view”
hehehehe (I don’t know if that was deliberate or not, but I kinda like it :)
Whoops. But yes that works too!
Gap of tutti gappi.