PZ has some new information from Alison Smith. It’s…not exculpatory of Michael Shermer, to put it mildly.

It wasn’t actually the next day that I left Shermer’s room. The entire amount of time that passed between me asking someone to come get me after leaving the party and me calling again to say please come get me I need help and don’t know where I am was around two hours. Some commenters seem to think that I had some kind of morning after regret or something, but in actual fact I was calling it rape immediately.

The other part is – me asking Shermer to be on that panel for the Sex workshop wasn’t a reaction based upon victimization (like,

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Ed has a good post on Michael Shermer’s exaggerated outrage at my criticism of him.

His comment on the bit where Shermer says I turned the inquisition on him and that we inquisitors are trying to force him to defend himself -

What does innocence until proven guilty have to do with any of this? That is a legal concept and you are not on trial, no matter how much you imagine yourself to be. You said something dumb and sexist in a public forum and someone else pointed out that it was dumb and sexist in a public forum. And the truth is that you are defending yourself, primarily by going on the offensive and accusing your critics of

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Ok so now Shermer’s “response” is online, so I can look at a couple of other details I omitted because I didn’t want to retype the whole damn thing.

By the way I get to respond in the next issue. I’m going to do that. I’ll be briefer, and more polite, and I won’t pretend to think anyone is going to “come for me.”

When self-proclaimed secular feminists attacked Richard Dawkins for a seemingly innocent response to an equally innocent admonishment to guys by Rebecca Watson (the founder of Skepchicks) that it isn’t cool to hit on women in elevators, this erupted into what came to be known as “Elevator­gate.” I didn’t speak out because I figured that an

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I re-read some of Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things this morning, to refresh my memory. I’ve read that and Why We Believe and the odd article here and there. I’ve never liked his writing much. It’s not bad, but it’s a little loose and lazy. Characterless. Journalistic.

I was interested to see that chapter 7 is titled Epidemics of Accusations: Medieval and Modern Witch Crazes. The modern ones are the panics about “Satanic” abuse in the 1980s and about “recovered memory” in the 90s. They’re interesting subjects and ones I’ve read a fair bit about, thanks to Frederick Crews and Elizabeth Loftus among others. It’s terrible stuff – people’s lives ruined by ridiculous beliefs about Satanic rapes … Read the rest

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Shermer’s unleashed a lot of assholes on me (because I didn’t have enough of them before). I’m getting pretty tired of people saying I lied, I must say. I did not lie. I quoted Shermer accurately.

“Atheist Revolution” is pretty shameless about calling me a liar.

In his response, Shermer notes that he was quoted inaccurately and out of context.

He was not quoted inaccurately. That is not true. I don’t consider it out of context either, but that of course is always debatable. But inaccurately, no. I’m tired of people calling me a liar.

And he takes the additional step of pointing out the problems with some of
Benson’s more common tactics regarding labeling those with whom

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I see that thanks to Michael Shermer I’m going to be having to do extra clean-up of falsehoods and misrepresentations for awhile. That’s skepticism for ya.

Here are some.

Jacques Rousseau‏@JacquesR

On the @michaelshermer talk where he’s allegedly sexist: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/12-12-12/#feature … – ‘it’s more of a guy thing’ seems descriptive, not normative.

No. I didn’t allege that he’s sexist. I didn’t draw any general conclusions about him at all. I quoted what he said as an example of dopy stereotypes about women; I did not go on to say “therefore he is a sexist.” The column wasn’t about him.

Also, since the column was about stereotypes, it doesn’t really matter all that much whether Shermer’s remark … Read the rest

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Where was I? There were some things I didn’t get to in the post this morning.

One of the things. Shermer is indignant about what I said about him. Here’s what I said about him.

You would think that nontheism and feminism should be a natural combination. Women have the most to gain from escaping religion, after all: monotheism gives men higher status, starting with their allegedly being made in the image of God.

But atheism hasn’t always been very welcoming to women. Maybe there’s an idea that men created God, so men should do the uncreating.

Mostly though, it’s just a matter of stereotypes, the boring, stubborn, wrong stereotypes and implicit associations that feminism has been battling since,

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 … Read the rest

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