Almost Everything I’ve Ever Wanted To Say To Atheists

It’s an unfortunate feature of a certain strand of contemporary atheism that it doesn’t treat religious believers as fellow humans with whom we disagree, but as tards who function primarily as objects of ridicule. And ridicule has its place. But sometimes it’s gratuitous. Sure, there are stupid/crazy religious people; there are also stupid/crazy atheists, and black people, and white people, and gays, and straights, and Republicans, and Democrats, and Sixers fans, and Celtics fans, and so on. Focusing on the stupidest among those with whom you disagree is a sign of weakness, not of strength.

It seems to me that the default stance of a proud secular humanist should be to respect other people as human beings, even if we definitively and unambiguously think they are wrong.

–Sean Carroll via David Moles

What’s sad is that I share a lot in common with atheist philosophy.  I am in favor of religion or spiritual practice being a private thing that does not have anything officially to do with our government, our public schools, and our public lives.  What you do with your soul is your own business, not mine, and vice versa.  But it’s the attitude that Sean describes above that usually puts me at odds with atheists.

Particularly when they hurl slurs around that, if (modified appropriately and) directed at someone due to their race, gender, or sexual orientation, they would find unconscionable.  Not that religious/spiritual bigotry is worse.  Just that, for some, saying nasty things about religious people doesn’t strike them as wrong the same way saying nasty things about black people would.  But it’s all nastiness.

William Sanders, You Stay Classy!

To bring this back around to where it belongs…

Sanders has returned from his trip and is responding to authors criticizing his bigoted views and/or asking that their stories be removed from the Helix site by, predictably, being a complete asshole.

He told N. K. Jemisin that he’d never publish her again and responded to Yoon Ha Lee’s removal request with some choice words:

He then … claimed that I only asked for the story to be withdrawn “because, let’s get real here, you feel the need to distance yourself from someone who is in disfavor with the kind of babbling PC waterheads whose good opinion is so important to you, and whom you seem to be trying to impress with this little grandstand play.”

As others have said: you stay classy, man!

To make things even better, on the page where Yoon’s story used to be is the following text:

Story deleted at author’s pantiwadulous request.

A quick check shows that this text also graces the two pages where N K Jemisin’s story used to be.

ETA: Looks like sometime last night Sanders rethought this strategy and simply deleted the pages. But Nick Mamatas has the screencap. You know, in case someone tried to pretend that shit didn’t happen.

And this morning I discovered that, though Sanders offered to take down the stories just yesterday afternoon, he now expects authors who want their stories removed to pay him $40 to do so. I’m sure if I sat here for another two hours, he’d do something else to offend.

If Sanders’ crazy wasn’t broadly evident before, it is now. (Also, pandiwadulous??)

Elsewhere, N K talks about the minefield one must traverse when something of this nature comes up. People don’t want to support Helix in any way as long as Sanders is involved, but the authors published there are not at fault and shouldn’t be punished. Doing the former without doing the latter, indirectly, is hard. It’s not the authors’ fault, but they may get backlash nonetheless.

Speaking of editors taking responsibility, Micole has an interesting post on the Aqueduct blog where she calls for a boycott of F&SF until they stop publishing Dave Truesdale on their website. (Others agree.) I’ve heard that Dave only has one column left on his contract, so he’ll be going soon, anyway. But it should be noted that he isn’t going away because Gordon van Gelder has expressed disappointment at the things Dave has to say (that I’ve seen), but just because the contract is up. Micole sites some of the nasty things Dave has said about me personally, which I appreciate other people pointing out (as Tobias did, as well). But I don’t know that this is going to move Gordon much. (He doesn’t have a very high opinion of me, so I don’t think he’d care if Dave or anyone else was nasty about me.) I’m less concerned about that than the crazy stuff he’s said as a columnist for F&SF and in other “professional” capacities. That anyone thinks it’s okay to give him a venue says a lot.

I’m going to say again: When will we, as a community, collectively shunn these people until they go away? Because, seriously, this has to stop. Pandiwadulous? PC Nazi? If people like this aren’t shut down and put out of the group, they will not stop, they will not get better, but they will infect others, drive folks away, and make the “professional” venues they’re associated with look like safe harbors for hate and bigotry.

Public Service Announcement

Despite the Internet’s efforts to make you feel otherwise, every thought you have during the day, every next step you make in the course of your hour, everything you eat, is just not that damn interesting, people.

Now, the majority of you confine this kind of thing to Twitter, which is great because it’s a choice whether to follow you in such a way or not. But now the heinousness of Twitter to LJ (and, apparently, WordPress) is upon us. There is still hope, though. If all your daily tweets go in one post, that’s fine. But I ask, on behalf of people like me who really do not give a flying fuck what cool thing you just saw out your window or that you found your favorite pasta sauce at Whole Foods: Put that shit behind a cut.

Don’t make me ask again.

William Sanders, Senior Bigot, Helix

I love writing science fiction and fantasy, I love reading science ficton and fantasy. I love (some parts of) fandom, I love (many parts of) this community. But there are times when I really feel like I could, and should, and must, walk the hell away before I end up hating all humanity. This is one of those times.

From a rejection letter William Sanders of Helix sent out:

I’m impressed by your knowledge of the Q’uran and Islamic traditions. (Having spent a couple of years in the Middle East, I know something about these things.) You did a good job of exploring the worm-brained mentality of those people - at the end we still don’t really understand it, but then no one from the civilized world ever can - and I was pleased to see that you didn’t engage in the typical error of trying to make this evil bastard sympathetic, or give him human qualities.

[…]

the narrator seems to be saying that it was this incident which caused him to take up the jihad, but he’s being mendacious (like all his kind, he’s incapable of honesty);

Full letter here.

You know what makes me so mad about this, beyond the obvious? I want to like Helix. It’s published some great stories by some wonderful writers (some of whom are my friends). But all of that is canceled out by the insane bigotry on display in that letter. And people like this are not shunned, cast out, or made an example of.

As I said. There are times.

ETA: Sanders responds:

Son, hasn’t anybody ever told you that public posting of a private email message is contrary to the rules both of accepted internet practice and common courtesy?

I do appreciate your efforts to be fair - certainly far more so than most of the other people in this ward, ah, group - but the fact remains that you’ve done something both socially and professionally unacceptable in posting it at all. So if you had any idea of submitting anything else to Helix, forget it. I won’t work with people who pull this kind of shit.

I suppose this is what I get for trying to be a nice guy, and give you a little encouragement rather than the standard thanks-but-no-thanks form rejection. Silly me.

(I notice, too, the presence in the lynch mob of another person I’ve tried to help, and to whom I thought I’d been particularly kind. No good deed, etc.)

Of course none of these people have read the story, and so they fail to grasp the context - that I was talking not about Muslims, or Arabs, or Oompa Loompas or any other religious or ethnic group, but about terrorists and violent extremists. (That being, after all, what your story was about.)

But I don’t feel any need to defend myself, or Helix, to these people; indeed I doubt that there’s anybody outside their little Mutual Masturbation Society who gives a damn what they think about anything at all.

They are cordially invited to have intercourse with their precious selves. I’m sure most of them could use the practice.

That makes it all better, right??

The contributions by lwe/Lawrence Watt-Evans on the thread are… special, as well.

Daughter of ETA: There is more commentary here and also here with the full rejection reposted, since apparently the person who was rejected deleted it from the original thread.  Speaking of the rejected person, he’s put up a post explaining that we’re all taking Mr. Sanders out of context:

There is a truly despicable Muslim character in my story. Sorry, world. Maybe I was playing into prejudices. Sanders was talking about that character, so it wasn’t an out-of-the-blue rant, it was targeted to the content of my story. In context, his comments were directed at MY character and those types of extremists. People are taking it out of context and interpreting it too broadly if they think that Sanders was referring to all Arabs or all Muslims. I’m sure that if my character was a Timothy McVeigh-like extremist, Sanders would have used different but equally scornful language. The extremism of MY character is what drew his ire, and so if there is any blame it’s MY blame.

I’m sure you can image what I have to say to that.  Lucky you, I posted it in the comments. I would cut Luke some slack due to him probably freaking out a little when Sanders was all “You’ll never be published in MY magazine again!” except that from his description of his own story I’m not at all convinced that he didn’t write something sketchy and racist himself.  I’m willing to be proven wrong.

A scenario for you

If a white person calls me a nigger, that’s pretty racist, right?  I mean, if someone is willing to use that particular word against me, that’s not a mistake, that’s not an oops, that’s not a slip of the tongue.  That’s a pretty clear cut situation.

Okay.  Now let’s say that “Bob” calls me a nigger and I go: “You racist! OMG.”  Would you expect rational people to then say, “But Tempest, Bob is really nice.  In the past, I’ve never heard him call anyone a nigger before.  He didn’t call Jamal a nigger last week.  And he marched on Washington with Martin Luther King!”

No, you wouldn’t expect that, would you?  And even if that did happen, wouldn’t your reaction be, “The dude called her a nigger you idiot.  It doesn’t matter what he did or didn’t do before this moment, that is some fucked up racist shit.”

Maybe Bob doesn’t always have racist tendencies.  Maybe Bob has an unconscious bias.  Maybe Bob was having a bad day, was drunk, just had a fight with his wife, whatever.  That still does not negate the fact that, in that moment, Bob pulled out some racism and hurled it at me.  And we don’t need to see Bob do it 10 more times over the course of several days, weeks, years, etc. to be able to peg that instance as A Bad Thing.

Right?  Right.

So, why is it then that whenever the gender bias thing comes up, people say “Well, you can’t judge on just this one instance” or “Statistically you need more data”?  No.  No, you really don’t.  Because it doesn’t matter what happened before.  If someone does something that smacks of sexism in one point in time, that is a problem at that point in time.  We don’t need statistics to tell us that the one instance was wrong.  More data can show a pattern, sure, and that makes things worse.  But the absence of a pattern does not make things better.  Because the wrong thing was still done.  Plain and simple.

We seem to have gotten to a point in this community where sexism and gender bias is a nebulous, hard to pin down thing that people don’t want to admit exists or require extraordinary evidence before they’ll admit it exists in one place.  Even when it’s as blatant as Bob calling me a nigger.  (As proof, I cite the Harlan Ellison boob grab incident.)  It’s not really a problem, some say.  It’s not a problem until you can prove it over the course of five volumes, others say.  It’s just you people looking to fight about something and then you’ll forget about it later, still others say.

No, people.  You need to stop.  Because, as with many prejudices, it is not okay to ignore the individual instances of wrongness until you can prove some sort of pattern.  Because each time it comes up, some yahoo will always claim it as an individual instance.  Take it from a person who has had to deal with both large scale and individual level prejudices all of her life: You do not win by ignoring the small stuff just as you do not win by only worrying about the small stuff and ignoring the bigger problem.  You win by pointing out and eliminating both.

So the next time you feel the need to say something about how it’s “just one anthology” or “just one year’s worth of a magazine” or “Just” anything, stop and eat a cookie.  Better yet, knit.  It’ll keep your fingers busy.

Rachel Moss and the Situation She Created

Because of what Rachel Moss did, I’m completely angry. It’s not just her stupid actions, but the domino effect of them. She cannot escape culpability in this clusterfuck because she posted that not on her LJ, which has some potential for wank, but on a website where people are encouraged to be nasty and over the top.

And of all the things that she said and did, I have to say the worst is calling Moondancer’s little boy a nasty name. I mean, as much as the rest of that is some bullshit, the rest of us are adults. We put those pics on the internet and, sad as it is, the world we live in does carry the risk of assholes deciding to use them for fun. But you do not say something like that about a random child. I fully blame her for the fact that the SASS assholes moved on from making fun of us to making fun of other kids in the Flickr pool.

Now that I’m done writing the ABW post, I’m ready to say what I think we should do about this. Attacking them will probably not work, as these are professional internet assholes with too much time on their hands as it is. I’ll write to the admins about the guy using my picture as his avatar and see if I can get that taken down. But as for the thread and the people on it? I have a suggestion.

I want a bunch of people to register at SASS and start posting to that thread. But not attacks. Because attacks won’t do any good, not unless we can find some pictures of THEM to make fun of (which I wouldn’t bother doing, anyway, because what more can you say about people with so little going on?). No, instead I think we should just start posting nothing but pictures of horses and kitties and puppies and baaaaaby animals.

And some gay porn.

We need to flood them with so much noise that they abandon the thread. If they start it elsewhere, we just do it again.

[ETA: I got bored! This is sad. One day and I’m already bored with those assholes. And unless some of the below things I want happen (not that they should), I can’t even get up the energy to care about them and their board. I still have anyone’s back who needs me to have it, but they’ve already become bogged down in their own loserness, I don’t feel the need to keep worrying about them.]

What I really want is for someone to find the real names behind some of these people and post that somewhere. But that would be wrong and probably a bit impossible. Of course what may not be impossible is hacking the boards or initiating a DoS attack. But that would be wrong, too, and I would never suggest it. I can dream, though.

Also, this is my last post on this particular blog about Rachel Moss until I am done writing up my positive WisCon posts.

Still A Nigger

Apologies to those I offend with the title.

After having to deal with much worse people throwing that word at me more times than I can count in a small span of time, I suppose I have some strength left to roll my eyes at this shit.  Someone’s using my picture as their avatar with the words 100% Nigger atop.

Oh good.

They really, really don’t know who I am, do they?

They are about to find out.

I Have Not Even Begun To Be Angry

I’m at the airport now and can’t make a proper post about the shenannigans on Something Awful surrounding WisCon but this post may help.  I checked out this fucking thread of ignorance and can’t believe some of the bullshit.  On about page 2 or 3 they start pulling images from the WisCon Flickr feed and making fun of the people (mostly women) for being fat, ugly, stupid, and more.  They even make fun of people’s kids.

Oh, fuck that.

I have a lot of words to say and some actions to do, but I want to say this one thing.  I was scrolling through the thread and looking at the pictures and, instead of being ashamed that I associate myself with such people (horrors!), I couldn’t help but think of how beautiful all those images are.  They are pictures of beautiful women of all sizes smiling, having fun, loving where they are and what they’re doing.  These are the poeple I go to WisCon to be around.  And nothing those half-brained monkeys on that forum say can make me feel any different.  You wanna call me out as a fat loser?  You go right ahead.  But it’s plainly evident that I not only have more class than you, I also have a better life and better friends.  All the evidence I need to support that statement is my lack of time spent on the internet trolling for pictures of people I don’t know in order to make fun of them for arbitrary reasons.

Get a life, you losers.  And coming from a Star Trek fan, that’s fucking sad.

(p.s. Rachel Moss just better be glad I am not still in Madison right now.)

Grand Theft Auto

Wil Wheaton has a great post about moral panic and GTA, sparked by the fact that GTA IV comes out today. Before the game is even out there’s people freaking out about bus ads and screaming WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN and whatever other nonsense. Cue eye roll.

The fact that kids shouldn’t even be playing the game and that, if they are, then perhaps the problem is their parents’ inability to parent never comes up in certain circles. Go fig.

But what really annoys me is the panic about how horrible and morally degrading the game is. Not because of the violence, necessarily. People rarely ever get up in arms about that. But because the character can have sex with and also kill prostitutes. OH LORDY.

First of all, the player does not have to kill prostitutes if they don’t want to. Second, the player can kill just about anyone, not just prostitutes. Why are people so concerned about pixilated prostitutes and not pixilated old ladies?

I think we all know the answer.

Anyway, I only care about this because I love me some GTA. Oh yes! I own GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas. Surprised? Maybe not. But it may surprise you how I play these games.

When I fire up GTA, I do pretty much the same thing. I first activate a cheat so that the cops will leave me alone. I then activate a cheat to get a bunch of dangerous and fun weapons. Then I walk out of my safe house and find a car. I then carjack it. Then I drive off in a random direction and explore the city while hitting pedestrians, running into other cars and making their occupants angry, and trying to find new ways to travel to San Francisco and Las Vegas (if I’m in San Andreas). Sometimes I get out of the car, pull out a weapon, and randomly kill people just because I can. I particularly love the flamethrower. When nighttime comes, yes, I go around looking for prostitutes. I enjoy the little having sex/car jumping animation. Sometimes, if I am in the mood, I kill the prostitute. Sometimes I kill the ones that won’t get in my car. After about an hour of flying the plane, killing people, picking up prostitutes, and causing general mayhem, I turn the game off and go do something else.

I could make a joke about how doing this in a game keeps me from doing it in real life, but the truth is that I have never had the desire to find a flamethrower and go to town on some random folks. I don’t drive, but if I did I think I could refrain from crashing into cars and running down pedestrians. I don’t have any interest in prostitutes or in killing them, or killing anyone. Playing this game has not made me more likely to knife anyone. I am not more hostile than I used to be (I’ve always been pretty hostile, just ask F. Paul Wilson). I bet this is true for most people. But I am sure there are plenty of moral outragists who will pass out from the vapors upon reading my GTA routine.

These are the same people who are convinced that Harry potter will turn kids into Wiccans and/or Satanists. Basically people who themselves are unable to distinguish fantasy and play from reality and right thinking. People who, because they listen to whatever some authority figure tells them without applying their own critical thinking skills, are convinced that everyone else is the same. Sorry, but no. I can think for myself, I know right from wrong, and some book, tv show, or video game isn’t going to change that.

Dear CSI (of any flavor)

Something you seem unable to grasp:

You Are Not A Soap Opera

Seriously. We don’t care if one CSI is cheating on another and we don’t appreciate the return of the Black Man As Addict storyline and, honestly, we really don’t need to know that much about the lives of the CSIs. That’s not why we watch. Sure, it’s great when you see that two people who are into each other hook up, but then that’s all we need to know. No more info needed, thanks. No drama required. We’re watching your tiresome shows for the hot forensics action and because we enjoy crime shows and puzzle solving. If we want relationship drama we’ll catch the replay of today’s All My Children. At least there we’ll find some more black people.

Once again: CSI =/= Soap Opera. Put it in a memo and send it to Gary, David, and William ASAP.