If your Twitter feed is anything like mine, you see it all day long: “educational” corporate accounts fighting negative public opinion regarding GMOs, biologists spreading the word about heritability and fighting their psychology professors about where behaviour comes from . . . PhDs chiming in about the Berkeley riots and disinvitations and voicing their free speech concerns. Ever notice how if you’re against anything big and powerful, that on top of everything else there’s someone out there telling folks you’re “anti-science?”
The pro-GMO stuff paints the anti-GMO movement as superstitious and paranoid, mindlessly set “against science” and progress – as though there aren’t corporate ownership and legal issues with the giant corporations that are running this science: anti-Monsanto is not anti-science, and it is not science the anti-GMO people don’t trust, it’s the huge, soulless multinationals who will own it. It’s no trouble finding boatloads of geneticists to explain the detail of why these new proteins etc., aren’t bad for you, and that’s the public discussion they want to have, the science one. They don’t want to have a legal one, or a financial one – especially not a historical one. That’s a form of trolling, if it it’s not a form of lying: we only talk about science and we only talk about the present and the future.
How could we possibly know a giant corporation would do something bad with this science? It’s brand new! It’s a trait of online communication, to be sure, but it’s not a positive one, so it’s part of the trolling phenomenon: history, people, the world, everything else we know is left out of this specific conversation. To include the world at large in an online argument is some sort of logical fallacy, apparently. Especially so if you keep it hidden for several comments and then try to pull it out in a “gotcha” sort of move. Ha.
OK, that’s not the big one by me. Now for Berkeley and the Dawkins radio interview disinvitation.
The New Right, the New Atheists, the New Naturists, call them what you will. I can’t stand to think of all those names as a monolith myself, but if there are overlaps, then what’s the difference? I don’t want to address the Alt-Right, but in America there are only two ways to vote, so we all line up on one side or the other, I’m afraid.
I abhor that North American atheists can be criticizing Islam while our countries are bombing and exploiting Muslims the world over. When the enemy were godless communists, our hawks were Christians, but now that our enemies are God fearing Muslims, then atheists can be hawks too, I guess. That’s the point that needs to be made because it’s the point no-one wants to hear. I’m not having any luck online with this idea, but the difference between criticizing Christian fundamentalists and Muslim ones, is that our anti-Muslim sentiment kills Muslims, while our anti-Christian sentiment not so much. There’s a lot of anti-Muslim feeling around already, you see, enough for us to bomb Muslims to Hell on a regular basis, so when we add our voices to that river of emotion, the net effect is that more bombs fly.
Complain about treatment of women, FGM, and they get more drones again, not schools, not hospitals, from our countries. War co-opts everything, there are no innocent voices. Muslims see this, as do I: we criticize and kill Muslims and we criticize and elect Christians.
Any of you young logicians see how that’s not cool?
Perhaps we can postulate a new creature, a hybrid, the Christian Atheist, maybe that can explain it, with Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins as prime examples.
I get it, atheists, I mean, I’m an atheist, although I’m not really committed to it. I don’t think learning that God existed would make me unhappy for long, it would almost certainly be good news. But I get it, religion causes all these problems, wars, I get the lack of reason in the stories. Don’t you know though, that persecuting people is guaranteed to strengthen their religion? Why do you think people believe, because life is too good, too easy?
Not only that, but are you really happy to add your voices to the Christians’ voices in the Islam slamming? Like you agree with the Christians, you approve of them? Are you truly Christian atheists, maybe a little?* Somebody’s either forgetting there’s a war on, or there’s hating religion and then there’s hating religion, right? Wait – I don’t even know if that’s why Dawkins is being deplatformed, it’s just that I follow him, and that’s my complaint about him. Again, he complains about Islam along with other religions, but it won’t impact the other ones the same way. Maybe that’s not it? Maybe the Christians blocked him, for the Selfish Gene?
Joke, at least I think so. It’s almost too bad they didn’t let it happen, have the riots if it got that far, though. It would be another level of weird to see the Trump enabled fascist Islamophobe pseudo-Christians who rioted for Yiannopoulos and Coulter lining up to fight for the atheist scientist geek professor against local Berkeleyites and students. (Barry Crimmins snort.) On second thought, just imagining it was enough, I’ve had my weirdgasm, no-one needs to see that. No wonder things are as bad as they are, seeing things like that fractures your mind in terrible ways.
I like Dawkins, I’m an atheist, as I said, and I’m into biology, evolution, genetics. I’m not happy to shut him up because I think he’s on an evil mission, I just assess the net good or bad from his stance differently than he does. If Christian maniacs take his anti-Muslim speech and hurt people, he can blame those Christians and their religion, and he’s right and he’s consistent, all that is fine. I just see the misuse of him as more powerful than the proper use of him in the present environment, is all. I have more, some detail, but again, pragmatism. I don’t want to spend my time today railing against someone who I basically think is one of the good guys.
This is all grey area stuff, folks, don’t pigeonhole me, ask me. Being on the “dominant Left,” I’ll tell you what I think, without fear of exposure or reprisal, because apparently folks like me are running this business and whaddayougonnadoaboutit?
Jeff
July 24th., 2017
* Of course, most North American atheists are culturally Christian, and there are sure to be a whole lot of Muslim atheists out there, and every other kind too.
Abuse with an Excuse 