Free Thought Blogs - Autism Plus Boogaloo

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chimpburgers

chimpburgers

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kiwifarms.net
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I've seen this website brought up before in a few other threads. The most common thing that I keep taking away from reading about the website is the confrontation that atheist YouTube personality Thunderf00t had with the website back in 2012 which has been pretty well documented on several websites. @Vitriol gave a nice summary of what happened back then:

Atheism + was a massive shitstorm back in the day. It pitted the controlling authoritarian radfems we now call sjw's against a community which was used to being able to ridicule, browbeat and bully anyone who disagreed with them without any blowback from their own community. Two groups of complete arseholes tearing each other apart and squabbling over possession of their hugboxes. Most of it went down on the now infamous free thought blogs network (which naturally was anything but) and was closely linked with autistic nonsense like the 'elevatorgate' scandal.

The jref had a long running thread where less euphoric atheists reacted with horror, its worth a read for those interested.

For extra context- a lot of prominent antifeminist youtube personalities migrated to utube from the free thought blogs during the schism- thunderfoot being tge obvious example. The A+ shenanigans is the ultimate source of a lot of mra type utubers like sargon and thunderfoots long running feud with the far left and the gradual pivot by such people away from focusing onthe religious far right and more on the psuedo feminist far left

The significance of this website is that it helped give rise to a lot of sperging related to this Atheism Plus bullshit that I believe still has had somewhat of an impact on these communities, and can also explain where specific kinds of lolcows related to all of this came from and why they do what they do.

Just recently, this guy I've never heard of named Richard Carrier has been in some odd dispute with Thunderf00t, calling him a racist, misogynst, every name you can think of and it seems like it's very heated right now. I know nothing about this website besides what I've read a little bit here and on some other websites, but maybe there's some content here worth talking about that would make it distinct enough to post here or something. I was originally just gonna do an Atheism Plus thread, but I'd rather focus on a specific website in this situation and go from there.

Long autistic article from Carrier here:

http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/9345#comments

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Again, I don't even care one bit about Thunderf00t, I just find it fascinating that he can trigger this many people into writing such hilarious text walls and sperging.

Thunderf00t's slapfight with this guy:

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'bout time this dump got a thread. What I'm really interested to know is what Richard Dawkins' relationship is like with the people who run this place. Him and PZ Myers have teamed up in the past to taken on creationists (and became one of the few owners of the much sought-after crocoduck tie), and a lot of people who are on there have indicated that they worship Dawkins. However, Dawkins has made it increasingly clear that he has absolutely no patience for SJW rhetoric whatsoever and considering that Myers and Free Thought Blogs will automatically demonize anyone who slightly disagrees with them I have to wonder how this has impacted their relationship.
 
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dollarhuviya said:
Atheism + was a massive shitstorm back in the day. It pitted the controlling authoritarian radfems we now call sjw's against a community which was used to being able to ridicule, browbeat and bully anyone who disagreed with them without any blowback from their own community. Two groups of complete arseholes tearing each other apart and squabbling over possession of their hugboxes. Most of it went down on the now infamous free thought blogs network (which naturally was anything but) and was closely linked with autistic nonsense like the 'elevatorgate' scandal.
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The atheism+ bullshit was one of my early introductions to internet SJWs and the above is a very accurate description.

On one side you have "militant" fedora-wearing spastic atheists religiously following their own atheistic dogma and on the other side you have "militant" SJW spastic atheists trying to expel the former and convert atheism into their own SJ religion.

"Free-thought blogs" are as much for free-thinking as "Rational Wiki" is for rational thinking.
 
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PZ Myers is boasting about books he doesn't have to read but criticizes anyway.

I don't begrudge people for not wasting their time with nonsense. There's too little time to read everything. But if you're aim is to debunk something, it is your duty to actually go over the claim, and within context. I hate the shit out of Davis Aurini, but I still watched the entirety of his "The Jewish Question" video to see if he was really as bad in context as he was outside. He was actually worse than I expected, but I take it as a point of honor that I can say that after looking myself rather than burying the guy based on something I didn't verify.
 
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I remember Freethought Blogs. I'm surprised that site is still around. They spent far more time pushing social justice bullshit than actually talking about atheism or science. They also have a long history of making false accusations against prominent atheists in order to drive them out of the community. The members of Freethought Blogs did this in an attempt to take control of the atheist community and make it all about social justice. Their scummiest moment would have to be the time when PZ Myers falsely accused Michael Shermer of rape. Thunderf00t made a video about the whole ordeal.

 
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TheImportantFart said:
'bout time this dump got a thread. What I'm really interested to know is what Richard Dawkins' relationship is like with the people who run this place. Him and PZ Myers have teamed up in the past to taken on creationists (and became one of the few owners of the much sought-after crocoduck tie), and a lot of people who are on there have indicated that they worship Dawkins. However, Dawkins has made it increasingly clear that he has absolutely no patience for SJW rhetoric whatsoever and considering that Myers and Free Thought Blogs will automatically demonize anyone who slightly disagrees with them I have to wonder how this has impacted their relationship.
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They had a massive public fallout during 'elevatorgate' iirc. Dawkins has long been disliked for being both white, old and male by the proto SJW movement during the nonsense around elevatorgate he made a comment about absurd oversensitive and the reaction to that grew into A+. I think, this was a few years ago and I'm currently using shitty rural WiFi so don't fancy spending ages loading old blogs to check!

I thought ftb was on its last legs?

Edit I apologise for the terrible lack of punctuation, my connection cut three times :S
 
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Vitriol said:
They had a massive public fallout during 'elevatorgate' iirc. Dawkins has long been disliked for being both white, old and male by the proto SJW movement during the nonsense around elevatorgate he made a comment about absurd oversensitive and the reaction to that grew into A+. I think, this was a few years ago and I'm currently using shitty rural WiFi so don't fancy spending ages loading old blogs to check!

I thought ftb was on its last legs?
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I would have thought so too, but it's still around. Even the Atheism + website still exists too but not sure if there's any content there or not.

Carrier has also gotten his own thread:

https://kiwifarms.net/threads/richa...autism-plus-sperg-ebegger.16191/#post-1192302
 
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Ok, as I was there from the start I have started to write a history of the shithole. I stopped just short of the creation of Atheism Plus, and the Sherman debacle that someone has brought up in the thread. There is an excellent Mykeru Media YT on it if Thunderdick isnt your thing.
I'l try for part two later.

Also, most of this will be about PZ myers as he is the Big Dog of FtB. I have been meaning to start a thread on Ophelia Benson cos she gets properly salty when her victim status or opinion is questioned.

Feel free to hit the Autiic buttons.

FtB started when National Geographic bought out Science Blogs and a number of Bloggers, most notably PZ Myers started to agitate about the coming restrictions on Freez Peach that would no doubt follow.
Ironically, there had been an earlier rift in the Science Blogs community when PZ and a couple of other bloggers had started to censor and ban commentators on their blogs for not following the nascent SJW line. PZ has always seen freez peach as important for him but not for others.
Abby Smith who blogged on biology, invited the banned commentators to an open thread she set up specifically for them to comment without restriction, and The Slymepit was formed. (can now be found here, the strange nature of the site is the legacy of the single thread that Abby set up http://slymepit.com/phpbb/)

The commentariate of PZ Myers blog who called themselves "The Hoard", discovering that they had failed to shut down non PC voices started trying to intimidate Abby Smith and you guessed it, finally doxed her. When even this intimidation tactic didn't work they wrote to her employers at National Geographic and accused her of hosting rascist comment. Yes, they have done it before.

We will call the above "DeepRift one"

Pz Myers had gained his notoriety and the notice of St R of Dawkins, when in order to prove the the Eucharist Cracker did not contain the body of Jesus arranged for a friend to palm one during communion. He then did a few experiments on it to prove there was no human tissue and finally threw it in the bin. This came to the attention of Bill Donahue and PZs short lived fame was guaranteed.
Dawkins started promoting PZ who saw his page views rocket, and coincidentally at around this time he became interested in getting out from under the National Geographic corporate yoke. It was definitely about the freez peach and not the dirty lucre guv.
He set up FTB with a failed comedian who had some IT nouce, Ed Brayton (who is actually quite funny), which surprised a few people as Brayton isn't the biggest fan of Myers

"PZ, you really are just about the biggest asshole I have ever known… You’re a liar, PZ, and a first class, double-barrelled, fully automatic asshole.

"Nor am I at all alone in this judgment... I get numerous private emails from our mutual colleagues that say, in essence, “Look, we all know PZ is a jerk, he’s always been a jerk"...His MO is to start the personal attacks and then pretend to be above it all when they’re returned and he clams up."

Brayton and Myers set up FtB and started to invite interesting atheist bloggers along to the site with various levels of success. The network must have one of the biggest turn over of bloggers on the internet but more will follow on that in other deeprifts. However, the "big Dog" of the site is PZ Myers who accounts for over half the page views on any given day even when he hasn't put anything up that day. And yes PZ does self identify as the Big Dog of FtB although he is always careful to call it humour or satire. Again, there is nothing new under the sun.



Once Dawkins was promoting him and his page views were rising , PZ got a bit above himself and once described himself as the fifth Horseman of the atheist apocalypse.



"http://thehumanist.com/magazine/november-december-2009/features/comes-a-horseman"



but as they say, pride comes before...



Elevator gate (here begins the book of Deeprifts two)



Free thought blogs was from the start enmeshed with Skepchicks, the bloggers would guest on each others blogs , they would promote each other, both blog networks pushed toward setting up the skepticon conference, and The Hoard contained regular cross posters on Skepchicks.

When Watson made the perfectly reasonable (go on, let me do a little bit of editorial) comment "dont do that, guys" the video was promoted on FtB which is where his Richardness (pbuh) probably saw it, prompting him to write the "dear Muslima" letter.(text about 1/2 way down)



http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-green/2011/07/richard-dawkins-chewing-gum



PZ Myers, the second to last donkey watcher of the apocalypse, immediately turned around and bit the hand that had been feeding him up until this point. The reaction of the feminist/Sjw community contained within The Hoard, praising him for attacking a privileged white man thought leader of Atheism, spurred him on to attack other privileged white men, who strangely enough are all more successful on the atheist thought leader / book selling/ touring circuit than him. He would also order his Hoard to "pharygulate" other peoples websites (yes it is a verb on FtB) where he would extol them to down vote their content and swamp their comment threads. The mostly White, mostly privileged, mostly female lovers of social justice, bearing nyms like SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius, HappiestSadist and referencing Jackboots and killing all Cis men, immediately went of and did his (the old white man's) bidding. But this was not internet harassment of any kind OK.



When a female atheist organizer called Skeptickle suggested that his increasingly tyrannical behaviour may be a symptom of an STI picked up at skepticon, he had his hoard dox her, and when they discovered she was a doctor he sent them off on a mission to complain to the medical standards authority about her behaviour, and wouldn't let up until she offered a grovelling apology on the internet.(honestly, its like holding up a fucking mirror at times).



As a result of all this a number of the Euphoric Atheist thought leaders started to distance themselves from FtB and the conference invites started to dry up.
 
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Apparently an atheist group called Atheist Ireland is publicly trying to distance itself from Myers and has clarified this with the following:

"Atheist Ireland is publicly dissociating itself from the hurtful and dehumanising, hateful and violent, unjust and defamatory rhetoric of the atheist blogger PZ Myers [...] Atheist Ireland has previously given PZ Myers public platforms in Ireland, both at the World Atheist Convention in 2011, and at our international conference in 2013 on Empowering Women Through Secularism. We now apologise for doing this. We believe his behaviour is unjust to individuals, increases prejudice against atheists, and is harmful to the promotion of an ethical society based on empathy, fairness, justice and integrity."

Link to full statement

Aside from his own ftb circlejerk (who will probably turn on him at some point) does anyone like this guy?
 
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TheImportantFart said:
Aside from his own ftb circlejerk (who will probably turn on him at some point) does anyone like this guy?
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If recent posting is anything to go by it wont be long before they turn.

He has had to reel them in because of the bad name (and lets be honest, loss of income) they were causing him in lost book sales , speaking gigs.
He's had to ask (quietly behind the scenes) a few posters to take nazi and fascist references out of their posting names. He also would not support them in a recent savaging of one of his oldest friends Ophelia Benson, that drove her off the network. He didn't support her either and basically watched while she was dragged under the bus, but his failure to side with The Hoard was noticed, and there have been a few snarls in his direction the last few months.

Micheal Nuggent, Shermer, Ben Radford, Thunderfoot of course, james Randi, CFi, American Atheists, Christ I could go on, all of them have made comments distancing themselves. He has made himself poison in Atheism, but the only audience that will give him the time of day is the one he created and who destroyed his blog network eventually.
 
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Atheism plus was first proposed by Jenny McCraight (I know Ive spelled that wrong) who blogged on FtB as BlagHag.

I actually like Jen, she was funny and laid back and set up the "boobquake" protest (worth a google image search).

She was also pretty sensitive, and did receive some nasty harassment which drove her out of internet engagement.

This left the A+ running down to cunts like Greta Christina, ex porn actress and man hater (yep, she chose to be a lesbian in middle age because the menz). Greta set up one of the first SJW ebegging schemes, where she claimed a terrible cancer had stopped her being able to work and she was in danger of being evicted.

Once the money had piled in (we were much more naive then) she announced that the doctors had told her it wasn't so bad after all and look at my lovely pair of $300 shoes.
 
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McCreight is a nutter, or at least she was during her brief moment of fame. She was the one who kicked introduced the progressive stack to atheism, with its associated privilege checking and white male cis heterosexual guilt. Here are her own words:

The “first wave” of atheism were the traditional philosophers, freethinkers, and academics. Then came the second wave of “New Atheists” like Dawkins and Hitchens, whose trademark was their unabashed public criticism of religion. Now it’s time for a third wave – a wave that isn’t just a bunch of “middle-class, white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied men” patting themselves on the back for debunking homeopathy for the 983258th time or thinking up yet another great zinger to use against Young Earth Creationists. It’s time for a wave that cares about how religion affects everyone and that applies skepticism to everything, including social issues like sexism, racism, politics, poverty, and crime. We can criticize religion and irrational thinking just as unabashedly and just as publicly, but we need to stop exempting ourselves from that criticism.
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It's not that she started something good that was later fucked up by Christina and Carrier. Atheism+ was a very bad idea right from the start. She's acting as if the atheist community hadn't even considered these things before she came along. Her problem was not that these things were not being discussed. McCreight's issue was that they were not being addressed within the social justice framework and that the prominent voices were the wrong ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Christina merely continued and enhanced the shit show already started by McCreight.

She is a terrible and now largely irrelevant person.
 
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Chemical snorfare said:
Pz Myers had gained his notoriety and the notice of St R of Dawkins, when in order to prove the the Eucharist Cracker did not contain the body of Jesus arranged for a friend to palm one during communion. He then did a few experiments on it to prove there was no human tissue and finally threw it in the bin. This came to the attention of Bill Donahue and PZs short lived fame was guaranteed.
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I was always at a loss as to why this was considered a good idea. It was pretty much on the tier of pissing on the Koran to piss off Muslims.

No Catholic would ever expect transubstantiation to result in some kind of scientific evidence or expect to be committing literal cannibalism.

It's "criticism" on the "lol he believes in God" level.
 
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The fun thing about the FTB style of social justice is that pretty much any cognitive dissonance causes the whole thing to fall apart. Issues related to atheism (y'know, the ostensible purpose of the site) are especially good at this. For example:

Ex-Muslims frequently complain about the way ultra-conservative imams are given a platform in otherwise progressive spaces. For your average white "intersectional" type, this presents in unsolvable dilemma: Do you side with a POC and risk being called an Islamophobe, or do you fight Islamophobia by siding with a religious conservative? Too complicated! Better just post more reaction gifs and neckbeard jokes!

Sarah Haider, an actual ex-Muslim, gave a speech about this exact issue at the 2015 American Humanist Association conference.
If you don't feel like watching it, there's a transcript here. Don't let the dailykos URL dissuade you.
 
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