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Rubbish => Preaching and Worship => Topic started by: The Lazy One on April 05, 2013, 10:38:44 pm

Title: What happened to Pharyngula?
Post by: The Lazy One on April 05, 2013, 10:38:44 pm
It's been a while since I'd regularly read that blog, and recently I went to go check it out.

At first I thought I'd searched for the wrong thing. PZ Myers has lost his goddamn mind. It's not an atheist blog anymore, it's like tumblr crashed into a radfem website and had a lovechild. In fact, most everything I saw was only tangentially related to atheism.

Am I going crazy or is this actually a thing now? Not-really-atheism atheism?
Title: Re: What happened to Pharyngula?
Post by: Captain Jack Harkness on April 06, 2013, 12:34:54 am
Uh.  What's wrong with it?  Are you going...here, I think?

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/r

I don't really go there.  My finger's not on the pulse on any of this shit.  So...yeah.  I've just been busy.  It sounds like it's hyperfeminism, but I didn't notice that in the skim of the site.

By the way, isn't it a biologist's blog?  It's not really an "atheist blog" so much as it's a "science blog," or at least I thought that was the case, purpose.  Sure, there's religious commentary, but I never thought of that as the main focus.
Title: Re: What happened to Pharyngula?
Post by: Osama bin Bambi on April 06, 2013, 01:53:05 am
It's hardly radical feminism, it's just feminism in a movement where it's sorely needed. I don't like Pharyngula either, but my reasons have more to do with P.Z. Myers' very petulant tone. Kind of like a wannabe Richard Dawkins, but bitchier and more feminist.
Title: Re: What happened to Pharyngula?
Post by: Patches on April 06, 2013, 08:45:17 am
Pharyngula started getting a more feminist slant after the whole "Elevatorgate" incident.  One of the few prominent women in the atheist movement made a blog post about how she was at a convention and told a group of people she was going to bed, and one of them followed her into the elevator alone, cornered her, and asked her to come to his room.  She made a general statement of, "Guys, don't do that, it's creepy", and she ended up getting a shitstorm of backlash about it.  The nature, size, and ferocity of the backlash made PZ aware of the problem of sexism in the atheist movement and he began his crusade of wanting to ensure that atheists held themselves to a higher standard than the patriarchy of religion, so has made it a habit of calling out sexism in the atheist movement when he sees it, as too many are content to sweep it under the rug and simply claim that atheism is more progressive than that.

He's still petulant and overly-confrontational at times, yes, and some of his targets of offense are a bit of a stretch, but I don't have any inherent problem with a person who was suddenly made aware of a gigantic stain on the movement he's at the forefront of and expending a lot of energy trying to make other people see it and help clean it up.
Title: Re: What happened to Pharyngula?
Post by: Diamandahagan on April 10, 2013, 03:46:07 pm
Pharyngulas as good as its ever been.
Title: Re: What happened to Pharyngula?
Post by: Tolpuddle Martyr on April 12, 2013, 07:11:19 am
....it's like tumblr crashed into a radfem website and had a lovechild.

This is a quote from radfem hub (http://fstdt.net/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=87723).

When PZ starts asserting that all men are necrophiles who secretly want to rape corpses then your hyperbole may be justified.

It isn't.
Title: Re: What happened to Pharyngula?
Post by: Osama bin Bambi on April 12, 2013, 06:20:30 pm
....it's like tumblr crashed into a radfem website and had a lovechild.

This is a quote from radfem hub (http://fstdt.net/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=87723).

When PZ starts asserting that all men are necrophiles who secretly want to rape corpses then your hyperbole may be justified.

It isn't.

Or when PZ starts attacking trans* people, genderqueer people, and pansexuals, (http://fstdt.net/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=88619) promotes killing off the majority of the male population (http://fstdt.net/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=88393), advocates parental neglect of male babies (http://fstdt.net/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=87848), calls for women to stop raising male children (http://fstdt.net/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=87725), calls "PIV" (penis-in-vagina) sex unnatural (http://fstdt.net/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=87818), and calls heterosexual women brainwashed (http://fstdt.net/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=87724), then you may have a point.
Title: Re: What happened to Pharyngula?
Post by: syaoranvee on April 13, 2013, 03:14:15 am
He played his part in the creation of Atheism Plus.

That is enough for me to hate that man.
Title: Re: What happened to Pharyngula?
Post by: Auggziliary on April 13, 2013, 11:45:38 am
He played his part in the creation of Atheism Plus.

That is enough for me to hate that man.

Isn't atheism+... a good thing? The atheist movement seriously needs to quit with the rabid sexism, racism, and other dickish shit.
Title: Re: What happened to Pharyngula?
Post by: Distind on April 15, 2013, 08:49:43 am
Isn't atheism+... a good thing? The atheist movement seriously needs to quit with the rabid sexism, racism, and other dickish shit.

Possibly, if it was handled in a sane way.

It wasn't. It's nothing more than clique behavior and whiny clique to clique combat. Which is pretty much why I dropped any hope of getting involved in the atheist community at large.

Per all of the half assed social justice bull floating across the internet it immediately imposes it's superiority over others(handy little plus there, kinda like how demi-sexual implies everyone who isn't is a whore). Per all of it they're stunningly overly sensitive to the smallest thing and have managed to only deepen any of the things they were supposedly opposing within the mainline community by wailing like the damned rather than actually pointing out what was wrong, why they believe it was and what could be done about changing it.

If people could grasp that jokes and the odd insult are not the crux of everything wrong with the world, and that actual structural oppression of a group is the problem rather than snide comments, maybe it might have worked. But that's not what's happened.

The internet echo chamber has convinced both sides they're right, they've already won, and has exacerbated the worst tendencies of both, so I'm just going to stay out of the lot of it.
Title: Re: What happened to Pharyngula?
Post by: Captain Jack Harkness on April 16, 2013, 02:55:38 am
He played his part in the creation of Atheism Plus.

That is enough for me to hate that man.

Isn't atheism+... a good thing? The atheist movement seriously needs to quit with the rabid sexism, racism, and other dickish shit.

Remind me again what the fuck Atheism+ is?  Is that like Google+ RECYCLED IN SPACE (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RecycledINSPACE)?
Title: Re: What happened to Pharyngula?
Post by: Distind on April 16, 2013, 06:44:40 am
In theory it's atheism with social justice tacked on.

In practice it's social justice actively taking swings at atheism.

But it's about what's to be expected from a movement founded on a series of over reactions and poor decisions.
Title: Re: What happened to Pharyngula?
Post by: Tolpuddle Martyr on April 16, 2013, 07:24:46 am
As far as I've been paying attention Skepchick and FTB have both been going along doing what they do, blogging along and haven't been affected one way or the other by Atheism+.

Still, haven't actually read anything from the Atheism+ board so I've got no direct experience with those people.