Search Results for amazing atheist
The Amazing Atheist spits on the memory of Amanda Todd [TW: bullying, sexual shaming, self-harm, suicide]
You may have read about the heartbreaking story of Amanda Todd, a Canadian teenager who recently posted a much-watched YouTube video (posted below) detailing the bullying and harassment she’d endured online and in real life. This past Wednesday, she was found dead, the apparent victim of suicide.
TheAmazingAtheist’s Misogynist Meltdown
At the risk of splitting the “misogynist dickbaggery in the atheist movement” discussion in two, I really need to mention the amazingly well-timed Reddit meltdown of TheAmazingAtheist. It’s already been covered pretty well by PZ Myers and by Jen McCreight of BlagHag but, what the heck, I’ll throw in my two cents as well.
TheAmazingAtheist, for those who don’t follow these things, is (or was?) a popular atheist podcaster well-known, and beloved by some, for being something of a misogynist dickbag. He’s been on a anti-feminist kick for the last couple of months, winning himself many plaudits on Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit, though even the MR regulars couldn’t help but notice that he’s a bit of an ass.
Well, now he’s pretty much revealed, with a series of horrendous comments on Reddit, what a complete and utter asshole he is. Let me put a second TRIGGER WARNING here (for violent talk about rape), on top of the default TRIGGER WARNING I put on all my blog posts.
The context : a discussion (which he started) about the propriety of one feminist Redditor calling themself ICumWhenIKillMen. I’m not going to defend that nickname, which obviously makes light of violence in an obnoxious way. But AmazingAthiest was apparently so troubled by this sort of language that he felt compelled to spew forth a succession of violent rape threats.
Let me draw your attention to some of the highlights. (Click here to see his whole comment history on Reddit, where he comments as terroja).
Things started going south about 19 hours ago, when he told one detractor:
I’m going to rape you with my fist.
He followed this with:
I will make you a rape victim if you don’t fuck off.
It got worse:
I’m tired of being treated like shit by you mean little cunts and then you using your rape as an excuse. Fuck you. I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow. Actually, I don’t believe you were ever raped! What man would be tasteless enough to stick his dick into a human cesspool like you? Nice gif of a turd going into my mouth. Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole? Or was it both? Maybe you should think about it really hard for the next few hours. Relive it as much as possible. You know? Try to recall: was it my pussy or my ass?
He continued in this fashion for some time, mocking those who pointed out that rape threats can be triggering, and regularly referring to his opponents as “cunts.” (Each of the following paragraphs is from a separate comment of his; click the quotes to see the full comments in question in their original context.)
BTW, you have to admit, when I told you that I hope you drown in rape semen, you got a little wet, didn’t you? It’s okay. We’re friends now. You can share.
Yes, you read that right: he was saying this shit to a rape victim.
Eventually, theAmazingAtheist found himself stopped short by this scathing critique, from the Redditor called veerserif.
I now know that, apart from being misguided, intentionally ignorant, and quick to resort to pathetic excuses, you are also a purposefully hurtful person with no sense of empathy, and no sense of remorse. You’re not just unintentionally uninformed, you actively turn what you know against people who should be deserving of your sympathy.
I was mistaken before. I thought, maybe, just maybe, after the circlejerking and the giggling, I could try showing you the stuff you said I didn’t highlight. I could show you what feminism has done for men, or maybe tell you about the existence of sex-positive feminism.
But this… this is a whole new level.
Your reputation, in my eyes, has fallen so far that dragging it back up to “mild disgust” would require nothing short of a miracle. You pretend to care about other people, but you really don’t. You like to think that you’re a decent human being, but you fall so far short of that you’re practically on separate planes of existence.
Deliberately triggering a rape victim? Equating being called out on your bullshit to the trauma of rape?
You know what you deserve? You don’t deserve death. You don’t deserve rape. You don’t even deserve some cosmically mandated, hilarious schadenfreude which would not only be brilliant, but just.
What you deserve is for everyone to know this side of you. You deserve for anyone who thought you were a good person to know what you’ve just done. You deserve your fans’ adoration turning to hatred, you deserve the judging stares and looks that people will give you. You deserve to be reminded, every day, of what you do and what you’ve done. You deserve to remember every day that there are people who suffer more than you, that there are people who are stronger and smarter, braver, more principled and better than you, in every way, until the day you realise exactly how wrong your actions have been.
I don’t want to see bodily harm visited on you, because I don’t want to see bodily harm visited on anyone. What I do want is for you - and, for that matter, every shitposter I’ve ever seen - to learn that anonymity is not an excuse.
At this point, theAmazingAtheist backed off, offered a whiny, petulant non-apology apology for, as he put it, “SOME of the statements I made,” and wondered aloud why people were still so mad at him.
He went on to make, yep, a little video about his experience, and to offer a weird and unconvincing “rebuttal” to PZ Myers’ comments on his meltdown. See PZ Myers’ post for links to the video, as well as the rebuttal itself (which is effectively re-rebutted by Myers). See here and here for a transcript of the video.
Naturally, there’s a discussion of the meltdown on ShitRedditSays as well.
One heartening sign in all this: the massive numbers of downvotes theAmazingAtheist got for his worst comments. I hope that a significant number of them were from actual Men’s Rights Redditors, and not only from people who came into the discussion from elsewhere on Reddit, but of course there is no way of knowing.
Will atheists and MRAs drop theAmazingAtheist like a hot rape-threatening potato? Or will they start rallying around him as some sort of heroic truth teller and rape threatener? Somehow I suspect there will be a bit of both.
Quiz: How did Reddit’s atheist community respond to a woman’s account of rape?
Here’s a little one-question quiz to see how much you know about Reddit’s Atheism subreddit.
QUESTION ONE: A woman describes being raped by a “friend” while both were intoxicated (though she doesn’t call it rape). Do the r/atheism regulars:
a) Respond with sympathy and support
b) Attack her and furiously downvote her posts, with the assistance of one of the moderators of r/mensrights, then return to posting and upvoting rape jokes
BONUS QUESTION: True or False: Someone on r/menrights links to her comment as “an example of how and why many people believe that rape is everywhere… because their definition of rape includes every sexual misadventure.” The most heavily upvoted comment in the r/mensrights thread declares that the woman who was raped “sounds like a delusional sheltered teen.”
Yes, the correct answers here are the ones you assumed were correct.
Here’s the woman’s post describing what happened to her.
She gives more details on what happened in other, also-highly-downvoted comments.
One highly upvoted rape joke from elsewhere in the thread:
Hilarious!
Amazingly, despite all the jokes and the victim blaming/attacking going on, the thread also contains some highly upvoted comments lamenting the tendency of people to blame the victim in rape cases. Apparently, when a rape victim is drunk, it’s not rape, even when she repeatedly says “no” and gives in because she’s scared, so it’s fine to attack away, and even to accuse the victim of being a rapist too.
This enables Reddit Atheists not only to blame the victim of rape without feeling guilty, or admitting that this is what they’re doing, while simultaneously feeling self-righteous in their condemnation of religious people doing the exact same thing.
And because their rape jokes are also couched as jokes about religious people’s views on rape, they can feel self-righteous while making them too.
Sometimes the actions of Reddit Atheists cause me to begin to doubt just a teensy weensey bit that “atheists are a community that’s pre-selected for clear thinking and empiricism,” as one commenter in r/mensrights put it not that long ago.
EDITED TO ADD: Thanks again to ShitRedditSays for highlighting this awful thread.
EDITED TO ADD 2: More SRS discussion, courtesy of Holly.
I’ve got mail!
This email from a non-fan was so thoughtful I thought I’d share it, and my responses to it, with you all. This is the whole email, by the way. No, “Dear David” or any other niceties at the start.
1. Why do you represent yourself as a head of a creepy fucking child?
Because the “creepy fucking child” in the picture is me? It’s sort of my favorite picture of me.
2. How can you honestly believe that we live under a patriarchy, at least in modern western society? I mean, men hold no where near as much power as they’ve had in the past. Women nowadays have pretty much all the rights and opportunities that men have (hell, they probably have MORE rights, privileges and opportunities than men have).
Huh. How on earth could I possibly have come to the conclusion that perhaps men have more than their share of power in society today?
3. So what do you think of the Amazing Atheist?
Why don’t you just go and read what I’ve written about him? Do you not know how to use Google, or the search box on this page?
You two do have your similarities to each other: you’re both fat, have beards, wear glasses, are very opinionated, and both enjoy insulting the people you don’t like (feminists/MRA’s) and naturally attract a lot trolls from those respective groups. But, you two are on completely opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to feminism and gender politics.
Huh. How could that possibly be, with both of us being fat and wearing glasses? I’ll have to bring it up at the next meeting of the Bespectacled Fat Elders of the Internet.
Also, there is a bit of a difference between bullying people you don’t like (a la Amazing Atheist) and QUOTING WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY SAY (a la me).
And no, DO NOT bring up his sexual exploits, trying focusing exclusively on his merits as a video blogger, and as a person who gives his opinions on YouTube.
I don’t give a shit about his “sexual exploits,” whatever they are. And I don’t have much to say about his “merits as a video blogger,” because I’ve only watched a handful of his terrible videos. What I do know. from what I have seen from him, is that he’s a nasty, hateful, misogynistic asshole who bullies rape victims online and mocked a teenage girl who was bullied into committing suicide.
That kind of outweighs (get it? get it?) any fat solidarity I might have for him because of his fatness.
Hope that helps!
Yours, in fatness,
David Futrelle
EDITED TO ADD: My correspondent has responded to this post! Here is his reply. You may notice certain ironies.
That’s fine, go ahead and post all my emails to you on your website. All it’s gonna do is show how much of a colossal douchebag you are. And nice job on having your army of worms and insects crawl from the woodworks to attack me. Just goes to show how much feminists and the people who support them DO NOT deserve to be taken seriously, when all they do is stoop to personal insult and just linking to articles when someone questions them.
On the abortion thing, yeah that’s a problem, but how does it prove that’s there’s a patriarchy in western society? How do you explain the states that do allow abortion, how do you explain the modern western countries where abortions are legal? All it proves is that , yes, there are some states that continue to live in the dark ages and are run by assholes. How bout next time, try to actually answer my question instead of linking to an article and hoping that I’ll be satisfied. But then again, I guess that’s too much to ask out the modern-day feminist simpletons in society.
Oh yeah, and about the Amazing Atheist, he actually bothers to refute what the feminists. It’s not like he just looks at a feminist and says “haha your ugly, your fat, etc.” You on the other hand, stoop to nothing but personal insults. Pretty much all you do is find people you don’t like, hold them up and say “haha look at these people I don’t like, now point and laugh my personal army of woodworms.” You don’t even bother to explain why you think they’re wrong. It clear to me that somebody doesn’t know how to use the search feature on Youtube.
Woodworms?
Canadian feminist activist receives death threats and other abuse after being targeted by Men’s Rights Activists
And so the MRAs have found yet another woman to hate.
Earlier this month, as many of you no doubt know, a Men’s Rights group sponsored a lecture at the University of Toronto. The event drew protesters, and the protesters drew MRAs with video cameras. One of the MRAs filmed a confrontation between a red-haired feminist activist and a number of MRAs who continually interrupted her as she tried to read a brief statement.
Her crime? She wasn’t exactly polite in responding to the interrupters. And so, after video of the confrontation was uploaded to YouTube, and linked to on the Men’s Rights subreddit and elsewhere, she became a virtual punching bag for the angry misogynists of the internet.
So who exactly has been harassing that red-haired Canadian feminist? A not-quite-scientific survey
MRAs rarely let facts get in the way of their tantrums
So the Men’s Rights subreddit has temporarily relaxed its policy of not allowing links to the terrible cesspool of lies that is Man Boobz to allow this post attacking me for detailing the disgusting threats and harassment a certain Canadian feminist activist has faced in recent days.
Most of the commenters flatly ignored the evidence of doxing and harassment that I included in my post — if they even bothered to read it — and simply invented their own story of what had happened. Instead of denouncing those who left death threats, they attacked me and the activist in question. And blamed all the ugliness on “trolls.”
Today in Rape Culture: More #Steubenville Awfullness on Twitter
Not actually the victims in Steubenville
The Public Shaming blog and Twitchy.com have been doing the world a service by documenting some of the worst rape apologist nonsense that sprouted up on Twitter in the wake of the Steubenville rape verdict. I thought I would add some more screenshots to the growing pile.
MRA: Making women suffer is a highly ineffective way to put them in their place
Making women cry: Highly ineffective.
Given the enmity towards women in general, and feminists in particular, that’s omnipresent in the manosphere, it seems logical to assume that most of the dudes lingering around MRA, PUA and MGTOW sites online would take a certain secret pleasure in seeing women suffer.
As regular readers of this blog know all too well, oftentimes the desire to see women suffer is not so secret: some MRAs and others of their ilk literally laugh at women getting cancer, declare that rapists should be given medals, openly fantasize about “beat[ing] the living shit” out of women, and tell feminists who complain about this sort of shit that they’re “so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.” (Those last two examples come from Paul Elam, one of the MRM’s most influential bloggers.) Still others send rape and death threats to outspoken women online.
But good news, folks! It turns out that not all manosphere misogynists want women to suffer. Why? Because suffering is an ineffective way to put women in their place. That, at least, is the argument of a fellow calling himself Höllenhund. In a comment on Susan Walsh’s Hooking Up Smart blog, he offered this argument:
Making women suffer wouldn’t achieve anything in itself – I’m pretty sure the overwhelming majority of the Manosphere would agree. Women are normally solipsistic and they fail to understand their own urges and don’t comprehend the connection between cause and effect. They’d never understand why they’re suffering in the first place.
So, basically, in his mind, women are dumber than dogs and thus harder to train. Even worse, the suffering women can sit down in the street and cry, and countless “white knights,” hoping to win their approval (and get in their pants) will rush to their aid:
Suffering only motivates them to fish for male sympathy (and thus investment) through crying and whining, to blame ‘ bad men’ for their ‘misfortune’ and thus play the game of ‘let’s you and him fight’. That’s how it has always been.
So making women suffer is largely pointless. I’d go further and say it’d actually be detrimental to men because it encourages white-knighting and intra-male competition. …
And some of the ladies even seem to sort of like it:
Not to mention the fact that many women actually seem to find some sort of twisted pleasure in suffering, that all this’d simply serve to justify more anti-male legislation and whatnot.
Poor Höllenhund doesn’t have much hope that women will ever see how totally terrible they really are
[T]he notion of making women ‘admit their faults’ is pie-in-the-sky as well. Again, I’m sure pretty much everyone in the Manosphere would agree. You have a bigger chance of seeing pigs fly.
If women are to recognize their faults in this SMP [Sexual Marketplace], they need to have a realistic picture of both their own sexuality and the SMP in the first place, plus they need to have empathy for beta males …
Er, you’re lecturing us about empathy?
Sorry, on with the rest of the sentence:
plus they need to be imbued with the sense of morality without which the very concept of ‘fault’ is meaningless.
And lecturing us about morality too?
I think we’ll sooner see Haiti become a dreaded military superpower.
I’d rather see that than live in a world in which women were so self-hating that they actually believed they were guilty of whatever unnamed sins Höllenhund attributes to them.
NOTE: I found Höllenhund’s comment because the blogger at Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology cited it as a prime example of the sort of brave “truth telling” that will get you banned “on feminist sites that supposedly support men.” And yes, it apparently did get poor Höllenhund banned from Hooking Up Smart. I’m not quite sure how Susan Walsh, a traditionalist devoted to slut shaming in a thousand different flavors, counts as feminist, but that’s not the point. The point is: I’m regularly accused of “cherry picking” comments from MRAs. In this case, Mr. PMAFT picked the comment for me.
Muck Ryking: Petition to remove Alexander Ryking as a Tumblr politics editor
Evidently Ryking wasn't in debate club in high school.
So Alexander Ryking is a Tumblr blogger and one of Tumblr’s community “editors” for politics. He thinks of himself as a liberal.
He is also a raging misogynist who regularly calls women “cunts” and tells feminists to “kill yourselves you feminazi twats.”
In recent days he’s turned his douchebag-o-meter up to 11. As a result, there’s now a petition up on Change.org to have him removed as a politics editor on Tumblr. It’s already gotten more than 3000 signatures, with several hundred new signatures added in the time it’s taken me to write this post.
Here’s unknowable woman, a frequent target of his cyber-wrath, with more details on his recent meltdown. (Read the post on her Tumblr blog for links to the evidence of his douchebaggery.)
Alexander Ryking, who has a history of attempting to silence women bloggers (he told Jess of STFUConservatives and the other “feminazis” to “go kill themselves” several months ago, and has also been rude to women of color but I haven’t been on Tumblr long enough to have personally witnessed that), defended The Amazing’s Atheist’s violent rape threats on Reddit by tagging his posts with “I support TAA.”
I and many, many other Tumblr users were disgusted by this, so we decided to tag our criticisms of Ryking that night with “Ryking’s banana republic”—a reference to his co-opting of [social justice] concepts, NOT a homophobic dig, and the person who coined it was a queer man anyway. Someone also wrote a few jokingly romantic lines about Ryking’s blind defense of TAA and new atheism, and Ryking interpreted this as homophobic and misandric…it wasn’t, but because I reblogged it, Ryking insists that I am now a homophobe, which is hilarious given my own sexual identity but whatever.
We also responded to some of his posts with pictures of extreme close-ups of our eyes.
Seriously. That is what this guy is calling “abuse.”
We did NOT threaten him, make personal attacks against his sexuality, tell him to go kill himself, send him rude messages, or commit any other acts that could reasonably be interpreted as the “cyberbullying” Ryking claims it is. I did temporarily change my URL to rykingsbananarepublic and I make no apologies for that. Why should I? Why shouldn’t a group of feminists and their allies be allowed to respond creatively to misogyny? The only actual cyberbullying that has taken place was TAA’s initial rape threats on Reddit; I wouldn’t even go so far as to claim Ryking’s tweets to me and other Twitter users are cyberbullying, though I leave it up to the other people who were insulted by him to label their experiences as bullying or not.
Anyway, a few nights later, I tweeted something in defense of Whitney Houston’s legacy, and suddenly there was Ryking going ballistic. He found me on Twitter, called me a cunt right off the bat, and insisted that I claimed Whitney Houston’s death was “more important than the death of 5,000 Syrians” (I didn’t! Here is what I actually said!). I had never exchanged tweets with this man before, and was confused about his sudden interest in my thoughts about Whitney Houston and Syria. Naturally, I responded, told him how wrong he was, and the next day I screencapped some of the things he said and posted them … I never expected that post to get the amount of notes it did, but I think that just goes to show how widespread the dislike for him is.
Ryking, for his part, has responded to the widespread criticism by striking the pose of a victim, and pretending that it is somehow all related to race. Apparently, the evil feminazis are impugning his white manhood, though he’s not white.
So-called feminists have subjected me to white-bashing comments (even though I’m Hispanic) and sexist attacks impugning my manhood (slash-fiction scenes featuring me and heterosexual men; being called faggot; being told to man-up; insults about my body;) by people who don’t realize I’m gay. After nearly two decades online, I learned early on that when you’re attacked, you defend yourself by attacking right back and just as viciously, if not more so. And that’s what exactly what I’ve done. …
What’s really at issue here is not my rude behavior but that you and others like you want to punish any man who refuses to conform to your rancid, misandrist orthodoxy by discounting everything he says and using his gender and race as the excuse for doing so. …
You don’t want me stripped of my editorial privilege based on my behavior but because I reject your sick, bigoted, misandrist (per)version of feminism.
Yep, apparently the dude who loves to call women “cunts” is the final arbiter of what is and what isn’t “true feminism.” Who knew?
I signed the petition. How about you?
