Tweet Your Brains: Are You Taking The Pish?

GamerGate Activists Celebrate My Womanhood

I think Tanzi's bang on with this one:  I suspect there's almost certainly a lot of people like me behind the tag 'NotYourShield'. But that's anonymity for you.

Tweet Your Brains Interview Special: Ben Atheism

Public Intellectual Ben 'Ban' Atheism agreed to do an interview with Spool Pidgin. However, true to his belief in discourse being held within the agora of the public eye, Ben stipulated the interview had to take place on his beloved Twitter where he's well-regarded. True to his reputation, Ben began the interview in his signature forthright style...

Thanks, Dave. And thanks, Ben!


@BanAtheism Facts!!!

* @BanAtheism claims he's never grasped the concept of gas. "I don't get what people are fussing about:  there's liquid, there's solid. End of story. I'm not impressed with all these stories one hears..."

* Watch out for a young @BanAtheism's walk-on part in BBC sitcom series 'The Good Life'! It's in episode four of series one ("Blink and you'll miss me!" he tells Spool Pidgin). He's the London Council planning permission operative who calls Tom a 'Shit-sucking C*nt-mind'.

*@BanAtheism fell in love with a Star-ship Trooper.

*Facebook removed @BanAtheism's page due to disrespectful clothing:  a snorkel and a sarong!  "How can it be sarong when it feels s'rite? I asked them," @BanAtheism quips.  "They didn't get the joke..."

*Vital statistics:  Born 1961. Married to Belshazzar Shropshire (Actress, dachshund). No known bladder.  

Tweet Your Brains: AT-ATs

Spool Pidgin is justly known for being unafraid to throw the hard question turd into the social media punchbowl. That's a given. It just is. But this latest query sparked nothing less than a multi-platform opinion-skirmish!!!

Tweet Your Brains: Politics On Television

When Nice Writers Say Unpleasant Things

"Execution needed;
A bloody vessel for your peace.
If man makes death then death makes man
Tear the torso with horses and chains...

All I preach is extinction."

                                                   -Archives Of Pain, The Manic Street Preachers

For reference, here is the article K Tempest Bradford alludes to (though I'm loathe to link to right wing newspaper, The Daily Mail. British readers will already know the DM doesn't exactly have the best track record on women's rights, but that's by-the-by) 


You know, I think it's the fact my opinion can only be contextualized as a judgement of the poor girl that's most depressing. In regards to the current state of the left (well, SF's left), I mean. The old order changeth, and the new order coarsens daily.

I'm not judging the girl, that much should be clear to anyone. Killing her prior and would-be rapist was a wholly understandable--and immensely brave--act of defence that no right-thinking, merciful court would ever condemn. Her neighbors showed, and continue to show, astounding compassion in protecting her.

But let's get one thing clear:  there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to celebrate, to heft up like a shining standard and call 'a correct response' in this tragic and depressing story. It's a series of horrific, de-humanizing events; the first lot unimaginably sadistic, the rest a necessity that must have left all involved psychologically scarred for life.

Let's look at that first sentence again:


'In my view, this is the correct response to rape.'


Now that's a right wing opinion, however you cut it. In fact it's about as right wing as it gets: a knee jerk, old testament-infused call to culture-wide violence untethered from any court system, mental health considerations or enlightenment values. It fits far more comfortably in the mouth of  Limbaugh, Hannity or Littlejohn than any SF fandom progressive (which, on any other day, K. Tempest Bradford is. From what I see she does a lot of good work). And, like any gore-hungry statement uttered by those three conservative 'pundits', it has to swiftly duck behind a wall of brutalized innocents to justify itself.

 
'In my view, this is the correct response to rape.' 


You can see its attraction though (It was re-tweeted and favorited numerous times). It appeals to that little worm in our hearts--mine included--that desires nothing more than a monotone retribution with all of life's uncomfortable nuances shaved off. It's why the Deathwish series was so popular. Indeed,  the first film's essence is caught in that sentence and improved, going so far as to cut out the middleman protagonist.     


'In my view, this is the correct response to rape.' 


I'm no expert on Papua New Guinea, but I'll take it as read raping one's child is counted as an abhorrent act there, as with any human society.

So how does it happen? How does someone become an incestuous serial rapist?

Well, first you have to be an extreme sociopath and one becomes a sociopath either through deformities in the brain prior to birth, being brutalized as a child or a cocktail of both.

Let's, for the sake of argument, accept a duality of the mind and body a moment. Now let's place K. Tempest Bradford's or Rochits Loen-Ruiz's mind--at the point of expulsion from the womb--into the girl's father's skull at the point of his birth. They would be rapists by now. As would I, as would you. The neuro-chemical and social realities of that scumbag's life would guarantee it.

Unpleasant to think that isn't it? As humans, we try to avoid these facts, despite science shining it in our face. It goes against thousands of years of spiritual and common sense thought. And yet we have always suspected retribution to be ultimately hollow, haven't we? Scientific fact proves that hunch. Scientific fact, increasingly, suggests our species do a little growing up.


'In my view, this is the correct response to rape.' 


I passed through my city centre before writing this, imagined how a modern society obedient to Bradford's spur-of-the-moment opinion might actually look (Recall she isn't just alluding to New Guinea. She means rape per se, in whatever context, whatever series of events. Presumably not all rapists would be killed by their victims in situ. Indeed, most deaths would have to be manufactured at some later time for practicality's sake).

Would all this justice be enacted on a plinth beside the town hall clock? The progressive crowd nurturing and encouraging the tenth rape victim into taking the first swing? Or would it be more private, more tasteful? A small installation on the edge of town, perhaps?

An absolutely histrionic, hyperbolic vision, I'll readily admit. But in my defense, it's bleedin' difficult to procure any other extrapolation from such an absolutist statement.


'In my view, this is the correct response to rape.' 


Do you want know what I think the 'correct response' to rape is? For what it's worth?  I mean in an ideal world (mine and not K. Tempest Bradford's)?

Rapists would be identified monitored and sectioned from society before they even came remotely close to their first victim. They would be treated with dignity in that sectioned off place because we as a society are not the sadistic, predatory beasts that they are. They would be studied, scanned, psychoanalyzed and cross-referenced in the hope that some day a cure--chemical or genetic--might emerge and allow them to become fully-functioning members of society or, in lieu of that, that the next generation of these beasts shall never emerge.

Is that weird of me to believe that? Wrong? Because, to me, to desire anything else is to mentally permit the cycle of brutality and suffering to continue forever. It is to condone it, if only subconsciously. That poor girl in Papua New Guinea did the right thing, but she didn't justice she deserved. Nothing 'correct'. Nothing like it. No one in that story did.

My 'correct response' may be a cloud cuckoo land, something absurd and impossible to reach. But running toward that--surely--has to be preferable to falling back into the same old right wing vengeance fantasy, no matter its liberal veneer. 


   

The Peculiarly Lonely Task of Defending Mrs Dawkins

Yep, another day another Twitter drive-by.  I'm not proud of it (I swear!) and normally these days I wouldn't post it here or, well, anywhere.

But here's the thing. Mr Alan 'Bobo' Lynch flung his first filthy tweet here through the bars of his cage right in the middle of another Richard Dawkins brouhaha (Very probably unknowingly: I wouldn't credit the guy with riding any particular zeitgeist, only a garishly-painted collapsing car with twenty of his mates climbing out of it) that one of Dawkins's tweets kicked off.

You can find a good clear summary of the micro-blog skirmish here (You'll find me in the comments wasting people's time as per). In roughest summary it was about RD being sexist/racist or at the very least being perceived to be sexist/racist. To be embarrassingly honest I'm not confident enough to argue it either way. I don't have the noble pugnaciousness of a natural social progressive warrior and neither do I sit around in mens groups sniffing my comrades' armpits and screaming 'Misandry!' at anyone suggesting, y'know, that the world might just,  just, be biased toward men.

(Hopefully, this here post proves I'm not some zombie to every stroke of Richard Dawkins's keyboard either)

So I merely lurked, watching the acid and vim fly from the safety of my cyber-thicket. What I noticed was Alan Lynch's first tweet floating in the top twenty tweets concerning RD at that point in time. 'Mannn...' I thought, 'You are soooo going down, pal,' happy in the knowledge (at least) one of the social justice peeps would dispatch him with suitable humour.

I got on with my life then went back about two hours later to see him burn. Lynch was now in the top thirty; a drop, admittedly, but still (for whatever reason; I don't pretend to grasp how twitter works in its entirety) riding high in the charts. And wholly untouched. Like a bleedin' Ming vase in the Guggenheim in fact. And that's where I leaped in and lowered the tone. Well... someone had to.

B-b-b-but... what happened? Here was a clear-cut misogynist attacking a woman for her physical appearance slap-bang in the middle of a raging debate about whether someone else was being technically misogynist or not. Clearly it would be wrong of me to pick out any individual SJW for such flagrant dereliction of duty because, well, they might not have seen it. But when one considers possibly hundreds of SJWs were engaged with the subject of Dawkins--and Alan Lynch went unchallenged--one can't help but feel short changed, cheated even. That cliche about action in relation to words and all that.

(A part of me, an ugly cynical part, wonders whether if some, SOME, of the people challenging Dawkins moved over Lynch's mindburp and swiftly forgot about it because he was a temporary ally of sorts. Dawkins was the enemy, after all, and anyone who worked toward psychologically destabilizing Dawkins was all for the greater good, no matter their message.

Hey, I said it was an ugly part...)

Personally speaking, it drained the life out of proceedings. Suddenly, what had until recently been a collective of individuals perceptively harrying Dawkins's preconceptions became oddly akin to a chunk of hipsters saying 'Gawwwwd, RD ACTUALLY thinks Doolittle is The Pixies FIRST album!!! #LOL!!!'

It's not a massive #fail (to use a tired internet wit-prosthetic a moment) but it IS a #fail. Such soft-bellied complacency erodes us all and is symptomatic of assuming one always owns the moral high ground. Truth is, no one gets the deeds to any moral high ground. Rather, it has to be earned. And earned daily.

Of Richard Dawkins And His Godawful Tweeting

Put that i-Phone down, Richard!

It's fair to say Richard Dawkins's adventures in Twitter-land have been, for the main, pretty disastrous. He's always been a remarkably clear thinker--anyone reading his books can tell that--but not a compact one. Here's his latest lamentable qwerty-dive:

"Mehdi Hasan admits to believing Muhamed [sic] flew to heaven on a winged horse. And New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist."

 Yeah. Not his most nuanced work, let's face it. To me it's more like some hastily scribbled thespian snark in Kenneth Williams' diary ("Hancock doing his stuff in too slow a tempo. He and Sid James' conversation real pleb stuff. Don't care for them at all") than one of the world's foremost explainers.

Self-destructive? Not 'alf! Online atheism, after all, is surrounded by hordes who'll willfully misread its every utterance, as the columns of the UK's press--both self-pleasuring right and de-clawed left--well attest. 'Dawkins Screams All Muslim Journos Should Be Sacked' swiftly became the Web's Tabla Rasa.

 Andrew Brown inevitably stuck his conk in, while this time around even faux-eccentric MP Tom Watson gleaned another self-aggrandizing freebie with 'You're a gratuitously unpleasant man'. He'd never felt safe enough to say that to Murdoch, even.

The sad part, at least to me, was that the tweet forever tarnished one of Dawkins's best moments. In a debate for Al Jazeera, he asks Mehdi Hassan (whose journalism I generally admire, I hasten to add) if he believes Muhammad flew up to heaven on a Horse. Hassan replies yes. Not as a metaphor--rich as the tale of Buraq is with that--but literally.

Watch this clip. Watch it and forget whatever preconceptions about RD you may have. There's no red-faced secular-nazi-pope Strawkins here; just calm, reasoned inquiry into the privileged indolence of religious literalism. 'Why up?' is a bloody good question. 'Yes, let's' is very funny. Hassan knows he's being enfiladed here because he's an intelligent guy, but that same intelligence is reduced to spinning about in a tight shell of religious upbringing. It's as plain as day.

Dawkins has posted an apology for the crudity of his tweet up on his site, explaining what he meant to say. It's an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff however, for the media won't have the nuance or objectivity to print or link to it. It's doesn't fit the narrative. I just hope Dawkins learns to use Twitter as a means to link to longer pieces because, as things stand, theists and faitheists--like Christ with his loaves--can stretch 140 characters into a heckuva feast.

Speaking as a non-believer it's his irresponsibility that depresses me most. He should know by now that a million arsewits lie in the cyber-heather, ready to pounce at his slightest gob-wrong. They intend to make him an irrelevancy.

It's funny. People talk about the pigheadedness of atheism but no one speaks of how atheism's critics subconsciously will it to be pigheaded. The mere act of being an atheist puts peoples' noses out of joint. They've loved ones who've passed away and it's understandable they want those loved ones' to still exist somewhere, somewhere where they will meet again. But daily, with each new scientific insight (the scale of the universe compared to us, the increasingly explicable chemical emergence of DNA etc), that very human need is increasingly weighed upon. Few, if any, like to be reminded.

Laugh if you like, but I'm one of that silent chunk of non-believers who wish people would just accept them as openly atheist and leave it at that (OK, so I rant about religions extremes but so do many theists). But in social situations it never works out like that. It's assumed I am angry.

Once I'm 'outed' someone will get irritable and pick and prod. Eventually, dammit, I bite: I like a debate as much as the next pub boor. Things heat up and almost always it becomes an unpleasant experience. My opponents mouths will be sneering and laughing, but their eyes...

...their eyes dammit, have this pleading look (You'll see it in Mehdi Hassan's in the above vid. The body language is archetypal too). An atheist among believers becomes a sort of totemic death's head, a raven mocked by jays. It's no longer a debate, because you've become the death of a parent, a dear friend or, ultimately, themselves. Seeing this, my mouth keeps up the bravado but my heart loses resolve. My heart--sap that it is--wants only to reassure my friends, tell them I'm sorry and that everything will be fine.

As below so above. The media plays upon these fears, fear equaling click-bait, and a minor industry has emerged of columnists who'll soothe the reader's brow by dismissing atheism with intelligent-sounding sentences. 'What these atheists don't understand about faith...', 'It's a sort of religion, with Dawkins its fundamentalist pope...' etc. You know the drill.

In such an atmosphere, whether your non-belief is strident or conciliatory, you have to accept there's something like a -20% modifier to any statement you make being understood, let alone accepted. On Twitter it is something more like 40% (If this blog's anything to go by men are particularly susceptible to its inherent traps, with anger, privilege and--in my own case--swagger being clumsy y-chromosome hooves.).

Any self-aware atheist--which I once took Richard Dawkins to be--would do well to remain wary of that. Every utterance should be checked over for clarity, for leaks of comprehension. In fact it's a responsibility. The other side never have to, of course, so it's not a fair fight. But it never has been.