Twenty Years

Twenty years ago on the 22nd of July – so twenty years this Tuesday coming up – I migrated from ranting on MySpace, to blogging on Blogger. If you don’t count the Blogger blog I think I remember starting, forgetting, and losing the login information to in around 2001, the 22nd of July, 2005 entailed my formal induction into blogging. I made the leap to WordPress-dot-com in March of 2007, and have remained with that host under a succession of blogs – all mothballed, bar this one.

The writing was on the wall well over a decade ago though; the blogosphere is dying. Not that I listened. Social media was spitting out posts for shorter and shorter attention spans, WordPress was becoming an e-commerce platform, and increases in internet access speeds were making vlogging and short video content more viable.

Text blogging? That was for nerds who hung out in Borders. Which closed, appropriately. People want to consume content about the top 10 substitutes for anal bleaching, not participate in a glorified online book club.

***

I left things turned on around here all the same. I’ve renewed the domain name every time it’s been due since starting at this address just over 9 years ago. Now there’s a thing. It feels like forever, but I haven’t even been at this address for half my time blogging. That first half went quick.

I have to admit, though, that the output has been low in the second half. Very low. As in, I-don’t-do-the-algorithmic-churn low. One or two posts a year for the last a few years. I even skipped 2022. “Why bother writing if you’re not going to be bothered fostering an audience? Aren’t you just shouting at clouds?”

Nonsense. Anything involved with The Cloud gets more traffic than I do.

I managed a few words by email with Mikey of Harrangueman fame last year. Have also kept in touch with Mr Ponsford of 2-bit noir – an old stalwart of a number of comments sections, and a metaller from way back.

More broadly, and more prominently…

Calling Ophelia Benson of Butterflies and Wheels a “blogger” would seem a little too reductive – she’s more than that – a fully fledged author and editor at least, as well – while also being more of a cornerstone of the blogosphere than any of us, and for longer.

We chat. And I still chat with a number of the commenters on her blog, elsewhere. But I haven’t commented over at B&W in a few months, so I should probably go back for a visit some time soon.

ScienceBlogs died long ago when it was sold. FreeThoughtBlogs had a few good bloggers to begin with, but probably wasn’t conceived on all fronts by people who held to the mission statement in good faith.

Ed Brayton of Dispatches From The Culture Wars has been gone for almost five years now. It feels more like two. I’ll admit that five years prior to that, I’d stopped taking him seriously when he exited Dispatches from the FTB network, while pulling the “both sides” card when Ophelia Benson was being dog-piled in a very one-sided, obviously coordinated campaign by a number of Brayton’s fellow travelers. Or former fellow travelers. He really did both the sides he left behind.

So off to Patheos he went. I’d always found the atheists at Patheos conspicuously self-interested, and even cynical on some occasions. It’s not that I think atheists and the religious can’t work together, it’s just that there was always this ick factor from the godless there; a little too much ease with the self-promotion, a little too heavy on the use of polarized jargon the user clearly didn’t fully understand, and a little too many inconsistencies in self-positioning over time. I’m sure the religious readers felt something was a little off, too.

Pharyngula is still going. But the less said there…

If AV from Five Public Opinions had never linked to Dispatches and Pharyngula as much as he did, I’d have probably not have read them nearly as much. I’m not happy Ed is dead, not in any sense, but I do wish I’d clarified my views on his writing, earlier. And, as often is the case, I wish I’d trusted my gut more.

(Gawd, AV. Missing from the blogosphere for over sixteen years now – some of us still miss ya, fella!)

I do recall before blogging myself, that some of the more inquisitive Australian bloggers read and linked to Butterflies and Wheels, while not doing the same with Pharyngula‘s early presence – possibly due to the reception of The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense in Australia. I know which I prefer.

I also remember the Usenet atheism days, at least around the 1998-2001 mark. I have very vague recollections of a mass-transition of atheists from newsgroups to blogs in 2004, but in 2004 I was tinkering with various flavours of Linux, and communing with LUGs and open source communities. And arguing with creationists in LUGs and open source communities – which was about as pleasant and not-at-all-embarrassing as you’d expect.

So I missed that transition from Usenet to early Atheosphere, re-emerging in a part of the blogosphere largely separate from what was going on in the US, with a perspective ground in Australian politics (I’d done a lefty political-internship not long before). Of course, evolution was a part of my studies at Uni then, so of course I was going to go there.

Australian political blogs got more of a look-in from me at least until around 2010. Anonymous Lefty, Grodscorp, The Happy Revolutionary, Larvatus Prodeo, The Road To Surfdom, Legal Eagle and others featured.

(And who could forget Iain Hall and Graeme Bird? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Who can remember Iain and Graeme and is still hanging around?)

***

Coming to blogging in 2005, before The God Delusion was published, and with a local political blogosphere that seemed like it was up for open discussion, was welcoming. I’d been to my first protest years before, had joined the Labor party and was already largely disillusioned by it, and had been arguing with creationists online since the ’90s, on and off. (I wasn’t going to join the Greens though, on account of the dogmatism, cultish harassment problem and history of pseudoscience).

2005. The Kansas Evolution hearings had kicked off, and The Flying Spaghetti Monster was unleashed. The End of Faith was starting to getting people interested in discussing religion, but not so much in Australia. Sam Harris was still being roped into atheist circles back then. People forget his first book wasn’t born of “The Atheist Movement” – it was conceived for better or worse, quite independently. And in 2005, it wasn’t really a news item in Australia. Not like The God Delusion or God Is Not Great were, later on.

Online atheism was, and still is, a dis-aggregated population of godless people, with godless interests and an array of persuasions, political and otherwise. It still tends towards social liberalism, with flair-ups of hot-headed, misogynist, libertarian, cry-baby gronks here and there. It still has its clutches of former religiously minded people, overcompensating for their past, while still not quite getting the materialism they rhetorically lean toward. It’s got all that and more – not all of it good, obviously. People are people.

I tell you what though. The tendencies of the Australian political Blogosphere, and the Atheosphere, really started to pull in opposite directions quite strongly. And in bad ways. If the Blogosphere hadn’t imploded, if things kept on going the way they were and blog participation kept up, straddling the two would have gotten pretty unpleasant.

The Oz political blogosphere owed a lot to being arts-adjacent. A number of more prominent bloggers here had intended career trajectories that could be, fairly or unfairly, negatively effected if certain prejudices weren’t catered to, or at least, not aggravated. Depending on what parts of the arts you don’t want to antagonize, you may not want to be seen as too sympathetic to Salman Rushdie – even this late in the piece. Pointing out that “sampling around the dependent variable” in statistics is a methodological flaw, could have you painted a supporter of the Iraq War, and made an outsider in other sections.

Deflate a beloved legal fiction and… you get the picture. Needless to say, denouncing The Wrong Kind of Atheists, irrespective of what those atheists may actually believe or do, was very popular back in the day in arts circles. And still is. What was allowed and what was verboten for atheists to inquire into was not being decided by people who actually knew what those atheists thought or did – or where they were actually going with things. Arguing against eugenics in a technically literate manner could get you accused of supporting eugenics by people with all the understanding of eugenics you’d expect of those raised on a media diet entirely made up of Sunday Arts.

(People who overly pride themselves on being cerebral often don’t like it when people use language they don’t understand – and technical language can become a repeat offender at setting this off).

If it was otherwise, maybe left-leaning religion journalists and the like would have made a bigger deal about specific instances of sexism documented within atheist communities, a lot earlier? In retrospect, it’s really odd that the critics of “New Atheism” mostly just left this alone, when it had the most evidence to support it relative to other complaints.

But why investigate sexism when you can accuse people, without a shred of evidence, and without being able to articulate why it’s even a problem, of attempting to resurrect a long-dead movement in philosophy? Because some of the people in arts circles you want to impress say it’s on the naughty list, that’s why.

The left side of the Australian political blogosphere catered to this kind of sensibility, to varying extents.

***

Meanwhile, in atheist land… We had the backdrop of an influential, but quite feudal arrangement of US secular organizations steeped in the American Civil Religion. The influence of Paul Kurtz in motivating US Humanism is large and well known, but his influence in making things so tribal? Not as much.

It’s been published what a control freak Kurtz could be, but there’s not so much analysis of the feudalism, at least not that I’ve come across. Needless to say, the details of his feuding with Richard Dawkins and intemperate or tone-deaf atheists seemed contrived – Dawkins hasn’t said half the stupid shit he’s been accused of, and of the actual stupid shit he’s said, Kurtz has had fellow travelers who’ve said worse, all without complaint from Kurtz. Hell, Kurtz had been falsely accused of some of the same going back decades, so he knew the tricks.

So when Kurtz joined in with the chorus decrying the “New Atheism” in the 2000s – a epithet he himself had used against him in the 1980s! – when Kurtz joined in in decrying Dawkins’ tone, amongst other things, Kurtz seemed mostly just to be railing against Dawkins’ influence relative to his own.

There was a struggle, from Kurtz, to direct organizations away from supporting Dawkins’ style (if not Dawkins himself). The way Kurtz exited CFI under a cloud after losing this struggle, just reinforced the impression.

It’s not that I want to smear Kurtz, though. But he had a part in making Playing The Game normal behaviour in movement spaces that are supposed to be geared to, in some sense, serve the truth. That’s not okay.

(It’s not that I imagine that Dawkins wouldn’t have done the same if he were able – he’s just not a natural at it is all, so you don’t really see it from him. At least, not directly. His proxies on the other hand…)

Meanwhile, American Humanism… yeesh. Much like a lot of their Unitarian brethren from the Harvard Divinity School, a lot of formally affiliated American Humanists seen to suffer from a strain of Smartest Person In The Room disease. Albeit a American liberal variety. For decades – DECADES – I’ve been seeing them waltz into conversation, not really understanding what other people are saying, and just assuming something deplorable is being said before launching into a condescending, corrective lecture. Never mind that their interlocutor may have been saying the opposite, and saying it better.

Add to this level of conceit, a dash of overcompensation for shameful memories of previous religious or bigoted misdeeds, an internalized redemption arc fantasy (ala American Civil Religion), and lashings of the kind of ambition-driven anxieties you get from The Cult of LinkedIn, and you’ve got the average American Humanist Association apparatchik I seem to keep coming across. You should see the Humanist chaplains!

Across the pond in the UK, Humanism doesn’t seem to have as much of the American Civil Religion aspects (obviously, but it does seem to be importing some of the tropes), or as much of the overcompensating, cult-hopper nonsense. But self-serving, media-aware professionals, again of the LinkedIn disposition? Yikes!

Australian Humanoatheoskepticism? Not really worth a mention. It’s got most of the usual symptoms, but a lot less of the statistical significance and all of the lack of influence to boot. Again, all of the Humanist chaplains I’ve come across in Australia are the same condescending, Smartest Guy In The Room, modeled-on-American-liberalism types, who seem to be conspicuously lacking in the actually-knowing-shit department for people so confident.

Layered across this, online, you have a small number of secular folks genuinely interested in open, honest inquiry in spite of how the algorithms try to shape their discussion (there were more, but the algorithm, online harassment and loss of interest have each taken their toll). You have a lot of profilitic identities trying to be the next trending thing in quote-unquote “progressive” thought. And you have a load of manosphere-adjacent chuds, similarly profilitic, but who are also the volatile, rage-baiting, less-humorous troll-successors of 2000s 4Chan, Something Awful, the crass end of Internet Infidels and so on.

Too many of the arts-adjacent seem apt to lump all, or much of this into the false taxon “New Atheist”, for various, often self-serving reasons. Maybe they want to appeal to their liberal-arts friends while also being sciencey, but they engaged in some misogynistic online abuse back in the day; they can claim they were “radicalized” by “New Atheism”, thereby externalizing blame.

Never mind that some of those radical “New Atheists” were women on the receiving end of said misogyny. Women who made great efforts in standing up to it. You can’t let facts like that stop you from lumping them in with their harassers and blaming them for your past actions.

Or maybe somebody doesn’t want to be accused of being a “New Atheist”, so they single somebody else out who is (but nobody is – it’s a bogus taxon). Maybe they can’t get tenure at Australian Catholic University, and need to keep being seen to be behaving, so need to differentiate themselves from people – anyone – seen as pesky in received wisdom. Or maybe it’s more base.

“Oh hey babe. Yeah, I’m not like those New Atheist guys. Yeah, nah, I’m not religious but I respect a broad who studies theology. I’m totally a feminist.”

You think people haven’t witnessed behaviour online that’s reducible to parody like this? That this doesn’t happen in liberal, “progressive”, arts-friendly circles? That it hasn’t always happened for as long as there have been progressives?

***

But yeah… if you were a blogger straddled across an arts-adjacent, center-left political scene, and a candid, secular movement committed to inquiry, you’d basically be spread across two antagonistic cultures at once. I’m certainly not the only one I’ve seen straddled across it.

I guess that’s a silver lining to the end of the blogosphere – that particular rift is gone.

I’ve grown away from several people from “both sides” over the years. Some I wish I’d cottoned on to earlier, other I had issues with but tolerated out of deference to the judgement of mutual friends, and with others, we’ve just changed. A handful of folks I’ve befriended via the blogsophere have sadly turned out to just have been somewhat awful all along – but we all knew to expect that about the Internet once upon a time, so I can’t complain at length.

Having Oz politics bloggers and secular bloggers go at it full-tilt, at the same time, at length, would have certainly made this process of parting a lot more explosive. Maybe painfully. Maybe destructively. And the polarization did increase, even if the readership didn’t.

Someone who kept writing, and yet somehow managed to rise above this kind of division in-general, gracefully, and all while not self-censoring (while religious), was the late Neil Whitfield, who died just prior to Christmas last year. I’m coming around to thinking that Neil was the definitive elder-statesman of the Australian blogosphere. I can’t think of anyone more deserving.

The real question is probably whether or not the Australian blogosphere deserves to be associated with him.

Even before his death, more than once I’ve thought “what would Neil say?” The idea of OzBlogging without him around is still hard to process.

So. Back to that question. Why bother writing if you’re not going to be bothered fostering an audience?

***

I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to keep this blog going. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be going.

I’m mortal. When I started this I was in my early thirties and throwing around some heavy weight at the gym, despite not being at peak health even then. I’m in my fifties now, feeling it, and no longer at the gym since the early pandemic. My health isn’t great.

I’d like to leave something – and yeah, I’m thinking of the leaving part – but I’m not entirely sure of the worth of the project. Especially without genuine engagement (no, not the social media statistical definition – I mean the human kind!)

I’ve stopped listing and have changed my email addresses, and I’m considering closing the comments section, given nobody uses it. Due to legal changes in Australia, blog hosts are now more liable for comments made than they used to be, and it’s otherwise a time-sink, if not a particularly frenetic one.

How would people engage with this “content” after that? Not outside of social media linking to it, I guess. Which is kind of worrisome. Handing over power, even a small residual amount after holding out seems bleak. Not in a practical sense, but in that it’s finally confirming the final nail in the coffin of proper, open discussion. The death of The Dream of The Internet.

This may be goodbye, my friends. Eventually. Soonish.

The only thing stopping me is a kind of Camus-style, existential rebellion against the Universe. The continuation of this blog for so long in spite of everything has certainly been absurd.

What to hope for? I’d like people to be able to talk again like they did in the 2000s. Maybe without the casual bigotry, but also without the self-censorship. How do you balance that? Well, not with an algorithm, and not with BlueSky or Twitter admins.

Maybe, if some of the few people remaining can band together and see past their differences, they can… We had a slow cooking movement, maybe we can have a slow reading… What if Zoomers took on 2000s-style blogging like it was retro…

No. There are challenges, and likely solutions, but they won’t involve denying that the blogosphere is dead.

I’ll keep the lights on around here for a while yet, just to rail against an absurd world in an absurd universe. And maybe I’ll even get a chance to debunk a few falsehoods about movement and subculture history. But I’m not going to kid myself.

If you’ve read this far, then thanks. It’s absurd that you’re here. But appreciated.

~ Bruce

“I don’t know you”

I’m not sure if it’s just some eastern state thing I’m yet to familiarize myself with, or a genuinely hypocritical phenomena arising out of organized freethought; being dismissed on the basis of unfamiliarity with an interlocutor.

Basically, you’re in discussion with a self-identified free-thinker, rationalist, Humanist or whatever – often from New South Wales in my experience – and they try to shut you down with the likes of a cliquish “sorry, I don’t know you”. The thing is, the shut-down is neither pertinent to the content of what you’re saying, nor suited to the circumstance; it’s not like you’re actually in their personal space – as much as they may pretend to own the place, you haven’t crashed their tea party.

The setting will be a mutual friend’s Facebook timeline, or a freethought organisation’s page, or so on; an ostensibly neutral territory that may be purposed to someone’s whims, just not your interlocutor’s. The setting is somewhere where at base, the validity of what you argue isn’t contingent upon you having standing or being a stakeholder.

You’ll make your argument, you’ll make no effort to flatter or offend and you’ll make it critical, all of which is perfectly acceptable in any community aspiring to call itself a home to freethought. Then someone will snap at you – usually someone vain – sniffily asking “who are you?”, or otherwise proclaiming your status as alien as if it counters the content of your claims, or warrants that they not even be considered.

I mean, they can refuse to consider what you’re saying, and unless they have some degree of executive responsibility, you can’t expect to force them to tell you why. It’s just that they do tell you why, and the reason why is a bit shit. A bit shit, and a bit indicative of a deeper problem.

Not for the first time, I’ve just had a short discussion with someone online who imagines that they’re open-minded and critical, and that it’s the people who’ve blocked them that are failing to live up to the best rationalist ideals. And not for the first time, I’ve subsequently seen my argument dismissed on the basis of my lack of familiarity to an interlocutor.

The irony here, is the insistence on identifying as open and critical, while simultaneously enacting a motivated shut-down of an argument on the basis that it’s alien. In any given instance, this kind of contradiction is funny. The fact that it seems to get repeated so often is not. Certainly within communities aspiring to freethought it should be regarded as pathological.

Maybe I’ve just been incredibly unlucky in running into this kind of thing repeatedly, or maybe I just bring the worst out of “Freethinkers”, but the vain bunker mentality is not a good look for movements that advocate critical thinking and criticize cults.

~ Bruce

Circling The Abyss

“A blog on politics, society and life as viewed from somewhere in orbit between the precariat and the event horizon.” – Circling The Abyss.

That’s the tagline for this outlet, and while reasonably descriptive, there’s more to be derived from this blog’s title. “Circling The Abyss” is a humanistic comment on living.

In the most obvious sense, we’re all in a decaying orbit, caught in mortality’s gravitational pull. We’re all slowly drawn towards a metaphorical black hole, from which once reached there’s no return. I’ve noticed too, as time passes by, that the rest of the universe seems to speed up – a subjective analogue for time dilation, albeit one for the thermodynamically advanced.

The trick is to resist the downward spiral in as far as is feasible, all while living out what time you have as best you can.

A relentless, downward tug isn’t the only thing you have to contend with. Life gives you challenges. All sort of detritus can be pulled into your orbital path ; hardship, malfeasance and malady. Occasionally there’ll be the random happy accident too, which you’ll want to embrace.

And then there’s the humanism; the human solutions to the problems of living, both for yourself and for others; the orbital corrections and the engineered gravity assists; the human built meanings.

In general terms my own personal challenges are incredibly common. Like an awful lot of people I live payday to payday, never quite sure what I’ll do when and if there’s a break in my finances. Like a good number of people, I’ve fought and will continue to fight against a downward spiral into insanity.

There’s also the ever-present peril of losing perspective despite being amidst the rest of humanity; of shifting your gaze away from your orbit around the abyss, in order to mentally orbit your own navel. Solipsism solves nothing. Humanism is best done collaboratively, and in good faith.

For my own not-at-all-special part, and like many others, I’ll accept mortality and approach the challenges of socio-economic decrepitude with the best mix of solidarity, stoicism and epicureanism I can manage; the solidarity to seek a common good, a stoicism adequate to accept what is real, and an epicureanism sufficient to remain sane in the face of death.

This is what’s meant by “Circling The Abyss”.

~ Bruce

Contemplating Humanist affiliation

A number of years ago I left the Humanist Society of South Australia under somewhat of a cloud, ultimately opining in print at the end of an extended disclosure, that I didn’t have anything more I wanted to write about the organization specifically. Nothing much has changed in that latter respect; either in as far as I can tell, nothing’s happened that would make me want to comment further, or I’m left with smaller issues that I’ve been informed of that I’m not in a position to properly investigate before making a case. So don’t ask me to (thanks).

At any rate, after my departure, not wanting to sever with IHEU/CAHS affiliated bodies entirely, I did a brief mail-around of a couple of other CAHS affiliated bodies to see if they’d take a South Australian. Queensland didn’t reply, quite possibly relating to some pretty intense upheavals at an executive level at the time, while the Humanist Society of Victoria (HSV) did get back to me, and in the affirmative. So I joined the HSV.

***

It’s a fun fact that when you do anything remotely akin to whistleblowing in public, you’ll wind up being contacted by people who’ve either tried to blow the whistle themselves, or who have something they just need to get off their chest. I’ve had all sorts of feedback and information fired at me in the back channels, not all of it trustworthy, and even less usable.

But it’s the verifiably true stuff that you can’t or don’t know how to act on that’s the most vexing. The context of some of this stuff spans decades and countries, and it’s hard to tell if or how some of it can be meaningfully addressed; court cases from decades ago demonstrating malfeasance by a Humanist I’ve never heard of, who was then boosted by an overseas Humanist organization I’ve never had anything to do with are a little out of my scope.

People have told me things about individuals from the HSV, and they told me before I opted to join. I have no doubt that my joining pissed off at least one former HSV member who’d contacted me. The thing is, that while some of the info given to me was verifiable, it was hard-to-impossible to extrapolate from those facts, to the organization as a whole, or even the committee in particular. Stating that dickheads exist within an organization is a pretty insufficient critique. Functioning organizations have dickheads too.

In terms of cultural problems though, even at my distance from the organization – my membership is nominal and pretty much a mere formality – there are some pretty overt warning signs; the publication in the Australian Humanist (edited by a founding HSV member) a few years back of a poem that was zero percent critique of Islam, and 100% denigration of Muslims; a terrible defense of the choice to publish this poem and another work of garbage in the very same issue; a committee that wasn’t close to being properly visible, and so on.

Not a lot of evil, but a lot of things to make you consider how functional a group is.

In terms of my miniscule involvement – I’ve witnessed a couple of pathetic displays online by folks of influence within the organization myself, and have just recently witnessed one of the smarter ones – one with influence over a public organ no less – claiming that harassment, sexism and so-on within atheist circles is largely made up, essentially just because it’s obviously true. This kind of reasoning doesn’t bode well for an organization that’s supposed to pursue reason in service to compassion.

On the flip-side, at the very least the HSV’s organization and promotion of public events has seemed honest and professional. I can’t tell you how sick I’ve grown of seeing atheist promotional shenanigans, either from afar or up close; organizers publicly announcing speakers from serious projects prior to confirmation, only for those speakers to predictably fall through; promoting their own members as speakers with misleading titles, honorifics and superlatives, and peddling non-peer reviewed, untested and untestable crank hypotheses as central to public “seminars”. The HSV, however, possibly has the best average quality of speaker academically speaking, out of all of the Australian Humanist societies, and the speakers are promoted formally and accurately, without gimmickry. That ain’t nothing.

(No, I haven’t been to any of these meetings, being in South Australia during all the ones I’d liked to have attended, but I don’t need to to make the above judgements; a good number of the people speaking have published works they can be judged by.)

Of course, it’s not just the HSV that has merits and cultural problems. The NSW Humanists have quite an asset in Humanist House, and quite a liability in not having been forthright in discussion of how they fended off entryism from neo-Nazis, nor how it all got nearly as bad as it did in the first place. The Humanist Society of NSW has had changes to its leadership since then, and I’m not interested in castigating, or in investigating to see what miniscule portions of blame can be ascribed to specific members of the current executive, but still, it’s cause for pause. Things don’t ever go this badly without cultural problems being a factor, and a fresh new executive isn’t going to just make those problems up and disappear.

Then there are all of the asinine arguments and ideations that just grind away at you, turning your resolve to dust; “Public criticism of Humanist leaders betrays your oath!”; “Children are sexual beings!”; “I don’t care if they’re a demonstrably mendacious climate denialist, I’m interested in how they make me feel about myself!”; “Geert Wilders is just misunderstood!”; “I’m thinking of incorporating astrology into my counselling work!”; “The women who accused Assange of rape work for the CIA!”; “People should be able to fuck pigs!”; “If some of this finite publication space wasn’t allocated to voice sentiments at odds with the IHEU minimum statement, why, that would be censorship!”; “Michael Shermer is so cool *swoon*.” You’ll never be free of this kind of stuff, anywhere, but you’d think you’d encounter a little less of it from people in spaces purposed to rational, humane, critical discussion.

So basically, if I up and leave the HSV, it’ll be a choice between asking the ACT Humanists or the Western Australian lot if they’ll have me, or seeing if an overseas IHEU affiliated body will accept my membership (I’m thinking Humanists UK). I’d just like to be able to settle down, and ease my way into meaningful involvement, digitally, without having to worry about how a community’s accumulation of alfoil may influence my WiFi signal.

***

Increasingly I’m finding it difficult to credit Australian Humanist societies with the ability or even intent to pursue Humanist objectives. There have been a few recent positives – such as the turn away from awarding the AHoY Award to rather obvious celebrity choices, and the CAHS website has been improved dramatically.

But the speed with which time and energy can just be diverted away from intelligent, purposeful discussion, in order to service petty defensiveness and entitled bunyip-feudalism is just so damn discouraging. Too many Australian Humanists seem far too insular, and far too many are accustomed to being flattered as if flattery were the whole point of Humanism. The moment that Humanists of good will attain a little political momentum, that momentum risks being either co-opted for the purposes of virtue signaling, or shut down entirely.

I’ll continue to consider my options, and will ask around in due course.

~ Bruce

First and last words…

Last year, I quietly resigned from the Humanist Society of South Australia (HSSA). After subsequently having my departure “explained” by a member of the HSSA, last month I came clean by writing a piece for Butterflies and Wheels, explaining a number of my issues with the way the HSSA is run (i.e. the actual reasons why I left).

You can read that over here…

As you’d expect, this was met with indignation. A few points;

No, my list of complaints was not a full, rounded account of people’s characters, but given that it wasn’t an attempt at biography – an entirely different genre – that’s not an issue.
Yes, inferences were made. I complained about the smoke, but didn’t demonstrate the existence of the fire. This isn’t however, an issue if I left on account of the smoke. I can leave an organisation on whatever basis I choose and yes, those reasons can infer other things. This is largely unavoidable and does not obligate me to silence.
It should occur to some people, especially those in leadership roles, that we’re all forced to communicate within given limits, and rely in good faith upon our audiences to pick apart and analyse things according to their ability and what they’re given to work with. You can’t reasonably expect people to just trust you, or to agree with you in all things, or to come to a given issue with an approved set of interests.

As you’d expect, (with the exception of one HSSA member) none of this was demonstrated to have been appreciated.

The kind of story telling that only convinces those who’ve opted to believe in advance, ensued. I’ve recently pulled some of this fabulist rubbish apart, again over at Butterflies and Wheels.

You can read that here.

~ Bruce

A decade and more of people coming and going in orbit…

I first felt the tidal forces wrought by being flung out of social orbit two or three years ago, when silently, both other persons and myself, went our own ways. Their trajectory sent them in professional directions I can’t say I’d endorse 100%, while I may or may not have been relegated to the status of ‘crazy guy they knew on the Internet’.

For my own part in this, I was getting tired. Tired of passive-aggression, of in-jokes (some poorly veiled), and tired of a few people being too egocentric to realise that no, they weren’t dealing with someone who was gullible, they were dealing with someone who was being charitable; someone who was humouring them, not the other way around.

If I regret anything from this particular period, it’s my lame participation in what passed for some of the humour – which often involved my riffing off of someone else’s bad joke.

All the same, while we were friends, I did get something out of some of them, during what was a difficult time for me, mentally. I don’t know if this admission would injure their egos, or comfort them, and I can’t say I’m particularly worried either way.

If there’s anything I’d be concerned about with them, if I hadn’t put them behind me, it’d be the prejudicial assumptions and leading questions; annoying for me, worse for them if it insinuates its way into their journalism.

The greatest imposture in all of this though, comes from my own faculties – particularly my relative inability to forget things, even small things I don’t much care about. Inevitably something comes along to remind me… like goings on over the past few weeks.

At the very least I wouldn’t be recalling all of these details if I hadn’t been reminded.

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Guest Post over at B&W: The Good Juror Pose

It’s been almost two weeks since I mailed this essay off to Ophelia Benson, but I’ve been on holiday in Melbourne sans notebook and passwords for most of the time. You’ll have to forgive me for my tardiness.

There seems to be a trend of late, of people lecturing jurisprudence at people who it is reasonable to assume, have been victims of rape or sexual assault. Notably, it’s often not just “Skeptics”, but “Skeptics” with friends accused of acting up and pestering people sexually (or worse), who engage in this practice.

It’s not that the presumption of innocence is to be suspended, it’s just that the presumption of innocence is often irrelevant to the context these discussions are taking place in, with potentially harmful consequences. I spend 2600 words (including quotes) on the matter over here…

~ Bruce

This is what PR dissembling looks like…

For those of you who don’t know, Karen Stollznow, sceptic, public speaker and author, revealed her account of how sexual harassment was dealt with in a recent Scientific American blog post. You can read that here.

Subsequent to this publication, multiple outlets are now naming the alleged sexual harasser/stalker, as the relatively high profile sceptic, Ben Radford. As I’m not privy to the details or evidence, I’ll not speculate on his guilt, but I suspect more details are going to come out in the wash at some point.

The employer, also not named in Karen Stollznow’s post, has since been named as the Center for Inquiry (CFI). CFI has now responded to all of this in typically boilerplate language. You can read their response in full, here.

For a moment ignoring the names, that have been named thus far, the personal politics, and the potential culpability of individuals in this matter, this is a strange document that borders on the meaningless. It’s almost a deepity in PR long-form.

“As a general rule, CFI does not discuss personnel matters in public. We refrain from discussing these matters in public not only out of consideration for our staff, but also because experience has shown that this is the best way to encourage people to come forward with complaints.”

In general yes, this is a good strategy. Especially before due process has worked its way through (something Karen Stollznow complied with).

But CFI is responding to a specific case here, and in this case Karen Stollznow has opted to go public owing to the alleged inadequacy of CFI’s process, and after the process has completed at that. Keeping things private in this context, is meaningless; CFI can’t keep it private because it’s already public, and it’s what CFI does under the veil of privacy that is in question.

People with potential complains seeing this case unfold, aren’t going to be worried about CFI’s ability to keep things in-house. Indeed, Stollznow, and about every other critic of CFI’s management, positively speak to CFI’s ability to maintain the hush.

Further, who’s decision is it, ultimately, to keep things quiet, or go public, if something has gone wrong? That’s not the organisation’s call, and unless we see court action deciding to the contrary, it was Karen Stollznow’s right to bring this to light.

What does CFI think people with complaints about harassment are more likely to be worried about – that CFI will go public with their information, if the issue is already public, or that CFI will decide of its own accord, without regard to the wishes of the person making the complaint, what level of openness is appropriate?

Yes, there are legal concerns about going public, for all parties, but in it’s release, CFI doesn’t cite this as a justification. CFI claims it doesn’t want to deter future complaints.

CFI’s response reduces the serious matter of privacy, from a human relations concern, to the level of marketing pablum.

And then things proceed to where the wheels really begin to fall off…

“However, we would like to make it clear that any suggestion that CFI has been less than diligent in addressing harassment complaints is mistaken. During the administration of current president and CEO, Ronald A. Lindsay, that is since July 2008, CFI has investigated all complaints that have been made to management, and, where necessary, has taken appropriate corrective action. “

On the face of it, this looks like a good thing, right? Investigating every case? Good-o.

“Neither allegations nor denials determine the actions CFI takes. The results of the investigation determine the actions taken by CFI. If CFI has employed an outside investigator, we go with the investigator’s findings; we do not substitute our suspicions. If the investigator found, for example, that a sexual assault occurred, we would accept that finding; likewise, if the investigator found that no sexual assault occurred, we would accept that finding.”

If you’ve read the whole release, you’ll notice that the remainder is mostly rhetoric in this vein, talking about rumor and gossip, while ironically not even vaguely citing any examples of rumor and gossip – CFI is gossiping about alleged gossip. While I’m not commenting on Ben Radford’s guilt, I wouldn’t dismiss Karen Stollznow’s concerns as “gossip”.

That aside, and to the point I want to make – CFI defers to investigators, in deciding the facts. It’s fair to say, that seeing as CFI acknowledged that sexual harassment did indeed occur, there are at least some facts between CFI and Karen Stollznow that are uncontested.

Furthermore, it’s the allegedly lax penalties for sexual harassment that were met out by CFI that Karen Stollznow disputes in her article. Are we to believe that CFI outsources it’s values as well, such that independent investigators also decide upon penalties, in addition to the facts of the case?

No. This is Ron Lindsay’s job, and the accusation is that he failed to appreciate the implications of the facts, such that remedial action was inadequate.

Raising the matter of independent investigators is an irrelevant act of self-promotion that (by design?) distracts people from the substance of Karen Stollznow’s concerns.

I’m not entirely sure that distracting attention from the substance of complaints, and dismissing them as gossip, is going to make people more comfortable with the prospect of making complaints to CFI. But if you’re not actually facing this prospect, and you can’t tease the implications out of the boilerplate language, then I guess CFI’s release would look nice and fuzzy.

I’m wondering how long they can manage to keep treating this matter like a PR issue, and making fatuous statements about privacy, instead of realizing that transparency about the process is the solution.

~ Bruce

Medicated #04: If you can’t come out swinging…

Contra this time last year, I can sleep quite well, actually. Thanks for asking. Too well, in fact.

An appointment with the doctor has it that the source of a persistent narcolescence is likely something other than my medication. Apparently my SSRI of choice doesn’t do that.

To test the hypothesis, my dosage is being dropped by half.

Gym has been suspended, and then given the green light, owning to the need for an opinion on an umbilical hernia I likely first obtained when body surfing across Gawler Place. It was either that or a taxi would have ground me into road pizza. I’ll take the hernia, thanks.

As it turns out, it’s not so serious, and it would have been better (with the benefit of hindsight) had I stayed at gym. Gym helps with my depression. It also makes me sleepy.

Now I’ve been away from the blogosphere quite a bit this year, but don’t you think that means I’ve been doing nothing.

In my spare time, when not twiddling my thumbs, I’ve been trying to organise the drafting of a harassment policy for the Humanist Society of South Australia (HSSA). We’re going to do this democratically, or not at all, so that takes a little more time, work, and patience than if we were to opt the route of executive power. I like to think that discussion both makes for a better policy, and keeps the membership aware of why the policy is there.

In dribs and drabs of I’ve-got-to-get-it-finished-soon (although it really leads into an event in May), I’ve been working on an article I started in December of last year. Suffice to say, the fact checking, verification and investigation took longer than I thought, and I now know a bunch of stuff related both tangentially and directly to the subject, than I ever knew before.

Some of it I wish I didn’t. Some of it agitates my clinical depression.

I’m forced to ask myself; which is more depressing, the knowledge that a problem exists, or inaction on said problem? Because if inaction is more depressing, then being depressed into inaction is going to cause feedback.

Problem; Inaction; Depression; Inaction; More depression; More inaction.

It’d be a lie to say that I’ve been inactive, generally, but by fuck (which is sacred around here), I can’t half feel the blanket pressing down on me.

Which I guess is an improvement over the last twenty years. The blanket always did press down on me to some extent, only for the most part, I wasn’t aware of it. I guess the meds have been doing their work.

I guess the crux of it is that the blanket doesn’t give me room for a good swing and hit. The alternative is struggling?

I’ll labour on. I mean, you do that when you’re depressed anyway, as best you can. The trick though, is to find the things that motivate you, which contrary to the cliché, are not necessarily the things you love.

Burning moral outrage doesn’t burn in me like it used to, which has had the twin effect of helping me see things clearer, and investigate further instead of getting my jocks in a twist. But a little more impulsiveness along these lines would at least help me get my volume of writing up.

Of course, I don’t burn out, either, being as I am at the moment.

I can’t even act out anger for the rhetoric of the rant anymore. Or at least, not for an extended period.

Poetry, or at least poetic prose is starting to flow more freely, and with humanistic intents. One of the themes emerging the HSSA has been religion’s monopoly on hope, and it seems to me that a godless literary tradition could offer competition.

Short of the suspended critical thinking of some of the transhumanists, the selfishness (and self-serving readings) of the Randroids, or the totalitarianism of some of the worst of the 20th century’s godless dogmas, that is. A literary tradition that speaks to what good humans can do, without getting all bleary-eyed about it.

The thing is, human folly notwithstanding, there’s still reason for hope without recourse to divine intervention, or secular fictions. Denmark does it pretty well, and largely without recourse to deities.

I have selfish reasons for wanting to see these hopes recognised in my own time, and my own circle, if only to motivate me through my own depression. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t this side to it.

That being said, I’d like to think that this would be a good way to get out there, if not quite swinging. I’d like to think that it’d be a good way to help others, and to fulfil an ethos of contribution.

But more on that, hopefully soon enough.

I have things planned and in the works. We’ll touch base again, and hopefully (I’m not ashamed to use the word) I’ll have a little more to show for my efforts.

~ Bruce

Upgraded…

Just a short bit of news…

The Humanist Society of South Australia Inc, has now been officially incorporated (nice work, Pres and Secretary!) We now await the decision of the national council to see if we’ll be accepted into the national and global fold.

Also, I’ve been up-voted to treasurer. Uncontested. It is treasury after all.

In semi-related news, I’m considering adapting Keatingisms into my everyday language. Desiccated coconuts and spivs beware.

~ Bruce