In an attempt to counter this, we’d like to try to get as many people as possible to vote instead for Professor Ian Frazer (#32 in the list), the inventor of the Gardasil vaccine.  Reasons why you should support him are given below the jump.

Margaret Court (#24 in the list) has recently courted controversy at the start of the Australian Open tennis tournament by speaking out about her opposition to marriage equality.  Her speel came directly from the books of right-wing fundamentalist christian apologetics, with plenty of blanket assertions and outright lies that are unsupported by any evidence, and actually fly directly in opposition to all the evidence and science on the issues.

The ACL are a right-wing fundamentalist religious group, and therefore any information about sexual activity is seen as bad.  Although I cannot find a location where they explicitly express as much in their press releases or on their website, things like sex education, safe sex, and anything healthy related to it their spokespeople tend to oppose.  They consider it all the “sexualisation of society” and promoting of an evil act, rather than just encouragement for people to do safely what they would otherwise be doing unsafely anyway.

For this reason, the ACL and many other right-wing fundamentalist religious groups are generally highly opposed the Gardasil vaccine.  Having Professor Ian Frazer outvote Margaret Court would be a direct slap in the face to the ACL.

If you need more reasons, then what better can you find than that it will also be a slap in the face to the AVN.

The AVN (Australian Vaccination Network) are a misleadingly named anti-vaccination lobby group from northern NSW, Australia.  They actively promote the misinformation and blatant lies about vaccines, scaring innocent victims and families in to not vaccinating their children.  The results of this can be seen as measles, whooping cough, and other easily preventable diseases are making a massive comeback globally.

Please, vote for Professor Ian Frazer for National Living Treasure.  Please also spread the word.  Help piss off the ACL and the AVN in one swoop.

The CFI is a sheet of paper that certifies that the person does not already have a legally recognised partner and is free to marry.  Since 2004, thanks to the changes added by phil ruddock and lil jonny howard, LGBT people cannot receive these.  Without these, they cannot marry.  Well, could not.  They will be able to once again after February 1st.

So from the 1st of February, Australians will be able to get married overseas, just not in Australia.  Their marriage unfortunately will still not be recognised in Australia either (according to amendments added by johnny howard in 2004).

Anyway, to get to the point of this blog post, I started looking around further at laws, restrictions, and other such things in regards to sexuality equality.  Eventually found myself on this wikipedia page.

It’s quite interesting that the first officially recorded gay marriage was in 27BC, with gay marriage first being outlawed in 342CE … by a christian emperor.

So much for the “tradition” argument against equal marriage by bigots.

That’s also about the same time christianity started (despite there being christians, christianity as we know today really started during the council of Nicea, 325CE when they codified gospel and doctrine), so you can say that the homophobia and bigotry we still see today is all thanks to christianity!

Every time someone uses it, I die a little inside.  Every time someone uses it, I feel a deep sense of foreboding rage building inside of me.  Every time someone uses it, a hipster gains his/her skintight jeans and thick glasses with no lenses.

What exactly is wrong with it?  Well, just about everything. 

The skill in taking good photos comes in capturing the scene, the beauty as it is seen in your own eyes, the capturing of what makes that thing to you so beautiful.  The capturing of colours that nature displays.  The finding of an angle that would turn a normally boring scene into something amazing.  The small little piece of beauty, inside an otherwise unremarkable location.  The capturing of fine details to really show off what a location can provide.

These are the reasons I’ve been making a concerted effort to get in to photography over the last few months, because I want to share some of the beauty I see, and what I personally see in different locations.  My attempts at photography are quite poor, but I’m working on it.  This entire rant about Instagram though is something I have thought for well over a year now, since it first came out in fact.  I was just spurred in to finally posting it due to a run of Instagram “photos” I saw on twitter and facebook last Saturday morning.

Instagram, by its very nature discourages all of these skills, and by its nature ruins any attempts to capture any of these things.

It doesn’t even work as a photo sharing site either.  It operates solely as an iPhone application.  The screen on an iPhone is a mere 8.9cm (diagonally), which means even full sized images are for all intents and purposes nothing more than thumbnails.  If you want to then browse (through the app) through someone’s past photos, you’re stuck with 1cm x 1cm sized thumbnails.  I have good eyesight, but even this is too small.

If you want to view it through any other device, whether it be another brand of smartphone, laptop or desktop computer, you’re stuck.  If you go to the Instagram website, you can do nothing other than look at their front page telling you to get the iPhone app.

Even when you do have a link to someone’s photo already, it won’t let you click on their name to see the history of photos.  If you like one of their images and want to see what else they took photos of in that area or elsewhere, without the app, you’re stuck.  This is a massive photo sharing fail.

The website is a massive photo sharing fail in more ways than just the limiting of browsing to small-screened iPhones.  The thumbnails it enforces on people mean you lose all detail from a photo.  The photo above-left was taken by a friend of mine, WeezMGK.  If you click on the above-left image and then select “view full size”, you can see the image in all its detail, zoomed in to a full sized image to look in awe at the fine details.  If you try that on the above-right image, you’ll find you can’t.  You’re stuck with the thumbnail.  Even if you did have the iPhone app, the small screen would stop you from zooming in enough to see those details anyway.  Can you even see the Sydney Harbour Bridge?  In this way, Instagram discourages the capturing of anything that has any detail.

The image above-left is another photo taken by WeezMGK of the sunset.  In this image he captures the colours and actual view from that moment in all its glory.  It really is an amazing picture.  Instagram though, encourages the use of filters to modify an image and make it “artistic”.  Above-right, I’ve applied the filter that best suited that image, and as you can see it completely ruins it, washing out all the colour and what really made that scene beautiful.  In fact, for all the viewer of the above-right photo can tell, it may well have just been photos of clouds on an ordinary day, with all colours added by Instagram.  There is no beauty in faked colours like that.  It’s not capturing what the person actually saw, the actual beauty in the scene.

To demonstrate further the point of not really capturing the scene, I took a photo of some rocks and rubbish (above-left), then applied some Instagram filters (above-right).  There was no skill used at all in this photo, nor attempts to capture a moment yet now it’s “arty”, or at least according to hipsters “DUHH! I CAN ART!”.  So with both the sunset and rocks examples in mind, what is it you’re actually showing me through Instagram?  Is it a beautiful moment that is no longer what you are trying to express (sunset photo), or is it something extremely dull and boring that you’re faking to express (rocks&rubbish photo)?

The heavy focus on the filters also takes away some of the skills in getting a good photo.  The framing of the shot, the balancing of the elements in the scene, the ability to find an angle that turns something ordinary in to something wonderful.  In the above photos for example, above-left I have the ordinary scene.  Above-centre, the unique angle to improve upon it (a view from road level), and finally above-right is the framing and balancing of the scene (the solitary girl walking down the road on the left, and the road rolling and weaving in to the distance on the right).  These are three things that many don’t bother with any more due to such single-click filters, making the images on Instagram even more dull.

And it does very heavily push the filters.  Just take a look at this screenshot, taken from a website that allows you to view Instagram through a web browser (yes, you need to find third party sites to do that one basic task).  Look at how few of those images are not retouched.  The filters themselves are simple sing-click things, so it’s not like any thought even goes in to applying those either.

—

Instagram is the bane of photography.  Every time you use it, you may as well be defecating all over the scene you’re pretending to capture.

It discourages the skills of framing a photo, finding an angle, and attempting to capture beauty by its heavy pushing of filters.  The filters mean you can never tell if the person was trying to convey what they were seeing, or are simply going “HERP!  DERP!  I HAZ AN ART!!!~1″, and make it too grainy to even see the subjects natural beauty and detail (sometimes to even see the subject).

Please, for gods sake (or what ever deity/lack of deity to prescribe to), PLEASE, STOP USING INSTAGRAM!  It fails at photo sharing, it ruins pictures, it removes any moment or beauty you wish to capture and share, and just leaves you with a generic, grainy, try-hard bunch of pixels that demonstrate less artistic ability than my two year old nephew with a pack of crayons.  If you use it, I WILL think less of you, I WILL hate you, and I most certainly will NOT look at your image.

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“While Tankard Reist has not gone so far as to issue court proceedings yet, she complains social media has intensified the level of vituperation against outspoken figures such as herself.

”Things have gone too far, people think they can just trash you,” she said yesterday. ”Why does being a blogger exempt you from the laws of defamation?””

The area where Melinda Tankard Reist has made a very serious error is one area that journalists and “professional commentators” very regularly get wrong.  She has claimed that social media and blogs have “intensified the level of vituperation against outspoken figures”.

No Melinda, it hasn’t.  What you see and read in blogs and social media are the exact same things people have always been saying to each other in conversation.  The comments and commentary from the general public has not changed at all.  The only difference with blogs and social media, is that we now have a way to express these thoughts and opinions in a way that you can see them.

Previously you were blissfully unaware, only the few that were specifically selected for “letters to the editor” do you read, and that’s only if people go to such effort.  Now, social media and publicising our own thoughts is an every day, every hour, every minute occurrence, so you’re seeing a lot more of it.  These are the publics actual thoughts, rather than your disillusions of what they were.

If you do happen to stumble across this particular blog, I should point out I’m using the “royal you”.  Yes, it is directed at you personally Melinda, but at the same time these comments are directed with equal value to everyone else who uses the press to criticise bloggers, commenters, and social media users.

—–

If anyone’s wondering my thoughts on Melinda Tankard Reists feminism or religious fundamentalism, well, I wasn’t overly familiar with MTR prior to the article which seemed to kick all of this off.  I knew her as an anti-abortion campaigner, and that was about it.

As I read through the article, I read nothing to make me consider her as a feminist other than the regular claims that she was.  All the descriptions of her and her activities sounded to me to come straight from the play books of the religious conservatives.  The people who insist that everyone, religious and non-religious alike, need to play by the same rules of their particular interpretation of god.  The people who insist that laws must be the way they want them and anybody who thinks differently is attacking their religious freedoms.  The people who love to discriminate, offend, and act like schoolyard bullies, but when called out on it seem to somehow think they’re the victims.

Is Melinda a feminist or a fundamentalist theist?  I’d say she’s probably both, but her actions to me seem to lean more towards the latter.  This does need to be taken with a very big grain of salt though due to my lack of real knowledge about Melinda.  I could be and most likely am extremely mistaken, these are after all only early impressions.

As to her outrage to all of this, it’s very much a Streisand affect which she’s created here.  Turned lots of people against her.  I can only see this as another person throwing their hat in to the circle, wanting to joint he likes of Andrew Bolt, Kyle Sandilands, Germaine Greer, and doing anything for publicity in any way shape or form.  The more controversial, the better.  They’ll unfortunately get ratings and people fawning to listen to them just so that those people can be offended.

It really is quite disgusting both that people act like this on purpose, and that it works.

I’ve spoken about the Australian Vaccination Network before, but those have generally only been mentions and references, I’ve never really gone in to who and what they are.

EDIT: BREAKING NEWS! It appears StopAVN have done something fantastic and unexpected at Woodford Folk Festival!  Please scroll down to the next bolded “EDIT:” and ensure even if you don’t read most of this, you at least read that!!!

Who are the Australian Vaccination Network?
The Australian Vaccination Network (AVN), despite all claims to the contrary, are an anti-vaccination group.  They are headed up by Meryl Dorey and claim they’re not, they claim they just support informed choice and provide a counter to the governments provides.  However, the information the AVN provide is wrong on almost all counts which means it’s not really an informed choice they’re providing but a misinformed one, and if the governments provides is pro-vaccine, then any stance counter to that surely must be anti?

Their preferred sources of information are not scientific studies, but rather conspiracy theorist sites such as whale.to (a site that collects any and all articles and claims no matter how crazy and unsubstantiated they are), conspiracy theorists such as David Icke (who promotes world leaders and the royal family being lizard people), and people with revoked medical licenses such as the disgraced Andrew Wakefield.

They’ve had their charity license revoked.  In the last two years, only two issues of their 6/year magazine “Living Wisdom” has been released (and despite being so far behind in issues owed, they’re still actively pushing subscriptions).  They regularly cry oppression, censorship and demand free speech, despite blocking/banning anyone who dares counter their supposed-not president Meryl Dorey with information that is nothing more than factual. They have also been caught filing numerous false DMCA requests to hide public and factual information they don’t like.  The Australian Vaccination Network about as hypocritical as one can get.

Who are Stop The AVN?

Fortunately there’s also groups out there who try to combat the Australian Vaccination Network‘s misinformation campaign, one of which is called Stop The AVN (StopAVN).  Despite being completely banned from the AVN‘s mailing list, FaceBook page, and google group for the reasons mentioned above, they’re doing an amazing job at countering the AVN‘s misinformation campaign.  With their own FaceBook page and information website they regularly counter Meryl‘s false claims, and have done some great work putting the AVN in its deserved place.  The ABC for example have been told globally not to use her as an expert in vaccines, and that if she is to talk at all it’s to be made clear she’s an anti vaccination promoter.

Unlike the AVN which was a charity (license revoked) and is still a registered non-profit business, StopAVN is just a loose collection of people with common interests.  They don’t have any official structure, nor do they ever campaign for funds.  Anything and everything is done entirely on the individuals time and with their own personal funds, simply because they care and are passionate about the wellbeing of others, helping out those who are too young to be vaccinated or who are immuno-comprimised so vaccines cannot help.

Woodford Folk Festival?
Last but not least in this little sordid tale is the Woodford Folk Festival (WoodfordFF).  It is a music/culture festival held near Woodford in Queensland every year between Christmas and New Years.  For the last few years they’ve invited Meryl to talk and give her false information on the topics of vaccines and autism.  Two years ago Meryl spoke as well, and all attempts to have this stage removed from her failed.  In fact it became quite clear that the people behind WoodfordFF were very in support of things like alternative (read: Ineffective) medicine, anti-vaccination, and just about anything not supported by evidence or science.  This extends to the point where they even have a homeopathic first aid tent on site.

Last year Meryl didn’t attend due to schedule conflicts, but this year she was invited back and accepted.  StopAVN first approached WoodfordFF to let them know just what/who they were providing a platform to, and they didn’t care.  If anything, their response yet again showed they supported the unhealthy and dangerous stance Meryl promotes.  StopAVN then went to the media contacts.  This second approach has proven more successful, with numerous sponsors pulling out due to the misinformation claims not only of Meryl and the AVN, but also of other stalls and speakers at WoodfordFF.  Numerous organisations including council/governments who support but don’t sponsor the festival requested their names and logos be removed from sponsor lists.

Through some great activism, StopAVN have managed to get WoodfordFF to reluctantly act, although not as much as I and many others would have liked.  WoodfordFF have decided to step back from giving Meryl an unchallenged stage to spout her lies and misinformation, and have allowed an immunologist to go up in debate against her, with a person from the World Health Organisation as the moderator.  This is great news, but debates still aren’t the best either.  They are won not by who is correct, but who is the most confident.  You need to keep your information short and sharp.  It is much easier to do that with lies and false statements that sound like “statements of fact” when said confidently.  Here’s hoping the moderator keeps her on a tight leash, stopping her on any lies.

It’s a good step, but Woodford Folk Festival are still not doing enough for the wellbeing of their patrons.  Remember, this isn’t censorship.  It isn’t silencing her either.  It is just refusing her a stage.  She is still free to spout her misinformation, but she’ll have to do it elsewhere.

EDIT: OH MY FRACKING GOD!  News has just come in that Stop The AVN have managed to pull something off I would not have expected in a hundred years!  They had people handing out these awesome pamphlets to counter the misinformation they’re expecting Meryl Dorey to be spouting.  Not only that, while Meryl was on stage spouting her misinformation (and for two hours after), StopAVN managed to hire a plane to fly over the festival with a banner in tow stating “Vaccination Saves Lives“!  This would have been flying above WoodfordFF right in Meryl‘s face during and just after her talk!  BRILLIANT!

So much praise to Stop The AVN!  My hat and pants go off to them.

EDIT 2: Stop The AVN have released some banners we can put on our blogs.  I’ve added them to the top and bottom of this post and will shortly be putting it on my blog sidebar as well.  I’m still waiting (hoping) for pictures of Meryl‘s talk and the plane, and will edit this a third time when I can get them. Bravo StopAVN, Bravo.

Links and Resources:

• Vaccination Saves Lives – Press Release from StopAVN.
• Vaccination Saves Lives – Pamphlet being handed out at WoodfordFF.
• Vaccination Saves Lives – StopAVN.
• Chain of Protection.
• My past blog posts about Vaccines/AVN.
• HCCC Public Health Warning about the Australian Vaccination Network.
• Stop the Australian Vaccination Network Facebook Page.
• Stop the Australian Vaccination Network Website.
• Scopie’s Law (details about whale.to).
• Disgraced Andrew Wakefield.
• David Icke.
• AVN at Wikipedia.

At the time, Christopher Maloney was throwing out threats of lawsuits left right and centre, and twisting anything and everything he possibly could to make it falsely look like he was being persecuted.  Not long after this, all news on him died off and this was the last the blogosphere heard.  This wasn’t the end of his actions though.

It has now become apparent that Christopher Maloney, Quack, N.D. had utilised his wife’s legal services to sue the original blogger.  A S.L.A.P.P. suit was filed against Mr Hawkins.

Fortunately, Mr Hawkins approached Ken White for suggestions of good legal defence, and instead got Ken White offering his services Pro Bono.

The case has now concluded, and Christopher Maloney has lost.  For the details of what transpired you’re probably best off reading Mr Hawkins’ blog on the topic, and/or that of his lawyer, Ken White.

This is great news, not only another loss for the quacks but mainly for another S.L.A.P.P. suit slapped down.

Links:

• Pharyngula: Christopher Maloney is a Quack.
• Pharyngula: Christopher Maloney is still a Quack.
• Pharyngula: Do not harrass the Quacks.
• Pharyngula: Andreas Moritz is a cancer Quack.
• Pharyngula: Why Quacks ought to lie low.
• FTSoS: Christopher Maloney and the lawsuit that almost was.
• PopeHat: Pro Bono victory in a Junk Science SLAPP suitagainst a Science blogger.

The last time I participated was back in 2003 and I raised over $800 by removing this.

Although I no longer have the lovely long locks, I’ve decided to try some other strategies to help make the earnings worthwhile.

Firstly, I’ll be participating in a group so you can either sponsor me personally (preferred – money gets added to WSFT tally anyway) or the Western Sydney Freethinkers group as a whole.

Secondly, I’ll be setting up numerous targets, with different / better things happening as each target is reached.

Target 1: Draw a sheepie.  If I raise only a paltry amount of money below $300 (warning: Goalposts may move without notice) I’ll just be colouring my hair to match my mascot.

Target 2: Trim a sheepie.  If I raise $300-$799 (warning: Goalposts may move without notice), everything above the neck goes, including the goatee.

Yes, that’s right.  You, yes YOU can be personally responsible for the removal of the goatee I’ve had since 1998!  How’s that for power?  But wait, there’s more.

Target 3: Shear a sheepie.  If I raise $800-$999 (warning: Goalposts may move without notice), not only will everything above the neck be shaved, but everything below the neck goes too.  Everything.  I mean it, EVERY THING.

Yes, that’s right.  I’m putting my entire body on the line to be shaved for World’s Greatest Shave.  If you’re one of the few unfortunate people too have seen me shirtless, you will know I am a proud Wookie.  Back, chest, stomach, arms, legs, everything must go, but only if I raise enough money.

Target 4: Wax a wookie.  If I raise over $1000 (warning: Goalposts may move without notice), not only will everything above the neck be shaved, but everything below the neck goes too … with WAX*!

Yes, that’s right.  Not only do you get to shame me in my natural wookie like state, but you also get to see me in great pain and crying like a little girl as my back, chest, stomach, arms, legs, everything, for the first time ever faces the wrath of hot hot wax*!

So start getting those donations in now!

You can sponsor me / draw a sheepie / trim a sheepie / shear a sheepie / wax a wookie here.

Or, you can sponsor the Western Sydney Freethinkers here (Note: Sponsorship to me will also go to WSFT’s tally anyway).

* Warning: I may woos out early on and decide the pain is too much for my entire body to go through.

Well, except for one ever so slight problem.  It’s actually not Sydney’s first tweetup.  They’ve actually been going on since 2007 for actual “tweetup”s under the guise of #STUB, #SHTBOX and #SYDRIBS (possibly more), and even longer for coffee tweetups (#coffeemornings).  Oops.

Jon Holloway has been copping a fair bit of flack about this on twitter under the #themeet140 tag as well as in the comments in his articles.  This post too was originally going to be along those lines, but as I started composing this post in my head it quickly changed to be a post in defence of him.  You see, I’m actually not all that surprised he couldn’t find information on the existing ones.

Lets run a little experiment, shall we?  Lets pretend I’m not familiar with the terms used for Sydney tweetups (as I wasn’t about 1.5 years ago – first learnt about the Sydney ones through the Brisbane #BTUB crew).  Where do we start?  Well, it’s social media so lets send out a tweet.

@BastardSheep: Can someone give me some details on #Sydney #tweetups?

2 hours later, still no response.  Ok, so social media failed me, what about old media?  Ahh, a google search seems to have a few hits.  Lets check the first three sites!

#1 – STUB, hasn’t been touched since 31/12/2010.
#2 – Sydney Tweetup, hasn’t been touched since 07/09/2009.
#3 – MeetUp, nothing found.

Only three sites, but remember most people don’t click even that many links.  The rest of the results I received were less relevant anyway.

THAT right there is my problem with tweetups and social media “events”.  Unless you’re already in the right circles and know all the details, they’re near impossible to find out about.

There’s very rarely a website with simple details for them for regular events (where if it’s at a regular venue, when if it’s at a regular day/week of month, who to contact if you have queries).  It’s something you’d think would be quite simple, and with all the “Social Media Experts” in attendance you’d think at least one of them would have a little knowhow to boost the google rankings while they’re at it, set up a generic central account, watch the networks for queries and questions.  After all, without social media aren’t you supposedly invisible?

Instead, despite being 100% social media, they are the ones almost invisible.  If you don’t already know all the details you feel outcast.  It’s somewhat intimidating to come in and request details.  It’s like seeing a bunch of people laughing about an in-joke and having to quietly say “Uhm, excuse me kind sir/ma’am, could someone please explain this to me?”.

My conclusion in all of this?  Don’t be too quick to scoff.  Sure I would agree with you if you were to say “without social media you’re invisible”, it really is a great tool to utilise and you’d be quite silly not to.  I would however also have to add “with only social media you’re invisible”.  Traditional media still has its place, please don’t forget it.

While we’re at it, does anyone care to take a look at this and tell me when/where the next #shtbox is?  I’m struggling to filter out the noise and actually find the details.  Chances are I’ll probably only track it down an hour or two after the fact (as I normally do), once it’s too late to motivate myself to shower/travel.

Oh, and by the way, come join us James Squires Brewhouse (Darling Harbour, Sydney) on Wednesday the 19th of October 2011.  Just down the road from Bungalow 8.

I’ve been looking through some of the Facebook pages, blogs, websites set up around this as well as to news articles talking about the problems, and I’m still at a bit of a loss as to why?

Sure, there are lots of problems with our society and our systems at the current point in time.  Some (but not all) are listed quite well here so I won’t really bring them up again.

One of the biggest problems being complained about is that upper management, directors, CEO’s etc are getting huge pay increases while those struggling to survive day to day are getting increases below the rate at which living costs are increasing.

All worthy things to complain about, sure.  I can understand that much of #OccupySydney.  The area I’m struggling to understand is what the goals of the protest and movement are.  What exactly are the organisers and those attending wanting to achieve from the protests and occupation?

The best I have found so far is from this site linked to earlier – up the very top of the page they state “The Occupy Sydney Assembly demands Bank reform putting people before banks and society before economy”.

Well, that’s great.  Could you be a little more specific?  Exactly what reforms are you after?  “putting people before banks and society before economy” is a broad idealism, it doesn’t even start to explain exactly what reforms they’re after.

So far, as far as I can tell it is little more than a bunch of people getting together to make noise for the fun of it.  As my gf put it “But chanting is fun! It’s like being in a cult, besides the giving up your life savings bit “.  It’s akin to changing your avatar on Twitter or Facebook and going EVERYONE LOOK AT ME I R ACTIVIST I R GUD!

Sure maybe a handful of people will look at you for a few moments, then they’ll get bored, go back to what they were doing, and absolutely nothing will change.  A whole lot of smoke and noise for nothing.

Until it get some goals and objectives, it is quite literally pointless.

Edit 10:50am 11/10/2011: After a few conversations on twitter I’ve decided to add one more thing to this post.  Although I am calling this particular protest pointless due to their lack of goals, there are occasions where activism/protesting can quite happily have no specific goals other than raising awareness and still have a point.  The prime example I can give here is Anonymous vs Scientology, and another would be Skeptics vs Alt-Med.  The reasons why “awareness” works as a goal in these situations is because the general public would not know the facts about these situations without awareness.  This lack of awareness about the reality of the Cult of Scientology and the ineffectiveness of Alt Med are the main reasons these things continue so strongly in society.

First it was the “brights”, people trying to push for a new name that was blatantly insulting to those not part of it.  Then it was the no true scottsman / no true skeptic calls from the atheist communities against skeptics who also happened to be [gasp] theists!  Now, it’s rebeccagate, and the vile and hate that just won’t die down due to it.

Sometimes I’m not really all that sure if I even want to be part of the skeptic community.

The “brights” I can cover quite quickly.  The idea was a word that indicated light, clarity etc.  However it’s also a synonym for intelligence e.g. “He’s a really bright kid”.  So to call your group “brights”, whether intentioned or not, whether you want it to or not, does in fact suggest that those who are not part of that group are unintelligent.  It’s an insult in and of itself, making it a horrible name to use for a group/community.

Personally, I think the best way to go is to just reclaim the words “skeptic” and “atheist” as part of each community, let it be shown that we are good caring people who for the most part just want to help everyone else, and are no different from the rest of the community.  Remove the demonism both words and titles have, that is the way to go when it comes to naming the respective communities.

Atheism & Skepticism overlap.  I’ve actually blogged on this in the past.  When I first discovered the skeptic community, one of the greatest catch cries doing the rounds at the time was the line “Everyone has a golden calf, except me”.  It was a joke to indicate that every single person in the world has something they believe in irrationally, and if you can’t think of yours then it’s because it is yours.  Others can see it, you can’t.

I took the line to indicate inclusiveness.  Just because someone may have one area they’re mistaken/deluded about doesn’t mean they should be shunned.  I loved it.

Then the atheist community decided to invade not long later, all of a sudden many skeptics who were also theists started feeling shunned, abused, as though they had to hide.  What happened to this golden calf saying?  Can these people not see the blatant “no true scottsman” fallacies in their calls that “all skeptics should also be atheists, otherwise they’re not really skeptics”?  Yes, I have heard that said numerous times word for word.

The topic of theism and theists should by no means be faux pas in skepticism, but we should be more respectful of the people.  Go for the topic, not the person.  Be accepting that for this person it is their golden calf, and keep discussions to specific claims of theism – not just “you’re an idiot if you’re a theist” as I’ve seen so many times before.

Finally, elevatorgate.  It all spawned from one small easily missed comment and as we can see from this post by Rebecca has ballooned in to daily emails of hatred, stalking, sites dedicated to talk against her.  At first I was just surprised by the number of people who almost seemingly wanted to take comments from her and those trying to defend her out of context.  Analogies taken literally instead of as, you know, analogies.  Comments cherry picked just as spectacularly as AiG, and the outright vitriol.  Hatred, and petty abuse.

All this because there’s one situation where certain people may be uncomfortable, and one person (Rebecca) simply wanted to let others who may not be aware know that this situation can actually be uncomfortable for those certain people.

You may have noticed my involvement in skepticism drop off this year.  To be perfectly honest, this is why.  As I said up the top, I’m just finding it harder and harder to want to be involved in the skeptical community.