NECSS apologise to Professor Dawkins for their handling of his disinvitation
necss.org/2016/02/14/statement-from-the-execu...Posted Feb 14, 2016, 11:18 PM UTC
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necss.org
Keep in mind, Dawkins got the stroke the evening after they apologized to him and re-invited him.
https://richarddawkins.net/2016/02/an-update-on-richards-condition-in-his-own-words/
This doesn't excuse what they did in the first place but just want to make sure that it's clear that the apology came before the stroke, not after.
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Yes. Dawkins confirmed this. He found it frustrating that his stroke came when he was feeling happy at the news.
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last paragraph of the post they mentioned their talks with him were initiated before the stroke and that they wish him a speedy recovery.
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I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt that this isn't just a publicity stunt, we don't want to become the kind of people who go arounding alienating everyone, looking paranoid and permanently branding people.
6
Does that mean I can't start branding scarlet letters into people? Just take all my fun why don't you :(
1
Feels like a common theme.
"Yeah, we fucked you over. We're pretty much wrong. Now that the damage has been done, well... sorry!"
How about just putting a leash on these fuckwads that keep getting people fired and dropped from speaking engagements? There's the problem. You let assholes with agendas fuck everything up and come back trying to act like your apology makes it all good.
I do appreciate a sincere apology, but how many times do we have to see this backtracking?
"Yeah, you lost your job. Yeah, we dropped your speaking engagement. Yeah, we got you arrested. Yeah, we got you kicked out of our show. Yeah, we prevent you from speaking in an open forum you've paid to take part in. We've banned you from using public services based on false reports. BUT, in hindsight it appears we may have overreacted and have turned around and made everything all better! We cool?"
Yeah okay, buddy! Thanks a lot, asshole.
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Doesn't matter, had a conversation.
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dm;hc. The new cry of the crybullies!
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I think we really started a dialogue here.
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You rang? (◕‿◕✿)
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Steve Novella leads the New England Skeptical Society, who runs the convention, and I'd bet anything he was the reason this happened. He mentioned that it was a "heated discussion" when they decided to uninvite Dawkins, and I am guessing that meant everyone else was begging him not to be an idiot. The guy is brilliant and incredibly hard working, but he has swallowed every last drop of the Atheist+ feminism Kool-aid.
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The guy
iswas brilliant and incredibly hard working, but then hehasswallowed every last drop of the Atheist+ feminism Kool-aid.
FTFY?
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No, he's still brilliant and hard working. It's not like people who buy into feminism are evil and wholly without value. People can have bad ideas and good ideas at the same time, they can do good things and also bad things.
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No, he's still brilliant and hard working. [...] they can do good things and also bad things
That might be so, but when I see people who've made a name for themselves as "skeptics" and "rational thinkers" fail to use those abilities to criticize other religions or ideologies, I question whether they were truly being skeptics in the first place when criticizing Christianity, or if they were just specifically attacking "Disliked Grouped X" for personal reasons and failing to apply their logic anywhere else.
He can't be brilliant or hard working while being a huge hypocrite to everything he claims to represent - claiming to be for free speech in the same sentence as "we're dis-inviting Dawkins", claiming to be skeptical while being against any satire or criticism of a certain religion, etc.
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I dunno. One of the defining characteristics of people that drink the Kool-aid is that they are incapable of compartmentalizing that shit. They literally view everything and anything through that lens; hence everything is political, everything is racist, everything is sexist, etc.
We don't refer to it as cancer for nothing. In time, it permeates everything about you.
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Subscribing to a different ideology or worldview doesn't invalidate a person's intelligence or work ethic. A PHD chemist that turns Christian doesn't suddenly become stupid and lazy. People are able to simply disagree on things.
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Maybe not, but if such a chemist were to start uncritically accepting major claims about the nature of reality that had zero basis in empirical evidence, said chemist would certainly be foolish, and one would then have to wonder how he squares these newly-accepted claims with his work.
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He is supposed to be a skeptic and rationalist. A better analogy would be a PHD chemist disinviting someone from a conference because they criticised homeopathy.
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it makes them quite worse at skepticism and free thinking as they claimed to be. There are intelligent people who are not skeptics at all and extremely closed minded.
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How about just putting a leash on these fuckwads
What they need is a god damn muzzle.
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We wish to use this incident as an opportunity to have a frank and open discussion
No they don't. Frank and Open Discussion means to grand stand and only express one view fairly, while having a weak speaker to poorly express the opposing view. The goal is to make your view look liking the winning one.
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It's why we should be using their tactics against them. A one sided war is never won by the side with the best morals and PR.
-5†
What are you, from Ghazi? That "No bad tactics only bad targets" bullshit only works for people who have no moral backbone. I don't give two shits about PR, but our morals are part of what defines us as people. If you have none, then you aren't doing anyone any favors in being here.
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I'm not a moralist, and even I agree here. We always stick to the truth, we maintain our honesty and integrity as best as we can, we continue to hesitate to affirm, even when being credulous would be easier. We don't do these things to maintain some mythical moral high ground, we do them because they possess intrinsic value on their own. You don't throw away inherently valuable things because it suddenly becomes, in some ways, inconvenient to cleave to them.
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We wish to use this incident as an opportunity to have a frank and open discussion of the deeper issues implicated here.
No we don't. Just because you were the fucking cowards who caved to the pressures of ideologues doesn't mean nobody knows right from wrong and needs a moral lesson about it. You don't get to fuck up and then pretend everybody else is just as wrong and needs to "discuss" it. We all knew from minute one you were wrong. We all questioned why you cockbags were such cowards. There was never any question in our mind you were wrong. So this mealy mouthed pretend diplomacy doesn't fly.
It's like a group of adults sitting there staring at a child throwing a tantrum, smashing his toys and screaming, then that child looks around and says "okay folks, we need to have a discussion on how not to be so childish, it's a real problem around here and needs to be dealt with, we're all responsible for these smashed toys."
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I don't think that's what they're saying. They re-invited him to give his original talk as well, so they've righted the wrong. They're just also giving everyone a chance to talk about what happened, which is always a good thing.
The worst that can happen is nobody goes home convinced of anything they didn't already believe. But there's a chance that someone has their mind changed. How can that be bad?
Don't be like an SJW and de-person them for making a mistake, especially since they've owned up to it.
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"Graciously allowing you to once again inconvenience yourself for our benefit" is not technically "righting the wrong".
Have they offered him any recompense for the lost time, effort, and emotional investment the disinvitation and subsequent shitstorm? It's possible they did so in private emails, but there's nothing to even hint at such from the statement above.
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"Graciously allowing you to once again inconvenience yourself for our benefit" is not technically "righting the wrong".
Only when phrasing it in such a way does it become nefarious. In truth, they apologized, admitted their fault in the matter, and not only re-invited him, but invited him to a panel in which a discussion about the events (and public dialogue in general, presumably) can be had. That's not just righting the wrong, that's attempting to heal the wounds. It's admirable.
Have they offered him any recompense for the lost time, effort, and emotional investment the disinvitation and subsequent shitstorm?
I think you're being more than a little melodramatic here. Recompense? Come on. He's not some delicate flower. He's a grown-ass man who does grown-ass man stuff. He can handle a little fire from reactionaries. It certainly wouldn't be the first time someone accused him of hate-speech or whatever else injures the feelings of those precious little dandies.
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"We're sorry that we got blowback for our actions. The actions themselves? Oh fuck you, they're solid, but we're sorry we just said fuck you, we meant to say fuck you in a much nicer tone."
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this is actually unfair. Dawkins himself wrote a response where his primary criticism was their decision to do things without talking to him about it at all.
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Skeptic community lets ideology influence community instead of skepticism. I am skeptical of a community that claims it is for free thought yet would like to bar members based on what they say rather than refute their arguments.
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I know SJWs are shitturds... but this is a great sign. Either they feel the pressure of public disapproval, or the non-SJW crowd finally spoke up and decided to make themselves heard. We have to keep exposing this nonsense for what it is.
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yeah it's interesting to me seeing someone apologizing to non-SJWs.
there's going to be a lot of triggering over this.
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Yes, and I hope that we don't make the same mistake that the SJW's do, which is to never accept an apology. Lets see what happens at the event. Yea they look like such a sham, but they could realize the cancer and pull a 180.
I believe it was Sun Tzu that said that it is advisable to leave an enticing route to escape so as to not fight an enemy that has no intentions of retreat.
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Don't let it get lost that he's not only been invited to discuss this action in a panel, but he's also being re-invited to give his original talk.
That's progress, folks. Let's avoid depersoning them. They fucked up, but they're trying to make amends.
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The skeptic in me says that they're only doing that because they underestimated the intelligence of their audience and lost a lot of money. That, and the fact that it's a pretty basic non-apology. They literally "want to start a conversation".
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They fucked up, but they're trying to make amends.
I'm highly skeptical of this.
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Alright, time to see the SJWs lose their shit. Grab your popcorn, folks.
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They've already lost me as a person that might be interested in them. As a skeptic, this is the most dogmatic "skeptical" organization I've ever seen.
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Well, let's see what we've got here:
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NECSS is organized by the New York City Skeptics and the New England Skeptical Society
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The NESS is run by a majority of the hosts of a certain podcast
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Said podcast was co-hosted for most of its existence by a certain Rebecca "Dawkins Is Toxic Sludge And Didn't Automagically Side With Me In The Elevatorgate Shitstorm" Watson
Frankly, I'm more surprised that Dawkins was invited in the first place than that the New England "Skeptical" Society and associates are so ready to side with SocJus dogma over critical thinking.
Why no, I'm not at all bitter that my once-favorite podcast on science and skepticism has been slowly turning into the Feminists' Guide to Social Justice for years now, whatever gave you that ridiculous idea...?
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I'm bitter, too. Long been bitter about BoingBoing turning into a SJW self-parody, favorite authors like Charles Stross spewing hateful feminazi talking points, Wikipedia being coopted by left wing psychopaths and Free/Open Source software being overrun by tranny drama queens.
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So that podcast to you is what Nintendo is to me, basically?
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Let's just say I haven't felt as betrayed by supposedly rational people since Russell "My Parents Named Me After Bertrand Russell And He Was Awesome!" Glasser responded to a caller, who very mildly compared Feminism to religion(s) in that Feminists can be kind of dogmatic about some of their views, with something along the lines of "What's so wrong about women getting to vote?! What's so wrong about women getting paid the same as men?! Misogynist!" and hung up without letting the guy even respond aside from a surprised and undoubtedly confused "Nothing!" between the leading straw questions.
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Well, you can never truly hate something until you love it.
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Damn I remember that distinctly. My stomach dropped when he said that. Don't forget Martin consistently calling people bigots because they fail to agree with feminist ideology. That whole show is full of the narrative. I stopped listening awhile ago.
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I'm just glad that it's nearly impossible for my favorite podcast to turn into SJW bullshit. Especially since they have SJWs listed as one of the all time biggest problems in the universe.
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Eh. Can't nitpick this too much. They apologized, said they were unprofessional, and are opening up a discussion with differing views (including Dawkins). They initiated all that prior to the stroke as well. I'd wait to see how they handle this before jumping down their throats.
10†
Actually can nitpick. Look I know most around here are left leaning to far left. So chances are you have never had or seen this particular technic used on yourselves or anyone you know before. But it's one of the things that the Right has been subjected to for years, in all manner of issues. It is the false accusation followed by your acceptance and validation of it.
Step one accuse those who's ideas you do not like of being something truly vile and disgusting. Throw a major fit. Fling poop like a deranged monkey. Get attention and outrage.
Step two. Apologize, so we can come together and have a conversation. The very act of having the conversation in fact validates the insanity that you have been flinging. The conversation is now not whether your ideological opponent is evil or racist or whatever. It is now about exactly how evil racist whatever they are. On no basis, with no valid facts or information, simply shitflinging and tantrums that would do a North Korean 2 year old proud, you have now gained a commanding voice at the table and can ramrod through whatever you want for fear of another shitflinging episode.
Step three, rinse and repeat with the next group.
The only defense against this is to spit on the apologee and tell them to go fuck themselves. Otherwise you will lose. Any attempts to be polite, reasonable or God forbid have a debate will burn you. But don't believe me, just ask any of those "racist sexist Republicans or gamers" you might meet.
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those "racist sexist Republicans or gamers" you might meet.
Yep, can verify. Virtually every conversation with a progressive begins with first justifying your right to exist as a human being, and convincing them that you don't literally eat babies. If you have the stomach to put up with the worst insults a person can possibly throw at another person, they will eventually say they overreacted, which is your queue to say something like "I can see how you would think I was a Nazi, that's ok", thus validating their outburst and their suspicions before you begin to actually talk about issues. If you don't accept the apology and self-efface, they reveal they weren't really sorry the whole time and that you're just as bad as they insisted you were in the screed they just got done apologizing for.
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Thankfully Dawkins is the kind of person who will monologue during the discussion and point out exactly how shitty they were and compare their actions to that of the Church. Plus, I'd wager my next paycheck that more people respect Dawkins than the rest of the panel combined.
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Yeah, after everyone called them hypocrites and morons of the highest degree. Even Sam Harris took the time to call them fools and duchebags on his podcast.
I hope this bullshit follows them around forever. Every time they make claims that they "believe strongly in freedom of speech and freedom to express unpopular, and even offensive, views" they need to get it shoved in their face that they don't. That they'd even consider this means that they don't. That they realized after the fact that their massive blunder backfired and revealed their idiocy and hypocricy to the world for all to see and laugh at doesn't somehow change this.
This just means they're not as stupid as they first seemed; they're still intellectually bankrupt as fuck, not to mention incredibly duchy (disinviting a guy without even talking to him because of a retweet). Now they'll just be less overt about it.
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There's no disagreement that they behaved like douche bags, but the second we turn to pure outrage, refuse dialogue, and start drawing ideological lines in the sand is the second the "both sides of gamergate are terrible" meme becomes true.
While I disagree with a lot of their recent actions I can't get angry at them for admitting a mistake and attempting to correct it. They have agreed to a conversation. That will anger sjws. It should not anger us.
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Yeah, calling this a mistake is grossly understating it.
What they did here is like a vegetarian holding up a steak and eating it while looking you straight in the eyes and proclaiming how much they love and adhere to the virtues of vegetarianism. Allowing them to continue calling themselves vegetarians at that point is insane. How can you even pretend to stand by something like that? The very suggestion is satirical in its absurdity.
If I can't trust them (which clearly I now can't, since they had to be called out to change their minds; they didn't come up with this on their own otherwise none of this would've ever happened), then I'm not going to listen to them, and I'm going to tell everybody else I know not to trust them as well, so that nobody else gets pulled in by the lies.
If you genuinely cared about correcting mistakes, then you would respond so negatively to them that they are heavily dis-incentivized enough that it wouldn't make sense to try to get away with them in the first place, which you don't do by forgiving them this easily, even if doing so may feel good.
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Meh. Would appear we disagree then. My opinion is not formed because "it feels good". Being open minded and engaging those you disagree with is no sin. What's the worst they are going to do? Go back to being douchebags? Ok. Then I'll react accordingly if that happens.
They haven't done that yet though. What they've done is apologize and offered a discussion. I'm just not going to get blindly angry at that. You don't defeat sjws by turning into sjws.
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pz myers is already throwing a tantrum on his blog. maybe he and the 2 other atheism plus members will boycot the next conventions
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It really just strikes me like PZ is really jealous of Dawkins. They are both biologists, but Dawkins is way more renowned and respected publically. Where Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist first and a skeptic atheist second, PZ has built his entire persona around his atheism alone. I honestly did not know he was a professor of biology before I looked him up.
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I actually really like his famous "Courtier's reply". And he and Dawkins used to get along pretty well, there's a video of them from a while back having a nice polite friendly conversation about their experiences of being thrown out of the Ben Stein movie Expelled premiere or something (ironically enough).
Of course, this was long before the atheism movement got infected with third wave regressivism and Myers lost his mind.
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He's just jealous that Dawkins invented meme, so he came up with the me me me
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They want to have 'frank and open discussions about the issues', and they think the first step to that is to no-platform anybody that might have a side on an issue they don't agree with.
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Maybe they mean to discuss censorship itself? They invited Professor Dawkins to attend, after all.
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I see it more as "we realise it was wrong to no-platform a dissenting voice, and that what we should be doing is having a discussion instead".
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That would be awesome. Let's hope it turns out that way.
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The irony is amazing. A group of people who spend their time saying offensive things about religion get butthurt and censor people when offensive things are said about their religion. Hypocrites.
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I wonder how many people withdrew their financial support from the NESS when they pulled this shit, as I did. Aside from the outrage, this may have hit them in the pocketbook as well. I don't know if there's a way to find out.
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Odds on Dawkins lawyers pointed out NECSS was a bag of dicks?
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Fuck these tools; I'd respect them more if they'd stood by their douchebaggery, not this faux appology
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for our handling of his disinvitation
We're not sorry for dis-inviting him, though.
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Well, they did re-invite him, for two panels instead of one.
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What do you wanna bet at least one of those panels will be on "sensitivity" or the importance of Feminism or "We're Totally Different From Religious Fanatics Even Though Our First Reaction Was To Protect Ourselves From Heresy" or somesuch nonsense? :P
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Complicated by the fact that they called one of four horsemen to it. Bullshit doesn't fly in front of professor Dawkins.
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Good for them for admitting their mistake to some extent rather than doubling down.
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"There is room for a range of reasonable opinions on these issues and our conversation will reflect that diversity."
'reasonable' as determined by us. and this is supposed to count as 'diversity' this is the kind of fake diversity that makes me wonder about the so called 'skeptical' community these days.
i suppose it's only reasonable as long as no one is triggered.
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For the way they handled it, you see. Not for actual doing it.
So it's not actually an apology at all.
"We are sorry there were consequences, please stop cancelling your registrations."
Pretty much. I would suggest to my atheist and sceptcle friends, just let this group and event die the natural death it so clearly deserves. This is not a conversation you invited, wished to have, nor is it one that has anything to do with your organizations. It is clearly yet another attempt to impose a third party outside agenda on your community. Don't fall for fake promises. Just tell them to go to whatever the atheist equivalent of hell is. (I'm guessing it's Detroit, but what do I know?)
An atheist and skeptic organization behaving like fundamental religious people. sigh
Isn't a key element of Atheism and Scepticism and understanding of evolutionary forces? This pack of fools added themselves to the Ideological Darwin List by their own actions. There is no benefit to the atheist community in validating these fools by "having the conversation". The conversation in question has nothing to do with the atheists beliefs, their actions nor is it in any way connected to their healthy Scepticism. It is merely an attempt to exploit that Scepticism for an unrelated third party's benefit. It's the old "Senator when did you stop beating your wife?" Trick.
Pretty much the more vocal they are about being Atheist the more of a fanatical religious zealot they actually are, they just subscribe to the religion of atheism.
I'd say the atheist equivalent of hell is Ark Encounter or the creationist museum.
Ark is pretty fun
I prefer Mudkip of the three Hoenn starters, but Sceptile are pretty cool.
Well played! Curse you Autocorrect you have befuddled me again!
my vote is Flint, Michigan
Or just Michigan.
The real snub would be to hold the conversation intended at another local. De-platform them as a venue.
Here's what I don't get either.
Like, if it was Mr Joe Blow skeptic that had "not good" political views and they uninvited him, that's one thing. I wouldn't agree with it, but I could at least understand their reasoning.
But Richard Fucking Dawkins? How do you un-invite literally the biggest name in the skeptics world, arguably one of the few people who really popularized that entire movement... and then expect to not see lost sales?
The core problem is that they invited him in the first place, if there was a chance they were going to disinvite him over a single tweet.
If they didn't agree with him, or agreed on some level and didn't like certain other things, then they should've either decided that that wasn't going to be a problem as that wasn't what they were inviting him for, or they shouldn't have bothered inviting him at all.
Yeah that's the thing, he's a known quantity. Everybody knows that he has his own views on a lot of these issues and they don't line up in lockstep with the virtue signaling requirements of the North American Creative Class culture.
He really is a strong humanist and a feminist, just not in the prescribed ways that culture demands.
It was a way to flaunt their power. "Look at us, social justice is so great and powerful that we can do whatever we like and no one can do anything about it! So don't you dare disagree with us!"
See, Gamergate is just like anti-GG when it comes to harassment, because we support this and refusing to give your money to people is the same as tracking down their phone numbers and home address, calling them in the middle of the night, vandalizing their home and contacting people anonymously to slander them.
Bill Nye is going to be there...
I hope he makes his voice heard about this shit.
Reading it, they kinda are apologizing for actually doing it. Specifically, they say (in the second friggin sentence) that they should've talked their disagreements over with him instead of just moving to cut him off like a shit.
"We're sorry you took offense to our mental retardation and belief that Social Justice is the one true religion instead of upholding secular thoughts as we were fucking supposed to. We hope this half-hearted pseudo-apology will appease the many free-thinking individuals who saw through our bullshit and we don't want to lose money in the same way every other Social Justice outlet has gone bankrupt or resorted to Patreon begging."
Considering they re-invited him, I think you're giving them a lot less credit than they deserve. It was shitty to disinvite him in the first place, but this apology seems fairly sincere.
this is actually unfair. Dawkins himself wrote a response where his primary criticism was their decision to do things without talking to him about it at all... in other words, they are addressing precisely what Dawkins felt was the issue.
Also they are kinda strong arming him into coming and discussing their issue, rather than whatever he would have wanted to discuss, when really he should be recuperating.