I won't be doing Mr. Deity again until an apology is made. Blaming the victim isn't funny or clever. It's old as dirt and just as disgusting

Love that dude but he has some apologies to make.

I witnessed this assault, and it was so bold and blatant that I and several other good men stood around because we couldn't imagine that it wasn't just the two of them playing around. None of us could imagine that someone would do such a terrible thing in a room full of people. We all felt so bad that we didn't understand what was happening and stop it. Men, don't make the same mistake. Until you know otherwise, don't hesitate to step in. I adore you, Ashley, and I'm so sorry I didn't do more.#65279;

You're not a mind reader. But you have to admit, that would be pretty damned crazy of me, right? I've spent the#65279; last seven years building something valuable to me -- it's how I make my living -- but now I'm going to risk all of that (including my financial stability) just to lie about some incident for the sake of a cause I've shown absolutely no interest in? I'm not just some guy sayin' x, y, and x. People know me and could ruin my reputation based on this.

As a prominent member of the Atheist community, whose reputation and respect would be destroyed were I to be caught lying about this, why would I stick my neck out like that? You’re assuming some kind of grand conspiracy in my stepping forward and backing her up. What would be the motivation?

Over the weekend, I talked to two professional activists in the secular movement. One had just left a job and didn’t intend to get another in the movement. The other is strongly considering getting out of the movement. Both are people whose work we are going to miss. Badly. Both are female.

This isn’t a coincidence. It’s a symptom of a movement that has let inequalities, injustices, and unprofessionalism fester too long and hasn’t been proactive about the steps needed to clean it up. This has gotten septic. We’re losing good people because of it.

...I have no idea if I was being trolled or not, but ultimately this doesn’t matter: making death threats crosses a line. It’s never funny. It’s totally inappropriate behavior and if Wachs was in the least bit invested in actual rationality, rather than the fevered defense of Michael Shermer, she would have acknowledged that.

But she hasn’t. She still thinks it’s hilarious that someone threatened to kill me and the abuse didn’t end there. Shocked that I called her behavior sociopathic, she demanded an apology–for obvious reasons, she didn’t get it. And that’s when she name-dropped my boss and threatened to call him.

Summary: she laughed at me for getting threats, told me I deserved it, then threatened my job.

And this is from an atheist. Not a fundamentalist Christian. An atheist. Someone who calls herself rational.

Her definition of rationality is as creative as Ken Ham’s definition of science.

Wachs’ abuse is just a highlight of the abusive tweets I got from other atheists, mostly men, over a 24 hour period. And let me reiterate: I’ve never actually accused Shermer or anyone else of committing a crime. My offense? I suggested atheists take rape allegations more seriously.

...unholy alliance of the quack far-left so-called feminists: a different kind of ardent feminist than I am — and the authoritarian anti-sex rightist religionists whom I used to run with decades ago. (How the heck is it that these two equal opposites agree on so very much these days, and the two last decades, too?).

As many of us have now gathered, Groethe is squarely in the libertarian/egalitarian feminist camp. Pinhead lefty academics have hijacked feminism, they cry, and decades of study have led these ivory-tower hippies to politicize gender. Milennia of patriarchy and oppression can easily be solved by passing some laws that state men and women are equals. Oh hey, and we have those! BOOM! Problem solved, sexism is over, everyone head home.

People like Michael Shermer may very well be “doing unto others” things that they have not asked for consent before rendering them incapable of giving consent. Minimizing this shit is damaging — not only to the victims of rape, but to the fabric of our community, and to the efforts to stamp out this sort of disgusting, unbecoming, predatory behaviour. And my description of such behaviour is crafted without even assuming any rapes actually occured!

Do I feel heartsick, disgusted, disillusioned by all these revelations about my community? You bet. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t wondered whether there’s any atheist or skeptical group left that’s worth supporting. But then again, if these allegations are true, these things were happening all along, and we just didn’t know about them until now. And however unpleasant the truth may be, I want to know what it is, always. Even if reality is depressing, reason forbids us from trying to pretend it’s other than it is. Our duty, instead, is to fix what’s wrong and make things better. Now we need to start thinking about how to do that.

For the sake of argument, I’ll grant that it was Scientific American’s timidity, and not legal bullying by CFI, that got Karen Stollznow’s post taken down. Even so, I have to extend CFI’s leadership a kind of horrified admiration. At pretty much every step of this controversy, they’ve managed to do just about the worst possible thing for their own standing and reputation. Every one of the staggering wounds they’ve suffered was wholly self-inflicted.

The good old days weren’t so good after all. We just didn’t talk about the bad bits. Although those women and men who are speaking out about their experiences today are getting a barrage of hate and threats they’re also getting throngs of support. Things seem really dark now but I believe shining the light on the worst parts of our skeptic culture is the thing that is going to move us towards a brighter future for everyone in our movement.

A system that prioritizes perpetrators over victims is a morally bankrupt system.

My affection for Randi is also decades long (30+ years, from when I was a ten-year-old nerd). And I remember the $10k Challenge, too. It physically sickens me that DJ Grothe pissed away all of that goodwill with his personal support of misogyny-based harassment and now unambiguous rape apology. The way he treated Amy Davis-Roth, who over the years had raised tens of thousands of dollars for the JREF, alone should have gotten him fired immediately.

...[A]s a skeptic, I’d rather face a harsh reality than a comforting truth. I don’t want to see people I admired doing terrible things. I don’t want to see people in power abusing that power at the expense of the less powerful. I don’t want to see my bookshelf increasingly clogged with tomes by people I no longer respect. I don’t want to see the ways that I’ve contributed to and benefited from a system that harms people who aren’t like me. I see those those things not out of some perverse wishful thinking, but because they’re real.

And I wonder about the people who reject complex, ugly reality for facile faith in an oversimplified perception of a just social order, who still call themselves “skeptics.”

[E]ven if, somehow, all of these accusations magically turn out to not be true, many people in the secular movement still have a massive problem with treating other people as human beings. Many people in this movement are perfectly content with a status quo that actively harms other people. I’m not okay with that. I’m going to fight to change the culture of harassment and abuse that’s so pervasive in secularism. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept, and I refuse to accept this standard anymore.