The more you keep rummaging around in this moral panic morass that the Gruesome Twosome tag-team of Becky Watson and The Naked Emperor have drowned us in, the more you come to realise that you are not even getting close to hitting the bottom of the barrel as far as sheer human decrepitude goes.

Myers, to some extent, can perhaps be excused for being a patsy, a dupe, a shmuck, a conscious man / toilet slave, a naive simpleton, or perhaps even having Stockholm Syndrome from a lifetime of being cuckolded and forced to eat doo-doo.

But where PZ stops being just a gullible twit and begins to venture into wannabe Scientologist1 territory is when he escalates ad himinim attacks to the level of wholesale public pillorying, as he recently did with a certain Philippe Giordana (MySpace band page). This, apparently by Pharyngula standards, is deemed acceptable behaviour. PZ, you are now not just a patsy, but officially a full blown, 100% pure gutter slime bag. Nuke the page if you wish, but if there is one thing I have learned from dealing with slimebags it’s to make mirrors.

What we see is a cherry picked handful of text snippets from what is an enormous body of otherwise fairly rational discourse from Philippe who has made that one fatal error – that of questioning The Naked Emperor’s authority. Philippe has even commented here in what is now, I assume, officially classified as “enemy territory”, yet even within these safe and tolerant2 confines he has not uttered anything that could even be remotely called extreme. And in any case, it pales into insignificance compared to some of PZ’s own greatest (albeit politically blessed) hits.

This is mindless, vindictive vilification that ranks amongst the worst that the web’s sewers can produce. It is no different to what a few of the “ladies” from ThinkAtheist and SensitiveLand did at one point – compile a list names and details of those males that had ever dared disagree with them and circulate it as a dossier of known RAPE APOLOGISTS (mentioned previously).

I can already visualise PZ waving his pudgy fingers around and pleading innocence – I didn’t write that. No, perhaps you didn’t. But this is your brand. These are your clowns. They dance to the tune of your piping. They follow your example. These are your babies. You encourage them.

Rebekah Brooks may not be guilty of phone hacking either. But in her position, turning a blind eye whilst encouraging such behaviour is no different to pulling the trigger herself. Like her, you are equally guilty. Again, you are a fucking disgrace.

But of course there is a person here that can make PZ’s moral and intellectual destitution pale into insignificance, and that is Becky Watson herself.

One of the early questions I posed of Becky, given that to any objective observer the elevator hysteria is nothing more than a case of catastrophised trivia, was whether this was simply a case of common attention whoring rather than any genuine offense. Naturally, this suggestion was greeted with general disgust from the apologist camp and merely further evidence of misogyny. Which makes this Tweet by Becky so utterly priceless –

Maybe it’s just my misogynist bone-headedness, but I am having difficulty differentiating traumatised hurt feelings from gloating at a hand well played.

I have to thank The Justicar3 for being far more diligent at capturing and collating this stuff than I am. But that is just the tip of the iceberg of goodies he has managed to unearth that, rather curiously, aren’t ever discussed by any of the elevatorphobes.

Watson's account at the Randi forums - click to enlarge - http://forums.randi.org/member.php?u=2685

Of more interest still is Becky’s relationship with Randi.org – or rather her restraining order from.

The brief synopsis (Justicar goes into more detail) is that once upon a time, Becky got herself suspended from the Randi forums for sock puppetry and, one would assume, over exuberant finger pointing.

On being reinstated, her account was mistakenly given an elevated set of administrator privileges. Not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Becky then proceeded to take full advantage of her newfound magical superpowers by commencing a pogrom against those that had offended her eyes. She was even emboldened to the point of publicly bragging about it –

Revenge party - click to enlarge

At which point the regular moderation team had come to the conclusion that enough was enough, reinstated her suspension, made it permanent and set about undoing the damage she had wrought as best they could –

The mop up - click to enlarge

Strangely enough, there is no discussion of these events on Skepchick, other than one user comment hoping the ban could get lifted by Gollum.

There is a rather more succinct comment on the current nonsense and Becky’s track record made recently by admin at Randi.org –

Is there any evidence at all his guy was at the skeptics conference, as opposed to just hanging out at the bar of the hotel he was staying at?

It seems to me Rebecca is trying to have it both ways, upset because she assumes he heard her talk and then denies the guy was part of any conversation at the bar.

And Rebecca was banned from this very forum because she didn’t have the social skills to understand when she was crossing the line, oh the irony!

You can feel the exasperation in every word.

So, this is where we stand. These are the folks that are the public face that atheism and skepticism presents to the world – a bumbling shmuck and a stupid girl-child throwing an endless tantrum; both with an obvious appetite for power, vengeance and destruction…

No wonder the religious conservatives are laughing sadistically at our expense. Sniping, backbiting, denunciation, slander, malice and now petty revenge. In short, every negative stereotype of the godless made by the theists is coming to life before their very eyes. They are fully entitled to claim that they were right all along about us. Fantastic work Becky and PZ. Who needs to destroy us? We’re perfectly capable of destroying ourselves.

Executive Summary for the lazy –

So what have we learned so far?

We have also learned that the ends justify the means as far as Watsonistas go –

  • That dissent of any kind is prohibited and may be silenced by any means necessary.
  • That where conventional censorship fails, conventional vengeance shall suffice and it is perfectly OK to attempt to terminate user accounts and have content or whole sites removed – either by abuse of power or by fabricated complaint.

And the lesson for us is –

  • If we are content to have such people represent us, then we just may as well pack all our things, give up and go home. Welcome to the new, new, atheism!

But… from a sociological perspective, all of this is fascinating – because what we are witnessing here is the evolution of a new fundamentalism establishing itself from scratch. Enough to make you wish there was a god.

Footnote 1 – PZ manages to jam yet another boot in his mouth

I refuse to even bother to try and understand how his mind works anymore – it just defaults to support whatever the pre-decided conclusion is. PZ’s comment from another post which I just let other folks deal with, but it did require an eventual response from me. Provided as-is by hit-and-run deposit here –

pzmyersPZ Myers Says:
July 28, 2011 at 1:33 am e

Which is all relevant…how?

Nobody has said, “you must believe us, because our traffic is so vast”. What you’ve done is a classic example of a strawman argument, complete with charts and tables, all mustered to skewer an argument nobody has made…and then to cap it all off, you tag it with the labels “sluttery” and “Babylonian whores”.

We’re laughing at you, guy. I thought you’d hit the nadir before, but you just keep digging.

That’s funny Paul, because somehow I don’t see you laughing. I see a Right Man that has painted himself so far into a corner that he is starting to sweat blood because his hubris won’t let him escape. As a result, he is lashing out in toothless anger and spite. Even your own daughter, in her ever so subtle way, has called daddy’s nonsense for what it is – nonsense. There are other things I could say too Paul – like why is it that a pudgy middle aged, b-list godless almost-celebrity has such a thing for young, mostly white, chicks half his age, but I won’t, because that would mean descending to your level of ad himinem.

I’d ask you how my observations even qualify as a strawman argument, but I don’t expect any kind of coherent answer. Just an FYI then, this is a strawman –

“What’s happened here is that he is at some remove from all of the details, and this issue got blown up by lunatics who felt their manhood threatened and who exaggerated the situation to an absurd degree…”

You do recall that don’t you?

Again, FYI, my post was a quantification of reality versus noise. Your attempt to frame it as that which it is not is called sophistry – an attempt to confuse the target by showing off the fact that you think your brain is bigger than mine and that big concepts may cause silence by intimidation (which I believe also qualifies it as a Courtier’s Reply). One thing it is not is a strawman.

The purpose of this quantification exercise is due to the fact that one way or the other, your complicity in this idiocy is related to the Skepchick brand. There are two4 commonly held theories for this –

1) You are being terrified into submission, or

2) You are doing this out of expediency due to some perceived populist advantage.

Both options require the Skepchick audience to be of quite monstrous proportion. The analysis shows it is not. Strawman? Do you actually take yourself as seriously as you expect us to?

The exercise of whittling Skepchick down to size shows they are more akin to the Salt Shakers, who are maybe a couple of dozen maniacs that via their sweatshops, are responsible for probably 90% of the moral outrage complaint letters in the entire Australasian region, than some Godzilla like behemoth in the skeptic and godless biosphere. They are nothing of the sort. They just compensate for insignificance with raw noise. And you fall for it. What a chump.

Has all this been worth it PZ? Chasing this idiocy with the uncritical belief of a snake-handler? You have effectively trashed your own reputation for a very significant number of your former admirers. Many, many folks, like me, are from this point on going to treat anything you say that’s not directly related to your bug tanks as highly suspect and believe-at-your-own-risk. For what? For a dull-witted girl child that solves all of life’s problems with tantrums, slander and emotional blackmail.

Footnote 2 – On how deep this rot actually runs

There was a first attempt made to take this blog down by a Watson groupie. Caused a minor hiccup, delayed this post by a day. But hey, to be expected from the kinds of folks we’re dealing with and the upside is that I pulled my finger out and tied up the loose ends for flick-a-switch recovery in case of disaster.

But this nonsense also made me do something I swore I would never do – delete comments (that weren’t outright porn or spam) and ban a user. But I wasn’t really left with a choice. What is now clearly evident is that this corruption and rot trickles down from the gruesome twosome and cross-infects all of those that follow them with the same disgusting behaviour patterns. I spanked a troll in a way they didn’t expect and didn’t like – so they resorted to creationist style tactics in reprisal. The result is that I had to do a bulk purge of some comments – it was easier than cleaning up.

If you are at all curious as to this troll’s intellectual prowess, you can see a copy here (denuded of any identifying info). It’s amazing how much abuse these folks can hurl whilst still maintaining that they themselves are the victims. All in all, this is behaviorally par for the Watson apologist course. Walk in uninvited, behave like a pig, call everyone a rapist, more or less dare them to hit you, then when they respond in a way you can’t anticipate or cope with – squeal.

They really need to start a church.

1 – Thanks John C. Welsh for pointing out the bleeding obvious that the rest of us have missed.

2 – Not to mention “rape friendly” if you keep up with the hype.

3 – The pertinent blogs are –

http://integralmath.blogspot.com/2011/07/ceterum-censeo-rebecca-twatson-esse.html http://integralmath.blogspot.com/2011/07/rebecca-watson-delenda-est-update.html

4 – These options are the only ones left because most people still don’t want to believe you are stupid enough to buy into Watson’s bullshit wholesale. Actually, there’s a 3rd, and that’s that you’re being blackmailed. At this point in time though, that’s just for amusement value. But given the atmosphere if insanity, it’s not one that can simply be dismissed out of hand as “too far out” yet.