Rebecca Watson is a menace that must be stopped
Skepticism should be about celebrating scientific skepticism and critical thinking, not about pushing particular philosophies or ideologies which alienate potential supporters. I think that regardless of Rebecca Watson’s controversial beliefs, her personality is anathema to the free exchange of ideas. She is divisive, hostile and authoriarian. None of these traits promote scientific skepticism, but instead hinder it and so she should not be a host of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe.
…oh hang on, no. Nope. That’s not me, that’s the people who created the ‘Remove Rebecca Watson from the Skeptics Guide to the Universe Podcast‘ petition.
I do find it a bit funny that people who listen to a free podcast that has hundreds of thousands of listeners believe they can influence the removal of one of the hosts simply because they don’t like her, because let’s not beat around the bushes here – that’s exactly why those people are signing the petition. For one reason or another they do not like Rebecca Watson and think it is perfectly rational to petition for her removal from a free podcast they download because of this. That’s ‘free exchange of ideas’ right there folks!
Let’s face it though, that petition wasn’t created to get rid of Rebecca from the SGU – it was created to tell Rebecca that people hate her. It was created to harass Rebecca a bit more, and to remind her how terrible she is, and what a menace she is.
I have never heard Rebecca be divisive, hostile or authoritarian on SGU. Those talks of hers available on the internet do not show her behaving in that way either. I’ve found her to be rational, outspoken, insightful, funny and consistent during the discussions and talks. I have learnt things from Rebecca Watson on SGU and in her talks that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. On more than one occasion I have rethought my stance on something because of insight from Rebecca. She has a valid and respected input to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, and she should not be forced off of the show simply because some people have issues with her elsewhere on the internet.
That’s why I created this petition to ‘Keep Rebecca Watson on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast’ – not because I’m kissing ass, or because I’m a sycophant, but because I’m a person who cannot stand passive aggressive bullies. I normally wouldn’t get involved in crap like this because there are better things to do with one’s time than poll jacking, but fuck bullies, man. Fuck them.
I think we should create an alternative petition to establish a “maximum 2 Novellas” quota on SGU, they’ve had it their way too long.
Two must there always be… one master and one apprentice….
I totally agree with this bit “Skepticism should be about celebrating scientific skepticism and critical thinking, not about pushing particular philosophies or ideologies which alienate potential supporters” The rest is just a personal attack on Rebecca Watson, which simply isn’t fair or appropriate, especially given the huge number of possible skeptical targets who fall foul of pushing particular philosophies or ideologies which alienate potential supporters.
Just signed. There seems to be a lot of projection in her critics – she is ‘divisive’ and ‘authoritarian’, so hey, let’s drum her out of the movement. Because petitions that target individuals are the way to encourage the free exchange of ideas. They sound more and more like teabaggers, with the whole “free speech means I can say whatever I want but you’re not allowed to criticise me, because that’s tyranny” thing.
I notice they don’t say which “particular philosophies or ideologies” they have a problem with. Maybe because if they said feminism it would undermine the argument that atheism+ is unnecessary because no atheists are anti-feminist.
‘They’, of course, being the anti-RW lot.
Hello,
I don’t find all that very funny. When Rebecca Watson wanted DJ Grothe to be fired from the JREF a few months back, I didn’t see Hayley Stevens creating a petition “We want DJ Grothe to keep his job at the JREF”.
But anyway, the original petition is silly. I agree. Myself I just stopped listening to the SGU a while back (at the time Rebecca Watson stated she wouldn’t go to TAM12), because I couldn’t listen to Rebecca Watson anymore. Hayley Stevens says she never heard Rebecca Watson being divisive, hostile or authoritarian on SGU. I would agree with that. She usually doesn’t do that on the podcast, but outside of it she does.
Anyway, I don’t find all that very funny because I do miss listening to the rest of the gang. I’m a big fan of Steven Novella for example. But because now I really get get annoyed listening to Rebecca Watson, I just gave up on the rest of it too. There are other very good skeptical podcasts on the Internet, luckily.
Skeptically yours,
I must have missed Watson calling for Grothe to be fired. Can you link me?
Hello,
Check out this link:
http://skepchick.org/2012/06/why-i-wont-be-at-tam-this-year/
“So when it comes to DJ Grothe, I can no longer support someone who is so incredibly dismissive of women’s experiences. I can’t give my time and money and energy to a man who blames women for speaking out about their own harassment, and I can’t give my time and money and energy to the organization he runs. I will always have the utmost respect for James Randi, who is responsible for inspiring me and millions of others to think critically and fight dangerous pseudoscience and superstition. It makes me incredibly sad that I can no longer support JREF.”
Skeptically yours,
So she didn’t call for him to be removed or sacked. You’ve just countered your own claim…
Well, that looks like an own goal. So she didn’t call for DJ to be fired.
I don’t recall anyone calling for him to be fired. I do remember one guy calling for him to resign honorably, but he didn’t do that.
‘Blaming feminist skeptics for poor women’s attendance at conferences, claiming no harassment was reported previously when it was’; ‘being a feminist’. One of these is a better reason to say someone should be fired, I would suggest.
Hello,
About the “claiming no harassment was reported previously when it was”, there has been a lot of discussions on the internet about what exactly DJ Grothe knew at the time, what exactly had been reported and how at the time, and how the JREF reacted at the time. No need to replay that part of the drama. My take on it is that DJ Grothe was mostly accurate at the time. You’re free to disagree with me on this.
Anyway, for the skeptic feminists almost any kind of behavior can be label as “harassment” (in a recent video with PZ Myers, Rebecca Watson stated that people coming to her in in the street and asking her “What’s your name?” was a form of harassment). So of course “harassment” (based on that kind of very broad definition of the term) happened at TAM before.
Most of the Watson vs. Grothe issue was a semantic issue.
Skeptically yours,
Rebeca is a bad-ass addition to the atheist and skeptical movements the real problem is the sexist elitist dinosaurs that cant dump there male privilege
Alternative petition to request Ms. Watson speak on SGU here: http://www.change.org/petitions/skeptics-guide-to-the-universe-podcast-keep-rebecca-watson-on-the-show
I don’t sign online petitions, I don’t want change.org phishing my email address & spamming me.
So I just went to their website and filled out their contact form, to let them know. http://www.theskepticsguide.org/contact.aspx
This was posted in Atheism+ FaceBook group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/AtheismPlus/
Yes, well… the article you commented on was actually about the alternative petition – which I created. Thanks for reading it before you commented.
There appear to be a couple of fake signatures on the anti-RWatson petition.
JM Abrassart – you say:
the skeptic feminists almost any kind of behavior can be label as “harassment” (in a recent video with PZ Myers, Rebecca Watson stated that people coming to her in in the street and asking her “What’s your name?” was a form of harassment.
So, what? you don’t think rude behavior is harrassing? Polite people are introduced by a common friend, or at least introduce themselves first. If you demand my name, it appears that you think you have a right to it. Anyway, strangers approaching like this fall squarely into the “Schrodinger’s Rapist” situation. http://kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-schrodinger%E2%80%99s-rapist-or-a-guy%E2%80%99s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced/
Two to tango.
Two folks approach one another one has to start somewhere unless they carry on by, is Watson too important to instigate first contact? ‘Hi, I’m Becca, a z list Internet celebrity, what’s your name?”
I can pretty much guarantee that IF someone had walked up to her and said “Hi, my name is Simon….” before he had finished she would be running away claiming harassment “How dare a male speak to a female who was not chaperoned”. Where are we, in the gentry set of Victorian England or living under the Taliban?
Seems to me that the ‘victim card’ will be played whenever it can be and being White, male and heterosexual is a stick to beat someone with – and heaven forbid if you are an ‘old’ heterosexual, white male.
I think it funny that all you folks talk about eradication of oppression and bullying, while all the time trying to oppress and bully the bejesus out of folks who think different to you. Is thinking a crime now?
Things will not end well as I see it, just like Affirmative Action in the US, standards drop to allow the inadequates to ‘compete’. Cream rises to the top, sex, skin color and disability are all excuses for failure to compete.
Meanwhile, all the time folks are crying out for ‘equality’ some humans in other countries have real problems. Civilization softens folks and makes them full of self pity, the west could do with coming down a few pegs or so.
Champ of the people here folks.
Bingo!
Edward, OK, serious response.
1. You start by basing your argument on an imagined version of Watson reacting in a certain way.
2. You complain about plaing the “victim card”, ignoring the fact that this is exactly what her critics are doing with their petition, and then go on to do the same thing yourself.
3. You make a bunch of fact-free claims, justified them with “cream rises to the top”. Motivated reasoning, folks.
4. You end it all with the some-people-have-real-problems (except they didn’t in the previous sentence) so-stop-complaining argument. Which obviously doesn’t apply to you.
Are we done yet with this childish campaign of finding harassment wherever we go? Nope. Seems we’re still not quite back on track. We have Amy Davis Roth claiming words on a t-shirt as a “dehumanising experience”, calling a ban for fake and parody jewellery and items on conventions, and now walking up to talk to someone on the street is a form of harassment. When will it end? I thought modern feminists today were supposed to be strong and independent? Especially modern feminists who calls themselves freethinkers and sceptics.
If her conduct on SGU is not to be divisive, hostile or authoritarian, then perhaps she should conduct herself accordingly elsewhere outside of SGU? Personally I wish she (and her colleagues) would stop playing the victim and finally start looking at the bigger picture. To consider these ‘lesser crimes’, as PZ Myers put it, on the lower totempole is just disrespectful and, ironically, from a point of privilege. Her ability to ‘check’ her own, though, has been mysteriously absent. By the way, you’re not actually making the case that Watson is not hostile, divisive or authoritarian? Because I’d be forced to bite my tongue. Your last line of not accepting ‘passive aggressive bullies’ is, as well, a bit too closer to home to not be seen as a form of parody.
The word, dawg!!
The word.
Finally some sense.
Nice…. Right out of the Karl Rove/Dick Cheney playbook.
Haley, you are, indeed, kissing Rebecca’s ass. Are you trying to appease her so that she doesn’t make you ever cry again?
I was going to tell you that I’m not kissing ass but then I remembered I don’t have to justify myself to you.
If you don’t think talking to someone on the street can be harrassing: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/03/belgium-film-street-harassment-sofie-peeters
This is like being an unwilling famous person – only all negative. You can never be “incognito”.
Some of the comments here come seriously close to failing the Turing test. They’re just a random assortment of anti-Watson cliches with no relationship to the rest of the conversation.
Haters, if you’re argument comes down to how much you loathe somebody, you might want to consider the possibility that it is not completely rational.
Are you trying to decipher which of us are human and which of us are machine? If not, then the Turing test has absolutely no relevance. Perhaps you should make it a point to first understand the term before you go dropping it around, trying to sound intelligent.
Yes to your first question. That was the point.
Discussions about Watson seem to inevitably fill up with comments that are just random talking points which have nothing to do with the topic at hand, and read as if they could have been generated by some sort of antirebeccawatsonomatic software or something. (Gee, jokes just don’t work as well when you have to explain them.)
Still, if you want to have another snark, my first post also had “you’re” instead of “your”. Go for it.
I have absolutely no doubt that Rebecca Watson will remain on the SGU podcast, but I feel compelled to ask why you find it so controversial that people would want to remove someone they have no respect for from a podcast. I listened to SGU a few times and tuned out a long while back – one reaason being that I found Rebecca Watson to be annoying. So I don’t really have much of a dog in the fight. That said, the question I have always had is why is she on the podcast to begin with? To me, she truly is the Kim Kardashian of the skeptics movement (sans the sex tape) – all of the self-importance, none of the substantive accomplishment or credentials. Lacking any ORIGINAL or INTERESTING intellectual insight from anything I have read of hers (which is admittedly not much), I’m guessing the Cult of Rebecca Watson has arisen from the fact that she’s just everybody’s favorite cool person to hang out with at TAM? Or is she just a function of this age of bloggers and twits?
In any case, can you at least understand the detractors? For me, if the Cult of Rebecca Watson reached a crescendo, it was her marriage ceremony to Sid Rodriguez at TAM. Let me repeat that – at TAM. And then, of course, trips on elevators evolved into feminist manifestos. (I almost cried when real publications actually validated this “controversy.”) Actually, I should clarify that it is a particular brand of feminism, and a type whereby if you don’t agree with it, you will bullied off blogs (e.g., FtB). And like any good movement that stifles the free exchange of ideas, the Cult of Rebecca Watson will accuse YOU of being the bully and classify you along with the 1% of male trolls. You all (see previous article on this blog) can focus picking at the bark of individual trees (e.g., the finer points of Paula Kirby’s article), but there is no denying the forest – i.e., injecting a particularly brand of left-leaning dogma into the skepticism and atheism movements (e.g., “AtheistPlus”) will certainly drive away people who didn’t come looking for lectures in POLITICS. (By nature, purveyors of dogma prefer to consider their own viewpoints as The Truth.) Political correctness, thy name is Skepchick.
In any case, in moving from quiet lurker to signing the petition myself when I heard about it, I simply put in a vote as a non-fan of Rebecca Watson to send a message to a person who appears to be in dire need of external validation, “Rebecca Watson, a lot of us do NOT respect you or think you’re funny or cute or whatever it is your redeeming qualities are supposed to be.” (Generally speaking, non-fans are never nearly as vocal when it comes to a cult of personality, mostly because they don’t really care that much.) But after I posted, I found the comments on the petition to be more revelatory of the true nature of the Cult of Rebecca Watson (indeed, I would not be a bit surprised if they were not the ones who started it) – where you will see 9 out of 10 posts seemingly devoted to a competition in snark that Watson promotes on her own site.
I was gonna say something snarky about you never having seen what an actual cult of personality looks like but I was too busy worshiping the dearly departed Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
Ed, wiki is your friend. “A cult of personality arises when an individual uses mass media, propaganda, or other methods, to create an idealized and heroic public image, often through unquestioning flattery and praise” – the key terms here being “idealized” and “unquestioning.” Since by virtue of my gender, I apparently have no right to challenge any characterizations Watson may make about alleged interactions on elevators, perhaps I should defer to a female’s own description of what I called the Cult of Rebecca Watson – The Sisterhood of the Oppressed.
OK, so you don’t like her. But why sign a petition against someone because you don’t like them? That’s quite a leap.
Regrding politics, most of the flak she has copped is not for somehow bringing her political views into the movement (a movement which happily allows MRA’s to promote their anti-feminist views in atheist forums, by the way) but because she has raised the issue of how women are treated within the movement. This is about behaviour, not politics, and if people are being treated badly then it is not the people raising the issue who are being divisive, but the people doing the harassing and the bullying.
As for the cult of personality, she has been subjected to a torrent of abuse for the last year, and people have stood up for her. Her critics would love her to be isolated, so they try to stigmatise and misrepresent her support. This is not about a cult, it’s about basic decency.
I remember when Jessica Ahlquist was being subjected to a hate campaign by Christians. I was genuinely shocked at how awful they were to her. It’s sad to see the same thing from atheists.
The problem with what you just said is that women are NOT treated badly within the movement. Rebecca is treated badly within the movement, though, so she assumes that the way she’s treated applies to every other female, but it doesn’t.
I’m not sure how long you’ve been involved with the community or how much you know of Rebecca’s past, but Rebecca made a name for herself early on for being a party girl and a slut, so it’s no wonder that people treat her with so little respect now. It sounds like you aren’t aware of any of that.
So she gets no respect because she was a “slut”. And women are treated fairly in the movement?
You mean besides the people dissing women if they are not chaste enough? Or has calling women sluts suddenly become totally not sexist?
I actually don’t know anything about RW’s sex life, and frankly I don’t give a damn. She could have fucked every man and woman in the movement, and that still wouldn’t warrant treating her disrespectfully, or calling her a slut.
And other thing, Rebecca does NOT have all the support that you think she does. Most of her supporters are male. With the exception of her fellow Skepchicks, very few of her supporters are female. What’s my point? My point is that the support from her male followers is disingenuous. They are simply supporting her to gain favor with other females within the movement, i.e., to look like the good, sensitive, understanding and supportive guy, when all they ultimately want to do is exploit a niche population of females for sex. There are many “pick-up manuals” on the market that tell guys that one of the easiest ways to score is to join a group of women, such as a feminist group, and to show sympathy for their cause.
I’m genuinely lost for words. But thank you for illustrating the attitudes at work here.
Jiust love the reasons for signing on that petition – havn’t laughed so much in ages
Personally, I’m really getting off on tedious white men deciding how I should feel about stuff.
I can’t imagine how demoralising it must be to be the person who only gets laid by strategically planning and tricking people. You know that isn’t normal, right? Most people can get laid a lot easier than that… you have my genuine sympathy.
That said I am well endowed, great-looking and witty and never seem to be without interest from the ladies.
Do these ladies wear white coats?
My favorite meme taken nearly to its farthest limit. Brilliant. A little too realistic, but that’s the risk one takes when you play the Poe game.
+1 to this comment.