It’s been about ten hours since I sent an email to the editor over at The Seminal and I’ve yet to get a response. I still haven’t regained any actual editorial control over my own post over there. The moderator is hanging around in comments, waiting for me to come back, spamming Youtube video links and waxing philosophical about Warren Zevon. Doremus is sucking up to them and getting the expected praise in return, it’s all very childish and stupid.

This, however, I feel I have to answer, as it sums up what’s wrong with the situation nicely:

doremus35 September 21st, 2010 at 8:16 pm
77
In response to RBG @ 76 (show text)

We can yell at each other and curse and scream and call each other names we reserve for our foes, but when the feathers settle and the beads of sweat pass into white wisps of past heated struggles, we FDLers are a community and we lock and holds hands knowing that we all are working for a better day when all men will truly be brothers and call each other friend.

Aww, isn’t that adorable?

Please. All men will never be ‘brothers’ and we shouldn’t hope for such a sickeningly saccharine outcome. People have legitimate disagreements, and moreover, *should* have legitimate disagreements. It’s part of being an adult and striving to make the world a better place.

But that’s a fundamental failure of American society; the privileging of civility over decency, of getting along over being right, of finding consensus over finding the truth. ‘Be nice!’ Americans say. ‘Everyone’s ideas are of equal value!’ they say.

Bullshit. While opinions are inherently subjective, not all ideas are of equal merit, and nobody is entitled to their own personal set of facts, their own personal reality that we all have to concede ground to.

The way we find the best answers and get closest to the truth is through argument, not hand-holding, campfire sing-a-long Disneyfied false camaraderie.

Of course the moderator, enforcer of false comity and Youtube link spammer, ate it up with a spoon:

RBG September 21st, 2010 at 8:21 pm
78
In response to doremus35 @ 77 (show text)

I could not agree more.

I couldn’t agree less. Get bent, the both of you.

I have written to the editor in charge of The Seminal at Fire Dog Lake, informing them of the moderator abuse and asking that my diary, and in fact all previous work, be pulled immediately. I do not know if this request will be honored, as they claim, in an About Us page clause that is not in the TOS agreed to by new users when they sign up, that they have the right to publish all work in perpetuity.

At any rate, I think I can close that chapter on my life without regrets. If they choose to pilfer my intellectual property to allow a petulant administrator with delusions of grandeur to poke fun at me for a few more days, it’s no great loss.

My last blog post about Atheists being defamed by various religious figures went up at FDL, a place I usually put them to get more traffic.

As has happened with every single atheism themed post I put up over there, it attracted a set of trolls, this time a particularly egregious one name Doremus35 who implied that I was a ‘religious bigot’ because I wrote about a Rabbi calling Atheists ‘parasites’ alongside the Pope. Apparently this was meant to imply that all Jews are anti-Atheist or something; I’m not sure, I couldn’t follow the logic.

Also, the Pope apparently has no religious authority in the US.

Later in the same thread, Doremus35 attacked me for being a ‘gender bigot’ because I used a generic male pronoun to refer to them.

When I responded to the first accusations, of bigotry and possible anti-semitism, I was censored for calling Doremus’ ideas, as I recall (I can’t access my own old comments) ‘half-witted’ and ‘stupid’. Not the man/woman/child. Their ideas.

They, on the other hand, got away with calling me a bigot, implying I was an anti-semite, over and over again. For bringing it up to the Mods, I got repeatedly censored as well.

I’ve just about had it with posting at FDL. The traffic is nice, but there’s an obvious rancor toward any irreligious position or writers over there. I’ve been attacked by front-page authors in comments for pointing out simple facts about how the tax code favors the religious. One front-pager a few months back wrote a piece about, amongst other things, how Atheists have no joy in their lives or something along those lines, because we’re too uppity about standing up to religious figures, that he had to largely retract in comments. There are numerous featured writers who author pieces from an explicitly religious perspective, and not one open atheist or agnostic.

Let me be clear: I’m fine with Doremus calling me a bigot. That’s fine, it just shows that they throw around slander when confronted by their inability to read a simple blog post, or apparently, to any criticism of a rabbi. Whatever. I’m a big boy, and I get called far worse. I’d be less fine with, but accepting of, consistently applied standards regarding insults.

What I’m not fine with is a situation where *I* get to be called a bigot for calling out an eliminationist rabbi, censored for criticizing someone else’s ideas, and defamed for using a pronoun in a standard way, but my erstwhile opponent can do whatever they please. Whenever I point out this hypocrisy, the comment is removed. Criticism of the censors is not allowed.

So I’m now effectively banned from commenting on my own thread. It’s a troubling situation, from an authorial perspective. I feel like my intellectual property has been usurped, in addition to everything else. I’ll have to see how this turns out before I decide on the next step.