A genuinely awful opinion from a genuinely awful person. He repeatedly harasses people with the same bullshit over and over and over when they’ve made it clear that they don’t want to talk to him. He’s even registered a new Twitter account to get around a block so he can fling personal abuse (Boghossian adopted a child from China, which Torres was definitely aware of).
None of this would matter if Phil was just some guy with Asperger’s Syndrome shouting at a wall. Unfortunately for their readers, Phil is a writer for Salon, who appears to have special responsibility in areas about which he has so little competence that he must surely qualify as an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
The reason he’s targeting these people is unconnected with any of the reasons he’s given. It involves his unintentionally hilarious “review” of The Conceptual Penis, but I’m not getting into it here because it’s not relevant to anything I’m saying.
1. There is nothing whatsoever in atheism that “enables” people to sexually assault women. There is certainly nothing right-wing or anti-feminist about it. I’m sure there are right-wing, anti-feminist people who are atheists, but as there is no organised movement, and atheists tend to disagree about pretty much everything apart from whether or not a god exists, the claim that it’s a problem “with atheism” is incoherent.
This fundamental misunderstanding of atheism is unforgivable coming from someone who gets paid to write about it.
If Lawrence Krauss or Michael Shermer are guilty of sexual assault, then they should face consequences for those crimes. I don’t care that they’re atheist, because “atheism” is not an organisation of any kind which could be used to justify, defend or cover up these crimes. It’s like saying that they’re both not fans of the Green Bay Packers. It might be true, but it’s irrelevant information.
2. Free speech does not mean forcing someone to listen to you. Free speech means that no one can stop you expressing your opinions, at least not legally. If someone blocks you on Twitter, that is not a violation of your freedom of speech. It just means that person does not want to hear anything from you. I am very close to a free speech absolutist, and I’ve blocked literally hundreds of people on Twitter, Facebook and tumblr.
To believe that you have a right to someone else’s audience is such an entitled position that I have no problem in characterising it as sinister and creepy.
This fundamental misunderstanding of freedom of speech is unforgivable coming from someone who gets paid to write about it.
