So my fellow SBer PZ is in all sorts of hot water with Catholics over a blog post. I didn’t really want to poke my nose into this, but there’s been so much noise about it, that it’s really unavoidable. But I think I’ve got a rather different opinion on this than most bloggers I’ve seen so far. And I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to be making any friends by posting this. But people keep asking, so I’m going to open my big mouth, and tell you what I think.<\/p>\n
You see, I think that both sides are assholes. Obviously, the people making threats take the prize as the biggest assholes, but a huge margin. But this isn’t a situation where a bunch of wackos went on an unprovoked rampage against a blogger; PZ deliberately<\/em> provoked this mess.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As you must have heard by now, the whole kerfluffle started when some student at a University in Florida got into a fight with the local church over a piece of communion wafer. That led to a lot of Catholic folks becoming very upset, because So far, you’ve got a typical story of loony religious types freaking out over Then, PZ chimed in. And in his inimitable fashion, he went way overboard, As you would expect, this caused the wackos to go absolutely ballistic. PZ has received death threats, and Bill Donohue of the Catholic League has used it as an excuse Like most other folks who’ve spoken up about this, I agree that the folks When it comes to the whole “Get PZ fired!” thing, I think it’s nuts. If you could But: I think that PZ is an asshole when it comes to religion, and I think that What PZ did wasn’t just say “These people are nuts”. That would be offensive, but What he did was solicit people to steal communion wafers, and send them to him, so I think that people have an obligation to behave in certain ways for civil society I’m not saying that everyone should pussyfoot around in order to avoid every But you shouldn’t deliberately provoke<\/em> people. There’s a big difference between “I think it’s stupid to complain about how someone abused a cracker”, and “someone please go bring me some of those crackers from a church so that I can Now, obviously, people are allowed to do things whether I think they’re acceptable or not. I’m not arguing that what I consider unacceptable should be illegal, That doesn’t mean that it’s OK for people to threaten him. It’s not OK to send him death threats. It’s not OK to try to get him fired from his job. That’s all, obviously, absolutely unacceptable, and I think that the people threatening PZ should get a visit from the police, and be punished appropriately for making threats.<\/p>\n But when PZ did the rhetorical equivalent of walking up to a hornets nest and whacking it with a stick, he shouldn’t have been surprised when the angry bees came buzzing out after him.<\/p>\n So PZ deliberately acted like an outrageous asshole. The reaction of people to his outrageous assholery is completely unreasonable – over the top to the point where it would be comic if it weren’t so dangerous. The reaction of loonies to his And then, there’s Bill Donohue. Donohue takes the term “raging asshole”, and But still… This whole thing is largely a manufactured uproar. You’ve got a bunch So my fellow SBer PZ is in all sorts of hot water with Catholics over a blog post. I didn’t really want to poke my nose into this, but there’s been so much noise about it, that it’s really unavoidable. But I think I’ve got a rather different opinion on this than most bloggers I’ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chatter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-aA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nthe communion wafer is deeply meaningful to devout catholics. Some of those folks went beyond upset and crossed right over into the realm of profound insanity – claiming that taking the wafer was the equivalent of (or even worse than) kidnapping a child. And some folks went so far as to send death threats. <\/p>\n
\nsomething thoroughly trivial. Yeah, the wafer’s got a lot of significance to them. But
\nat the end of the day, it’s a cracker.<\/p>\n
\ndeciding that merely flaming the stupidity of this wasn’t enough. Instead, he
\nflamed the stupidity of it, and then<\/em> asked his readers to send him
\ncommunion wafers, so that he could desecrate them on film, and post the images to his website.<\/p>\n
\nto get lots of attention calling for PZ to be fired.<\/p>\n
\nthreatening PZ are a bunch of raging assholes. And I agree that whatever your religious
\nbeliefs, becoming violent over a non-violent action taken by someone else is absolutely, unquestionably wrong. In fact, it’s more than wrong, it’s downright batshit insane<\/em>. The people making threats should, if possible, be tracked down,
\nand get visited by the police. Threats of violence aren’t just wrong – they’re criminal, and they should be treated as such. The people making threats should be prosecuted.<\/p>\n
\nshow that he’s discriminating against religious students, or otherwise mistreating
\nreligious students in his classes, or in any part of his role as a professor at UMM,
\nthat would be appropriate. But no one is plausibly claiming that. People who know PZ in
\nperson all say that he’s a pleasant, softspoken guy, who would never abuse his students.
\nPrivately, he might think that they’re a bit crazy; but no one has ever plausibly
\nclaimed that he’s ever done or said anything inappropriate to students at UMM on the basis of their religion.<\/p>\n
\nhe deliberately provoked this shitstorm. He didn’t just say something offensive; he made a very deliberate effort to provoke people. I think this whole mess is the result of
\na very deliberate, calculated action on his part.<\/p>\n
\nperfectly within the realm of civil discourse. He didn’t just say that it’s just a damned cracker, and getting hysterical over it was stupid and foolish. That would be offensive, but perfectly within the realm of civil discourse. He didn’t just say
\nthat people who compare stealing a cracker to kidnapping a child are total fucking loonies. That would have been fine. That probably still would have caused some amount of shitstorm, but nothing near the scale of what we’re seeing now.<\/p>\n
\nthat he could desecrate them and post images of that on the web. Now, PZ’s a really
\nsmart guy. It’s not like this reaction is something that no one could have predicted.
\nAnyone with half a brain would realize that going over the top that way was guaranteed
\nto create a crazy reaction. He knew<\/em> when he posted it what kind of reaction it
\nwould provoke. And he went ahead and did it – because he wanted to provoke that
\nreaction. <\/p>\n
\nto function and survive. People who deliberately provoke others for no purpose beyond the malicious joy of provocation should be recognized as the obnoxious assholes
\nthat they are.<\/p>\n
\noffending anyone else. There are lots of things that offend people, but that are
\nappropriate and reasonable things to say. Saying that religion is silly is deeply
\noffensive to some people – but for anyone who thinks that religion is silly, there’s
\nnothing wrong with saying it. And if other people think that you’re an idiot for saying
\nit, there’s nothing wrong with them saying so, either.<\/p>\n
\ndesecrate them, and post pictures of it”. The latter, in my opinion, is not acceptable behavior. It’s being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole; provoking people not to make a point, but just for the sake of provoking them. It’s petty, childish,
\npointless, and obnoxious.<\/p>\n
\nor in any way actionable. But when you go out of your way to provoke people, when you deliberately do something to offend and hurt them, when you very deliberately and calculatedly say something that’s going to produce an emotional response, then you shouldn’t pretend to be surprised when you get that response, and people react badly. When you do that, you should expect<\/em> that people are going to react badly. You should expect it, because you deliberately provoked those reactions. PZ went out of his way to provoke a shitstorm. And now he’s complaining about the crazy things that people are doing. Well, duh… He went out of your way to
\npiss off and provoke a bunch of people that he knew are irrational loonies; what did he expect?<\/p>\n
\noutrageous assholery make PZ look squeaky clean and rational in comparison. The
\npeople reacting to him are nothing short of insane. It’s terrifying to see
\nsuch a vivid demonstration of just how close to violence many people are – that
\nan offensive blog post can provoke people to sending death threats<\/em> is
\ncrazy.<\/p>\n
\nbasically redefines it by example. Donohue is an lunatic who’s made a career out of
\nfinding things to be offended over, and running around screaming in violent outrage
\nevery time he finds one. He’s a vile, disgraceful excuse for a human being. It’s
\nan absolute crime that he’s managed to present himself as some kind of
\nspokesperson for the American Catholic community. It’s even worse that he
\ngets treated by our dreadful media as some kind of reasonable voice in the
\npublic square. Bill Donohue belongs in a mental institution, not in front
\nof a television camera being presented as a respectable community leader.<\/p>\n
\nof insane assholes on one side, like Bill Donohue, screaming threats. And on the other
\nside, you’ve got a guy who gets his rocks off on provoking the loonies, basically
\ndoing the rhetorical equivalent of painting a target on his ass and handing out rocks.
\nIt’s stupid all around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"