Most of us grew up in heavily Christian cultures and are vaguely familiar with what the camp experience entails. Imagine, instead if you grew up around a few Christians and heard plenty of rumors about them at temple, but they were rarely featured on TV and the only books you could find on them in your language were the Bible, histories of the church that focused on doctrine and politics and books aimed at believers about how great it is to walk with Jesus. This would tell you nothing about camp, or what church services were like or the role of potlucks in community-building. Knowing all about the history of Christmas and the traditional ways of marking it tells you very little about how most Christians feel about Christmas and the Bible tells you even less.

Unless you live in a handful of heavily-Islamic communities, that’s how things are with respect to Islam in the English-speaking world. My friend Heina is trying to rectify this in a book she’s writing, tentatively titled The Skeptic’s Guide to Islam. She will cover what you do at the mosque, the way people obey all the rules you’ve heard about and so on. I encourage you to go help push her the last few hundred dollars over her stretch goal on Kickstarter to make the book extra awesome.

However, my piece on Anita Sarkeesian wasn’t panned to be particularly positive. While she does a lot of good work, it tends to be mixed in with a lot of sloppy work. Then, I got thinkign abotu whether it was advisable for me as a man to criticize a fairly prominent voice of feminism for being a bad feminist. It sounds kind of mansplainy. I thought about it some more and realized that I wasn’t so much wanting to criticize her for being a bad feminist (though she is that, too) as a bad movie critic.

She has a strong tendency to come up with interpretations based on her personal views and pet theories rather than the text, then impose them on the text, then criticize the text because she finds her interpretation offensive when her interpretation was something she brought from outside and not the fault of the work she was evaluating at all. On a closely related note, she seems to have little sense of nuance, despite explicit claims to the contrary, and takes everything terribly literally and interprets most material on a shallow level. In practice, this means she can’t tell the difference between straight uses of a trope and subversions or parodies. She also seems to confuse her personal tastes with moral value.

Criticizing her for her frequent use of out-of-context examples that don’t fit her thesis and cherry-picking is going to look like criticizing her feminism, though, especially since there’s currently an anti-feminist dogpile on her based on the idea that she goes around looking for shit to be be offended by (a common stereotype of feminists). Plus, I want to make direct criticisms of her feminism since she’s anti-sex-worker and, if I’m interpreting her correctly, a gender essentialist.

My concern is that anything I write critical of Sarkeesian will come off as the dreaded “yes, but” argument. It hardly seems fair to lay off legit criticism just because a bunch of people are combining illegitimate criticism with asshattery. Is there any good way to handle this?

Dana Hunter gives a good overview of the harassment problem that’s been burning up the Interwebs lately here. Jason Thibeault gives a timeline of the major events. Ashley Miller explains what the point of all this is. Teal Deer version: a few months ago, a few women in the atheist blogosphere said there had been a problem with harassment at the atheist conventions. This is actually two related, but distinct issues: people being harassed by speakers and people being harassed by other attendees. DJ Grothe, president of the James Randi Foundation,weighed in and said they can’t very well do anything about harassment if people wait until after the The Amaz!ng Meeting (their con) and complain on the Internet instead of reporting it to them when it happened. The complaints were creating an impression that that the problem was much bigger than it really was and women’s registration was way down over the previous year in consequence. They had never actually received a harassment complaint. A bunch of other bloggers pointed out that he had gotten complaints. Several people came forward with specific incidents they had reported to him. You can read about one here and another here. These apparently don’t count because they weren’t “officially” reported or weren’t harassment or something. People pointed out maybe people would report to the organizers if it were clear what the official policy was, but there isn’t one beyond that they reserve the right to ask people to leave if they cause trouble. This gives no indication who to report to when there is a problem and doesn’t tell staff what to do if they get such a report. Also, there’s been a big history of women getting pilloried for coming forward. Many bloggers pushed for an official written policy and DJ caught a lot of heat for not committing to implementing one and apparent goalpost-moving. Ophelia Benson got some vague threats for speaking out on the issue and pulled out of speaking at the next TAM. Greta commented on why we have to take these seriously. I think that brings us up to date on everything.

This brings me to Thunderf00t’s post on the issue. Before I get into my analysis, I wanted to call attention to his rhetorical strategy here. He’s arguing against a position, but gives no links, no quotes and names no names. This is usually a strong indicator that you’re in for a big straw man and this is no exception. It’s easy to make your opponents look ridiculous when your audience only gets your word for what exactly it is that they are saying. For any position, it’s fairly easy to find someone who made an indefensible argument or at least make up a bad argument. I could probably name half a dozen people I’m embarrassed to agree with about any issue I have a position on.

For instance, 9/11 conspiracy theorists will have you believe that any who thinks the World Trade Center was brought down by a terrorist attack using planes believes everything the government tells them. While it would be a bad idea to take the government’s word for everything, that is not the only reason to believe the “official story.” In fact, many people think there was a genuine terrorist attack on 9/11 and the government tried to cover up their incompetence in failing to prevent it. (This is a terrible oversimplification, but fine for illustrative purposes.) If you poke through all the links and comments, you can find people who said some ridiculous or unsupportable things. For instance, the idea that no one should have sex at a conference is unrealistic and if there’s a good reason to think the JREF board wants harassment instead of just being more concerned about the publicity and terrible at communicating, I have yet to see it. However, this is not the main thrust of most of the posts on the topic and Thunderf00t fails to address the main arguments made. In fact, it’s the other way around. All of his arguments were already addressed because various readers also made them. However, you wouldn’t know any of this from his zero-context commentary. In the interest of fairness, I shall quote his article in full. On to what he actually wrote:

I’ve been around on the internets a LONNNG time, and its been my experience that the more people use terms like MISOGYNIST, RACIST, BIGOT and FEMINAZI, the less valid their arguments are likely to be.  It’s kinda obvious in many ways, a good argument stands on its merits, not on how many times you can call someone a misogynist, and if you had a worthwhile argument, why not just present it, like so:

“Sexual Harassment at Conferences”.  –Lets nail some colors to the mast!

Yes, sometimes people do use accusations of bigotry instead of arguments. I’m sure you could find a few such people commenting on this issue if you looked hard enough. However, there’s a big difference between evaluating someone’s behavior and speech and concluding they are a bigot and asserting as a way to dismiss their claims. Ideally, it’s an assertion that someone’s claims are based on irrational prejudice rather than rational evaluation of the evidence. More importantly, if you read through the commentary I linked above, you’ll see very few assertions that DJ or anyone else is a misogynist. The complaints are based on analysis of what he did and what he should have done and why he should have done that instead. A few people do speculate as to the reason for the considerable gap between the ideal and reality, but not most, and it isn’t the crux of the argument.

Thunderf00t’s choice of terms is revealing. His implication is that we all know “feminazi” is a bad word, so we shouldn’t call anyone a “racist,” “misogynist” or “bigot,” either. I feel like I’m on Sesame Street playing that game where there are four things and one of them doesn’t belong. “Feminazi” is a term made up for purposes of being inflammatory. Yes, some women lay claim to the term “feminist” and are generally authoritarian nogoodnicks, but the term is a straight Godwin meant to discredit feminists without addressing them. In practice, it gets used to describe people like Sandra Fluke, not the ones who accuse strippers of being gender-traitors. The latter three words are the closest we have to neutral descriptive terms of attitudes that are socially unacceptable in an identifiable form. He could have just as easily said we shouldn’t call people criminal or incompetent. Those also carry strong social implications, but are ultimately descriptions of demonstrable behavior. If he had some specific examples of people making unfair accusations, this would be a fair issue to address, but he doesn’t have specific examples of anything.

!!!!Accurate assessment of a problem is the first step towards moving towards an appropriate solution!!!!

Now first let me say from a strategically point of view sexual harassment at conferences really is a non-issue (and if reading that has just pushed some buttons, I want you to calmly unplug those emotions and put them in a box, then take a deep breath, relax and read the rest of this reasoned argument)… breathing calmly yet? good!, then we can continue….

The not-so-subtle implication here is that anyone who disagrees is just being emotional and not making a rational assessment of the facts like him. This is a classic way of not taking women seriously. In fact, several people comment on it in the various threads on this issue.

…… indeed to a large degree the conference scene is mostly redundant.  A large conference is a couple of thousand people.  In terms of viewership, a mediocre channel such as mine would pull in several tens of thousands of views for a video.  Then of course many of these lectures are repeated from conference to conference, and virtually all of them are available online.  Put simply if your primary focus is on the conference scene, then in the internet age, it’s probably misplaced.  Further it’s my personal experience that sexual harassment affects only a very significant minority of attendees.  Indeed I personally know prominent women who went to TAM last year who said from a harassment point of view, it was the cleanest TAM yet (battle fought and game won?).  So the full scope of the problem is a minority of a  minority.  As such do you really think this is the priority target where you will get best bang for your buck in terms of focusing hard won resources, or focusing the attention of the online community?
Now this is not to say that conferences are obsolete (they clearly still have functional roles to play), or that sexual harassment isn’t a bad thing. Sure it exists, I’ve seen it, although it seems to me that such acts overwhelming happen in the bars outside the conference.  I’ve seen some of this first hand, and was happy to help try to resolve the matter in an appropriate and mature fashion.  My personal estimate would be, of the things that aren’t just people being social clutzs, something like 1 guy in 100-1000 (and maybe the odd girl too!) causes almost all of the problems.  My straw poll estimate from half a dozen such meetings is that the ‘harassment’ that goes on in the bars at such meetings is little different from that you would find in practically any other bar in the country.

Further a female friend of mine who repeatedly attends many such events has informed me that the most recent TAM was the best ever in this fashion.

*THIS REALLY ISN’T A BIG PROBLEM*

If he isn’t saying conferences are obsolete, then what’s the point of down-playing their importance? If they are important enough to do at all, I would think they are important enough to do correctly. He certainly doesn’t think his considerable Internet viewership makes it unnecessary for him to attend conferences. He spoke at the Texas Freethought Convention recently and includes a picture from a conference in this very post. Clearly, people think they are worth having or they wouldn’t happen. In fact, The Amaz!ng Meeting only started in 2003, well into the Internet age. A lot of the appeal of conferences is that you get to meet people IRL that you know on the Internet. (This is one of the reasons it’s unrealistic to say that people shouldn’t have sex there.) I’d say the Internet is actually driving the demand for these things by building the networks that they capitalize on and making it far easier to publicize them. Besides, pick any post I link to above and read the comments. Harassment happens online far more, so the Internet is not helping his case.

Yes, some people are socially inept and make people uncomfortable. However, pointing this out this does not solve the problem. If you read the specific allegations, it really defies credulity that anyone could not know better in many cases. Who doesn’t know that you aren’t supposed to follow women around and demand/beg for sex after being repeatedly told “no”? Some harassers use this idea to create plausible deniability to avoid any consequences if someone does dare step forward. Besides, if people are feeling like they are being harassed, the conference has a problem whether the alleged harassers are doing it intentionally or just so socially maladjusted as to not know any better. The distinction is important when it comes to deciding how to prevent the problem and how to deal with it when it happens, but that’s a question of how a harassment policy should be written and publicized, not whether it should exist. In fact, if there are a lot of guys out there who are completely blowing their chances with women because they don’t what they are doing and scaring all the ladies away, I would they would welcome some guidance on what not to do. It could be a tremendous boon for them.

Moreover, the claim that there’s relatively little harassment and most of it is just misunderstandings seems to be based on a single anecdote and a lot of speculation. His female friend may have just been lucky. Why should we believe Thunderf00t’s suppositions over the testimony of the dozens of women who have reported harassment? Do we have any reason to believe that only a minority of a minority are affected besides a flat assertion? Even if this were true, why should we dismiss minority problems? Atheists are a minority of a minority as well. Should we should up about disestablishment of religion since most of the population is indifferent or wants their religion to set public policy? It’s easy to say that a problem isn’t important when it doesn’t affect you.

Besides, no one claimed that a woman can’t walk from her room to the conference hall without getting groped three times. The claim is that it’s common enough to be a problem and the organizers could deal with it a lot more effectively than they have been. Also, women don’t have to be directly harassed to be affected. The steps they take to protect themselves from being a target can lessen their enjoyment of the conference, even if nothing happens. The threat of creepers affects how they can dress, where they can go unaccompanied and means they have to constantly watch their backs. This may seem unnecessary, but it’s not up to third parties to decide how big a deal a plausible risk is.

Straight shooter…. I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em…. and this is my strategic assessment of the extent of the problem.

… and such problems can of course be dealt with quickly and discretely without spoiling the fun for everyone else (the modus operandi of most nightclubs).

So why the 50% drop in female attendance at TAM?

Well like most things its likely to be a mix of factors, but I can tell you there is a reason why nightclubs typically advertise themselves with a little subtext in the bottom left hand corner saying ‘management reserves the right to refuse admission’ and do not advertise themselves as:

(graphic of a nightclub sign with an sexual harassment policy as big as the club’s name)

Thunderf00t is engaging in a bit of hyperbole here, of course. He knows that no one wants to rename TAM to “The Amaz!ing Sexual-Harassment-Prevention Meeting.” Without the hyperbole, his point doesn’t hold up, though. For one, I don’t think that most people want TAM to have an atmosphere too much like a nightclub and I’m guessing that Thunderf00t has never actually worked in a nightclub. I have, though I worked in a stripping capacity and was not directly involved with the running of it. Nightclubs do have policies about harassment of customers and they brief the bouncers on them. Some clubs, including the one where I worked, have signs posted about expected customer behavior. Similarly, they have policies about preventing drunk driving and other bad situations the club could contribute to. Since bars are a lot smaller than conventions, it’s pretty clear who to complain to. At TAM, the closest thing they even have to bouncers is hotel security and their powers are considerably more limited. They also may not occur to people who aren’t used to conventions.

He’s also ignoring that there were plenty of attempts to deal with this in a low-key manner and it exploded onto the Internet because they weren’t effective. DJ could have had a quiet discussion with a few prominent blog ladies about what would be a good policy, but he didn’t do much, then complained about them on Facebook when they tried to make an issue of it. (TAM had not even been singled out at that point.) That was the main factor in getting him all this negative attention.

Because

1) The level of the warning suggests the issue is far more problematic than it is in reality.  I’ve heard talks at such conferences (from prominent activists in the community) that literally suggest that to merely turn up at such talks will get you rape threats etc etc.  (let me be honest, repeatedly publicizing rape threats from a troll simply shows a crass lack of personal judgment and an immaturity at dealing with the interwebs, rather than a secular community ridden with men looking to rape women at conferences).  Put simply the environment is widely being unrealistically portrayed as more hostile than it actually is.  If your goal is to encourage women to attend such events, highlighting troll comments as representative of the conduct at such conferences is both willfully reckless and counterproductive to such a cause.  Indeed it’s kind of self evident.  If these threats had even the remotest air of credibility, the ONLY appropriate course of action is to simply report the matter to the FBI and take it to its logical conclusion, and then drag their legally beaten carcass around the walls of Troy… you get the idea.  (and yeah, it’s what I would have done in the blink of an eye had I found such threats credible).

The biggest problem with this section is the clear implication that because harassment isn’t very common, if you do get harassed you shouldn’t talk about it as you’ll give people the impression that your experience was typical. People deserve and need support when bad things happen at conferences, regardless of how common they are. This is a conference about skepticism and is theoretically aimed at people more rational than average. I would hope potential attendees know an anecdote when they see one and don’t jump to conclusions. This whole argument is infantalizing the women who may wish to attend because it is predicated on the idea that Thunderf00t is better able to evaluate their interests than they are. If we followed this suggestion, it’s unclear how we would ever find out if there were a major problem because we’ll never know about harassment unless we witness it or we’re told about it.

No one else follows this strategy, or at least no one sensible. Cities don’t build unassuming police stations disguised as office buildings and keep all their police in plainclothes lest people see a police presence and assume they have a major crime problem. Some harassment will happen no matter what. I think everyone understands that. What makes people feel secure is knowing they have somewhere to turn if they do have a problem.

Thunderf00t is also being a hypocrite. He’s done a lot to publicize death threats he’s received from trolls. If he worried that he was giving a false impression that he was a lot more likely to be murdered than he really was, he never let on. See here for PZ’s coverage of one such incident. Go to his YouTube channel and do a search for “death threat” and you’ll find plenty more. No one ever fire-bombed his house or tried to shoot him at a convention, so why did he call attention to this non-issue instead of just reporting it to the FBI and keeping quiet in public? The truth is that it’s easy to ignore threats when it isn’t you being threatened and, as Greta explained in the link above, threats work to intimidate people into changing their behavior, even if the person who made it never intended to carry it out.

-Put simply, YES talking about sexual harassment can sometimes be a bigger problem than sexual harassment.

2) The VAST majority of people at these conferences are civil, honest, respectable folks.  Giving people a list of things they are and are not allowed to do in the bars in the evenings gives the impression that this is not a conference for grown-ups but an expensive and repressive day/night care where your every action will be vigilantly vetted for dis-approval by the conference organizers.  Put simply this sort of thing is a killjoy for the civil, honest respectable majority.  If I want to chew on some womans leg in a bar, I don’t want to have to consult the conference handbook to see if this classes as acceptable behavior!

(picture of him chewing on a woman’s leg at a bar)

It’s a bar….boys AND girls and have fun in bars!  Sure sometime people misjudge situations, and sure there will be a few bad apples (who usually, and quite rightly, get their actions addressed at some point).  But like I say, IT’S A BAR!! and those are the rules of engagement in bars, as the old saying goes, if you are gonna eat tuna, you gotta expect some bones!

Look, I’m no libertarian, but I frankly find the idea that a conference should be dictating to me what I am and am not allowed to do in a bar outside the conference as approaching the “WTF is wrong with you???” line.  Nor do I particularly care for the McCarthyism argument which would typically be advanced at this point of ‘only communists would oppose such rules’/ ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’.

No one has said that most people at cons are harassers. The problem is that it’s difficult to deal with the few who are. If she wants you to chew on her, it isn’t a problem. No one is trying to ban flirting. Or if someone is, they are in the minority. This isn’t the kind of behavior the complaints have been about. The issue is the guys who do such things without making sure it’s wanted. All the complaints I’ve read were about the conference proper, not about bars near the hotel. No one has suggested trying to control behavior at the bars. In short, his hypothetical here bears no resemblance to any incident that anyone has complained about. The woman in the picture didn’t go and report him or complain on Facebook about him, so that’s clearly not it and there’s no reason to assume that a policy would interfere with this behavior. If someone proposed a policy that would have this effect, he should point it out, but he seems to be making broad assumptions about any possible policy. Again, it’s easy to say that talking about harassment is a bigger problem than harassment when talk makes you feel uncomfortable and harassment doesn’t.

    In summary, is there ‘harassment’ at conference?  I’ve not really seen anything at conferences themselves, although in the bars elsewhere, yeah sure it goes on (although arguably not that different from any other bar in the country). –From half a dozen conferences, this alone gives a ball park figure of the extent of the problem.

It’s a lot easier to not notice harassment when you aren’t looking for it, are busy doing your own thing and somebody else is the one getting harassed. This argument presupposes that Thunderf00t would notice any harassment in his general vicinity, even though he was admittedly busy having fun and flirting with women at the bars and I’m sure he had things to do in the hotel as well. I don’t see any reason I should find his estimation of his abilities credible here.

    As for the actionable items, I see writing down policies then policing them as essentially unfit for intended purpose and an inefficient deployment of resources.  For the conference itself, this would seem an exercise in redundancy (you might as well have rules against theft, it would be exactly as valid, and likely see exactly the same usage (or does the lack of a theft policy suggest conferences tolerate kleptomania? Or is the absence of evidence for theft being endemic not evidence of absence?)). Put simply, typically the less bureaucratic paper work associated with these conferences the better for EVERYONE.  Less legal fees in getting them written, less overhead in getting everyone running the conference to know what the guidelines are and in getting the attendees to read them all (no point in having guidelines if no one knows what they are!)

If there were a lot of reported problems with theft, it would make sense to implement policies to prevent it. Comic Con does have this problem and gives advice in its handbook about how to avoid having your stuff stolen. Besides, the police can deal with theft. Sexual harassment can be a big problem without the harasser doing anything criminal, meaning the conference has to deal with it. This doesn’t mean hiring a team of lawyers to draft and vet the policy and some high-paid expert to implement it. Despite what he implies here, anti-harassment policies are common at other conferences. It wouldn’t take much to lift a policy from someone else and spend a few minutes briefing each staff member to make sure they know what to do if they get a report. You’d just have to expand the current policy about the convention reserving the right to remove people to a few paragraphs. I doubt you’d even need another page in the handbook. The hard work of developing a reasonable policy that protects attendees without being oppressive has already been done. Here’s a handy list.

In terms of enforcement ‘Management reserves the right to refuse admission’ is perfectly fit for purpose for enforcing the policy of ‘don’t be a jerk’.

That’s essentially what we have now. It hasn’t been working very well since it doesn’t say what to do if someone is a jerk and gives staff no indication where to draw the line. This is why harassment has been dealt with in a haphazard fashion so far. A few paragraphs ago, he said the problem is guys who are socially clueless and don’t know any better. If most harassers have no idea that they are being jerks, how is this helpful? You can’t have it both ways.

…and as for what happens in the bars elsewhere I really don’t see as falling within the remit of the conference organizers.

That does not however mean that nothing can be done.  I would go for the application of ‘soft power’.  Even if it’s not the direct concern of the conference, most of these things can (and should) be effectively addressed in a quiet, mature and social way, in a way that is eminently more fit for purpose (the more so if cooler heads prevail), but that’s a story for another day.

Any policy would be soft power. It’s not like the conference organizers can beat you up or put you in jail. The threat is being kicked out of the conference and/or publicly shamed. It would be a lot easier for the staff to be fair and consistent in how they deal with alleged harassers if they had some policy. And, as I said above, attempts to deal with things quietly and unofficially haven’t worked very well.

This whole article is based on misrepresenting and avoiding opposing views and  asking us to just accept his speculation and assertions over the lived experience of quite a few women because he is apparently more rational than they. This is what we on the internet call mansplaining. It’s isn’t rational and is based in a very egocentric, rather than objective, evaluation of the evidence. This is not a good start on a blog network dedicated to rationality. There’s nothing wrong with being a middle-class straight white guy. I’m a whitish, straightish guy myself. But if he’s going to talk about social issues, he should make sure he knows what he’s talking about. Otherwise, he should stick to science, where he’s fairly good.

P.S. While I was writing this, PZ Myers also wrote on the topic.

Edit: Thunderf00t also posted to YouTube about this:

Short version, he says that you shouldn’t pick fights with other atheists because it weakens the movement, then proceeds to pick a fight with almost his entire blog network. The idea being that they are the ones causing the problem, but he’s above it all and only trying to fix things. He does his usual straw-manning and trying to conflate sexual harassment and consensual sexual behavior and takes a pot shot at Rebecca Watson.

Edit 2: Greta Christina also weighed in.

Edit 3: So did Chris Hallquist.

Edit 4: Richard Carrier is recommended reading.

I read something that made me angry, went straight to Facebook about it on the assumption I was on very solid ground. After I got questioned, I tried to dig up the evidence and realized that I was not on so solid ground as I thought. Instead of doing the sensible thing and backing off and thinking through whether the charges were really fair and if so, whether I could substantiate them, I just started out throwing whatever I could find. I asked people to take my word for it on the more serious allegations, namely that he said he didn’t mind white supremacists using Draw Mohammed Day to advance their cause and that he had made a death threat against Ali first. Others were based on things that I more read between the lines rather than things he actually said. The more trouble I had finding the videos I thought I remembered, the angrier I got. I attempted to rope other people into the argument as if having support of other people would somehow make up for not having the support of facts. I generally failed to recognize that I was angry at myself and taking it out on Thunderf00t.

The root of this is that he said some things that rubbed me the wrong way a couple of years ago and I unsubscribed. Ever since, I’ve been inclined to interpret things he says in a very uncharitable fashion. I didn’t even realize I was doing this and thought that my inferences were objectively present in what he said. I suspect this is the root of his disputes with a lot of his critics, going both ways actually. See the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. When you are dealing with people as a voice or face or string of text on the Internet, it’s very easy to ignore that the person on the other end isn’t just a font of things that piss you off and does in fact have feeling and reasons for what they do.

He would say things I disagree with and thanks to the prejudices I had formed, I would assume he was being disingenuous or bigoted rather than wrong for any number of other reasons. I also held him responsible for the behavior and beliefs of people he agreed with on some particular point.  This is especially bad and somewhat ironic, because other people reacting to what they think people are saying and throwing out accusations instead of dissections is one of my biggest pet peeves and was in fact the cornerstone of some of my criticisms of him, as was the idea of guilt by association. As they say, Hitler ate sugar. Using arguments also used by racists is not evidence of support or indifference to racism. Everyone has idiot fanboys who do embarrassing things and we all think there are people out there who make really good arguments on one topic and are way off-base on another. Failure to disown someone hardly constitutes endorsement.

I think at this point it would be useful to take another look at one of these disputes I was holding against him. This is the one I doubled down on, in fact.

This issue started with this video:

And here is HappieCabbie’s reply.

And here is Thunderf00t’s response to that reply:

After going through this again with an attempt to be objective rather than find points to use against Thunderf00t, here’s what I come up with: Some of HappieCabbie’s criticism is correct, some of Thunderf00t’s response is correct. Thunderf00t is right that most lay Christians know nothing of scholarship, so it’s pointless to bring it up for a critique that’s addressed at them. However, HappieCabbie is right that Thunderf00t’s understanding of what a shepherd does is completely out of line with what lay Christians believe. The verses he cited work their way into sermons and Sunday School all the time and those, not the modern factory farm industry, form Christian ideas about shepherds, so factory farming is just as irrelevant as what gets taught in theological seminaries. However, the second part of HappyCabbie’s critique is off-base. Christians try to have it both ways when it comes to having Jesus take care of them instead of solving their own problems. The idea that it isn’t officially doctrine isn’t entirely irrelevant, but it lay Christians often talk and believe that way and you can walk into any Christian book store and find a bunch of posters and other kitsch that implicitly endorse this idea.

So he really only knocked down one point, which weakened the overall video, but it still mostly stands. What upset me about the video is I took his claim about the needle between rationality and religion and how his critics were pushing it toward religion. I took this as a claim that atheists shouldn’t criticize other atheists in general, but in the context of what he was responding to, he is talking about some specific criticisms he saw as pedantic. I disagree with him on this point, but it’s a far cry from how I interpreted it.

In summary, yes Thunderf00t sometimes makes bad arguments and sometimes doesn’t address criticism very well. I diagree with quote a bit of what he has to say. However, in that way he’s no different from anyone else in the former, me included and no different from half the bloggers on FTB in the latter. I spend a lot of time on FTB addressing MRA arguments and the like while being careful to never interpret in anything they didn’t say. I thought I was above this sort of petty conclusion-jumping, but apparently not. I apologize to Thunderf00t and the people I drug in to the situation. I admit that I was not making a very good argument. If he says anything particularly ill-supported or ill-considered, I’ll call him on it, but will not attack him based on my opinion of him, which was mostly unfair anyway. Thank you to everyone who called me out on my own serious blunder who took the time to talk to me about it in private instead of making a public blog post about what an awful person I was.

Common reasons for disbelief include being raised that way and not really thinking about it, dislike of the social institution of church, a lack of a need to feel a greater purpose, a smug sense of superiority to believers, lack of any solid evidence for religious claims and moral objections to religious teachings. Only those last two are rational, and not necessarily even then. There’s also a great deal of diversity of belief among atheists. I’m a materialist who believes in the scientific method and reasoning to the most like explanation, as are most of prominent speakers on the atheist lecture circuit, but plenty of people don’t believe in God but do believe in karma, mind/body dualism, chakras, choprawoo, conspiracy theories and pseudo-scientific versions of racial and gender essentialism. I started thinking about this again because of this recent story, ably covered by Dan Fincke over at Camels with Hammers. Short version: a minor atheist blogger Leah Libresco has converted to Catholicism.

Before I get into why this doesn’t surprise me at all, I want to cover an interesting point about this story. Her blog gimmick is called “Unequally Yoked.” This is a reference to 2 Corinthians 6:14, which says, in the English Standard Version, “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?” Her blog gimmick was chronicling her experience as an atheist dating a Christian. The practice of dating unbelievers and trying to convert them is sometimes referred to as missionary dating. The only advice I’ve ever heard on the practice from any pastor, youth pastor, Christian advice columnist or any other semi-authoritative source is “don’t do it,” citing the verse above. Supposedly, you may think you can lead them to Christ, but in reality you are just immersing yourself in the secular world and building a life away from Jesus. This is how the devil wears you down. Also, there will be a terrible temptation to have sex, which would be horrible. If I were a Christian high-schooler who wanted to date that cute girl at school who didn’t go to church, I would definitely be telling my parents all about this case as proof that missionary dating works, albeit after they broke up in this case.

Many bloggers and net denizens have been surprised and hurt about Leah’s conversion. See the comments on the linked article for a good sampling. On one level, that’s understandable. The majority of American atheists used to be Christians. Hardly any prominent Christian spokespeople used to be atheists. C.S. Lewis (who she cites as an influence) is the only famous example that comes to mind.

Sure, they all have a story about how they used to be an atheist, but this usually only means a phase in their teens where they didn’t like going to church. People who were actually involved in the atheist movement becoming theists is very rare. The Catholic church isn’t exactly one of those harmless denominations of Christianity, either. On the other hand, I’d say her current views are no less rational than her old ones. She seems to have been one of those atheists who wasn’t religious because she wasn’t raised that way. Sure religion sounds a bit silly if you aren’t raised in it and its done plenty of things to court bad publicity, but she was never a counter-apologist or anything like that and didn’t seem to have prioritized a consistent, supportable worldview. As covered in the link above, she already believed in a supernatural dualism.

A lot of the reactions are focusing on disbelief that she actually found Catholic philosophy convincing. I think that these comments are based on several bad assumptions. Lots of Christians do believe this stuff, so it’s self-evident that the justifications are sufficient for many people. Unless she was well-versed in the problems with Catholic philosophy or psychologically averse to accepting it or committed to a particularly rigorous skepticism, I don’t see a reason why she would have to be different. She seems to have been a bit averse due to their moral teachings, but the other factors don’t apply to her at all.

Many of the comments about how horrible Christian philosophy is are referring to conservative protestant doctrine. I can see why Catholicism would seem very similar to fundamentalist protestantism to most atheists. On most of the issues where religious folks and atheists frequently clash, they are very similar. Both oppose  gay rights, abortion, reproductive rights in general, secular education, “smut” in the media and many other things near and dear to our heathen hearts. They look quite different from the inside, though. The church services, doctrines and philosophical underpinnings are all only vaguely similar. Catholics have had almost two thousand years to work out something that sounds fairly consistent. They are not Biblical literalists and in many ways, draw more on Aristotle than on the Bible for their most basic ideas. She did not have to accept creationism and the contradictions in the Bible are irrelevant. I doubt the people she talked to spent much time convincing her why birth control is bad, either.

The most important point is that this did not happen in a vacuum. She didn’t convert to Catholicism because a priest gave her a good philosophical pitch and she said, “Gee, I never thought about it that way.” Contrary to what many cradle atheists seem to assume, religion is not a set of propositions that people believe because they think there’s good evidence. What very few responses address that a lot of the groundwork was laid while she had a serious long-term relationship with a Catholic. For most of us, our beliefs are formed less by rational evaluation of evidence and more by our biases and what’s convenient to believe. We may think we have evidence, but our reasons are actually post-hoc rationalizations. If this weren’t true, we’d all be on the same page when it came to religion and politics. It’s much easier to believe than idea that’s in your interest than one contrary to your interest. Religion does a lot to make itself attractive, like giving people apparently easy answers to all the questions, which sounds like it was the main draw for her. She didn’t need so much need proof as something that met a minimum standard to allow her to think she was being rational.

Atheists are not part of a team. It’s not a worldview or a philosophical paradigm. We have nothing in common besides lacking a particular kind of belief. Leah’s new beliefs are more dangerous than her old ones, but they aren’t any less justifiable. If anything, they are slightly more. Her Catholicism has only slightly less in common with my atheism than her atheism did. While it’s not good that the Catholics gained another member, we shouldn’t be surprised that plenty of people manage to not believe in God, at least initially, without being committed to critical thinking.

P.S. WordPress spell-check tells me that “protestant” is not a proper noun, but “protestantism” is. I am assuming this is incorrect.

edited to fix a major factual error (I somehow missed that she broke up with her boyfriend) and some writing-style issues.

I fell out of the habit of posting daily in the finals crunch and it’s hard to get back on the horse, as has happened before, something finally got me angry enough that I had to wrote about it. I feel behind on reading FreethoughtBlogs, so just realized this, even though it was announced a week ago, but Thunderf00t is joining the network. I have a problem with this: namely that Thunderf00t is a xenophobe and a tribalist who cares more about winning arguments and congratulating his audience on how they are so much more clever than whoever he’s pwning than being right or effecting any sort of positive change. To this end, he is not above quote-mining, bullying or much of anything else. Also, he has a martyr complex where he can’t shut up about how brave he is to keep speaking the truth in the face of all these death threats. I’m not accusing anyone of endorsing any of this. Despite all this, he has made a lot of good science videos that manage to be very funny while either teaching important stuff about science or tearing down bad anti-scientific arguments. I subscribed to his channel for several years. I can see why someone would think he was a good fit if they didn’t dig deep into his archives. To be clear: the problem isn’t that I disagree with him on some issues. I disagree with everyone there occasionally. The issue is that his positions and tactics are contrary to the goals of the site. Evidence is below the fold. Keep in mind that he operates on YouTube. I’m talking about a period of several years and can’t just do a Google search for phrases and pull things up. Videos have a tendency to go down the memory hole there either because the poster didn’t like how they were received and deleted them or a bunch of people false-flagged it for offensive content and YouTube deleted it. Many things he said are gone or have no good way to find them. There’s enough left to make a good case, though.

I should point out first that this has come up before. If you follow Internet atheist blogging at all, you probably remember TJ Kincaid, aka TheAmazingAtheist flaming out rather spectacularly in February when he argued that post-traumatic stress disorder and triggering are fictions and that people who want trigger warning are just whiners. To illustrate this point, he threatened to rape a rape victim. He had some defenders pop up as always happens, but the blogosphere pretty much washed their hands of him. I was pissed. When I say I was pissed, I mean that I was pretty much unable to work on anything else for several days and missed time with my girlfriend because I was busy on the Internets. This wasn’t the worst thing he’d done, just the latest. More than two years earlier, he had made a video mocking a young creationist woman where he essentially said that she was a bimbo and she should stop talking because her mouth was only good for sucking dick. Laci Green, another YouTube atheist, made a video calling him out on this so he made a follow-up accusing her of pretending to be upset and showing cleavage in order to manipulate her audience. Guys would see it and feel protective of her and not listen to her arguments. There was a bit of other slut-shaming mixed in. TJ had been a bully and a misogynist for years and was the most popular YouTube atheist by a large margin and was probably the only person to make enough money at it to do it professionally. He had hundreds of thousands of subscribers who ate this stuff up. I brought this up in the Pharyngula thread dedicated to TJ’s melt down. I said that TJ was not an obscure guy. If he wasn’t the official face of atheism on the Internet, he was pretty close. This behavior was not new. This was typical for him.  Everyone seemed willing to ignore it until the latest blow-up, where he notably went after an atheist, not some creationist with a few dozen subscribers. This led to an argument in the comments. The general assessment was that YouTube was a sewer and the Pharyngula readership hadn’t criticized him because they were only vaguely familiar with him. His subscriber base had very little overlap with the written blogs and certainly not with the social-justice oriented ones like Pharygula. It isn’t their job to seek out every atheist jack ass and condemn him, even if he may be popular in some sense. After I calmed down, I had to admit they were right. Lots of fishing through the discussion archive turned up very little mention of him. He really had flown below the radar of polite society until this point. So what does this have to do with Thunderf00t?

Look through the comments in the linked thread. Thunderf00t is brought up as exhibit C of how YouTube is a sewer, full of people more interested in posturing, pwning and epeen than making good arguments or promoting some rational cause. (Exhibit B was Pat Condell.) The most positive thing anyone had to say about Thunderf00t in that thread was that he was on the low-end of informational science videos as opposed to be completely worthless and that he wasn’t as bad as TheAmazingAtheist or Pat Condell. I would like to call special attention to what jijoya said on comment 1226:

Speaking of the YT atheist community, Thunderfoot has given me yet another reason to regret ever subscribing to him. He favorited a video by some guy bashing Coughlan’s input on TJ-gate (because TF hates Coughlan). However, to this day I’ve yet to see him utter a word or like / favorite a video dealing with the actual subject matter. Once again, it seems that militant misogyny displayed by one of the YT atheist icons clearly isn’t all that important (compared to petty personal grudges, for example), so a comment from the other YT icons isn’t really required.

So in this major blow-up where most people on FTB condemned TJ as generally reprehensible, Thunderf00t passive-aggressively supported him. Why? Because Richard Coughlan was criticizing TJ and Thunderf00t has a grudge against him for previously criticizing him. IIRC, that situation started with this video:

Most of you are likely already familiar with the alleged ground-zero mosque, but in case you aren’t,suffice to say that video is just uncritical recitation of right-wing propaganda that mostly originated with Pamela Geller. It’s a mixture of lies and spin with zero unvarnished truth. The site isn’t ground zero, but several blocks away. It isn’t a mosque, but a Muslim community outreach center. The people behind it have nothing to do with terrorism and are the sort of Muslims that participate in interfaith dialogues and are generally more tolerant than your average Southern Baptist. This isn’t to say they are harmless, no religious group is, but they are definitely not militants or fundies. This is a serious category error. These people had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks and are in fact wanted to build this partially to have  positive image of Islam in the neighborhood and not let a couple dozen assholes they didn’t know define who they were.

The next big blow-up was about death threats from Ali aka Dawah Films. Pharyngula covered it here. This article only covers Thunderf00t’s account. Ali shows up in the comments, but he’s no more objective than Thunderf00t and doesn’t do himself much good. This is one of those cases where the original videos have been deleted, so you may have to trust me on this. Ali is a Muslim apologist. He got in an argument with Thunderf00t about something. I had already unsubscribed him at this point, so only found out when other channels picked it up. It ended up with Thunderf00t responded to a claim about the great accomplishments of Islam by saying that Islam only survives  because the West allows it. Ali responded that if anyone tries to kill innocent people, Muslim or non-Muslim, Muslims will rise up and kill the invaders as the Koran commands. Thunderf00t edited this clip to remove the part that made it clear he was talking about a hypothetical self-defense situation and made a video about how a “moderate Muslim” was giving him death threats, but he wouldn’t be intimidated and would keep speaking the truth even if it cost him his life. This was part of his usual schtick. He would take any example he could find of Muslims threatening violence and then use it as an example of how “moderates” support violence. He also did a lot with the “Why won’t moderate Muslims condemn violence?” meme. If you are unfamiliar with this, plenty have condemned violence, but guys like Thunderf00t just go on pretending it didn’t happen. Ali, instead of doing anything sensible at this point, obtained Thunderf00t’s personal information and tried to get him fired. He rounded up some support at this point. To be fair, I don’t think he intended the original video as a threat, just as cultural dick-waving, but I can see how Ali took it that way. Ali’s behavior was indefensible, but that doesn’t excuse anything Thunderf00t did, especially since he was quote-mining the guy before he did anything wrong. He caught a lot of flack for this from other YouTubers, which led to the following videos:

To summarize: anyone who criticizes him is saying what Ali did is OK. He is an Internet doctor who can speculate about what mental illnesses people have and then discredit them for said illnesses, despite all his hammering creationists for basing conclusions on scant evidence and leaps of logic and trying to weigh in on fields in which they are not qualified. Anyone who’s ever taken drugs is not credible, even once they beat the habit. Of course, he only insinuates these things instead of directly saying them for the most part, so he can claim he has been wronged if someone criticizes him for what he said. (I should also point out he picked a video of Coughlan from a year or so earlier unrelated to the dispute the were having and called him emotionally unstable for crying about something that would have reduced any man to tears. So we have more quote-mining mixed with some gender-normative shaming for emotional displays.) Perhaps the worst point is the second video, where he argues that atheists should never speak out against other atheists, even when they are wrong, because it’s important to keep a united front. This is terribly ironic since he constantly condemned Muslims for not speaking out against other Muslims. Also, he was saying this to criticize several other users for calling out his dishonest tactics and questioning the validity of his guilt-by-association arguments. And he took his title from the Bible.

Oh, and Muslim countries suck because they don’t do publish enough scientific research. I’m sure that Islam does have effects that restrict scientific inquiry, especially when it comes to evolution, but he doesn’t show any evidence of this. He just says that correlation equals causation and ignores that the non-Muslim countries used in his comparison are quite a bit richer than the Muslim ones, which is a far more likely explanation.

Plus there’s the issue of him censoring any entries into the Draw Mohammed Day contest that made fun of him instead of just Mohammed. I agree with basically everything in the following series, which includes a lot of responses explaining things that happened in the videos which disappeared:

If Freethought Blogs wants some good vloggers who can put out a steady volume, I would suggest Laci Green or Divinty33372 or really any of the people featured in the above videos. The bottom line: PZ told me when I got upset about TheAmazingAtheist that the guy was not part of the community. The mainstream blogs didn’t link him and didn’t invite him to the major conferences. As I pointed out at the time, Thunderf00t was being invited to conferences. Now, he’s on the verge of being promoted by one of the biggest blog networks. This time, you can do something. You do not want this guy to be a spokesperson for you. I am a rationalist first, a liberal second and an atheist third. I am an atheist because it is reasonable and because religion has terrible social effects. I am not a member of any team and won’t give a pass for bad reasoning and bigotry just because they are being used to support a position that I hold. Thunderf00t has done a lot of good work, but all rationality or honesty goes out the window when he has a point to score against religion or his ego is on the line.

Earlier this year, I decided not to apply for an opening at Rewind (after spending several hours developing a review of Sucker Punch that fit their format) because I don’t think that my TV is good enough for me to accurately judge picture quality. Once I get regular income, I’ll drop $2,000 or so on a decent TV and this will no longer be a concern. Of course, I also won’t have as much time to write.

One of the main issues is I am not really a slave to the release schedule. I am generally watching things that came out years ago. Most demand is for new releases. People who write for websites tend to get free releases from the studios, but I wonder about deadlines. For instance, Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series hit Blu-ray a while back. It’s seventy-three episodes, a miniseries, two movies and a couple collections of webisodes. The majority of episodes have an audio commentary and deleted scenes, plus there are various other special features. In total, there’s about one hundred hours of material. When a reviewer receives such a set in the mail, how long much time do the have to write the review? How much do they get paid. Granted, it’s Battlestar Galactica, so a low hourly rate may be acceptable, but reviewers are also expected to watch a lot of shitty shows and movies.

Sometime in the next few weeks, I should be finishing both Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek. I think that when I’m done, I’ll write in depth looks at the Blu-ray releases of both and something about how the sci-fi genre has changed over the last few decades. I mat endeavor to write about every movie I watch from now on as well. In the meantime, I’ve become active on TV Tropes. I think I’ll write about that experience once I’ve done more actual editing. Right now, my experience is mostly in arguing in the trope repair shop.

Plus, I still have a family event thing to write about. I’ll start that with a question for the readers: How old do you have to be before people stop insinuating that you don’t understand because you’re too young and eventually, you’ll agree with them?

P.S. Is there some way to find posts that Facebook did not see fit to preserve on timeline? There’s some stuff there I’d like to find.

Fussell’s Thank God for the Atomic Bomb rests on a number of premises, some of which are explicit and some of which are implicit. These are as follows: utilitarianism, or something like it, is a valid basis for determining whether a decision was correct. That is, the rightness of a decision depends more on its results than abstract duties. The probable result of not dropping the bomb would have been far worse than what came of dropping it. People directly affected by an issue should be given special consideration because for them, the decision is real, not just an abstraction. The American soldiers who were likely to die in an invasion thus have more authority on the subject of the bomb than those who were safely unborn at the time or on the mainland. On the more concrete level, the atomic bomb was the least-worst way to make Japan surrender and it did, in fact, cause Japan to surrender. I can understand his general approach here and I made a presentation for a history competition when I was in seventh grade based on similar arguments. The director of my school’s extended learning program questioned whether the mass killing of several hundred thousand people could really be called good, rather than regrettable at best. Over the years, my position has changed as I thought these matters through. I came to realize that even if we grant Fussell’s framework for how to determine a correct decision (moral philosophy is outside the scope of this paper) many parts of his argument do not hold up.

Most of Fussell’s weaknesses come down to what he proclaims as a strength: his personal involvement in the subject. He was one of the American soldiers he frequently mentions likely would have been killed in an invasion of Japan. (Fussell, 218) While this gives him certain insights, though not into the politics of World-War-II Japan, and explains why he “thanks God for the atomic bomb,” it also gives him a rather narrow perspective. This most obviously affects his argument that opponents of the nuclear attack lack credibility because they were never in danger and are only looking at the question theoretically. There are several ways to turn his premises against his conclusion.

If Fussell can argue that it’s easy to argue that it’s easy to argue dropping the atomic bomb was wrong when you and your family aren’t going to die in an invasion of Japan, (Fussell, 212) then surely a Japanese person can argue that it’s easy to say the bomb should have been dropped when it wasn’t dropped on you. If the American soldiers get special standing in this debate because they theoretically could have died, what about the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of whom actually did die? He does address this to some degree, acknowledging the horrors of the bombing, but his comparison to the other horrors of the war doesn’t really support his argument. (Fussell, 220) It merely shows that neither of the scenarios he lays out could be considered good.

Fussell’s reasoning also does not apply to the rest of the Japanese population. He discusses the brutality of the war on both sides at some length to make the point of how gruesome the alternative he posits, ground invasion of Japan, would have been. However, this means the Japanese soldiers (and, as he points out, civilians) who would have died in an Allied invasion were also saved by Japan’s surrender. In fact, even more Japanese would have died than Allies as the Allies were surely going to win in an invasion scenario as well, albeit at a much heavier price. Therefore, if his reasoning holds up, Japanese, or at least those in the areas that would have been invaded, should be even more supportive of the atomic bomb than he is. This is clearly not the case. Clearly, there are other factors at work which he never addresses and this whole line of reasoning falls apart when scrutinized.

A lot of the problem here is that Fussell is making what is known as a “weak-man argument.” This is a variation on a straw-man argument where one selects an opponent’s weakest arguments and rebuts them, but ignores many significant opposing views in the process. By stereotyping people opposed to the bomb as essentially ivory-tower upper-class liberals who think Truman and his cohorts were evil, he not only ignores Japanese people, but people like my teacher who thought Truman acted in good faith, but did not make the least-worst decision. (Fussell, 220-221) This also contains shades of ad hominem tactics as it portrays his opponents as judgmental, impractical and unserious. This focus on people’s motives and character steers discussion away from the facts.

Fussell glosses over a lot of theoretical objections. He argues the residents of Hiroshima had fair warning the city was going to be obliterated, but few left, but doesn’t address why this might be. (Fussell, 219) Propaganda was common and people exposed to the leafleting had little reason to believe them. Hasegawa explains warnings were common with conventional bombs, which while quite destructive, certainly did not obliterate a city. (Hasegawa, 121) Besides, this still leaves Nagasaki bombed without warning and all of this is begging the question over whether giving advance warning is actually relevant. If the atomic bomb were not justified, would warning people first change this at all?

Any question about whether a course of action was justified raises the question “as opposed to what?” Fussell’s argument is heavily based on the idea that Japan surrendered because of the atomic bomb and the only plausible alternative was an allied ground invasion, which would have been much worse. Even if we assume the first point, as he seems to have done, were these really the only options? I’ll assume we are only talking about 1945 as questioning the U.S.’s earlier behavior brings up a lot of issues not directly related to the atomic bomb. He quotes Alsop to make this “bloodbath or bomb” argument on the basis that War Minister Anami was opposed to surrender under any circumstances. He dismisses Javorsky’s view not because Javorsky’s evidence or reasoning are faulty, indeed, he barely indicates what Javorsky’s reasoning even is, but because he’s a college professor and a theoretician and thus less qualified than Alsop, who was there on the ground. (Fussell, 215-216) However, this has the same problems as Fussell’s experience. Fussell is arguing against a worldview and a caricature, not specific claims. While this episode explains Alsop’s feelings on the matter and perhaps gives him some expertise on the conditions in Japanese prisoner of war camps, it isn’t clear how this relates to the issue at hand, which is what Japan would have done if it were not bombed. It is not as if Alsop spent his time in captivity with Anami. Anami’s opinion is only relevant if he were in a position to actually declare surrender or was representative of the people who were and the atomic bomb caused him to change his mind. Neither is true. Anami was only one of six people on the war council. Not only is Fussell attributing more influence to Anami than he actually had, Anami still did not give up after the bombs were dropped and was involved in an unsuccessful coup to prevent Japan from surrendering even then. One could just as easily cite Togo, who had wanted to surrender earlier. (Hasegawa, 113) This part of the argument essentially depends on a lot of extrapolation from one man who doesn’t even fit the hypothesis himself. Indeed, if the Japanese were really hardened to fight to the last man, why would a few hundred thousand civilian deaths, which would have happened in a few months anyway, make a difference? In fact, Hasegawa argues Japanese leadership was not so much concerned with preserving civilians as the office of the emperor. (Hasegawa, 116) Had the U.S. stuck with the original proposal of the Potsdam Proclamation and guaranteed Japan could retain their monarchy in some form, Japan would have been able to save face and perhaps much more willing to surrender. (Hasegawa, 117) This concession would have been essentially symbolic and cost the Allies nothing tangible. Instead, Fussell treats surrender as a singular idea, with no nuance as to the different forms it could have taken.

Perhaps the biggest failing of Fussell’s hypothetical situation is that he imagines the war to only be between the U.S., Britain and Japan and bases all his scenarios on what the Allies could have done to make Japan surrender. He completely ignores the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union attacked Manchuria three days after the Hiroshima bomb was dropped. The U.S. knew about the impending attack and Russia stepped up their timetable due to the bombings. (Hasegawa, 110) The assumptions the invasion was planned other no longer held. Bomb or no bomb, it wouldn’t have happened the way Fussell posits.

With the Soviet Union in the Eastern War, Japan was fighting on three fronts: the Soviets, the U.S. and British forces, and the Chinese, who had never really been pacified (and who are also essentially ignored by Fussell). Japan had no real hope of winning before and this only made their situation worse. Japan was now not only in danger of losing their new colonies, but parts of Japan as well. The choice was no longer between surrendering or holding out in hopes of better terms, but surrendering to the U.S. and Britain right away, or waiting and having to cede large amounts of territory to the Soviets as well. The end of the Western War made it clear that Japan was better off surrendering to the U.S. This of course presumes the Japanese would react rationally, but so would any surrender scenario. Fussell accepts the Japanese would surrender in a clearly hopeless situation, but does not weigh the bomb against this also bleak alternative which would have killed far fewer people. In fact, we do not have to presume this, because we have record of what the War Council discussed before making the decision to surrender, and it was the Soviets, not the atomic bomb. (Hasegawa, 116) Thus, the Soviet invasion, which would have happened within a few days regardless of atomic bombs, was the real impetus for Japan’s surrender.

Finally, despite Fussell’s bluster about “canting,” we can’t know for sure what would have happened and it’s a rare scenario where his confidence would be justified. I would argue that advancing it is definitely justifiable to kill about two hundred thousand people based on suppositions about the alternatives is itself a rather undiluted form of canting, especially when one uses one’s own self interest as a criterion, and bases the argument on a few unsupported assumptions and a few poorly supported ones while failing to address realistic alternatives. In short, while it is impossible to show conclusively whether Truman made the right decision in dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I believe the evidence points to know. If there is a good alternative argument, Fussell didn’t make it, rather he mostly strung together a series of logical fallacies while barely even addressing the evidence.

As of the 1880 census, only nine U.S. cities had more than five hundred Chinese residents, and five of those were in California.[1] California itself held nearly three quarters of the U.S.’s Chinese population. Oregon and Nevada were the only other states where Chinese made up more than one percent of the residents. Overall, Chinese made up less than one quarter of one percent of the total U.S. population.[2] As they were relative few and geographically concentrated, very few Americans had even met a Chinese person, much less been in danger of losing their job to one. Despite this, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 passed with broad national support. It banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S., ostensibly to protect American wages. Anti-Chinese sentiment continued for decades after this, leading to the Geary Act of 1892, which was extended indefinitely in 1902.[3] With fresh immigration very limited, the Chinese population naturally dwindled. As of the 1930 Census, only about six one-hundredths of a percent of the U.S. population was Chinese, yet the restrictions were not eased for decades more.[4]

If Chinese posed no threat to most Americans, why were they concerned about the “Chinese problem”? For the vast majority of whites, their knowledge about Chinese people and culture came entirely from the emerging popular culture and mass media. While most portrayals were heavily stereotyped, no single white American view of Chinese emerged. While the images are varied and contradictory, they are consistent in that the Chinese are inscrutably foreign. Chinese are portrayed as fundamentally dissimilar to whites, with culture, motivations and emotions so indelibly different whites can never fully understand them.

In many stories, the Chinese were not treated as discreet individuals, but a countless multitude with only a group identity. While relatively few Chinese actually immigrated to the U.S., Americans were quite aware of China’s very large population and feared whites being overrun and outnumbered by mass migration. This may have been rooted in memories of the Mongols’ short-lived domination of Europe.[5] While newspapers depicted the influx of Chinese immigrants as a hyperbolic invasion, several fiction writers chose to treat the topic very literally. Near-future tales where China’s military conquered the U.S. with the help of American Chinese were a subgenre of sorts at the end of the 1800s.[6] Robert W. Chambers wrote a more fantastic story in a similar vein in 1896, with the Chinese represented by a plague of strange yellow crabs led by a mystical Chinese man.[7] These are among the most negative portrayals of Chinese. The Chinese are not individual characters. They show no sign of individual history, nor even independent thought. They merely act in uncanny concert. It was this genre that popularized the “yellow peril,” the idea that Asians were a threat to the very existence of Western society.[8] To borrow a phrase from one of the genre’s authors, Robert Woltor, they are not actually characters at all but an “Asiatic swarm.” Woltor goes on to explain that while Chinese can be injured and killed, they do not react to this and are apparently impervious to pain.[9] They are, in many respects, as alien as Chambers’ rampaging, devouring crabs. They are not given personalities, cultures, motivations or any other human characteristics, much less sympathetic ones.

Chinatowns of popular fiction were mysterious and secretive enclaves; everyone was a criminal and conspiracies were the only real relationships. Real Chinatowns were initially developed as a defense against whites after exclusion.[10] Immigration continued through legally dubious means, and exposure would have meant deportation for many residents, so Chinese society would have, in fact, seemed impenetrable to an outsider.[11] Beyond police racism, this is the main reason law enforcement rarely got involved in Chinatowns before the turn of the century. Relatively few people were actually involved in criminal conspiracies. Many writers of the time were aware the Chinese were not a single, monolithic group, though this was frequently limited to the concept of warring criminal organizations. Tongs, or secret societies, were quite real and ran, or collected protection money from, the various illegal businesses such as casinos, brothels and opium dens that sprung up in the police-free environment and form the background of so many Chinatown crime stories.[12] This made the tongs a substitute for an actual police force. Most residents were at their mercy, not on the take. The presentation of these genuine issues in most popular crime-fiction was, at best, highly fanciful.

Writers frequently treated Chinatowns as if they were transplanted pieces of China rather than parts of the U.S. created by American political and economic circumstances. Despite what numerous stories assumed, the tongs were not Chinese secret societies, but rather American secret societies vaguely modeled on cultural antecedents. Authors also frequently confused these criminal organizations with the Six Companies, which were civic organizations formed largely to fight exclusion policy, and linguistic groups like See Yup and Sam Yup.[13] Essentially, these portrayals made crime seem a far more central part of Chinatown than it actually was and, by divorcing it from its cultural and historical context, made it a Chinese problem rather than an American one. The fact that a substantial portion of illegal businesses were owned and patronized by whites usually did not come up.[14] This image also persisted long beyond when it had any validity. While Chinatowns were often dangerous at the turn of the century, most were cleaned up over the next ten years or so as tourism became more profitable than vice. They did not clean up in fiction, though. As of the late 1920s, their depictions in crime-thrillers were essentially unchanged, even though Chinatowns had long since moved from brothels to restaurants.[15]

The inhabitants of these fictional Chinatowns did not exhibit typical white social mores, nor did they form families. Their relationships to women and children were defined through distortions of the familiar family bonds: slavery, prostitution, kidnapping and rape.  The prostitution narratives tended to focus on the idea of ruthless Chinese men exploiting innocent Chinese slave-girls, ignoring the fact that many prostitutes and customers were white, most of the sex workers were not slaves, and the social context in which all this happened.[16] Namely, there was a severe shortage of Chinese women in the U.S. As with many immigrant groups, Chinese men initially largely came to the U.S. on their own with the idea of making their fortune, then returning home or bringing over a wife. However, the Chinese Exclusion Act disrupted normal immigration patterns. Many men were left in the U.S. with no way to bring a woman in from China and the vast majority of states had anti-miscegenation laws, preventing Chinese men from marrying white women even if they found a willing partner. Ironically, crackdowns on Chinese women immigrating were promoted as a way to stop the influx of prostitutes.[17] The actual effect was to ensure what few Chinese women were in the U.S. were presumed to be prostitutes and treated as such and until sex ratios evened out naturally over the next generation or so after exclusion, Chinese men in the U.S. were condemned to be permanent bachelors with no sexual outlet outside prostitution. It also greatly limited natural growth in the Chinese, leading to massive population declines, which was presumably the intent.[18]

Opium and opium addicts were central to lurid Chinatown tales. While opium had originally been foisted on China by the West, it became heavily associated with the Chinese and Chinatowns in the U.S.[19] Portrayals varied in fiction, from part of the background of the setting to sensationalist stories about the drug’s potential to corrupt.[20] Generally speaking, though, opium use was normal for Chinese, or at least consistent with their characters, but tragic or dangerous for whites. At least one story went so far as to posit that Chinese were immune to opium’s effects.[21]

In Achmed Abdullah’s “A Simple Act of Piety,” the main character is written entirely without empathy or any sort of identifiable emotional response. Nag Hong Fah is not a career criminal. He has a family and a successful restaurant. These do not prevent him from committing cold-blooded murder, however. The narrator tells us Fah neither liked nor disliked the victim. He looks back on the murder with regret, but apparently not shame. Covering up an affair and protecting his family honor were sufficient motive. He is quite clever in his execution and has an apparent knack for treachery and cunning. In Abdullah’s version of New York’s Chinatown, Nag can speak about this openly, making the entire community complicit. To the Chinese in this story, murder is unremarkable and opium is used as casually as coffee.[22]

Taken as whole, the Chinese men in popular fiction of the half century from 1880 to 1930 seem to have no compunctions about committing any crime. Not only are they addicted to vice, they are prone to theft and will commit violence over the pettiest of causes. They are too ugly to attract women, so will resort to kidnapping and rape in order to posses them. Both white and Chinese women are vulnerable.[23] They completely lack empathy and thus have nothing to hold them back except their cowardice. An 1899 American political cartoon captured this view. It shows a short Chinese man with a torch in one hand, a gun in the other and a knife in his teeth. His queue rises up like a snake behind him. A woman lies apparently dead by his feet as a house burns in the background. The caption reads “The yellow terror in all his glory.”[24] This cartoon distills most of the anti-Chinese ideas into a single panel. The character is a threat to womanhood and civilization. He is ugly and violent and resembles an ape more than a man.

L. Warren Wigmore’s “The Revenge of Ching Chow,” from 1924, tells the story of a rather pathetic villain who also showcases almost every Chinese criminal stereotype. The titular Ching Chow is an opium addict and envies a local merchant for his slave girl. He plans to kidnap her, but is foiled when a missionary lady leads an anti-slavery raid. He plans revenge on the woman, who doesn’t seem to even know he exists. He does not confront her directly, but sets an elaborate trap, which he accidentally falls into himself and is killed.[25] The prostitute, Purple Dawn, never actually does anything. She exists only as a plot point in the conflict between two evil Chinese men and a heroic white missionary. Ching Chow himself is not only one-dimensionally evil, he is described as repulsive and dies because he is petty and stupid.

Dr. Fu Manchu, who first appeared in 1913, is another imagining of the “yellow peril”: more sophisticated than the thugs of other stories and all the more dangerous for it. He was not portrayed as an overt sexual threat, but an evil genius who the novels frequent compare to Satan in his malevolence and brilliance. Manchu was portrayed as a master criminal whose plans for assassinations and world-domination incorporate exotic Asian elements.[26] The Fu Manchu stories have a different focus than their contemporaries in the genre, possibly due to their British origins, though the books were also popular in the U.S. The Doctor’s clashes with white heroes recast the territorial struggles of the day as battles for racial dominance.[27] Unlike the swarms or common criminals of other stories, who represent white fears of being out-bred and losing control of the land itself, Fu Manchu embodies a fear that whites will lose political control and be outsmarted and out-developed. In this way, he was a challenge to the racial hierarchy. While Dr. Manchu lost in each encounter, he always survived for the next book, reminding readers the white race’s place shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Not all media portrayals of Chinese were negative, but many positive characters were scarcely closer to real people. Chinese characters in a comedy could be bowdlerized versions of the negative stereotypes, with their criminality essentially demoted to harmless vice.[28] In fact, while negative portrayals focused on Chinese men’s sexualized destructive power, good Chinese were rendered essentially impotent in order to be non-threatening.[29] Positive portrayals actually grew quite a bit in the period from 1880 to 1920, but mostly focused on loyal domestic servants. These characters were generally no more elaborately drawn than their villainous counterparts and existed mainly as props in object lessons about being kind to lesser races.[30] The racial hierarchy was therefore not disturbed and, much like the villainous Chinese characters, their moral worth was ultimately measured by their usefulness to the white characters. Interracial romances frequently appeared, but were assumed from the outset to be doomed, if not pathetic. The white party usually did not reciprocate and they typically ended with tragic death through suicide or heroic sacrifice.[31]

Broken Blossoms, released in 1919, was intended as an anti-racist film, but in many ways is still based on a “yellow peril” worldview. The protagonist, Cheng Huan, is rarely referred to by name. The titles call him “the yellow man,” defining a potentially complex character entirely in terms of race. In the story’s central conflict, Cheng attempts to shelter a white teenage girl, Lucy, from her abusive father, a boxer known as Battling Burroughs. Cheng is a Buddhist missionary, which is treated unusually positively. In contrast to the violent, impulsive Burroughs, he is peaceful and reserved. While Cheng smokes opium, this is treated sympathetically as a symptom of his loneliness. However, he still has the potential to be frightening. In a scene where Cheng has Lucy on his bed in his room above his shop, he apparently has to restrain himself from raping her, though his better side does triumph and the title cards assure us his love is chaste.  Despite brief bursts of fearsome masculinity, he is generally shot in soft focus, much like the women are, effectively emasculating him. While Cheng is portrayed heroically, this does not carry over to the other Chinese characters. Evil-eye, the Chinese secondary villain of the story, is an embodiment of all the Chinatown criminal stereotypes. He’s violent, petty, devious, vengeful and implied to be a sexual predator. Both he and Cheng are played by white actors in yellow-face. Actual Chinese actors are limited to background roles, diminishing the on-screen value of Chinese people even as the story argues for their equality. In the end, Cheng is unable to save Lucy from Burroughs and commits ritual suicide, basically affirming that his relationship with Lucy was doomed from the start. The audience is meant to be sad Cheng didn’t succeed, but not to seriously consider the idea that he could or should have had a happy ending.[32]

Charlie Chan is a much less tragic Chinese protagonist, but also quite inscrutable. First introduced in 1925, Charlie Chan is a police detective who never fails to get his man. In some ways, he does challenge dominant racial ideas. Unlike any of my other examples, he not only works in a “white” job, but is incredibly talented. However, this threat is minimized because Chan is also an over-the-top comical stereotype. He is effeminate, clumsy, ludicrously deferential and speaks mangled English. The stories are set in Hawaii, which was not yet a state, so Chan’s power stayed comfortably distant from familiar American life. Chan’s creator, Earl Derr Biggers, chose this setting because it was the only place in the U.S. where Chan could plausibly be on the police force.[33] Chan traditionally closed each case with an ancient Chinese saying, which served the idea that China was a fascinating, though mysterious and foreign land. In many ways, this was just a new variant on the old tradition of the eccentric detective, with Chineseness itself being a sort of eccentricity. While Chan ultimately worked for a white boss, his oddness did not prevent him from besting racist criminals.

Meanwhile, an alternative version of Chinese culture was being promoted by Chinese themselves through Chinese restaurants. Chinese-Americans restaurateurs had been trying to market to whites for years, but were rejected because the food was too unfamiliar and reputed to contain rats and other unpalatables.[34] Chop suey was developed in the mid 1890s in San Francisco and soon caught on, having spread well outside the traditional Chinatowns by the 1920s. Entrepreneurs found many ways to alter and present Chinese culture to appeal to Americans, despite anti-Chinese biases.[35] They essentially embraced their reputation for inscrutability and designed restaurant décor around fantastic and foreign themes, with paper lanterns, pointy temples and dragons in abundance.[36] Food presentation was adapted to European standards, with meat being cut into small pieces rather than being left as identifiable heads and limbs. Chop suey itself was not really a Chinese dish at all, just a hash of inexpensive ingredients with soy sauce and bean sprouts included to give it uniquely Chinese features. Fortune cookies are one of the best examples of this phenomenon. They were invented by Chinese American restaurateurs based on a Japanese cracker, then given a false Chinese history and faux-Chinese sayings similar to Chan’s proverbs, which seemed wiser for their secrecy.[37] They did not come from real China, but rather the China Americans wanted and expected. China had been presented in the media as exotic and forbidden and restaurants were a relatively safe way to sample this world. It essentially mediated cultural contact through consumerism and placed the Chinese cooks and servers in servile roles, meaning white customers could feel they were in control of the whole experience..

Americans removed from direct contact with Chinese saw many ideas were exposed to many visions of Chinese men through the popular culture. They could be threatening or comical, clever or foolish, gamblers or chefs, master criminals or master detectives. Women, on the other hand, could pretty much only be prostitutes. One thing neither men nor women could be was ordinary people. While Chinese were sometimes portrayed as useful or even noble, they were not seen as a potential part of American society, even though they already were by any reasonable measure. It is a small wonder then that most Americans, who may have been eating chow mein and reading Charlie Chan books on a regular basis, were still not open to the idea that Chinese could actually become Americans themselves.