EdgePenguin wrote:VickyCaramel wrote:Thanks guys. There has been plenty of mentions of A+ being dead in the water, but it occured to me, the only sign of it I have seen is that forum. The celebrites and 'leaders' of our movement were really talking it up at one point. I wasn't even sure that the A+ forum was the official forum... for anything official?
On it's face it was a bad idea, but those of us who were aware of what kind of people were behind it, and what kind of people would subscribe pretty much predicted a disaster. That it has become such a disaster in such a small space of time... and such a monument to feminist idiocy, is something that gives me cause for optomism.
I'm happy!
sKepptiksowat ~ There is a link in my signature to a pic.
Nothings official in A+, which is why I was able to create an A+ spoof account and people were convinced it was official for a long time. It has the same problem as the Occupy movement - their aspiration to reject power structures in practice leads to them being spoken for by the first person to speak up.
Occupy was a bad joke. I basically equated it to being like the left wing version of a Tea Party rally, as all you had to do was replace the country music with people banging on buckets, and replace the dudes wearing rifles with dreadlocked white folks playing hackey-sack. But the comparison was really noted in the fact that these movements both were unclear in goals. They seemed like nothing more than just a bunch of people trying to say they were mad about...um...well Tea Partiers just didn't like the brown skinned guy who won the election (of course they wouldn't admit that was the REAL issue they had) and Occupy seemed to be mad about the corporatism present in US politics, but they never were bright enough to be specific and it was just like some hippie "the system, it sucks, man..." statement.
In the end, both Tea Parties and Occupy are just like the Atheism Plus thing. You have a crowd of people who initially start the thing who are very unclear about what it is they're trying to do. "Social justice" you say? Well what exactly is social justice? Well it's anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia/transphobia etc. OK, that's all fine and good, but we already have organizations that are long established, well organized and well funded with connections to actually get shit done in our society that address these issues, so what exactly is A+ going to do?
Well, it was clear from the start they didn't even know what the hell their little social justice movement was going to do. Jen McCreight says it's the beginning of "third wave atheism", which to me was auto-fail because my atheism informs NOTHING about my stance on civil rights. The fact that I see no evidence for a divine hand in the universe does jack shit to my views on whether blacks, latinos, asians and whites, men and women (and all variants between) and straight and gay people should be treated with the same level of rights and responsibilities in society. So now we have this so-called "third wave atheism", as defined by FTB, give us the Richard "Cheney" Carrier manifesto: you are either with us or against us, if you are an atheist that isn't a "c.h.u.d." (still don't know what the fuck that is) then you join or get removed because you're a douchebag. OK, so Atheism Plus is third wave atheism and a movement for all atheists, even if you guys are being a bit dickish about it. I think I got it...
WRONG! Then we have the A+ forums, which were seemingly designed to be a shelter for seriously damaged people who are overly needy, who practically define themselves with badges of oppression, and who seem to delight in ironically trying to twist anyone who disagrees with them into an other, a boogeyman who they can then marginalize and pick on. Now the funny part is in the early days all the FTB leaders and defenders of A+ were actively promoting the forums and saying that this was the place to go to organize and whatnot, and over time as people pointed out the Lord of the Flies nature of the place, then they were saying that the forums were not indicative of A+, that A+ was a social movement and the forums were a safe haven for oppressed minority groups. Well make up your minds FFS. But then again, these people would actually have to read the forums and understand the level of batshit crazy, and none of them do or did, even as they banged the A+ drum.
So now we have A+ as it stands today. There's a forum on activity life support, most likely due to the nature of oppressive groupthink and heavy handed moderation, there's logos on PZ's and Greta's blogs, even though neither of them has really pushed the idea of A+ much in months, there's people like Matt Dillahunty who seem to continue to defend A+ with a bit of Stockholm Syndrome, even after his firsthand experience in the asylum, and then you have Richard Cheney, I mean Carrier, who pops up out of nowhere after months of silence and says "This is A+ in action!" despite admitting to not having read any of the A+ material and completely failing to notice how dead their grand so-called third wave has been. Just like the Tea Party and Occupy, the Atheism Plus movement has become irrelevant, defended by an ignorant and insular group of people who are so wrapped up in their ideals that they can't see that the public at large is dismissing them and relegating them to the dustbin of history. Maybe at most we'll see the forums last until their hosting period runs out (probably end of summer, since most internet hosting services run their plans in 1 and 2 year options) and some Surly-ramics with the A+ logo. Hell, maybe we'll even see PZ put an A+ logo in a slide at his next convention speech. But that's about all this movement has left since it's been quickly killed from within by it's own supporters, who acted as a cancer all by themselves.
