Thursday, October 23, 2014

On asexuality, atheism, and other news

On The Asexual Agenda, I have a post talking about how asexuals are impacted by the current split in the atheist community.  Note that The Asexual Agenda has a much stricter comment policy than I do here, so if you want to comment freely, do so here.  I'm not obligated to respect you though.

In the years since 2011, it's become increasingly obvious that the atheist community has become more ace-friendly in the feminist communities, and less ace-friendly elsewhere.  This is good for people like me, who mostly follow the feminist atheists.  But the median person in the ace community is a non-religious woman who does not participate in the atheist community, and I suspect they mostly have negative encounters with anti-feminist atheists, or even MRA atheists.  I think aces mostly don't know where it's coming from, so the purpose of my post is to explain it to that audience.

Speaking of feminist wars, I feel like in the last month or so, the atheist feminist wars have been eclipsed by the gaming feminist wars.  That is, by Gamergate, which is probably the reason I've been blogging about social justice so much lately.  Gamergate looks very similar to Elevatorgate, albeit on a larger scale, even getting major media attention.  Furthermore, it's been noted that there's overlap between gamergate supporters and slymepitters.  To long-time atheist bloggers like me, it feels like deja vu.

I'm not so much concerned about gamergate itself, which I hope will die after so much negative news coverage.  The harassment campaigns are a serious problem, but I'm more concerned about the greater number of people sympathize with gamergate's supposed "journalistic ethics" platform, which really consists of ending "SJW" bias.  I'm more concerned about the gaming culture which spawned this movement in the first place.  I'm concerned about the impact these people have on wider society, even when they're not talking about games.

In other news, next week I will be traveling.  So I'm declaring a blogging break.

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