Every week I receive proof that my decision never to be part of any communities (except this blog which is the only worthwhile community I know) was absolutely right.
See, for instance, this ridiculous debacle in the atheist community. When instead of keeping their most intimate beliefs about the nature of life and death to themselves people use them to attach themselves to others, something this silly and pathetic is bound to happen. It doesn’t matter what word you choose to describe your belief system – atheism, agnosticism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, whatever. As long as it all becomes about hanging out with others who have chosen the same label, except petty fighting, idiocy, and arguments of the kind you see in the linked post.
I don’t feel any need to defend my belonging to any group because the only person who can grant me access is me. I was kidding about becoming a Catholic, of course, but the joke was based on a profound conviction that if I want to become Catholic (or belong to any other imagined category), I will not feel the need to ask anybody’s permission.
As a result of this approach, I can enjoy as much of my culture as I want without ever meeting any Russian speakers. I can practice my religion without feeling the need to justify the stupidity of all those people who claim to belong to it but only in order to vomit their hate all over the planet. I can be a feminist without being drawn into stupid gender wars every two seconds. I can be a progressive who is not in thrall to the “everybody is a victim of something” mentality. I can be an academic who loves academia and feels no need to whine about its hardships. I can be a Hispanist without being apologetic and ashamed of the imagined insignificance of my field.
In other words, peer pressure and group psychology do not poison my existence.
Clarissa's Blog 
In fact, this is the only valid anarchist attitude about this.
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Michelle Bachman is a woman-hating cunt.
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What is sadder than such a spectacle of self-hatred?
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I have no problem to vomit misogynistic remarks against misogynistic people.
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I agree completely. They should get some of their own medicine. Maybe that will make them wake up.
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And Melissa McEwen should not be shocked by that.
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The word “community” is a joke most of the time anyway. It implies some sort of support system and interdependence which really doesn’t exist. If everyone in the “community” were to move into one house or form a village in the countryside or something, then perhaps it would be a community. I cringe whenever someone uses the word “community” to describe people s/he can’t borrow salt from on a sunday. “Scene” would be a more fitting word.
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” I cringe whenever someone uses the word “community” to describe people s/he can’t borrow salt from on a sunday. ”
– Exactly! Communities whose members are not even known to you are not real. They are imagined entities that only produce a fake sense of comfort.
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Ha.
You and Groucho Marx
What’s especially funny is that the atheist “community” is not united by any belief but by an absence; and that somehow this lack of belief implies some commonality beyond the lack of belief in God itself, so of course people argue vigorously about this and what so-and-so’s behavior implies for this group of people who have decided for different reasons they don’t want to belong to any religious community.
It’s like holding that gravity is a firm tenet of the laws of the universe and expecting that to give me a wealth of commonalities with other gravity-believers.
Comical.
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“It’s like holding that gravity is a firm tenet of the laws of the universe and expecting that to give me a wealth of commonalities with other gravity-believers.”
🙂 🙂 🙂 This just goes to show that people can invent a community around anything. Or nothing.
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Apparently my satire on taking “natural laws” as dogma cannot be understood easily by American atheists either. I was really mocking the MRAs, who hold that there are natural laws that women must submit to, in order to fulfill their “natures”. But here there is an overlap between USA atheism and MRAs, since both would like to hold that there are “natural” gender differences that must be acknowledged and if need be, reinforced.
Anyway, some militant atheist guy on Facebook was unable to understand whether my video was mocking science or something else. This shows the degree to which there has not been any critique of ideological dogma or of the idea of invoking “natural principles” in the atheist community. In a way it seems that atheists just want to replace the authority of religion with the authority of what they take to be science, including the spurious ideas of much of “evolutionary psychology”. They especially hate that feminists question this authority, because then they are left without a dogma and feel threatened.
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Very good video. I agree that this evo psych crap has become very threatening. It has practically destroyed the feeble feminism that existed in the Russian-speaking countries, for instance.
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I like to see evolutionary psychology as nature’s way of getting rid of the dunderheads.
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I think there is a limitless supply.
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Nature has no particular quota.
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Atheists for jendah indentity, bleah! 😦
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identity
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Talking about gender identitiy…
http://sexnotgender.com/2013/03/20/activism-to-normalize-gender-transitioning-now-comes-at-childrens-expense/
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The American atheists don’t like feminists because Rebecca Watson and those around her exposed some of their behavior as slightly sexist. This led to huge, extremely sexist vendetta against all women who could be identified as feminist in any way. It’s very tiresome. The tired old beliefs that women are “oversensitive” or irrational originate from Christian dogma. American atheists are so deeply mired in these notions that they can’t even see them for what they are.
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Yes, I remember that story. The amount of jerkdom that was exhibited was overwhelming.
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I just returned from the Annual Spring Topology and Dynamics Conference. The mathematicians who attend this are indeed a positive community, even though we see each other only a few times a year. There is some friction, but not the sort that apparently happens in many other academic communities. I like the fact that there is a venue where I do not feel like a misfit. This is not the only such, but it was the first one I discovered.
I find it difficult to imagine that there is no community at all in other fields, even though I have been made aware that academics in other fields do not get along with each other the way we topologists do. But if no one had a sense of community, no one would ever agree to referee a paper submitted for publication, no one would ever be willing to organize a conference, no one would ever be willing to be a journal editor, etc. These are all things that require sacrifice with little or no reward, based solely upon ones commitment to the larger community of ones academic discipline.
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“But if no one had a sense of community, no one would ever agree to referee a paper submitted for publication, no one would ever be willing to organize a conference, no one would ever be willing to be a journal editor, etc.”
– People do it to have things to write in the “Service” portion of the merit review.
“These are all things that require sacrifice with little or no reward, based solely upon ones commitment to the larger community of ones academic discipline.”
– If only that were true. The rewards of being an editor of a journal consist in having the power to humiliate people, the adulation of sycophants, the power to make or break careers, the power to gain favor with lovers, friends, and relatives and punish enemies. Those are enormous rewards.
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However, things written in the “Service” portion of an annual review are worthless, in my experience.
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Not according to our operational documents. Although I wish this were true.
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I have colleagues who have done the experiment of working huge amounts of time on service activities for a couple of years and then doing nothing at all for two years. They both got exactly the same rating for service all four years. So, they both decided to do whatever thay wanted with regard to service, as it made no difference at all.
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