Over at Mixing Memory, Chris is annoyed with Larry Moran and PZ Myers for comparing themselves to suffragists:
It's difficult, at this point, to say anything other than, "Are you kidding me?" Watching white, middle-class, mostly ex-Protestant males (the dominant new atheist demographic) compare themselves to feminists, labor movements, gay and civil rights activists, or the members of any other persecuted group fighting for their social, political, and economic lives is just plain surreal. Or worse, as Trinifar notes, it's just plain manipulative.
The ensuing discussion and the follow-up are about as enlightening as you might expect.
This whole thing just makes me sad-- so much fuss over a simple typo. You see, Larry didn't mean to type "suffragist," he meant "suffragette." He wasn't claiming that atheists should model themselves on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, he was saying they should be more like Ziggy Stardust, liberating humanity from the banality of religion through sexual promiscuity, massive drug use, and kick-ass glam rock.
It's an interesting strategic shift, or, rather, it would've been, were it not for that fateful typo. As it is, Larry inadvertently compared himself to women's rights activists, and being the stubborn cuss that he is, he couldn't just retract it, and the whole thing spiraled out of control.
Really, it's a tragic missed opportunity-- think Velvet Goldmine with more discussion of evolutionary biology. Alas, we're stuck with a new self-righteous spin on the same old arguments...
(OK, maybe I need to catch up on my sleep a little... But, hey, it makes as much sense as anything else.)
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Damn! Now I understand. Thank you!!
Suffragette is just the phrase given to radical women in the suffrage movement in Britian. It seems a bit odd that you associate the word Suffragette with Bowie more than with, say, the WSPU, but maybe that's just cause I'm a brit.
It's almost Scienceblogging:
Life On Mars
David Bowie
... It's on Amerika's tortured brow
[social critique]
That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow
[transgenic animals]
Now the workers have struck for fame
[the attention economy]
'Cause Lennon's on sale again
[Leninism or entomology of beatles?]
See the mice in their million hordes
[Population Biology]
From Ibeza to the Norfolk Broads
[Geopolitics]
Rule Britannia is out of bounds
[Postcolonialism]
To my mother, my dog, and clowns
[debate on selective imitation]
But the film is a saddening bore
[cinematic reviews]
'Cause I wrote it ten times or more
[trolling]
It's about to be writ again
[prediction]
As I ask you to focus on
[Optics]
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
[correlation of aggression and art]
Oh man! Look at those cavemen go
[Human Evolution]
It's the freakiest show
[comparative literature]
Take a look at the Lawman
[Jurisprudence]
Beating up the wrong guy
[Anomalies in the Law]
Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know
[Epistemology]
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?
[Exobiology]
As a die-hard Bowie fan, I approve. I wouldn't have been as annoyed at Moran and PZ if I had only known...;-)
It makes so much sense now!
BTW, for those die-hard Bowie fans out there, I have only one thing to say to you:
Dance of the Ever-Circling Skeletal Family