Sanders: 10/10 on integrity. Clinton, I don’t know, maybe 5/10?

I don’t think it matters very much. I feel like a big part of this election has been people revolting against a supposed system of elites bribing politicians to implement evil policies - that’s part of why Trump’s so popular, he can honestly claim to be self-funding and so not beholden to campaign contributions. But I don’t think there are clearly great policies which the only reason we’re not enacting is because politicians are too corrupt (w/ possible exception of ending various forms of corporate welfare). I think most issues are genuinely hard, or genuinely involve conflicting ideologies.

Also, in cases where companies are bribing candidates to go against the popular will, at least half the time I’m more in line with the companies. I think there are a lot of populist ideas, like totally closed borders, which are pretty bad, and that companies which have economic self-interest and some common sense provide a useful check and balance against those.

Yeah. I was thinking about this recently after reading a story about how the guy who covered some of the Missouri U protests and exposed their hostility to the media was invited to speak to an atheist group. Audience members (primarily black) demanded he stay on stage and respond to their concerns, then heckled him with hostile questions and accusations of racism. He was clearly really upset about this, and protested that he had autism, was experiencing sensory overload, and if they didn’t let him leave he was going to start crying, to which audience members started heckling him about “white tears”.

The atheist blogosphere is now reporting about this in the context of how white people are selfish and entitled for privileging their own emotional state over the legitimate concerns of people of color, and how “white atheists” are the big problem of the atheist movement. See for example Thin Skins And Male Tears: The Tragedy Of White Atheism, although JT at least seems to be a little concerned.

And the problem is that this seems to happen all the time in movement atheism, to the point where you pretty much expect it at any movement-atheism-associated- conventions or meetups or blogs. Anybody who sets foot anywhere near it is putting themselves at serious risk of this kind of treatment, and if you protest it you get an avalanche of “lol white tears you need to recognize your own ignorance and entitlement” and that’s that. And avoiding movement atheism isn’t too hard, and is probably a good idea anyway, but now it’s starting to spread to colleges, and those seem kind of important in case people want to learn stuff.

And *I* solve this mostly by not leaving my room, figuratively and sometimes literally, but I’m not sure what the effective movement-building solution would be. Like at some point I feel like the only way to have a movement where anyone at all can feel safe is to hang up a big “NO SOCIAL JUSTICE ALLOWED” sign in front of the door.

The problem is, there really are a lot of okay social justice people who are concerned about inequalities but don’t do this kind of thing. I know Ozy doesn’t like being called “one of the good SJWs”, but the fact is they wouldn’t heckle an autistic person to cry and then gloat about “white tears”. I know a lot of great people with an interest in social justice, but I’m not sure how to protect people from the terrible ones without just hanging the big sign in front of the door. “SOCIAL JUSTICE IS OKAY UNLESS YOU’RE TERRIBLE” only works when people can all agree on who is or isn’t being terrible, which is apparently a problem far beyond the abilities of movement atheism.

Also, the thing I wrote about before where trying too hard to protect yourself from the bullies on the left makes you a honeypot for all the bullies on the right, and then you get overwhelmed by them.

So far the only thing I’ve ever seen that works is just to make some vague anti-social-justice noises loud enough to let the bullies know they won’t have enough support for it to be worth their while, but not so loud that it scares people away, and definitely not so loud that everyone assumes your movement is made of Nazis and the actual Nazis try to join you on account of thinking you’re a kindred soul. But this is a frustrating and draining tightrope to walk and one that’s easy to slip up on.

My first possible reason for optimism is that people have become better at a kind of critical analysis of these issues recently and eventually “social justice person who isn’t terrible” might become clearly defined enough to serve as a natural category. My second reason is that as more and more people become turned off by this kind of thing it may be easier to make it clear that you don’t tolerate this sort of thing and still attract mostly decent people and not just crazies.

Taper SLOWLY. For specifics, I’d recommend the “how to deal with it” section on CrazyMeds here: http://www.crazymeds.us/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MedClass/SSRIDiscontinuation