So Ed Brayton, thats the leader, or owner or something of freethoughtblogs is now referring to me in these terms:

“I want to do whatever it takes to make sure that he is essentially drummed out of this movement, never invited to speak anywhere again and is forever a pariah.”

Awwww, what did I do to be referred to in these terms you may ask?

Turns out freethoughtblogs has a secret mailing list which they use, among other things to conspire against people (indeed I laughed when they cooked up what they thought was the ‘least damaging story’ to FTB for my expulsion. Boy did the truth take a backseat in that thread!). Now as with many top secret mailing lists of course FTB has some footer saying how everything on this mailing list is ultra-confidential (kinda a contradiction of terms in my books sending out ‘secret information’ to an entire mailing list) but that doesn’t stop FTB OPENLY disclosing/ leaking whatever they want on that list when it suits their purpose. For instance they were quite happy to openly talk about Greg Ladens ‘threats of violence’ on the mailing list and PZ was quite happy to discuss the happenings of this ‘ultra confidential’ list in his video (sorry too late to delete the evidence boys, I’ve got it all!). Oddly enough, freethoughtblogs did nothing to admonish this sickening and evil violation of trust, or write blog posts about how this could result in the exposing of peoples real identities, people losing jobs, getting turned into newts and burned at the stake or some shit. Nor do they seem to realize that their main beef that I ‘stole their personal details‘ is clearly stupid. I, and everyone else on that mailing list, would have had all of those details (whatever they actually are, I still have no idea) anyways from when they originally signed me up to the mailing list. So what exactly are these personal details they think I’ve ‘stolen’ here?

Secondly I DONT FUCKING DOC DROP.

Even if I actually knew what this personal information was (I seriously have no idea who most these people are) I wouldn’t care, because:

I DON’T DOC DROP. Never have done. Never will.

Honestly if I were in FTBs shoes I would worry about the other guy they expelled, Greg Laden, who also has access to all their personal data. He has a history of threatening people on FTB and stalking people elsewhere. Like tracking people down in real life and trying to get them fired (Abbie Smith of the blog ERV) etc etc. Notably this was all done while Greg was at FTBs.

Now I always found the behavior of the folks on freethoughblogs on this secret list to be kinda cliquish, where chinese whispers morph from rumors to facts within one or two emails. For instance, when I first joined I was accused of being an ‘rape culture apologist’ guilty of ablism, devaluing addicts, and not being careful between challenging islam and outright racism, all based on no evidence whatsoever! ya freethought at work!

Many emails on this list were on points on which “everyone” on FTBs agreed, simply for the applause of everyone who responded. There was a LOT of self-congratulation and self-re-enforcement (herding) behavior there. Conversely even modest disagreement was greeted with snide derision. The sad thing is that freethoughtblogs refer to themselves in humor as ‘the hive mind’ and as ‘free thought bullies’, when in reality both are actually fairly accurate descriptions. So why is any of that important?

So a week or so ago a guy called Michael Payton who works for CFI Canada (Center for Inquiry) put up a tweet about finding FTB unreadable. Now it turns out ironically Michael is on FTBs side on the issue of harassment policies at conferences (well mostly), however that didn’t matter if he was going to speak ill of freethoughtblogs and this precipitated an angry torrent of twitters from at least one FTBer and another to write an entire blog post about it (promoted by PZ Myers of course), and as with all such posts on FTB he (Payton) was repeatedly branded in the comments section with pejorative terms such as misogynist and MRA (the irony being that he posted an article on skepchick ‘speaking out against hate against women‘ FACEPALM). Indeed it turned out that merely hours after this tweet, CFI Canada had been contacted with calls for his dismissal. Yes his real life job was being threatened because of one tweet about FTBs!

That was a pretty disturbing turn of events having someones job targeted so quickly after a single tweet about FTBs, and after a brief chat with Michael, and knowing that FTB were going ballistic about this on their secret backchannel with some THIRTY messages being circulated on the backchannel about his single tweet, let him know what they were saying about him (naturally no personal details were passed on). Michael did not want to know, he did not need to know that personal info.

This is some of the chatter I passed on to Michael.

Just an early warning, I’m strongly leaning towards publicly making a minor deal of this – not focusing on Payton exclusively, but just as an example of the general attitude of dismissing all of FTB despite not being familiar with hardly any of us – *unless* there’s either an actual apology to us or some kind of sufficient reason for why it would be a bad idea to draw attention to his remarks at this time, such as a relevant illness.

WTF is it with FTBs and skepchick always wanting people to apologize for stuff? Anyways they continue:

I’m usually not one to get involved in internal disputes in the movement, but if a national leader of the SCA or American Atheists had been so openly dismissive of FTB as a whole, I imagine we wouldn’t just let that pass unnoticed. So I’d just like to know if there’s any good reason why I shouldn’t do this, even if I can’t necessarily be privy to the details of it.

Translation: is it safe to do a knife job on this guy?

and

“But his statement was so broad, so casually dismissive of some of the smartest people in this movement (me among them, I’d like to think), that he can’t really be surprised that one of them took offense at it and criticized him for it, can he?”

What sort of person actually writes shit like that? (well Ed Brayton as it turns out). I’m guessing you can see at this point why they are so terrified of this stuff becoming public. Personal details my ass!

Well FTB found out that I had given Michael Payton access to this information, I then became the subject of the secret societies wrath. This is just one example of MANY. This is Ed Brayton (the head/ owner or similar of FTB) talking about what he wants done to me.

“I want to do whatever it takes to make sure that he (thunderf00t) is essentially drummed out of this movement, never invited to speak anywhere again and is forever a pariah.”

That’s right, all I did was clued someone in whose job was being threatened as to FTBs little conspiring (some THIRTY emails over his single tweet!) against him and for this heinous crime FTB now wants me ‘drummed out of the community’ as ‘a pariah’. And now this whistle blowing action is being reported on FTBs as:

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Tags: abbie smith, ashley miller, blogs, community, cult, doc dropping, dumb, free, freethoughblogs, groupthink, hounded, myers, out, pariah, pz, pz myers, still, thought, thunderf00t, zinnajones