You were alleging that I would get drunk and rape someone. Calling that “accidental” rape was sarcasm against you–as if somehow alcohol would just happen to turn me into a rapist, which is absurd. I’m now glad you agree with me.

Evidently you were instead using the “bitches be liars” argument. I was being charitable and assuming you weren’t so dumb. So let’s talk about that stupid argument.

I have not established a precedent that evidence doesn’t matter. Testimony is evidence. You are the one dismissing evidence by claiming any testimony coming from any woman ever is always a lie.

Which means you are irrationally worried that all rape accusations are lies. Which means you don’t believe rape can ever be proved and all victims should always be ignored and dismissed as liars. That is what should haunt anyone with a conscience.

Why you think alcohol is relevant to your point is beyond me. I could be a total teetotaler and never sleep with anyone and still get accused of raping someone by some hypothetical liar. So what I do has no bearing on my risk of that. That can happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime. That it therefore almost never does should clue you in.

I’ve already discussed how Shermer could create reasonable doubt in favor of his innocence, in the comments on the relevant article (this is not a comment thread on Shermer). That he has not done so is disturbing.

By contrast, in the extremely unlikely event someone tries to create a false accusation about me (as some wanker tried to do to another blogger on our network) I’ll ascertain the facts and bring to light all the evidence discrediting them (as that blogger did).

I will also not act like a privileged creepy ass and create dozens of witnesses to my repeated disregard of women’s boundaries, thus establishing a vast precedent for my going further. I will instead actually comport myself in such a way that I can produce countless female witnesses to my respecting their boundaries and not acting like that. And that is what I have done. For years.

If you want to protect yourself from the extremely rare and unlikely prospect of some liar falsely accusing you of rape, you should do the same. And not use the extremely rare and unlikely prospect of that cause you to disregard the testimony of every rape victim in the entire history of humankind.

My point was that you have you might well find yourself accused of sexual harassment or worse by any number of women you have interacted (or not interacted) with at any number of conferences, and no matter how flimsy or nonexistent the evidence may be, you have already established a precedent that evidence doesn’t matter.

I don’t wish this upon you frankly you may well find yourself one day in the mouth of the monster you helped to create.

Regardless of whether this ever happens or not, one day you will realize the grave moral errors you have committed and that will be your punishment (in fact I’m actually paying you a huge and likely undeserved compliment in assuming that you have a sound conscience that will in time cause you to regret your actions during this time).

It’s amusing to hear someone use childish taunts like “Peezy” talking about me being morally bankrupt.

And then giving zero evidence of my being uncompassionate, dishonest, or unreasonable.

And instead engage in stock-off-the-shelf rape apologetics.

For the record, one doesn’t “accidentally” rape someone, or take advantage of them. So I’m not in any danger of that, no matter how drunk I get. If I have sex with anyone, I will make sure they consider it and consent to it first. With the same consistent ease that I always make sure I don’t drive.

Which is basically the opposite of being morally bankrupt.

Richard, you aren’t important enough to be an enemy. But honestly, with “friends” like you, the “atheist movement” really needs no enemies. It’s a good thing you are largely unkown outside the skeptic blogosphere, because you are really an embarrassment. Trust me, even many who continue to speak kindly of you publicly are questioning your judgement and inside your mental stability in private.

These recent shenanigans of yours in which you and Peezy appear to have tried to breath new life into the still born Atheism Plus movement by effectively accusing Michael Shermer of rape without any comelling evidence brought to bear whatsoever marks a new and loathsome low point for you.

Congratulations, you are now officially morally bankrupt.

Hopefully one night soon you will awake in a cold sweat and have that eureka moment where it finally dawns on you just how fucked up you have become. I mean, really, goddamn, if Shermer were actually guilty of what you publicly accuse him of, he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But he hasn’t and he won’t because of the simple fact that there is no compelling evidence that Shermer did anything wrong whatsoever. You are really a moral horror show on public display.

You know something Richard, you have been known to bend the elbow quite a bit at conferences and subsequently “act the fool”; it would be the ultimate poetic justice if some day someone suddenly asserts that YOU had done something of the sort you accuse Shermer of. It wouldn’t be the first time a self righteous zealot ended up being consumed by very monster it helped to create and feed.

What happened to you? Mid life crisis? Didn’t you used to be sane once? Oh well, look on the bright side; as a bonafide, ahem, Neuro-atypical American, you can at least absolve yourself of the guilt of possessing “neurotypical privilege.” You’re practically Rosa Parks!

Good luck l’il Richy…

What a bunch of factless delusional weirdness this comment is.

With enemies like this, who needs friends?

Atheism Plus is in reality just a bunch of privileged, “trendy left” white people making a grand show of their supposed liberal bonafides by making hyperbolic charges of various and sundry “isms”. PZ and Carrier basically mortgaged their reputations over this silliness (the latter’s mental/emotional stability is now an open question).

Anyway, A+ never got off ground, largely due to the excesses of it’s higher profile advocates and the extraordinary intolerance and weirdness of the infamous A+ forum. This is sooooo summer of ’12 people; I can’t believe people are still talking about this. What a lame thing for Carrier to have jumped the shark over, huh?

Of course you mean “opinions among those who knew about that link, and who cared enough to vote”, which isn’t at all the same as a representative sample of the public, or even a representative sample of a particular community. In other words, your “data” are mostly meaningless and can be easily dismissed. Even if your data allowed one to make meaningful inferences about opinions, what remains true is that individual opinions are often irrational and uninformed, and can’t be relied upon as reliable guides to objective analysis.

Sorry. I don’t know what that link has to do with this article you are commenting on here, or its conclusions or point.

(And just to head off the chuckleheads who like to dispute the validity of that rule, one should understand that it is meant as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you if you were them,” it thus does not entail an egocentric standard of what is desirable; that has to be imported as an assumption, and that assumption would be invalid, as it ignores the intended function of compassion and empathy in applying the rule.)

Pretty sure Emery Emery is a libertarian.