Previously:
Part 1, what DJ said
Part of the problem with the DJ/Greta dustup is that it was spawned by something that happened on Greta’s Facebook page. Facebook does not make it easy to permalink to old threads, so basically nobody has the context for this unless you’re both (1) friends with Greta on Facebook (2) patient enough to scroll through all the stuff on her page to find something that happened more than a month ago. So I’ve decided to go ahead and make screen caps of the thing. Not whole threads, but I’ve tried to get everything relevant and then some (especially in the case of the second thread).
You can discuss this now or ignore it; I’ll be giving my own commentary later.
Thanks for posting that for those of us who don’t do the facebook. I hope you’re not planning on defending Ryan Grant Long given the above thread.
You’re welcome.
Thanks for the context. I’m quite baffled by the whole dustup, but I keep reminding myself that there’s a difference between rationalists and atheists, and that the latter is immensely larger than the former and hence more room for all sorts of stupid and inappropriate.
I’ve really stopped paying attention to the Paris Hilton of Skepticism and her clique, but this explains a bit of what I missed. I can only borrow a phrase from one of my favorite podcasts – “Dogma makes you crazy.”
Thanks for the post – be interesting to read what you think.
Knowing this doesn’t seem to really change that much. I find Ryan Grant Long’s behavior and commentary very strange.
Seriously? what is Ryans goals?
So he disagrees with Rebecca Watson – I think we got that message early on.
suck it up and move on – why is a casual remark made ages ago on youtube still able to make people so angry?
It has been rehashed many times, that I don’t know how he didn’t realise that bringing it up in that conversation basically was trolling, just as GC pointed out.
I am moderator for a Danish forum. In our guidelines we suggest that when you have composed a reply or a post, wait a while before submitting, if necessary wait a day.
I think a lot of this shit could be avoided if people weren’t so quick at replying. I am sure Ryan is a nice person, he just seems like a jerk in this context
Am I the only one who has no idea what the hell is going on here? Everyone just seems to be screaming.
Annatar, you’ll still have to wait a bit longer before I dissect this in detail, but you sound like you understand it fairly well.
Wow. So, I actually came across this Ryan guy in a thread where he said that Greta would not listen to opposing viewpoints and bans people who disagree by saying that they are “trolls.”
Having seen enough of her writings calling for fights, I was relieved to see someone else got it. But, then when I read on her 2 posts about this topic, that he said she should be kicked in the c***, I went back to the thread and criticized him for it and representing himself honestly. He didn’t respond.
He’s obviously emotional and being baited on top of that.
Getting the background context, you find out that Greta and Ophelia introduced these other notions of kicks to the c***. Ryan’s also put in some position where he’s supposed to defend the actions of other people or respond to other threads. But, no link is provided here. Was Ryan acting like a troll in another thread? Then, Greta should have banned him stat. Instead of trying to negotiate the situation, she delights in her stunt being correct, but a status like that could only lead to such a conclusion for Greta introduced the controversy in the status. Not only that, but she posts a second status about this matter in delight.
It’s becoming more clear that DJ had a point in suggesting that people were using this controversy for pagehits. Not sure how that would work in Facebook, but given that Greta took the conflict here and brought it to her personal blog and wrote 2 posts about it targeting DJ, it’s extremely troubling.
It’s still not apparent at all why in Greta’s judgment, it’s responsible behavior of a leader to take conversations of hers and DJ and bring this conflict out in the open to post on her blog rather than discussing this privately. It doesn’t help the community one bit for her to chastise him in public and to attempt to turn her followers against him.
*for not representing himself honestly
BTW, can you get the other screenshots and their context. DJ includes the context in his analysis of the situation. Greta demands that her interactions with this character are irrelevant.
Personally, I *loathe* when someone uses quote marks around a sentence that I haven’t used in a discussion and can see why this Ryan guy gets bent out of shape. He’s obviously unstable, and Greta along with a couple of the commenters have a field day in poking at his eyes. She admits to exaggerating but argues that it’s permissible because she got the main idea.
There are so many things wrong with this.
I don’t know where she went to school, but these are some fundamentals.
You quote the person exactly and then paraphrase to the best of your ability in good faith what you understand the person to be writing and what you believe the implications to be. Then, you can confirm with the person if they feel you really understand and see their POV correctly. From there, the process continues.
Instead, she flips his words around in a more fanatical light and quotes them. I actually think for all his instability that he showed some restraint and I give her more credit than her as you can see that this guy is very troubled by it and is in some typo of agony for it to move on and leave the community, while Greta calmly brings it up and jabs for entertainment.
Think I was wrong and exaggerate the entertainment for her?
“bathtub of chocolate, a pony”, “The magic works!”, “It’s like magic!”
This is PZ Myerseque behavior, and although I’m not of the same emotional state as this Ryan fellow, I concede some of the shared concerns when even our so-called leaders are egging on the conflict.