A Sense of Doubt blog post #2489 - Christianity rejects Trump and is porn addictive - Skepchick and Rebecca Watson
https://www.patreon.com/rebecca
Transcript:
“Finally,” reads a viral tweet with 4,600 likes and 1,300 retweets, “Evangelical Christians are rejecting the immorality of Donald Trump. This is it. He's finished.”
Wow, I guess that’s it, huh? Evangelicals have rejected Donald Trump. Our long, national nightmare is over.
I mean, no. No, it’s not. It’s like that @BronzeHammer tweet where it’s like “Well I’d like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam! *Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily* Ah! Well. Nevertheless,”
Okay so yeah what happened is that Christianity Today declared in an editorial that “Trump Should Be Removed from Office;”
“It’s time to say what we said 20 years ago when a president’s character was revealed for what it was.”
Christianity Today is, of course, the publication founded in 1956 by Billy Graham, the Southern Baptist minister, not the rock promoter and let me tell you, that was a very confusing situation when I moved to San Francisco and attended my first show at the Bill Graham Auditorium. The magazine previously supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton and the resignation of Nixon, so it shouldn’t come as much of a shock that they have also just published an editorial supporting the impeachment of Donald Trump, despite the fact that Trump got about 80% of the evangelical vote in the 2016 election. I mean, it wouldn’t come as much of a shock if evangelicals weren’t known to be hypocritical morons, which Billy Graham’s own son has reminded us by posting on Facebook that his dad definitely would not support Trump’s impeachment, because his dad voted for Trump and Trump is pro-life and defeated ISIS (which is weird and I wonder if anyone has informed ISIS). Trump is obviously not evangelical, or even Christian by any definition considering he’s clearly an atheist sociopath who, according to several women including his own ex-wife, also happens to be a rapist. But he is a useful idiot for evangelicals, as he proved by helping them take control of the Supreme Court, and so why would an evangelical want a president that Jesus would have liked if they can get one that helps them usher in the end times a little faster?
And so now Twitter is full of people celebrating. Trump is finished! Christianity Today dealt the killing blow! Even Trump is angry, replying that starting right now he is definitely not going to read “ET” anymore. You know he had a subscription to Christianity Today and read it every month (week? However often it came out) and is definitely not confusing it with Entertainment Tonight.
Look, I know we are in the worst timeline and we need every tiny spark of hope we can find. But please know that this does not matter. At all. Yes, Christianity Today has done the absolute minimum of recognizing reality, and maybe they should be applauded for that. Baby steps, after all. But they’re a magazine. No magazine is important today, in 2019. I guarantee that the majority of Trump’s base, whether they are evangelical or not, do not give a flying shit what Christianity Today has to say about the impeachment process.
Liberals’ celebration over this reminds me of atheists like Richard Dawkins who believe that all the world’s ills are caused in some way by religion, and that by destroying religion we can live lives free of superstition, hate, and war. We can’t. Humans are just too good at those things. Trump’s base may still consider themselves “Christian” but they are slavishly devoted to a new messiah, and they will defend Trump regardless of what he does, and regardless of what any authority figure tells them. QAnon is an actual cult that has formed around Trump and will persist despite a lack of evidence for their conspiracy. Trump was not being hyperbolic when he said he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th avenue and his supporters wouldn’t bat an eye. They wouldn’t. Their support of him is not based on reason, or compassion, or logic, so you can’t use those things to change their minds.
No editorial will ever be the end of Trump. The House passing an impeachment will not be the end of Trump. We can only end Trump, and stop future fascists, with direct, collective action. We need to vote him out. And yes, we need to vote for his opponent regardless of who the Democrats put up which, god help us, is probably going to be fucking Biden. You can whine all you want about the “lesser of two evils still being evil” but that’s something you have the privilege to think because you’re either blissfully ignorant or you’re not the one who is at risk of being driven from your home, shoved into a cage, made homeless by rising sea levels, or just straight up killed for being Jewish, or gay, or brown. Because the greater of evils is so much more evil than you think.
And then we have to vote for progressive change-makers at every level of government. I don’t care if your ballot asks you to vote for the fucking municipal dog-catcher, you research those assholes and don’t let the fascist win.
Finally, we have to start building guillotines. Uh, metaphorically. We have to fuck shit up. We have to make our politicians scared. Make the rich scared. Protest. Scream. Agitate for change. Don’t leave it in the hands of evangelicals to wake up and suddenly care. They won’t.
Hey Patrons! This is an old video that Dr. Nicole Prause found and filed a DMCA removal request on due to me using a thumbnail of her headshot to illustrate who I was discussing. YouTube removed the video and rather than countersue, I am just re-uploading with the headshot (and some Tweets from her, just to be sure) removed. More info to come!
Transcript:
“NoFap Founder Is Suing a Neuroscientist Who Thinks Masturbating Is Fine,” so I read in Vice this week. How appropriate! It’s about sex, science, pseudoscience, AND this is “#NoNutNovember!” I couldn’t wait to make a video on this. I was wrong. Making this video nearly broke me. I’ve spent hours reading court documents, Tweets, and forum posts from a bunch of people who think that not masturbating for a month will give them magical powers. I need a stiff drink. Pun intended.
“NoFap” was started and trademarked a few years ago by Alexander Rhodes, who now runs NoFap.com and helps oversee a nofap subreddit, all of which are critical of the porn industry and try to encourage people (mostly men) to stop masturbating to pornography, and to stop masturbating in general, in order to receive a number of benefits. What those benefits are vary from person to person and belief system to belief system, but generally they claim that you can strengthen your own relationships, have better control over your life in general, and have more energy for doing things other than cranking your meat. The NoFap website also makes it clear that they believe porn addiction is real and is damaging to people with it.
Nicole Prause is a neuroscientist who has researched pornography and found that there is most likely no such thing as porn addiction. You can form a habit of watching porn, and that habit can get out of control, but it’s not a physiological addiction like, say, being addicted to tobacco.
The general scientific consensus is with Prause, here. NoFap.com claims to be “science-based” but they simply are not when it comes to this, and their site is awash in evo psych pseudoscience like explaining how porn is at odds with the “primitive environment” our brains evolved in.
Prause clearly has a scientific bone to pick (haha) with Rhodes, and so when I saw the Vice article proclaiming that Rhodes was now suing her for libel I immediately heard alarm bells. I’ve made many videos about the chilling effect of libel laws and how pseudoscientists use them all the time to silence scientific criticism. The Vice article points that out, along with describing how NoFap is misogynist, racist, and full of harassers who doggedly attack critics.
It all made sense but there was one thing missing: Vice didn’t discuss what the actual supposed basis of the lawsuit was. No quotes from a libel suit claiming, for instance, that Prause had libeled Rhodes and NoFap by claiming they were wrong about porn addiction. So I went looking for all the court documents, and what a can of worms I found.
First of all, I found the website YourBrainonPorn.com, made and maintained by Gary Wilson, author of a book by the same name. Wilson has collected several text books of information about Nicole Prause. I mean, regardless of what Prause has done to him, it’s an obsessive amount of links and screenshots and screeds. I’ll be honest, it immediately added more credence to Prause’s position that NoFap and/or the people affiliated with them are a bunch of stalkers.
But I found the court documents that Rhodes filed and I looked through them anyway. Rhodes isn’t suing Prause for saying that pornography isn’t addictive, at least on the surface. He’s suing her because, according to Rhodes, Prause repeatedly over the past three years falsely claimed that he was stalking her, harassing her, violating restraining orders, is a misogynist, and promotes the neo-Nazi Proud Boys.
And here’s the thing: Rhodes includes screenshots of all of this, and it looks like he’s telling the truth. Let’s take the Proud Boys thing. Rhodes presents tons of screenshots of Prause telling the world constantly that Rhodes promotes and works with the Proud Boys. The truth is clearly that back in April of 2016, Rhodes went on Proud Boys’ founder Gavin McGinnes’s show. Rhodes points out that back then, McGinnis was simply known as the founder of Vice, who had a popular streaming show. (Yes that’s right, Vice, the publisher of the article I read bashing Rhodes.) That’s because McGinnes would not even form the Proud Boys for another 5 months. Rhodes says that he would never interact with McGinnes now that he (and the rest of us) know he’s a neo-Nazi. And that appears to be true as he has not been on the show since.
The rest of Prause’s claims are like that -- misunderstandings of the facts that deliberately or not paint Rhodes to look terrible. She quotes a jerk on Twitter with “NoFap” in his username and Rhodes replied on Twitter that they had already served him a cease and desist. She ignores his reply and changes the subject to talk about a random person who blogged that she should “get fucked,” and then a post on the nofap forum where a random user calls someone a professor when that person doesn’t have a degree. Her tweets were, to put it in a scientific context, completely batshit.
I do sympathize because I’m sure that NoFap attracts its fair share of misogynists. The subreddit is especially at risk because of how easily incels and other misogynists propagate there. But just for fun I checked out the forum on NoFap.com and it was completely clear of sexism as far as I could see. I even looked in the “lonely incel” section and all I found were some dudes who were genuinely sad about not being confident enough to try to go on dates. None of them were blaming women -- they were all talking about how hard it is to improve themselves in the face of depression. You know, real incel shit without the misogyny.
In fact, over on Twitter I noticed this in one of the replies to the official NoFap account’s description of the lawsuit:
“I was banned from your website for saying that Jews own the pornography industry. Now they are attacking you guys, calling you hateful, antisemitic, deceitful, sexist, etc in full force. SWEET FUCKINH KARMA. YA SHOULD HAVE LISTENED.”
Prause claims that the official NoFap forum is antisemitic but here, this stupid piece of shit is coming right out and saying, “Nope! They banned me.”
Does that mean I think Rhodes should be suing her for libel? I’m not a lawyer, and I tend to think that libel lawsuits should only happen when the case is egregious and really damages someone. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I had fantasies about suing some of my harassers for libel. If I had the extra money laying around and the energy for it, who’s to say?
And does all this mean that I think that Prause is wrong about the addictive nature of porn, or that Rhodes is right? Abso-fucking-lutely not. Let me make this very clear: the scientific consensus is that pornography is not addictive, nor is it bad for society in general. Masturbation is not bad for you, and in fact it can be very good for you if it keeps you relaxed. In fact, several studies have suggested that regular ejaculation, whether through masturbation, sex, or wet dreams, may reduce your risk of testicular cancer.
Most if not all of the benefits people claim they get from not masturbating are pure fantasy and pseudoscience. I may not have found misogyny on the NoFap forum but I did find some real howlers, like this poor guy who thinks that not ejaculating helps his body absorb sperm that will turn into stem cells and repair his body like Wolverine. There’s an entire subform for talking about “sexual transmutation,” the idea that you can take whatever energy you aren’t spending on sex or masturbation and instead spend it on success. I hear that’s how Isaac Newton managed to come up with the idea of gravity. It was all thanks to the not fucking.
So no, the entire thing is stupid. But some people like it, and that’s fine. What’s not fine is when it turns into a cult, and when you read the nofap subreddit it does sound exactly like a cult. I wouldn’t be surprised if some assholes who identify with nofap and frequent those forums and buy into the idea that this is a life-changing philosophy would turn around and harass scientists who point out inconvenient facts, like that porn isn’t actually a physiological addiction. But in this case, it really does look like the guy who runs NoFap.com, and who trademarked the name, is keeping his house clean and disavowing people who do stupid shit like that. The core philosophy of NoFap doesn’t appear to be misogynist, or anti-semitic in the least. That misogynists and anti-semites have gravitated to it honestly doesn’t seem to be Rhodes’s fault. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s Gavin McGinnes, who adopted the philosophy and then spread it to the Proud Boys movement he later kickstarted.
So yeah, I know this video is probably going to surprise some people but for the first time ever, a pseudoscientist is suing a scientist for libel and I can’t say that I’m 100% on the side of the scientist.
Transcript:
Hello, YouTube. What a few weeks I’ve had! I’ve learned something very important recently: no one reads the description. You know, the doobly doo. So with that in mind, I’m going to put everything important right here, in the video itself. BUCKLE UP.
First of all, did you know that all my videos come with a handy transcript where I link to all relevant studies and articles and Tweets and whatnot? It’s true! You can find the transcripts over on my Patreon or on Skepchick. So many ways to learn and also to support me if that’s what you would like to do! Although, liking, commenting, subscribing, and sharing my videos is another great way to support me so thank you to everyone who is doing that!
Second of all, you may have noticed some videos appearing, disappearing, and reappearing on my channel lately, sometimes reappearing with really crappy audio and video! And although I have explained some of these things, I made the mistake of explaining them in the description of the videos. And then you all comment: “The audio sucks!” “Didn’t I see this video before?” “Hey, it’s May, not November!” And at first I was annoyed but then I was like, well, do I always read the description? No. No I do not. So, I rescind my annoyance. Y’all are fine. Allow me to explain what’s been going on.
Waaay back in November of 2019, I learned that Andrew Rhodes, the founder of the anti-porn, anti-masturbation group called NoFap, was suing pro-porn neuroscientist Nicole Prause for defamation. I have often called out people using libel laws to scare their critics into silence, so I was ready to jump in to defend Prause, whose research seemed to me to be legit and in keeping with the current scientific consensus that pornography is not addictive and not inherently dangerous to individuals who watch it.
But when I looked into the evidence presented in that court case I came to the conclusion that this was not a clear-cut case of a pseudoscientist crying defamation to sue a scientist into silence. I’m no lawyer but it seemed to me that Rhodes might actually have a valid case. It’s all pretty interesting and if you want to know more details, go watch that video.
Then in April of this year I read a new study about how most people who are in favor of banning porn might use “science” to argue against it but in fact they are almost exclusively religious fundamentalists who are cherrypicking data to support their moral objections. Of course this reminded me of the mostly secular NoFap group, so I looked to see whether or not the court case had resolved since 2019. I found that not only was the case still ongoing, but there had been several more lawsuits, threats of lawsuits, and various weirdnesses since then. So I made another video where I mostly talked about the new study but also briefly mentioned the NoFap/Prause updates.
That’s when things got really interesting. A short time after that video went live, YouTube notified me that there had been some DMCA takedowns filed against those two videos. The person who filed them was Nicole Prause, who claimed I had “stolen” the thumbnail of her Twitter profile picture that I showed in the corner of the screen for about ten seconds when I first mentioned her in each of those videos.
When it comes to DMCA complaints, it’s my understanding that YouTube usually immediately sides with the complainant, so I wasn’t shocked that they said they had removed my video from 2019.
All of this happened while I had actually taken the week off because, and I’m not even joking here, I decided to elope. And god dammit I was committed not just to my new marriage but also to my vacation on the beach where I did not have my laptop OR good internet, so I just made everything private on YouTube and Skepchick and then ignored it to go surfing for a week.
Prause had also contacted Patreon to inform them that I was violating her copyright. They got in touch with me and I was like, well, the supposed violation is on my YouTube video and that’s no longer available so...we good? They agreed: we good.
After my vacation I settled in to figure this all out. My options were to either let the DMCA takedown persist and edit Prause’s picture out of my videos and re-upload them, or file a countersuit that would basically escalate this legal process. The basis of the countersuit would be “Hey, it’s fair use to use someone’s low-res profile picture for 10 seconds to illustrate who I’m talking about” but fair use is a tricky territory that isn’t well defined. Like, very expensive legal battles have been won and lost trying to work out what is and isn’t fair use. I figured “Hey, I don’t have the time, the money, or the energy for that fight. I will edit the videos and re-upload.” It’s extra work, it’s a bit stressful, but whatever. Considering how many lawsuits Prause is either filing, defending, or threatening, I kind of should have seen that coming.
But YouTube wouldn’t let me download my original video from 2019 because it had the DMCA strike, and apparently I backed up everything except November of 2019 to my external hard drives because, well, I’m me, that’s the sort of stupid thing I do. So I found a low quality version of the video with crappy audio and I uploaded that, removing Prause’s profile pic and also preemptively censoring screenshots of her Tweets, too, because I just didn’t want to have to deal with this again. Remember that, it’s important.
So THAT is the video that went up earlier this week, where you all complained about the bad quality and the weirdness of me saying it’s November when it’s clearly May.
Once that was done I went to start editing the most recent update video, which was way easier because I had the raw file. But before I finished, I got this email from YouTube. Even though I didn’t challenge Prause’s DMCA, YouTube actually noticed that it was fishy and that my use of her profile pic was actually most likely covered under fair use. So that video was available for me to once again make public, which is super cool! But before I made it public again, I removed the section where I gave the update on Prause, because I decided I wanted to make this video where I explain everything. And honestly now that video is better for it because there’s no distraction from the new science about Christian fundamentalists and porn bans.
I then emailed YouTube and said “Hey, if the ten seconds of a profile pic were fair use in this video, then can you also reinstate the previous video that did the same thing?” I haven’t heard back yet and honestly it can be hard to get through to a human at Google so I don’t know if anyone will see it, but if that video gets reinstated I can go ahead and delete the bad quality one.
Right after I made the 2021 video public again, I got another automated email from YouTube announcing that an ***individual*** has requested removal of the re-uploaded 2019 video due to “privacy” concerns, with timestamps noting the seconds where I am speaking about the very public lawsuit filed against Nicole Prause with a censored box in the corner. YouTube was giving me 48 hours notice to make changes before a human takes a look and decides if it is, in fact, a privacy concern.
Meanwhile, I noticed some weird thing happening on Twitter. There were a bunch of replies to my Tweets that I couldn’t view, and it turns out that Nicole Prause blocked me on Twitter but somehow was able to keep replying to my Tweets. I...I did not even know that was possible. It’s not possible anymore because I went ahead and blocked her, too, but I took a look at her profile (thanks private browsers!) and found that she was accusing me of defamation. This helped explain something I noticed in her messages to YouTube trying to get my video removed, where she wrote, “The information presented is false, defamatory, and the current subject of a lawsuit against Rebecca Watson in California. She cannot be presenting "news" about herself.” I had no idea there was a lawsuit against me in California or elsewhere, but maybe it has something to do with this?
Prause claimed that it was “false and defamatory” for me to say that she was suspended from Twitter, but then she quotes herself thanking Twitter for reinstating her account. After she was suspended. So.
She also says I defamed her when I said she had lost defamation lawsuits. Let me correct the record and be as clear as possible: according to Gary Wilson, Prause sued him for defamation in an Oregon small claims court, which ruled against her and ordered her to pay court fees. She also lost one anti-SLAPP suit (I mistakenly thought there had been several anti-SLAPPs but it was just the one -- as Prause says in her Tweet, I didn’t fully read all the documents -- my bad!) in response to her trying to get a restraining order against Wilson. When neurosurgeon Don Hilton sued Prause for defamation, Prause agreed to settle out of court. NoFap’s Alexander Rhode’s defamation case against her is still ongoing. And psychotherapist Staci Sprout says that after she was asked to give a sworn statement about Prause’s harassment of her for one of those defamation lawsuits, Prause demanded Sprout pay her $10,000 and then tried to sue her in small claims court in California, where the case was dismissed for being in the wrong venue.
Back on Twitter, Prause claims that her critics are my “anti-porn heroes,” which is kind of hilarious considering that in each of my two videos on this topic I say pretty clearly that I don’t think porn is bad for people. She claims that I said I was in litigation with her (I never said that, that would be an absolutely insane thing to say) and that I said she was in litigation with ScramNews (I never said that either -- I correctly said that ScramNews was sued for defamation for repeating Prause’s comments, they lost that case and had to apologize, pay fees, and then they went out of business). Then she says I “link to groups that say I was not sexually assaulted,” which….yeah. I never said anything about whether or not she was sexually assaulted. Quite the non sequitur.
Finally, she thanked YouTube for removing the previous video “that posted stolen photographs of me falsely claiming I had lost lawsuits, was involved in pornography, etc” and holy shit, what? I’m actually blown away by how casually she throws out this comment about her being involved in pornography. I NEVER said she was in porn, and why would it even matter if she was in porn? Like, you do you lady! There’s absolutely nothing wrong with or shameful about being in pornography.
So, Prause tweeted several things about me that are untrue. Does that mean I’m about to get in on all these defamation lawsuits? No. Here’s why: as I (a non-lawyer) understand it, defamation of a public figure such as myself requires that a statement be false, be malicious, and cause damage. Her statements are obviously false but did she know they were false? Maybe, maybe not! Maybe she has confused me with the many other people she is fighting with in the public sphere. Maybe one of those people said she does porn. I don’t know.
And was it damaging to me? Well, she did tag Patreon, my primary income provider, in one of the false Tweets (she also contacted them to try to have my previous video removed). And yes, her DMCA did remove this video for a period of time which resulted in some lost ad revenue, and it took me a few hours to edit, re-record, and re-upload these videos, which sucks. But for real, I seriously hate defamation lawsuits and if I’m going to launch my own you’d better believe it’s gotta be worth it. And as of right now, I still have my Patreon and YouTube accounts, so I’m willing to take the loss.
I’m staunchly opposed to people using the court system to silence critics. I would much rather trust in the common sense of rational people to see how Prause is behaving and understand that she is not to be taken seriously. It is truly jaw-dropping that she would go after me this hard when I AGREE WITH HER that the science shows that pornography isn’t damaging. And because I’m me, I can’t just delete everything and move on when I’m threatened. I prefer for everything to be out in the open. So I made this video and am fighting to make sure the other videos remain public.
So that’s the story as of right now. I’ve tried to record this several times but each time I get some new notification that Prause is trying to shut me up, which is mostly annoying because this isn’t the Nicole Prause channel and I’d prefer to make this my last video on the subject.
If you’d like more frequent updates on this, plus photos of my dog, stupid jokes, and sciencey stuff, you can follow me on Twitter @RebeccaWatson. Thank you so much to everyone on Patreon and here on YouTube who are liking my videos, subscribing, and sharing with friends. I really appreciate it.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2112.11 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2353 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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