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http://gretachristina.typepad.com/

This article documents some recurring themes in the writings and posts of Greta Christina, particularly her tendency to assert a claim, opinion, or point of view, especially on a controversial topic, and then claim to be too busy to substantiate the claim at that time, and then go on to fail to substantiate it at a later date.

Closely related to the issue of "controversy for views for money".

Background[]

Greta Christina, who can lay claim to being the mother of "atheist misogyny", essentially earns a living entirely via blogging and speaking engagements, and as already noted, exploits controversies, usually contrived, in a manner not dissimilar to Fox News or Freethoughtblogs (where she now resides). As an example of her following-the-money for the sake of blog hits, there is this example of her baiting PZ Myers on AlterNet with the clear knowledge that this would be a guaranteed winner (there is no honor amongst yellow journalists) -

Can Atheism Be Proven Wrong?

Where Christina really hit pay dirt though was by concocting the atheist misogyny meme. The article that finally hooked home for her was from September 2009 -

Getting It Right Early: Why Atheists Need to Act Now on Gender and Race

Unsurprisingly, this article was in cahoots with Rebecca Watson and had several follow-up posts. The article was not really the first on this meme, in fact, the campaign had already been running for years, but it was the one that hooked the attention of the less critical and was widely crossposted throughout many community sites, and took on a viral life of its own. As with everything that has been said before or since, the article is heavy on insinuation, and devoid of substance, being little more than yet another everything is the white males' fault piece. It has been paying off ever since.

"I Don't Have Time"[]

Outatime

She would rebut you. Really, she would. And she would tear you to pieces with her superior intellect and reasoning skills... if only she had the time. Unfortunately, Greta is running so short of time she soon won't have time to tell people she doesn't have time.

Perhaps we are being a bit harsh on poor old Greta. When you have the hectic lifestyle of a full-time blogger, even the mundane tasks we all perform every day can be a drain. Greta explains:

It’s not like going to the bank is a huge fucking nightmare. But when you’ve already spent the morning returning emails and booking plane tickets and picking up the dry-cleaning and calling the vet, going to the bank seems like an exhausting, overwhelming, impossibly Herculean task.
- Greta Christina, in a post about how being an adult is hard.

So, please. Bear Greta's impossibly herculean workload in mind as she explains why she just doesn't have time to respond to your carefuly thought out, well-worded argument:



Sep-15-2014: Re Sam Winston: Ordinarily, I might have more patience for Sam Winston’s comments here.... But I’m on a book tour. I don’t have access to my computer for most of the day, and I’m not able to moderate this discussion closely, or to participate in it fully. Plus I’m very tired, and I don’t want to spend the two or three hours of down time I have each day paying attention to this ignorant, condescending, sexist bullshit. No Time At All (comment #59)

Sep-9-2012: I don’t have the time or the energy to reply to this fully right now. CFI - Divisiveness Within The Secular Movement (comment #23)

Aug-2-2012: [This is a variation on the theme]: "I’m fairly swamped today, so I want to crowd-source this: Can we get some links to scientific studies of racism? .... However, I’m swamped today, and I really don’t have time to do Google-Fu, and email all my friends and colleagues who have sociology and psychology studies at their fingertips, and otherwise spend the entire day lining up links to the countless studies demonstrating the reality of racism. So I’m going to crowd-source it." Scientific Studies of Racism

Jun-28-2012: "I don’t have time or energy today to discuss which parts of Stiefel’s post I agree with and which parts I don’t. What I want to say instead right now is this...." Todd Stiefel, and Some Thoughts on Critiquing Codes of Conduct

Jun-25-2012: "There is so much wrong packed into this one post, I could write an entire novel-length systematically dismantling everything that’s wrong with it. But I don’t have time or energy for that today…" - So Much Wrong, Part 1: thunderf00t and Sexual Harassment

Jun-15-2012: "I haven’t been getting as involved in the recent “sexual harassment at atheist/ skeptical conferences” discussions as I would like to. This is my last week at my day job, and my time has been both much more limited and much more frazzling even than usual." - Holy. Fucking. Shit.

Jun-5-2012: "I may not be able to get it out for a couple/few days, as I’m more than usually swamped right now." - Sexual Harassment, and What “Not Naming Names” Does And Does Not Mean

Jan-31-2012: "I’m more than usually swamped for time right now, and don’t have time to get more deeply into the conversation." - Frederick sparks at black skeptics on Be Scofield, Greta Christina, and New Atheist Racism

GC time

Jan-26-2012: "I don’t have time today to do a line-by-line fisking of Be Scofield’s latest screed in Tikkun against the so-called “New Atheists.” Which is irritating, since the piece targets me by name and at some length." - Atheist Arguments = Racist Cultural Imperialism?

Oct-26-2011: A two-fer!

"I’m going to leave it to someone else to do the line-by-line fisking of this piece. I’d love to do it myself, but my time is even more crunched than usual this week, and I just can’t manage it."

...

15056349

"But I really can’t do a thorough, line-by-line critique of everything this piece gets wrong about atheists and atheism. I just don’t have time today." - Echo Chamber of Picking Fights Atheists Just Can't Win

Sep-08-2011: "Okay. I don’t really have time and energy to respond to this line by line. But I can get the ball rolling for the rest of y’all." - "You're talking about a straw man": From the Mailbag

Nov-15-2010: "I have work to do, and I don’t have time to reply line by line to each of these comments defending the validity of NDEs as evidence of an immaterial soul. I will simply point out that none of these defenses actually, you know, defend anything." - Why Near Death Experiences Are a Terrible Argument for the Soul

May-07-2008: "I am hereby declining to continue this argument. Barefoot Bum has either misunderstood or misrepresented almost everything I've said on this topic -- at times even asserting that my point was the exact opposite of what it really was. And I don't have either the time or inclination to explain, for the third time, what I meant. If anyone else wants to discuss these ideas with me in my blog, they're welcome to do so. I am not going to do so here. " - Larry, the Barefoot Bum

The Replicating "I Don't Have Time" Meme[]

Women cyclists make up a far higher proportion of deaths involving lorries than men. Why?

"Women may also have less time than men, she says, because they tend to have the responsibility of looking after children before and after work, and are often carrying shopping." -- Jane Hornsby, 49, from Oxford


The Greater Baboon Jungle[]

Not having time to address an issue is an effective tool for any toilet slave or Baboon. It makes an appearance in the related blogosphere, such as manboobz (a feminist themed site referenced on the Baboon boards), and often covers similar topics, for example, the Witch-of-the-Week feeding frenzy. Example witches include Theamazingatheist and Johntheother)

Between the Baboon boards and manboobz there seem to be many common readers who, after licking the pharyngula toilet bowl, seek out different, more intensely flavoured excrement.

When confronted with the AgentOrangeFiles, a compilation of writings from members of the sites http://radicalhub.com and http://radfemspeak.net , advocating mass violence toward and extermination of all males, and deliberate starvation of male children in order to stunt their growth, David Futrelle, the author of manboobz, responded with:

"But I have spent some time going through these files myself in a completely random manner, which is evidently what AgentOrange expects everyone who downloads the files to do. To be perfectly honest, I haven’t spent that much time on this. I’ve really been quite busy with other things. But I have spent some time. More than twenty minutes, anyway." - David Futrelle, author of manboobz responding to the AgentOrangeFiles

Apparently, Futrelle believes that parsing through the files in a "random manner", then stopping after 20 minutes, counts as a credible review of the evidence. In his article, Futrelle ignores the incriminating evidence in the AgentOrangeFiles.

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