DawahFilms, You Pathetic Moron

So there’s a 36-hour charity this weekend in the service of raising money for finding a cure/vaccine/SOMETHING for AIDS (I’ll be doing an hour of it on Saturday, as well as available for comic relief at other points as well)!

Aaaand several someones got a little cranky, but one person in particular had to share his feelings on his YouTube profile:

Soo, the person running the charity event decided to gently share his own feelings about the sharing!

And then there was a huge Internet Shit Storm. Just imagine a huge shitstorm here, it will be easier that way than me posting a list of videos.

In response to this, first DawahFilms is indignant.

THEN he gets pretentious and starts lecturing us, starting off with how we’re not doing the kind of activism on the kind of topics he thinks are important in places he can see us doing them.

I’ll address the rest of my comments to this douchebag.

First off, you’re sending this video to a community of people who make videos. Your contrived drag from the hookah before you speak makes you look even more pretentious than you usually do, because we all know that this is a mediated experience and you look like you’re trying (too hard) to put on an air of casual indifference towards us. If we weren’t a concern to you, you wouldn’t be on the OTHER SIDE OF THE DAMN PLANET making videos to us about something that has no effect on your life whatsoever.

In case you hadn’t noticed, free speech is under attack all over the place, not just if you have brown skin or you’re Muslim – and the threat to both freedom of speech and freedom of association is under far greater threat from the covert than the overt, and is (as it ever was) a global issue.

In case you hadn’t noticed (and aren’t just nutpicking), private censorship and abuse of power is on the rise, so what happens on a private website is indeed a concern – or are you buying into the capitalist arguments you hate so much?

In case you hadn’t noticed, you’re completely ignoring the coming isolation of Iran from the Internet. Oh wait, you’re probably thinking about other things.

In case you hadn’t noticed, thousands of your brothers and sisters (both in the faith and just plain human beings) are languishing in U.S. prisons and are being used as cheap labor (and it’s getting worse), and you say nothing. Oh wait, you’re probably focused on one of the billions of other things that are going on.

In case you hadn’t noticed, secular humanism has nothing to do with capitalism, especially since capitalism (approx. founding date 1776) predates secular humanism (approx founding date 1851). Oh wait, you’re too busy affirming your rightness and righteousness to be familiar with such details.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Israel’s chief military commander is stating outright that the case for war with Iran put forth by our political and economic oligarchy is baseless, and that Iranian leaders are just as rational as the leaders of any other country (though this last bit gives me some pause). Oh wait, you wouldn’t want to actually support parts of a machine you blindly hate but that have a perspective that aligns with yours on such an important issue as war. Or, you could be focused on other stuff.

And lastly, in case you hadn’t noticed, YouTube is not a platform for activism, it is a platform for entertainment first, communicating about what’s on YouTube second, and other things third. Using YouTube as a substitute for activism is pure narcissism. Kind of like trying to project a combination Islamic-scholar/Byronesque/faux-hipster/jaded-world-traveler/American-expat vibe.

Let me once again reproduce your bulletins here in full before I continue:

Now first of all, your overblown rhetoric sucks. In the beginning you use “you” to mean either devchelle, YouTube Atheists, or Atheists in general, and in the middle you use “your” to mean (presumably) United States/Western, and at the end you use “you” to go back to your first definition.

Second, you bitch about not being taken the way you mean to be taken when you’re not even consistent about who you’re talking about.

Third, your scare quotes around “spreading atheism” are silly. What you’re thinking of is “spreading democracy,” specifically “spreading democracy in the middle east.” Then again, you may not be thinking at all.

Fourth, you and InMendham need to sit down and have a chat, and maybe figure out how you arrived at this idea of an objective measure of suffering so that suffering can be quantified and compared across different places and times. It would be really neat if you could teach us this.

Fifth, your self-centered cluelessness is appalling. You are not the only fundamentalist who has attacked the AIDS charity event, and some of them have indeed attacked us for the specific purpose we’re holding it for. It’s not all about you, it’s about a general class of idiots (like yourself) who are raining contempt on us and connecting it to an event that is not contemptible.

As for what we’re individually doing for change? That’s an entirely different question, and you embarrass yourself by conflating it with the AIDS charity event. I wouldn’t tell you what I’m doing if my reputation depended on it any more than I’d tell Brett Keane, Thunderf00t, Stigmadeign, Gorilla199, or fringeelements because I have no use for self-important sophomoric asshats of any kind, and don’t see your kind as fit to be trusted with anything I consider to be of any importance whatsoever.

However: I do welcome your scorn, and your tears are delicious.