PZ Myers, the Grand Patriarch of FreeThoughtBlogs, is a biologist and an Associate Professor at a pretty decent liberal arts college. Academically, his career has been one of no great distinction; the fact that he’s still an Associate Professor at age 58–at a Liberal Arts school that mostly offers preparatory degrees for those going on to bigger universities–should clue you in that his achievements as a scientist are hardly impressive.
There is of course no shame in that; simply being a good teacher is one of the most honorable things you can be in this world. And indeed, evidence is that for an undergrad science teacher, he’s pretty good at his job. I imagine he might make a pretty good High School science teacher as well.
However, instead of being content and proud to be a good teacher, it seems that for many years he has tried to overcome his lack of academic and scientific distinction by attacking Creationism (which is like shooting fish in a barrel for a living) as well as bullying anyone of traditional religious bent, while also bullying anyone who dares dissent from any of his atheist-y psuedoreligious “Social Justice” beliefs, such as the ideological feminist pseudoscience he consistently refuses to confront.
He is notorious for attacking minority religious groups, slandering others as rapists with no evidence but allegations, endorsing censorship of campus newspapers he does not approve of, and more. Indeed, by his own standards on rape allegations, he and several other male FreeThoughtBloggers should be presumed to be confessed rapists. (He is of course no such thing, but by his own pseudoscientific standards he should be considered one.)
As a male who embraced the modern day religion of Feminism, it should not surprise that he’s in the habit of smearing men’s human rights advocates of just about every bad thing you can, up to and including pedophilia (which, as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, all I can say is this: screw yourself sideways with a porcupine PZ). It is worth noting that he’s been politely challenged on dozens of occasions to rebut us on anything we advocate on an evidence-based basis. These requests have always been ignored, so we assume that, like most feminists, he has no rational response to any of the issues we raise on education, suicide, homelessness, criminal justice, family law, genital mutilation, sexual assault and abuse, domestic abuse, and more: we dare to question Feminist Ideology, and as a proud Priest in that Church, he requires no evidence to maintain his faith in the Holy Dogma of Patriarchy Theory.
Mostly we’re content to ignore PZ and the sinking ship that is FreeThoughtBlogs. It’s such a cesspool of antihumanist, hateful ideology, cheap shots, character assassination, harassment, unverifiable allegations, and smear campaigns, why bother? Still, when they outright egregiously lie about us (which they’ve been known to do), it seems worth noting. And when they use clearly manufactured evidence that not only a High School kid could spot, but that anyone who knows anything about us would instantly recognize as wrong, well, I guess we have to acknowledge them.
Not long ago, it was brought to our attention that PZ Myers had libeled Paul Elam with a forged document. No, this is not a matter of opinion. The document is a forgery; our only question is whether Myers created the forgery himself, fabricating the story whole cloth, or if he simply took the word of whoever sent it and did not do the most basic work of verifying its authenticity before launching another smear tirade against someone just because he doesn’t like them.
In a posting entitled Duck morality is not for me, PZ Myers “quoted” Paul Elam as writing things he never wrote. A simple phone call or email to Paul to verify the quote, or checking for a hyperlink to our forums, would have made it easy for Myers to verify the truth of this. Frankly, just a little skepticism would have been called for: anyone who actually looks at this with their own naked eye can see that it does not line up very well with how messages are generally displayed in our forums.
Still, here’s an exact copy of the forged image that Myers used:
This forgery appears to have come in part from this thread in our forum, where you can immediately see, formatting doesn’t quite look like that picture would have it. It’s also a thread Paul never posted in. It does appear that the forgery used some of what’s there that’s written by other people, and some of which is clearly just text that’s never appeared in our forums, or would likely cause heated debate (and likely mocking) if it did.
But if the naked eye won’t do it for you, just adjusting the contrast on the image makes it obvious that this is a really bad forgery:
Looks like he didn’t even bother using something decent like Photoshop, but rather a crude program like MS Paint or something.
I asked Paul what he thought of this. He said he finds Myers “such an obvious hack I don’t think we should bother responding to him.” But I think it’s important to get this out there since some credulous people do still take Myers’ blogging seriously. So I asked him and he obliged.
That quotation is a bunch of pseodoscientific horseshit and anyone who knows me knows I’d call that what looks like some of the seedier and dumber PUA crap out there. Not that all PUA is BS but that’s what some of the worst fringe material in PUA-land looks like. Also by the way, Ayn Rand is OK but I’m not a huge fan so I’d never use that quote except ironically, since I don’t embrace male chauvinism. For fuck’s sake, humans are pairbonders, not all men fawn over all women, and I’ve said thousands of times over the years that I reject the entire Alpha/Beta male paradigm for humans to begin with. If you know anything about evolution you know damned well that if we were rape-type tournament maters like gorillas we would never have evolved human civilization. That PZ Myers is such a dishonest and irresponsbile douchebag isn’t surprising, and at this point I’m used to people putting words in my mouth that I never said. But holy shit can you get any dumber? PZ would try to get a student expelled for this shit, and if the FreeThought Blogs community had any standards they’d throw his ass out. I guess they can’t because he owns it, but Christ can you get more pathetic? FreeThoughtBlogs isn’t for atheists, it’s for morons peddling Social Justice Crusaderism and Feminism as their religon.”
Anyway, we won’t hold our breaths waiting for PZ Myers to in any way apologize for passing off this crude and obvious forgery. At this point we’ve seen enough of the man’s work to know he’d never be so honest or so honorable; even if he does retract, he’ll likely try to claim this is our fault somehow anyway.
But let’s be clear: PZ Myers has now undeniably engaged in willfully putting out a provably forged, libelous document. He ought to face censure from the academic, humanist, skeptical, and “FreeThought” communities. We doubt any of that will happen, so we just put this out there in the public record for anyone who cares.
Editorial note: the [sarcasm] 100% true-to-life professional photo [/sarcasm] of PZ Myers that we used for the title image here is courtesy of the Where In The World Is PZ Myers campaign. More people should join!
