The Astral Log

25 January 2016

Skepticon 8, Day 2: Success and disaster

Filed under: Skepticon, US-Missouri — Andrew T. @ 20:20

After a restful night, I managed to snag breakfast with a few acquaintances and made my way to the main conference hall. What would happen in Skepticon's second day? I was excited to find out.

Islam: A Primer for Atheists

The first speaker of the day was Muhammad Syed, who shared his knowledge and experiences (by way of Pakistan) in a presentation titled "Islam: A Primer for Atheists." Syed is the founder and president of Ex-Muslims of North America.

Following him was Fallon Fox, a transgender mixed martial artist (MMA) fighter. A tense moment came in the Q&A afterwards when some guy in a Tapout shirt prompted Fallon with a rude question about her "manhood"...and the convention organizers responded to the person with a cut-off and dismissal. I was impressed by how well and how quickly the incident was diffused.

I was ready for lunch, but I stayed seated in place: Word had gotten around that the conference organizers had made a last-minute addition to the schedule, and we would have a back-and-forth question-and-answer session about the racist incidents and surrounding protests at the University of Missouri. It was a current event of pertinent significance in the state of our conference, it made perfect sense to have a discussion about it, and I looked forward to seeing what information and engagement the next hour would bring.

The clock struck high noon, and the session got under way. It struck me that a few things were amiss: There was only one participant...a white self-described photojournalist by the name of Mark Schierbecker...and his "dialogue" turned out to be a monologue. Mark wasn't involved with the protests themselves, but shared recollections of his attempts to brazenly film them...notably, without articulating the participants' motivations or gaining confidence around them to reduce their suspicion.

He shared a sample of his footage (that came off as minutes of chaos, shedding no insight whatsoever on the situation) and spent the remainder of the hour making points of entitlement...letting loose that his objective wasn't to end the racist harassment and chancellor conduct at Mizzou prompting the protests, but rather to lobby for the firing of a Mizzou staff member who turned him away when he violated a safe space. Then...whoops! Out of time! Guess this wasn't a Q&A after all.

Fortunately, the audience wasn't silenced easily. An observer in the second row raised her hand and challenged Schierbecker's privilege and audacity in inflating his indulgences as a white journalist above years of anti-black oppression. Several others joined in, pointing out his obliviousness to privacy, the backwardness of his priorities, and the regular record of journalistic coverage being used to spin and lie about protests. On the final front, Schierbecker's reputation preceded himself: His coverage of the Mizzou protests was latched onto by Breitbart and fucking Storm Front as "evidence" that protesters were thugs, and he had done nothing to withdraw the footage or stop them from using it to their ends. I looked back near the end, and saw four or five of the people that I knew storm out of the room in disgust. I was pinned near the front, and waited through to the end. That end came with a whimper, with the disgraced photojournalist offering up "autism" as the excuse for his behavior...thus throwing people with neurological conditions under the bus. I tried rejoining my acquaintances at the lunch table afterward, but they shooed me away so they could process what they had just experienced among themselves...so I was left to cope by myself.

To their credit, the Skepticon organizers publicly apologized for this fiasco of an event, and Danielle Muscato resigned as Schierbecker's public relations manager afterward. Unfortunately the stench remained, and what was done could not be undone. It also didn't help that a pack of regressive assholes tried spinning the incident on social media afterward as a tale of how mean ol' Skepticon had supposedly bullied a pitiful, autistic boy for no reason at all.

Several of the people who were in attendance at the Q&A subsequently wrote about their experiences there. For further insight, I recommend reading the pieces by Alex Rudewell, Jason Thibeault, and Feminace.


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©2015-16 Andrew Turnbull