For Reason and Science?

[Pure Blonde]

I've never assumed LP's attacks on the shambles of the RDF were anything other than pointing out gross errors and inefficiencies of a shoddy and somewhat incestuous organisations. Her motivation for doing that are irrelevant.

I think that’s rather underselling LP’s determination, to be honest. There are plenty of shoddy, nepotistic, omnishambolic organisations in the world. LP’s efforts at pointing out gross errors have been fixedly concentrated on the RDFRS, say, rather than other atheist or sceptical orgs or charities which might have similar problems with lack of organisational culture, egocentric leadership, and loose accountancy checks on the books. There is a perception that LP’s focus on the RDFRS is obsessive to the point of conspiracy theory, and that is being used to undermine the value of the reams of data and facts she’s been accumulating.

Rebecca Watson is a clown, no rationale is needed as to why Dawkins might not wish to have anything to do with her, knowing she only exists to play the victim for hits. She is best ignored.

If Watson were a clown, it would have been more clever of Dawkins to ignore her completely after Dublin, rather than have fed the feud by blacklisting her. Since then it’s been classic Streisand Effect in action; so I’ll take issue with who the real clown is on that score.

His opinion of her (which is increasingly common) is also irrelevant to this topic and LP's actions. Sadly the clown college at fTb has been using her investigations to support the defamation of his character has lead her being pulled into a different fight.

What defamation? Most of RD’s recent stupid faux pas have been of his own infliction — he has a major case of foot-in-mouth.

Most of whom are little more than attention grabbers who use any opportunity to promote their disturbed nonsense which is to achieve fame by vicarious accusation. Rebecca Watson is as irrelevant to this topic as fTb is.

Gross incompetence because of sexual relationships is quite a different thing from "oooh look, he's got more than one wimmin, he must be the devil". His sex life is no-ones business and is irrelevant to this topic outside of claims of mismanagement and incompetence. That he cannot separate business from pleasure may be more interesting to some. I've always thought Dawkins a bit of a tool anyway so none of what's happened with the foundation surprises me.

I’ve not the slightest intention to judge RD by his sexual relationships, but they do rise to a level of being objective facts that impinge on people when there are interpersonal feuds being conducted in real life. While I agree his relationships should bear no relevance to the claims of mismanagement of the foundation, there is the small matter alleged that the foundation underwrites the travel costs for Richard’s entourage, so as you put it the line to ‘separate business from pleasure’ is not always a sharp dividing line.

[Tero]

Like all retired male professors, yes he has a penis.
(To Tyrannical post)

[lordpasternack]

Andrew Chalkley is also entirely capable of verifying the provenance of the email discussed, given that it was forwarded to him by Cornwell herself.

On a sidenote, I will only add that all this speculation about Dawkins' dislike of Rebecca Watson, is, as Audley stated - so not my fight, and not what I find most compelling about that email. The speculation doesn't really interest me, and I see little substance in it… I also have some correspondence with Dawkins, discussing Rebecca Watson. I'm not going to post it here because it isn't relevant, in my opinion - but I might share it behind the scenes, given that it would shed a little more light on that situation than the tenuous link to the email being discussed.

[lordpasternack]

I think that’s rather underselling LP’s determination, to be honest. There are plenty of shoddy, nepotistic, omnishambolic organisations in the world. LP’s efforts at pointing out gross errors have been fixedly concentrated on the RDFRS, say, rather than other atheist or sceptical orgs or charities which might have similar problems with lack of organisational culture, egocentric leadership, and loose accountancy checks on the books.

You're most definitely right - and the main issue is that I am mostly ignorant of other such organisations. I have never been involved with them in any way, I have never held their founders on a pedestal, I have never watched their gross incompetence and disingenuousness repeatedly unfold before my eyes, and I have never had private correspondence with their Executive Directors in which I was repeatedly lied to, without compunction.

And that aside - yeah, there's the basic issue of evidence, and choosing to accept it or not.

[Pure Blonde]

This view is also currently unanimous behind the scenes, for what it's worth. Paula Kirby is not the villain you're after

These are screenshots from a conversation with Andrew Chalkley - who was the source of the "some possible ideas" email - which had been forwarded to him by Cornwell, to "bring him in on the discussion".

[PB: I snipped out the screenshots for the sake of length — I accept them as having been read into the thread.]

Feel free to look him up and confirm the provenance of the screenshots with him - and take his words and mine, as you will.

LP, I hope you did read where I mentioned that I’ve had no personal interactions with any RDFRS people at all, and so I have little in the way of preconceived ideas about their roles and actions as part of the RDFRS. (Unless they like sock puppeting at places like the Intersection, for kicks. But I still wouldn’t have known it was them, if that were the case.)

Dawkins is famous; people like Cornwell, Kirby, Chalkley, and Timonen are not. So owing to the lack of familiarity, I can read some of those conversations and get some of the picture of the people and personalities involved. I’m aware I’m lacking context. However, I’m not going to be drawn into assuming that there are obvious ‘villains’, or that even it’s always the same people to whom the ‘villainy’ is being attributed, in all circumstances. So for example, while it’s nice that Andrew C. thinks Paula is ‘1000% saner’ than REC, you must admit that is only a relative comparison.

I also think it is possible, given the lack of oversight of the US operations from the UK side, for Timonen to have been engaging in small-time embezzlement, and for the extent of that misdemeanour to have been vastly inflated. Or perhaps Timonen really did hive away a very profitable line of business from the US shop and the RDFRS’ incompetence in bookkeeping made it impossible to pin any wrongdoing on him at all, especially once Timonen obtained competent lawyers who trained the discovery process back on the Foundation… and the Foundation discovered that it had lost all of it’s email records. (That was a particularly hilarious bit of the litigation, I have to say, rather like the old excuse that ‘the dog ate my homework’. I didn’t expect to see that coming from Richard Dawkins’ side of the lawsuit.)

So I’m willing to believe that Cornwell could be a malicious actor behind that… or applying Hanlon’s Razor, the explanation might be sheer incompetence over malice. The evidence that would make me change my mind either way is probably complicated — what I’ve seen of the paperwork revealed from the litigation is horrendous — and there might be better quality evidence for establishing the mismanagement of the RDFRS.

[lordpasternack]

Pure Blonde - I find it very, very difficult to accept that the lawsuit was simple incompetence, for numerous reasons - not least the fact that Cornwell, on behalf of RDFRS, kept chopping and changing the story - the fact that the evidence being presented to her was in direct contradiction of the claims she had forwarded, and, instead of admitting error and proposing a quick settlement out of court, Cornwell just kept saying and doing crazier and crazier things.

Timonen and Norton also provided heaps of documentation. It's quite disingenuous to say that they trained the discovery process on RDFRS.

[Pure Blonde]

I didn’t deny that most of the documentation came from Timonen and Norton. By that phrase ‘trained the discovery process on RDFRS’ I refer to their lawyer’s itemised list of 171 categories of different documents that were demanded of RDFRS by Timonen and Norton, dated 15 February 2011. It’s well beyond my pay grade to speak to it on the grounds of legal necessity to defend a case, but it looks to me rather like a shopping expedition, and it paid off in an interesting way, when RD had to admit he was missing all of his e-mails that had been lost.

Bedtime here… no sorry, actually it’s over an hour past my bedtime. Zzzzz

[lordpasternack]

It’s well beyond my pay grade to speak to it on the grounds of legal necessity to defend a case, but it looks to me rather like a shopping expedition, and it paid off in an interesting way, when RD had to admit he was missing all of his e-mails that had been lost.

My emphasis.

I don't know whether you'll feel disillusioned or reassured to know that Richard Dawkins himself admitted no such thing - because he hadn't engaged with the lawsuit at all, to the extent that, when it came to the parties attempting to settle the lawsuit through mediation - Richard reportedly didn't even know that RDFRS had been sanctioned for their failure to comply with the discovery process.

Reportedly, when Josh Timonen raised this matter with Richard - Richard responded by appearing baffled, and stating that he'd have to ask Cornwell about that. (Yes, yes - he reportedly said he'd have to ask Cornwell about that - and not his goddamn lawyer! )

I've already addressed this point in detail on RatSkep - so I'll just cross-post what I've already stated:

Can anyone sum up what happened with the court case?

Given that the whole thing was arguing about who was entitled to what when both parties didn't bother to communicate any sort of agreement about what payment would be given for what work, Dawkins dropped it on the grounds that not having any evidence at all for what he claimed was somewhat of a problem for the court.

Also, Dawkins seems to have used the same questionable judgement that he used to hire Timonen to hire his lawyers, who seemed about as good at running the case as Timonen was at running websites. Eventually the shambles got put out of its misery, with Dawkins dropping it after after the judge got narky at Dawkins' lawyers for being unable to follow due process.

My emphasis.

Actually, Dawkins most definitely did none of those things.

See the Motion for Terminating Sanctions - p13, lines 5-9:

To-date, Plaintiff Dawkins has failed to produce a single communication to the defendants... Rather, Robin Elizabeth Cornwell [sic], on behalf of RDFRS, has produced in very large part only those documents she apparently believes are supportive of the Plaintiffs' contentions...

My bolding.

And that was in July 2011. At least 7 months into the case. And Dawkins as an individual was supposed to be filing suit against Timonen personally, remember...

And in case you needed to know the reasoning behind this particular delegation - you can view this archived snapshot of the RDFRS Staff page and see:

Dr R. Elisabeth ‘Liz’ Cornwell, PhD, has been taken on as the first Executive Director of the US branch of RDFRS. She has already made many contributions to RDFRS behind the scenes, including... setting up our system of accountancy, auditing and legal advice. She was equipped to do this during her years as a businesswoman, working in marketing and sales in the semiconductor industry in California.

My emphasis.

Also note that that capture was taken on 22 May 2011 - and that the claims about her auditing, accounting and legal expertise were removed by the time of the capture taken almost exactly a month later. The comment about her business experience was also shunted further down in the bio, successfully divorced of its original context - and an outright lie about her having filmed lecture events was inserted, for good measure.

And it may not have been RDFRS's lawyers who were failing to follow due process. It may have been one of the lawyers' clients. Ahem.

[Rum]

Get over it folks, you are women atheists. That makes you...atheists. And Richard Dawkins is a retired professor. Nothing special.

The interwebz.

[lordpasternack]

As a further note, I'll only point out that OlivierK was inaccurate in stating that the parties had never agreed on how the RD.net Store was to be run, and who would be entitled to what. The parties had reached a pretty clear agreement, in 2007:

22. All products sold in the Upper Branch Store publicized the issues and cause(s) supported and advanced by Dawkins and RDF but Dawkins made clear that, in Dawkins’ own words, the Upper Branch Store was “not directly concerned with RDF[]’ activities.”

23. At all times hereunder, Plaintiff was an independent business (independent from RDF, et al.), and Mr. Timonen autonomously ran and operated the Upper Branch Store from a location within Los Angeles, California.

24. Timonen proposed to Dawkins that Timonen could donate certain profits of the Upper Branch Store operation to RDF. In response, on or about July 25, 2007, Dawkins emailed Timonen in Los Angeles: “it’s your baby, your profits, your tax . . . as for whether Upper Branch should make a donation to RDF[], I don’t think you should feel any moral obligations in that regard.”

My emphasis.

The above is from Upper Branch's First Amended Complaint against RDFRS et al: Paragraphs 22-24, pages 7-8.

[lordpasternack]

And just a little heads-up - my efforts in hammering out evidence are being frustrated by the fact that a number of keys on my laptop's keyboard have gone kaput, rendering my laptop non-functional, because I can't even enter my password to access it. Shit happens.

[DaveDodo007]

Get over it folks, you are women atheists. That makes you...atheists. And Richard Dawkins is a retired professor. Nothing special.

The interwebz.

Ain't that the truth, it's not like the press don't have it in for Dawkins as we have seem lately they are prepared to quotemine him to make him a peado enabler and regularly print horseshit about him being a 'militant' atheist. Yet they are handed this story on a silver platter and still don't care. I'm convince by lp evidence that RDFAS or whatever it is called is full of shit and nepotism. Though it is clear that the media are not, I accept that you care deeply and are passionate about this but when you can't get a story printed in silly season as the press call it, then are you being productive with your time. Time waits for no person and Dawkins is probably good for being photographed with and little else. He has more or less been put out to pasture (or stud is half the stories are real.) Do you really want to pursue an elderly person to their grave, is there anybody on this planet who is a paragon of virtue and has no vices? I'm a old cunt now but I still get mad about evil done in religion or ideologies name but fools and their money being parted, spare me and go and smoke a spilff.

[Rum]

I have become convinced that LPs obsession is no longer rational. Sorry LP, but you have taken this too far.

[lordpasternack]

I have become convinced that LPs obsession is no longer rational. Sorry LP, but you have taken this too far.

I'm convinced that your 'reasoning' isn't in the slightest bit rational - especially in light of the numerous documents I've linked to in just the past few days.

[Rum]

It isn't your reasoning, its your obsession LP. We had this out before, not that it matters what this old guy who doesn't give much of a shit what the bloggosphere is gossiping about at any given moment thinks. He's an old man with a well deserved reputation for his achievements. He has many failings too it seems So fucking what.