Revised. Something really funny happened yesterday. And then something funny happened today. Thunderf00t tried to lie, and got caught. And embarrassed, he threw out a bunch of insults and blather, and ran away. The event was amusing. It was so easy to catch him out. And his response to having been caught was so pathetic and bizarre. And then after publishing this post today his fans caught me in a mistake! Which is amusing for a completely different reason. And I’ll be correcting that mistake below. But it all reminded me, not only would Thunderf00t make a lousy sailor (for reasons I’ll explain), but so much has happened since I last exposed him (not even just this), that it’s high time I aggregated the new material exposing him. So here is your complete update on the horror show that is Thunderf00t.

Backstory

Thunderf00t is a well-documented liar. As well as a borderline criminal, misogynist, and at least mild racist. I suspect he may be sociopathic, based on his self-absorption, unrelenting reliance on lying and manipulation, his ready criminality, and his shockingly callous attitudes toward other human beings, as well as his ready willingness to hurt them for his own self-satisfaction. One might propose that he is simply insane, that he actually believes all his lies, but I find that extremely improbable. His manipulation of evidence requires conscious and deliberate effort. And he scrupulously avoids addressing your evidence when you expose one of his lies. I already documented examples of his lies, manipulation of evidence, criminality, misogyny, and racism back in 2013 (Is Thunderf00t a Sociopath?). Even more examples were collected at length by Michael Nugent. More has accumulated since.

It isn’t news to most people, but Thunderf00t has continually defended the harassment of women generally, including (in consequence) even guys who joked about raping a teenage girl on her own online thread (I demonstrated that in the above link). He has even said outspoken feminists deserve the rape and death threats they receive (ditto), while also simultaneously insisting they get no rape or death threats (because, being a misogynist, he believes women who report such things are liars). He is a well-known anti-feminist and MRA idol. He appears in fact to be an infamous profiteer on victimizing women. This has been documented and analyzed by Jay Allen (How Crowdfunding Helps Haters Profit from Harassment) and Margaret Pless (Sargon of Akkad and Thunderf00t: #Gamergate’s Well-Paid Talking Heads).

His borderline criminality includes hacking into our email list (here at FtB) and spying on us and stealing and publishing private communications, as well as committing what I’d say amounts to fraud, by publishing false customer reviews on a commercial website to destroy the business of someone he didn’t like, and suborning a mob to assist—which is basically racketeering: burning down a business (through a fraud-induced bankruptcy) to shut the owner up, and thereby threatening by proxy anyone else who would exercise their free speech against him. The computer espionage I documented in my 2013 article. The virtual fraud and racketeering has been documented by David Futrelle here and by Catalina Hernandez here.

He’s basically the closest thing the atheist movement has to a Bond villain.

Thunderf00t also engages in rape apologetics, and has said several confusing things about the Holocaust as an acceptable price of doing science (which you can almost make sense of, but he does not much help you with that). Both those links, incidentally, catalog how awful Thunderf00t is as a debater and a thinker, how he evades serious issues by simply pretending a question wasn’t asked, or by avoiding answering a question with other tactics, and basically just acts like a dick rather than saying anything clear or substantive or even, most of the time, correct. His logic is often obscure. And his evidence scarce to nonexistent. And when evidence is even offered at all, it is often doctored or manipulated.

There are growing collections of his drama and misdeeds at RationalWiki (beginning with his spring flying loose here at Freethought Blogs and continuing on down) and SJWiki. So you can bookmark those to keep tabs.

But one thing I’d like to call attention to: most consistent across all of these sources is Thunderf00t’s lying and manipulation of evidence (when evidence even comes up at all). This has been beautifully illustrated by L0G1C B0MB in a detailed exposé of Thunderf00t’s dishonesty in his videos against Anita Sarkeesian. It’s so thorough and elegant and spot on, that I highly recommend you watch it. Even just on that topic. But keep your eye on the general point. Because this is what Thunderf00t does with everything. The same tactics are repeatedly used: deliberately hiding information so as to falsely represent the facts; wanton reliance on embarrassingly obvious logical fallacies; and resorting to buffoonish insults and blather to avoid acknowledging either. My article in 2013 documents numerous examples. Now we have another…

The Never Sinking Ship

When on Twitter Thunderf00t took it upon himself to rebut my evidence that he is a liar and a likely sociopath, his argument was, in effect, that I must be wrong because Freethought Blogs is “a sinking ship.” He then linked to the free Alexa website tracking page for Freethought Blogs which shows a graph of its relative ranking throughout 2015. And said “BURN!” (like a child). Let’s set aside the obvious fallacy. How would the declining audience for a whole blog network two years later in any way rebut any of my documentation of his lies and vicious nature? It doesn’t. And he’s supposed to be a scientist, remember. Reliance on embarrassingly obvious logical fallacies? Check! Instead, what’s even more embarrassing is that his linked graph was not a graph of our audience size. It is a graph of our ranking relative to other websites across the entire internet. And only for 2015.

I pointed out that he must suck at science if he thinks a relative measure is an absolute measure. I could also have pointed out that Alexa is so inaccurate and unreliable that professionals don’t use it. But I could also have mentioned that only looking at 2015 is a serious fail at data analysis. As it happens (as we’ll see shortly), traffic at FtB routinely dips toward the holidays and rises toward the summer. All his graph shows is a dip toward the holidays. If you looked at a graph from 2012 through 2015 complete, you might see pretty much the same up and down pattern. So only looking at one year is not a reliable means of understanding what you are looking at: an actual decline, or a repeating dip before a repeating swell.

But that’s moot here, since again, this is a relative measure. It’s therefore useless. The graph shows we went from being around the 20,000th most frequented website to around the 40,000th across the year, though the drop only started in the last half of 2015—our rank was steady all through the first half of the year (so…what’s the connection with my evidence in 2013 for his lying and villainy again?). And that’s only globally. In the U.S. our rank ended the year at around the 14,000th most frequented website, far above even where we started globally. So as foreign websites grew and thus drew more global traffic, our relative ranking fell globally, even though we lost no audience at all (as I’ll show shortly).

For Thunderf00t to use this as evidence of our decline pegs him as a really shitty scientist, who doesn’t know basic math concepts, and has no idea how to use data properly. Or maybe he assumes his audience is stupid, and knows well and good his evidence is shit, and thus is basically just lying. Probably lying.

Because he did this before. As I documented in 2013. He used the same deceitfully fallacious abuse of data analysis to claim Freethought Blogs was in decline, when in fact the real evidence showed the contrary. In that case his methodology was so obviously laughable it was jaw dropping that he would even attempt it. It’s even more jaw dropping that his fans continue to defend his brilliance given this egregious science and math fail. Because there are only two explanations. He is a really, really, lousy scientist. Or he is a liar who is trying to manipulate his audience with an outrageous abuse of statistics and analysis. And the latter should outrage his fans. Because they are the people he is duping with this shit. He is insulting their intelligence by even trying it—although verifying their stupidity by succeeding.

Back then, he again tried to pass off a relative number as an absolute number (which is either a basic math fail or a consciously deployed equivocation fallacy), and he again cherry picked data to effect a deliberate deception, and he again tried to hide data contrary to his claim. Note what he did two years ago and how similar it is to his manipulation and lying now. As I explained then:

First, the graph he shows is only [a relative keyword search] for PZ Myers. Note that when you run the numbers for other bloggers, you get very different results (here’s me). Ooops. Can’t show your viewers that. That would destroy your case. So just show them the one statistic. The one statistic that isn’t even related to me—you know, the person Thunderf00t is actually talking about.

…

[His sources also] only measure how often a search term was used relative to all other searches on Google. Which means we have a huge confounding variable: rising interest in other subjects (for example, nearly the same graph derives for the term “solar installers” yet installation of solar panels has substantially increased, not declined, in that same period). Moreover, the only term Thunderf00t is looking at is “PZ Myers.” In other words, one man’s name. Look what happens when we run the same graph and compare that name with the term “social justice” (here). This shows PZ is vastly (I mean vastly) less popular as a search term than social justice. So by Thunderf00t’s logic, PZ should talk about social justice even more, specifically to draw traffic! Of course, Thunderf00t’s logic is bullshit. But I’m not the one using it.

So, this is what Thunderf00t does: he lies, manipulates data, commits basic math goofs (I believe on purpose), and mimics a creation scientist’s data mining and graph fakery. All just to claim Freethought Blogs is “in decline.” Except, when you look at the data that actually pertains to that question, our actual number of readers, it shows no such decline. And even by his own shoddy methodology, the one guy he was actually talking about—me—increased in internet popularity, precisely after I began overtly defending feminism and social justice causes. So even his own shitty method refutes him. But it’s a shitty method anyway. Let’s talk about a valid method…

You know what would constitute evidence of changes in our audience size? Actual counts of our audience size. I know, right? That I would have to explain this to a fucking scientist beggars belief (to borrow his own idiom).

But first we have to at least move from relative measures to actual counts. And you can only get actual counts if you’re an insider. Public free trackers don’t have access to the real data. They try to estimate. But some estimate better than others. In fact, we should use the one that uses and compiles the most different kinds of data so as to produce the most reliable estimate. Like Complete. But even then, you still have to ask what the audience count was, not the relative ranking!

So, I reply with this correct (as in, the actual pertinent) evidence:

@thunderf00t @WaterdragerNDZ Hmm. A scientist who doesn’t understand a relative measure. Weird. https://t.co/zGTmmmZEDb You suck at science.

— Dr. Richard Carrier (@RichardCCarrier) January 5, 2016

“Hmm. A scientist who doesn’t understand a relative measure. Weird. You suck at science.” At which I linked him to the free Complete website tracking page for Freethought Blogs, which shows a graph of a combined-sources estimate of our actual audience size throughout 2015. Guess what? It shows the exact opposite of his graph. Our audience in fact grew from around 150,000 at the start of 2015 to around 250,000 at the end of it! Even our relative popularity (within the U.S.) stayed between the 11,000th to 10,000th most frequented site all across the year. Thunderf00t surely knows this data is easily accessible and how to access it. So he consciously chose to avoid this evidence, because it says the direct reverse of what he wants, and hunted around for any evidence he could make look like it was relevant, as long as it graphed in the right direction. That makes him a liar.

Of course, in fact, it would be just as fallacious of me to say this Complete graph means Freethought Blogs is exploding in popularity, as it is of Thunderf00t to say his graph means we are a sinking ship. Because, again, this graph is only of one whole year. It therefore hides any recurring annual patterns. If our audience typically declines in Winter and rises in Summer, maintaining a roughly stable average year after year, then we would also expect this graph from Complete. We would see numbers starting low sometime in Winter, and rising throughout the year (and to repeat the pattern they might dip again in January). So to check against that, we need to see the data from previous years. For that we use a reliable, industry standard counting service (StatCounter; you can see it’s logo at the bottom of every page on FtB), so as to have the most accurate true data on unique and repeat visitors and pageviews. And guess what it shows?

Well, you don’t have to guess. I tweeted the real graphs, of what happens to my actual audience counts, from 2012 through 2015 complete, right at Thunderf00t to expose his lies. For forgetting to click a button, I mistook this as the whole network’s stats, which I’ll get to shortly (my goof). But before anyone knew that, that’s when he started going off the rails. He just piled on with jokes and insults and blather and kept re-linking to more and more bogus graphs. First cherry picking two isolated months, thus hiding all the data in between and before and after those months; and then posting a Quantcast graphic which I thought contradicts the actual true data, because I thought Quantcast doesn’t have reliable data for us, it is simply guessing based on third-party cookies and other highly confoundable factors, which I thought Thunderf00t surely knew. I was wrong. More on that in a moment. But he also didn’t know this at the time. He just insisted I just don’t understand, and resorted to several other fallacious deflections. So I kept re-posting the actual data I had.

That actual data is shown in the graph above. That graph is actually for my blog. The green indicates all site hits, the blue indicates unique visitors, and the orange indicates returning readers. It shows everything by quarter from all of 2012 through all of 2015. You’ll notice the curve is the same for all three indicators (thus hits, uniques, and returns all rise and fall at the same times of year and roughly the same rates). The unique visitor marker begins properly in early 2012 at around 90,000, rises to 150,000 mid-2012, drops back to around 80,000 in Winter of 2012, rises back to around 130,000 in Summer of 2013, dips slightly in Winter to around 100,000, rises again in Summer of 2014 to around 120,000, drops back to around 80,000 for Winter again, then rises back to around 140,000 in Summer of 2015, and fell to 100,000 by the end of 2015 (the usual Winter dip, though not as deep). Even regular readers has not varied significantly (it fluctuates between 30,000 and 60,000 in every year without significant change). Total page views have not changed either (from a high of 200,000 in 2012 to a high of 200,000 in 2015, which is in fact higher than in the two intervening years, which peaked only at 180,000). In other words, the actual true data show, that I myself at FreethoughtBlogs have experienced no significant change in audience count in three years. I mistook this for the whole network. Although Thunderf00t didn’t know that either, and instead pretended I never showed him this. And resorted to pompous deflection thereafter.

That’s when I called out exactly what had just happened:

@thunderf00t @WaterdragerNDZ So here’s recap of what just happened: u tried sneaking relative ranking in as if it was audience measure. Lie.

— Dr. Richard Carrier (@RichardCCarrier) January 5, 2016

@thunderf00t @WaterdragerNDZ Then when I exposed the lie, you pretended you never said that (like a creationist). And tried a different lie.

— Dr. Richard Carrier (@RichardCCarrier) January 5, 2016

@thunderf00t @WaterdragerNDZ Ur second lie was to cherry pick data to fabricate the appearance of a decline, like a climate denialist. Lie.

— Dr. Richard Carrier (@RichardCCarrier) January 5, 2016

@thunderf00t @WaterdragerNDZ I then exposed you on that, by showing the *full* data, thus demonstrating you are lying by hiding data.

— Dr. Richard Carrier (@RichardCCarrier) January 5, 2016

@thunderf00t @WaterdragerNDZ Sad thing is, back before you went insane, you would have minced a creationist who tried what you just did.

— Dr. Richard Carrier (@RichardCCarrier) January 5, 2016

If you can’t read the embedded tweets, this is what I said: “So here’s recap of what just happened: u tried sneaking relative ranking in as if it was audience measure. Lie.” “Then when I exposed the lie, you pretended you never said that (like a creationist). And tried a different lie.” “Ur second lie was to cherry pick data to fabricate the appearance of a decline, like a climate denialist. Lie.” “I then exposed you on that, by showing the full data, thus demonstrating you are lying by hiding data.” And finally, I closed with the observation, “Sad thing is, back before you went insane, you would have minced a creationist who tried what you just did.”

I reiterated this after his final tweet which just mocked me aimlessly. He ran away at that point. As of press, he had tweeted nothing directly in response. Not surprising. Because there is no response that doesn’t make him look even more like a fool or a liar. I showed him the actual data, complete and unedited. His claim that Freethought Blogs is “a sinking ship” was at that point directly and conclusively refuted by that data. He instead used data he knows doesn’t have anything to do with his claim (the relative global rankings, and for only a single year). And when I called him out on that bad science, he blatantly cherry picked two months and hid all the rest of the data. And when I called him out on that bad science, he conjured a bogus statistic from a website that he had no reason to believe was actually counting our hits but estimating them with a highly confoundable algorithm. Which is the worst science of all. He was shown the actual data. And his reply is to cite an estimator? Since when does an estimate of what the data might be trump the actual fucking data? So far as he knew, that’s what he just did.

That’s where things stood as of first press. It turns out, though, that I was using the wrong data, too. My evidence only proves my blog isn’t a sinking ship! Which does ironically pattern match Thunderf00t’s previous attempt to make this claim in 2013. Where again he ignored the evidence of my steady success and tried to claim the reverse with irrelevant and manipulated data. In fact, other bloggers vary, some have increased and others decreased audience over the years, but the total number of bloggers obviously has an effect. And I assume that’s the data Thunderf00t was looking for. He didn’t actually base what he found on any relevant data at first (a relative rank rather than a count), or even at second (cherry picked data points), but lashing around he did finally find some kind of reliable decline marker after all. Kudos to his fans for working this out. Occasionally they do something useful.

Due to the departure of several bloggers over the last two years, the aggregate network audience has indeed dropped, albeit only slightly at first, then mostly due to those who only departed in the last six months—a dip that will be rectified when we onboard new bloggers next year. Thunderf00t’s final grab at evidence correctly showed that. My sincere apologies to him for not realizing it. The mistake was indeed mine. Although now that it’s corrected, I have discovered Thunderf00t’s actual manipulation of the data. First, aiming to correct my mistake, I now realize our StatCounter control panel doesn’t do a network aggregated graph (just for the front page alone, which is no use). So I’ll just assume Thunderf00t’s cited source, QuantCast, has been correctly tracking us all these years and give you their table for the whole network from just before 2012 to now. After all, he trusts this source. It’s the only one he had. So he can’t complain about it now.

This is what you see below. Although to make the trends clearer than Thunderf00t did, I am using the month-over-month graph. Because the graph Thunderf00t used hid a lot of the data in daily or weekly spikes (manipulation number one).

 

 

What we see here is the global readership in grey (including the U.S.) and the U.S. readership alone in blue, from August of 2011 to now (because that’s when QuantCast started counting). Both measures more or less match in their ups and downs. I’ll just use the global counts. According to this—Thunderf00t’s own chosen source—beginning with the Summer of 2011, our global unique views every month numbered in the 300,000s. At the end of 2015 they numbered in the 300,000s. That’s not exactly a decline. A fact Thunderf00t hid with his choice of where to put the start mark (manipulation number two).

But let’s invent a narrative about our glory years, the next three years, where in 2012 we averaged about 600,000 unique visits every month, and then 2013 was actually about the same, except for one spike in Summer where we peaked at 900,000 (notably after I posted my exposé of Thunderf00t, although there is certainly no causal relationship, he evidently can’t claim it caused any decline), and then 2014 was actually about the same yet again, averaging only slightly less than 600,000 visits per month, with a summer spike again, this time of 735,000 per month. It is only in 2015 that our audience size reverted into the 300,000s monthly (and with no spikes). So we’ve returned to where we were. And that merely because we offboarded some bloggers. What do you think will happen next year when we onboard their replacements?

This is all so silly. And I was laughing my ass off as I kept grinding him under on this fallacious irrelevant nonsensery of his. I really don’t care where the FtB audience share goes. Nor would I draw weird conclusions about what that meant that are wholly unconnected with it. The reason I bring out this example in detail is only because it is a paradigmatic example of what exposes Thunderf00t as a fraud. He claims he is superior in all knowledge and argument and conclusion because he is a scientist…but when it comes time for his actual skills as a scientist to matter (such as understanding the basic mathematical concepts of statistics, like fluctuation, and how to correctly collect and analyze data), he behaves like the most craven of pseudoscientists. He so egregiously abuses and manipulates the evidence, and ignores the real evidence even when it’s presented to him, that indeed if any creationist did this to him, he would vilify and destroy the fucker. This is clear even before my error was noticed. And it remains the case even with the data corrected, since that only highlights his actual manipulation of it. So that’s what Thunderf00t has made of himself: he has become the same lying quack he used to vilify and destroy.

The links I provided in the backstory section only repeat the same sequence of demonstrating the very same things. He does this over and over and over again. It is, in fact, his modus operandi. Which is a disgrace to science, a disgrace to skepticism, and a disgrace to atheism. That he deploys this quackery and deception in the service of wanton misogyny is just the more sickening. Would that he only did this in ardent defense of astrology. The world would be a better place.

Conclusion: Why Thunderf00t Would Be a Shitty Sailor

Back in my days at sea for the United States Coast Guard we got used to heavy seas. One of the main areas I worked, or indeed even lounged when off duty, was a secret-security-clearance space we called Lower Sound. It was the chamber directly above the active sonar dome and thus contained all the equipment for its function as well as a small workshop. That meant two things. It was near the bow of the ship. And it was pretty much at the bottom of the hull. When we rode 14 foot seas, the bow rises and falls more than any other point on the ship. You really feel it. We would go hours alternating every several seconds between being nearly weightless to laboring under a heavy vertical acceleration. Up and down. Over and over. For hours and hours. You get used to it.

By Thunderf00t’s logic, our ship was sinking.

His first graph post, his best argument in other words, showed a dip in relative rankings. As I showed, in actual audience count, much the same dip occurs every year actually, precisely around Winter, rising back up in Summer. His second evidence posted, his next best argument in other words, showed a dip between two arbitrarily selected points on a graph (but hid the graph so you couldn’t see any other points on it). His third evidence posted, his dregs of argument in other words, relied on, so far as he knew, largely blind guessing to draw the shape of the wave form; it didn’t involve actually looking out the porthole to see how the waves were actually going. I showed him what’s out the porthole, the actual waves themselves. And he pretended the guess trumped the actual observation, and thus insisted the ship is sinking, because he cherry picked one instance of it falling, and then cherry picked another instance of it falling, and then cherry picked where to look so as to imagine a fall. When all the while, it was going up and down, and really, remaining quite level. Indeed, even when his last evidence is rehabilitated and shown without distortion, the supposed decline is actually just a return to level.

That’s why Thunderf00t would be a shitty sailor. He can’t tell the difference between the inevitable ups and downs of riding the waves, and a ship actually sinking. He literally thinks anytime your ship crests a wave and falls down the trough, it means the ship is sinking.

Well, actually, he probably doesn’t really think that.

Because he’s a liar.