Inspired by some of the discussion in this thread. I don’t think it’s appropriate place for that discussion there, but hey why not have a separate thread for it
If I think religion is not good in general, am I Reddit and cringe and basically Richard Dawkins?
BI (before internet) being an atheist meant being in complete ideological isolation. If you tried to discuss it with anyone you would be ridiculed and sometimes even physically threatened. Theists had complete domination. Atheist = devil worshiper/commie. These people developed a persecution complex that dates back at least to Giordana Bruno but probably much earlier. The first real online social networks were newsgroups which were almost entirely academic and darpa techie nerds. I got my first internet uni account around 1997 and gnu atheist rationalists were already controlling the online (newsgroup) narrative by then. For the first time in history they had an advantage and they kinda went mad with power. Reddit and other early social forums were just the graphical web extension of newsgroups.
Iirc there were some obscure social networks BI like Center for Inquiry and James Randii foundation and they quickly took control of the atheist/rationalist online narrative. People like Michael Shermer, Penn Jillette, Richard Dawkins etc. As a 90’s kid I was initially excited because I thought I found my people but I was also becoming a baby leftist and I noticed the far right influence. I believe the right/left split was already there ( Feynman/Randii vs Carl Sagan/Steven Gould) but there was a sense that control of the internet was at stake. A massive war for control raged during the naughts (some really funny shit happened lol) and finally came to a head around 2012 with ElevatorGate. The scorched earth take no prisoners nature of ElevatorGate pretty much destroyed whatever was left of the internet atheist power structure.
I don’t know if this is true. You can read plenty of early/mid 20th century books where characters will outright talk about how they don’t believe in a god. Sure certain areas you could get away with it more, but I think there has always been some prevailing strain of people just going along with the community aspect and not being a believer.
fucking what is elevator gate
“Sex positive” sex pestery among thirsty New Atheist convention goers, and a feeemale daring to state she felt uncomfortable being propositioned in a closed elevator at 4am far from home, lead to Dawkins’ notorious “Dear Muslima” letter.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Elevatorgate
I dare to suspect that the Youtube atheist fad of “debunking” creationists shifted gears to being really mad at feeemales and stayed there, only expanding the rage to SJWs/wokeness/DEI
after that moment.
yikes
Wö-men. Men of wö.
“Men of woe”
Insert boomer wife hatred jokes here
You’d suspect correctly. There was some base misogyny there to build on, see TheAmazingAtheist and the disgusting things he said about SA including to an actual SA victim.
I don’t want to repeat that vile piece of shit’s words, but I do remember them clearly.
Amazing atheist and several other atheists did wonders for the proliferation of garbage reactionary content on youtube
Avoid going down the elevatorgate rabbit hole if you value your sanity. The same people involved in elevatorgate started GamerGate.
I hear that thunderfoot (don’t look that up) broke his brain on Brexit and Covid so now he’s back on center-left but likely still a misogynist. Dawkins, Ham Sarris, Shermer, Jillete et al. just got old and feeble or outright ded like Randii and Dennett. They only pop in now and then to say something like “more jews won nobel prizes than muslims so we should exterminate all muslims” which they’ve been doing since GWOT
there were just a few good ones, like AronRa.
i understand everything now