clarissa on Nostr: So not long ago someone responded to me saying that the new-atheist -> ...
So not long ago someone responded to me saying that the new-atheist -> fascist/gendercrit pipeline is definitely understudied and I've been thinking about it since then and I think I have an easy way of summarizing my theory now:
the throughline is that they're all, fundamentally, about the politics of cringe
Okay, what do I mean by that? So part of what made the new-atheist movement what it was is that it wasn't just fighting against christian hegemony or for the broad right to believe/not-believe as you wish, it was---deeply---about aesthetics and contrast. It was flying spaghetti monster memes, jokes about unobservable teapots, "hitch-slapped", debates, thunderf00t &al. videos about creationists. It was "we're smart because we're don't believe and do cringe things like christians". And, y'know, the problem here is that there was some truth to it: young earth creationists say fucking wild ass shit, ray comfort is---in fact---one of the stupidest motherfuckers alive and I was making fun of him long before it was cool, &c. And there can be some catharsis to it.
But when your politics is too much "I am drawing you as the soyjack and myself as the chad", even if you're right about your ideological opponenents being fucking cringe, means you get easily manipulated into being angry at things without a good reason beyond "I don't like it". Like, conservative christianity is bad because it's an oppressive force that actively harms people. It wasn't bad because "lol you believe in a sky daddy".
So, yeah, when gamergate happened we already saw how a lot of new-atheist types immediately moved into attacking the most basic feminism with the same "lol cringe" rhetoric as making fun of kent hovind. Feminism is bad because a woman with dyed red hair was making an angry face in a frame of a video lololololol.
And you see that too with both the people who've crossed over from the new atheist movement to anti-woke gendercrit bullshit and the red-brown alliances forming in the self-described "dirtbag left".
Do you know, in just casual looking through these spaces, how many dozens of fucking times I've seen people link to the same fucking video of that hair salon where the stylist asks questions like "what are your pronouns?" and "can I touch you?" before starting? What are they doing wrong? What is the moral wrong on display? Cringe. That is the moral wrong, from their perspective.
So, yeah, that's why I think it was really easy for a lot of people to go from "lol you believe in a sky daddy" to "lol you have pronouns".
And, like, this is a kind of a theme in some of my writing lately but I think this is another example of what happens when you don't have good reasons for believing what you believe. The same way some folks can be vulnerable to being swayed by numbers being plausible looking numbers being waved in their face without really digging into what it says or means, I think a lot of people are vulnerable to a politics of revulsion where gut reaction gets reified to moral law.
the throughline is that they're all, fundamentally, about the politics of cringe
Okay, what do I mean by that? So part of what made the new-atheist movement what it was is that it wasn't just fighting against christian hegemony or for the broad right to believe/not-believe as you wish, it was---deeply---about aesthetics and contrast. It was flying spaghetti monster memes, jokes about unobservable teapots, "hitch-slapped", debates, thunderf00t &al. videos about creationists. It was "we're smart because we're don't believe and do cringe things like christians". And, y'know, the problem here is that there was some truth to it: young earth creationists say fucking wild ass shit, ray comfort is---in fact---one of the stupidest motherfuckers alive and I was making fun of him long before it was cool, &c. And there can be some catharsis to it.
But when your politics is too much "I am drawing you as the soyjack and myself as the chad", even if you're right about your ideological opponenents being fucking cringe, means you get easily manipulated into being angry at things without a good reason beyond "I don't like it". Like, conservative christianity is bad because it's an oppressive force that actively harms people. It wasn't bad because "lol you believe in a sky daddy".
So, yeah, when gamergate happened we already saw how a lot of new-atheist types immediately moved into attacking the most basic feminism with the same "lol cringe" rhetoric as making fun of kent hovind. Feminism is bad because a woman with dyed red hair was making an angry face in a frame of a video lololololol.
And you see that too with both the people who've crossed over from the new atheist movement to anti-woke gendercrit bullshit and the red-brown alliances forming in the self-described "dirtbag left".
Do you know, in just casual looking through these spaces, how many dozens of fucking times I've seen people link to the same fucking video of that hair salon where the stylist asks questions like "what are your pronouns?" and "can I touch you?" before starting? What are they doing wrong? What is the moral wrong on display? Cringe. That is the moral wrong, from their perspective.
So, yeah, that's why I think it was really easy for a lot of people to go from "lol you believe in a sky daddy" to "lol you have pronouns".
And, like, this is a kind of a theme in some of my writing lately but I think this is another example of what happens when you don't have good reasons for believing what you believe. The same way some folks can be vulnerable to being swayed by numbers being plausible looking numbers being waved in their face without really digging into what it says or means, I think a lot of people are vulnerable to a politics of revulsion where gut reaction gets reified to moral law.