Permanently Deleted
I was big into the new atheist movement, right around the late 2000s. I was reading Sam Harris and Michael Shermer books, watching “skeptic” YouTubers. I enjoyed the collective dunking on conservative christians (especially since I grew up around a lot of them). At a certain point I was also on board with their rhetoric about Islam, unfortunately.
Elevator-gate was about when I jumped ship. It was super weird to see all these people I’ve been listening to decide that it’s totally fine to follow a woman into an elevator in the middle of the night to hit on her. Once the penny dropped, I noticed how reactionary a lot of the skeptic community was. Then gamergate happened, and I watched from a distance as a bunch of them worked themselves up over a review that didn’t even exist, and that was it.
I didn’t really become a proper leftist until a few years later, but that was the end of my shameful reactionary phase.
I still miss the skeptic’s guide podcast but their “science not politics” really got to me after a while
Like, you can’t talk about vaccine denial as a isolated idea. I mean, they obviously did, but they had to get even weirder in your logic to justify it than the anti-vaxxers did.
I noticed how reactionary a lot of the skeptic community was
the skeptic community is so strange, I’m into paranormal stuff and the sheer amount of hatred and vitriol they direct towards anything outside of their weird atheistic paradigm is so bizarre to me. It’s understandable given the history of…ideas like that but I remember having a professor who was the president of a big skeptic association and he seemed like a really uniquely miserable person. Despite being a liberal he also had some really YIKES takes…
weird atheistic paradigm
That’s a great observation. The skeptic community claimed to care about rationality, evidence, science, etc, but in practice they basically just fetishised a very particular aesthetic of rationality. Turns out, you can use that same aesthetic to argue for totally irrational and unscientific things, and it still sounds the same.
