The gnu-flavored atheist movement was founded in part by people who favored military adventurism against muslim-majority countries, chiefly Christopher Hitchens. That movement quickly morphed into a broad liberalism which appealed to less bloodthirsty people like you and I. That was revealed to be paper thin cover for a reactionary mindset during Elevatorgate, which is why FtB is so much smaller than SciBlogs had been before the schism.
Elevatorgate’s queen was Abby ERV, who basically abandoned pro-vax activism in favor of a 24-7 misogyny campaign. Together with Gamergate and the MRA and incel movements, these were the foundational kernel of the neo-nazism that has taken over the USA. If you meet a rethuglican bro under fifty, he probably spent some time in one or more of these online communities, or their descendants.
If we take that piece of shit ERV as being an icon of atheo-skepticism who contributed to fascism, what of her opposite number in the anti-vax movement, Jenny McCarthy? Anti-vaxxing (and medical woo in general) used to be strongly associated with liberals, with left of center people. When conservatives embraced anti-vaxxing, those people swung hard. I’ve had the misfortune of talking to some of them. Maybe they have a left belief or two among the gallery of monsters in their skulls, but they are ardent supporters of shitler, and many are Qanon as well. Both pro- and anti-vaxxing contributed to fascism.
So here’s my moment of bothsiderism. Who contributed more to our present political ruination, gnu atheists or antivaxxers? Abby ERV or Jenny McCarthy? Even tho the actor was much more famous, I honestly do not know the answer to this question. Both movements had some amount of access to the halls of power via lobbyists or cultural prestige.
In composing this post, I found myself reflecting on the strange political moments and movements that added up to Nazi USA. That broad tent is wild as hell. It’s so much easier to take the world apart than to make it better. The locust swarms flow into and out of each other, devouring hope and love.
I do not fault anyone for feeling doomed and destroyed, but I still have hope for all of you, that you keep it together, that you enjoy the things you can, and you don’t feel too overwhelmed by the overwhelming circumstances. We’ve got each other and we’re still alive, baby.
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I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as “gnu-flavored atheist”, is in fact, GNU/Atheist, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Atheist. Atheism is not a belief system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full belief system as defined by POSIX.
All of the people mentioned in this post are rounding errors compared to people like Rupert Murdoch, the Kochs, the Federalist Society, and the Heritage Foundation. Hell, they’re not even rounding errors… It’s like taking a scanning tunnelling electron microscope to one spec of dust on a tank, looking for the dangerous bit.
Also:
A widespread belief, I don’t think it was ever actually true. They just used to have better access to the media than all the right-wing anti-vaxxers.
“Who contributed more to our present political ruination, gnu atheists or antivaxxers?”
A plague on both their houses I’d say, and with the antivaxxers in charge…
I think you could make a good case that the real core of the movements in question is ‘conspiratorial ideation’. Whether it’s the anti-muslim 9/11 Truthers who supported stomping on Iraq for what were already known to be lies, or the chemtrail/anti-fluoride/anti-vaxx folks who long for the days of rugged real men surviving on the frontier, both movements are, at their core, conspiracy theorists. And we have lots of evidence saying that people who believe one conspiracy theory are more likely to get drawn into others, even contradictory ones. Because a conspiracy theory is always more about disbelieving the official story than it is about having an actual consistent counter-explanation.
Conspiratorial ideation knows know ‘left’ or ‘right’, only enemies… which is to say, everybody who says that they’re wrong.
(For anti-vaxx in particular, sure the stereotype of the crunchy granola hippie who refused modern medicine dominated the discussions early on, but the people who refused vaccination for religious reasons were always there as well. And, honestly, a number of the old-school ‘hippies’ ended up drifting into libertarianism, since their actual fundamental guiding ethic was ‘nobody can tell me what to do!’ When the government they were rebelling against was right-wing anti-communist Vietnam war supporters, they looked left-wing; once the government became more left-wing ‘we need to actually support our people no matter who they are’, these same people became right-wing. Because it was never about any beliefs other than ‘the government is wrong and can’t tell me what to do with my life’.)
… misogyny … with Gamergate and the MRA and incel movements, these were the foundational kernel of the neo-nazism that has taken over the USA.
Aw c’mon – ya gotta give some credit to racism, sexism, xenophobia and other good ol’-fashioned Tradivitional Values™!
@1
Glad someone else made that response:)
I think the atheist community generally exaggerates how important our own schisms have been to the rise of the alt-right. It makes sense that we care about what happened in our local space, and one way to sell the urgency is to relate it to broader political trends. But I don’t think this narrative holds much sway outside our spaces.
I have noticed lately a narrative blaming Curtis Yarvin, who kind of came out of Rationalist spaces–although I don’t think the narratives usually mention that.
For ref: https://harpers.org/archive/1991/01/why-we-are-stuck-in-the-sand/
(I don’t like people misrepresenting Hitchens)
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beholder, behold the joke:
“The term “Gnu Atheists” is a satirical twist on “New Atheists,” coined within atheist circles to mock or reclaim the label. It originated in the comment section of Ophelia Benson’s blog Butterflies and Wheels, likely by a commenter using the pseudonym Hamilton Jacobi2. The pun plays on the homophone “gnu” (a type of antelope) and “new,” injecting humor into what some saw as an overly serious or pejorative label.
The term gained traction through bloggers like Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers, and Ophelia Benson, who used it to highlight the assertive, unapologetic stance of atheists challenging religious privilege. It also became a kind of mascot-driven identity, with the gnu symbol used in logos and memes to represent this more vocal form of atheist activism.”
— from the Bubblebot and from my own recollection.
Yeah, I’ve seen a bit of that, and I’m not really buying it… There’s always people like that floating around, and usually they have no impact on the world whatsoever. Yarvin’s only important (to the extent that he is, which is fairly limited) because a bunch of very wealthy and powerful people made him important. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else – there’s always somebody, and none of them actually matter that much. It’s the people with the power and the money – but who are smart enough not to actually write a bunch of essays about how we need to re-invent aristocracy – that you’ve got to worry about.
Much like Friedmanite economists, or Hayekian political theorists, these people are basically court astrologers – they make their livings by telling their rich patrons what they want to hear.