I’ve made posts wondering before if any of the people from the shit side of the regressive/progressive atheist split find themselves looking at what has come of their politics, looks at the war, the hatred, the censorship, the reality denialism, the terror that has taken over the world, and realizes what they’ve done, feels at all bad about it. There’s no evidence of this in the “thought leaders” and I’ve never seen any from the trenches. Like the SlymePit™ seemed, for a while, to have more popularity and even perhaps more staying power than the FtB it was born to oppose. And yet here we are, and they are..?
I can see from comments elsewhere that many of them are in the comments at the blogs of fascist tools like Jerry Coyne, so not much evidence of reality penetrating their skulls yet. But still. Not even one of them? I suppose this is like wondering why there are no good billionaires. Or maybe it’s me asking that question that vexed me so often as a small child – the earliest evidence I had theory of mind – that I always wondered why bullies did what they do.
Why do they want to be despised? Why do they want to do harm? These things never made sense to me, even as their cruelty fostered a violent imagination in me. I want to hurt people because they hurt people. Clearly not the same goal for us, and they still don’t make sense to me. I do think observation of people and other animals has slowly teased something like understanding out of me. It’s entertainment, diversion. Humans suffering is, to them, like the erratic movement and bleeding of a tormented prey animal to a cat.
Back to the point tho. We are literally under nazism, in all but name! There are people in the halls of power with neonazi tattoos! Science in the USA – once a point of pride to movement bros like Chundersh1te – has been decimated, hosed with a goddamn flamethrower, with no hope of recovery in sight. We’re involving ourselves in holy wars on purpose.
Every ideal of freedom and rational thought and wisdom that the nu atheists claimed to uphold is being piled into mass graves. Things aren’t even as bad as they can get! You’d just think that like, fuckin Matt Dillahunty, who spent time trolling Atheism+ as a “social experiment,” might take a look at this shit and connect some dots. Might realize this is the logical end point of regressive beliefs, and hey, maybe that means y’all were wrong about progressives on some level? Just a bit?
I saw a comment somewhere from one of the shitbirds saying “i can’t believe you made us do this, ftb! look what you made us do!” Hey, who is winning, bruh? Who controls everything right now? When Sam Harris crows that murdering Persians is a good thing, it’s not because he’s trying to convince the powers that be, it’s because he’s defending them doing the thing he’s always promoted. He’s saying how cool it is that he got what he wants, and begging the naysayers to drop their distaste for mass murder long enough to be as happy as he is.
If antifeminists have literally taken over the world, how did we make anybody do anything? The powerful side was yours. This is the history you always sought. All we did, in opposing you, was to help elucidate the difference between us, help you understand yourselves. You do understand yourselves by now, don’t you?
You do see the blood money medical crank piling up quack dollars over dead American kids? Right? That’s you. You do see the petty con artist thrust into nuclear godhood from a base motivated with literal cult behavior, right? That’s you. That’s the fruition of your beliefs winning.
Does this not give any of you pause? Insert we’re the baddies meme? What will it take, you fucking creeps?
We’re tired of saying “we told you so” over the innocent dead. If you can’t come correct now, at this late stage, just fucking eat shit and die. I wish I could say I was done thinking about you, but I don’t know if I ever will be. That first question I ever asked myself about the minds of others, it never goes away; it only changes.
Why do bullies hurt people? I might as well ask my fucking cat.
–
There’s bullies on “our” side as well…
that’s true. at the moment most of them are anti-ai hate mobs.
that’s a lil pithy from me. i recognize shitbird human instincts and actions can be found anywhere but it does feel silly to bring it up when we’re talking about the relationship between a grassroots hate movement (elevator gate/related atheist creepery) and the political forces whose primary driving force is cruelty (republicanism/fascism). for our side it isn’t foundational to our position, which gives us a basis for recognizing it as hypocrisy and course correcting (let that day come). for theirs, realizing it’s a problem would be a rejection of their organizing principles.
I didn’t interact much with slime even back in the day, so I definitely don’t know any better than you. But I imagine some people *did* regret their actions. Then they left. They’re not the ones we’d find if we dared to look at Coyne’s blog.
But why not more of them? You’d think that if they had an ounce of skeptical values left in them, they’d be raging mad about RFK Jr. at the very least.
this is what i’m saying! abbie ERV has tried to wash her hands of the monstr she facilitated, for the sake of career, but she was originally on the anti-medical-woo team on scienceblogs. if that ever meant anything to her (besides “dunking on rubes”), she should feel a helluvalot of remorse.
I think there are multiple categories of people here. Aside from those people sensible enough to not get involved in the slime in the first place:
– People who are loudly and proudly insistent on the regressive status quo and will continue to be right up to the moment that they get to the last line of the Niemoller poem and discover that, no, they’re not the people in power, and the real people in power don’t need them anymore, and will never admit they were wrong if it doesn’t get to that point.
– People who have realized they screwed up, and have mostly just decided to hunker down and hope everybody forgets rather than actually admit anything and bring attention to themselves, likely relying on Internet anonymity to dodge any problems since the Progressives are a lot less likely to doxx people than the regressives they had been siding with who are more likely to try to trash ‘apostates’.
– People who not only realized they screwed up, but have publicly admitted it and apologized.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that those three groups are listed in descending order of the number of people in them. The people who got into skepticism for the ‘dunking on rubes’ angle are always going to do their best to convince themselves that they’re really right, and social group pressures from the Pit would definitely encourage ‘quiet quitting’ rather than doing anything that might draw attention to you when leaving.
true facts. i think it would be heartening to hear from a slyme apostate, make one feel a sliver of hope for hugemanatee.
I got solicitations to join them, back in the day.
In Dan Fincke’s FB posts and elsewhere.
I gave them my nasty side, the fuckers.
hurrah, sir.