2021-05-12


Worthy

  • Long, but many of his readers will see this as an explainer for the last decade of their lives. The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars - Astral Codex Ten

    People were just as atheist as before, maybe more so. They just all suddenly agreed it was stupid to talk about it and anybody who did was a fedora-wearing euphoric loser. I argued that it had been felled by social justice, which was a sort of Liberal Ideology 2.0, filling the same social role New Atheism, only better. Most atheists jumped ship to join the winning team - "this atheism blog is now a feminism blog" was kind of the unofficial slogan of the 2015 blogosphere - and thus was the empire forged.

    and

    New Atheism didn't fail because Christians proved they were wrong about God’s existence. It failed because a hipper generation of young people accepted all their premises but declared them uncool for caring about it too much. In the same way, social justice was able to easily fight off wave after wave of MRAs and redpillers and alt-righters trying to prove that they were wrong about factual issues. Heck, it even made a meme out of it - "Watch this YouTuber DESTROY SJWs using FACTS and LOGIC". Once the very idea of trying to use facts or logic to disprove a movement becomes cringeworthy, how can it fail? I think if it fails, it will be because every time they open their mouths, younger and cooler people will just roll their eyes and say "Woke!"

    The other relevant phrase is "cancel culture". SJWs aren't bad because they get basic facts wrong, quash free speech, bully their opponents, or make unfair generalizations across diverse groups. They're bad because sometimes they get your favorite TV show cancelled. I hope you'll excuse me if I sound bitter, but it really disappointed me how, of all the criticisms of social justice, this was the one that really got traction. But I think it got traction precisely because it had no connection with any substantive criticism of social justice. It wasn't coded conservative.

etc


Media / Many Ministries of Truths / Censorship

Security / Militaria / Crime / Police