Mod 'er hate

"Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word "God" as though we knew what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world - to say, for instance, that both the Bible and the Koran contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish - is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of of such political correctness. We must finally acknowledge the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance."

Sam Harris - The End of Faith


I've probably watched a larger proportion of Thunderf00t's videos than of any other single poster on YouTube. Yeah, sure, he tends to ramble and knot himself in overly-verbose phraseology but hell, so do I. Being as I know very little of physics, I find his various pyromaniac videos entertaining enough. Being as I'm too lazy to do it myself, I also appreciate him running through basic estimates of energy transfer when debunking this-and-that. More impressively, he's managed to stay on the sane side of pretty much every topic from creationism to WWII military tech to Brexit to conspiracy theories to feminism and various SJW lunacy to crackpot inventions and scams.

Though really, for all his knack for pissing people off, his ballsiest moment had to have been speaking the words "group selection" in his conversation with none other than Richard Dawkins... without even immediately ducking!

In a couple of videos from earlier this year, he acknowledged that he no longer finds much reason to make videos about feminism, as some of the most ludicrous feminists from a few years ago have vastly decreased in popularity. The "crazy blue-haired feminists" pose nowhere near as immediate or severe a threat to reason as religious fundamentalists. In this Thunderf00t is, as usual, technically correct. The best kind of correct. Religious fundamentalism appears more widespread than feminist fundamentalism. But that unfortunately ignores the pervasiveness of "moderate" feminism and the very different localization of its fundamentalism.

Feminism is in many ways a placeholder religion for the post-modern age, one of the representations of the Shadow of God of which Nietzsche warned. It establishes an absolute good and an absolute evil (female vs. male) and condemns one and all for having been born into the original sin of The Patriarchy, which must be expiated by adopting and proselytizing the new faith. Like other faiths, it's fundamentally a business. It sells irrational hope (salvation through the feminist Utopia of perfect bovine peace and safety) and perhaps even more importantly it sells entitlement, the self-righteousness of the saved screeching at the infidels and launching into occasional pogroms. To some extent it has always coexisted with other faiths. If you want to start a tribal conflict, your most useful propaganda tool beyond even differences in traditional religion has always been the eternal battle cry of "save the women!"

Higher education gradually broke from religious indoctrination over the centuries. The Inquisition could not be reconciled with academic inquisitiveness. Religious fundamentalists' power base now mostly sticks to the sticks, to cultural backwaters, and the less educated the better. Feminist fundamentalism, on the other hand, is based in polite latte-sipping urbane discussion circles and especially in universities. It is in "women's studies" departments, two doors down the hall from Chemistry and Physics, that feminist scriptures are codified and feminist saints beatified. So it should've come as little surprise that Thunderf00t's main clash with feminists years ago took place within the (largely academic) atheist movement subverting itself through a new irrational faith even as it attacked the old ones.

If the intelligentsia are to stand up to religious fundamentalism, they must address the rot at the core of left-wing politics. The fundies may be the greater direct threat, but it's postmodernist objectivity-denying social justice activism and especially feminism with its overwhelming media circus which saps the only significant resistance to that threat. We've had a generation's worth of "skeptics" protesting blind faith while demanding we "always believe" all women. The center cannot hold.

And even if we ignore the uncomfortable academic and legal system seating arrangements for Fem Fundies, we're left with the much wider prevalence of moderate faith in feminist gospel. Even if most women would not describe themselves as feminist they still love the moral authority lent to them by the constant stream of abuse hurled at men by feminists. They love feminism for keeping the men in their lives on the defensive, easier to manipulate, easier to shame and guilt into servility. Male adherents love playing the "one good man" to their ever-observant mistresses, and if you're looking for any notion more widely accepted a priori than the purposeful influence of supernatural forces, look no further than "sugar and spice and everything nice." Extremists draw their legitimacy from moderates, and if a few fluorescent-haired loons have lost their star power over the past years, rest assured there are plenty more on the way.

"The benignity of most religious moderates does not suggest that religious faith is anything more sublime than a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance, nor does it guarantee that there is not a terrible price to be paid for limiting the scope of reason in our dealings with other human beings."

The basic propositions of feminism, its commandments, cardinal virtues and deadly sins, are less noticeable as such for their widespread public acceptance. Female moral purity and paranoia over female safety are so entrenched within our pre-sentient animal instincts as to make us accept even the most ludicrous statements like "rape culture" without a single critical thought. If anything, the feminists from five years ago have waned in individual popularity because their caterwauling has gone mainstream and they're splitting that pie many more ways. Are they less noticeable because they're less influential... or because we are no longer opposing their subversion of reason?

Sure, sure, you moderate women, you'd never make a false rape accusation. You'd never have a man fired and rendered unhireable for some bad joke he told years ago or because he had his fly open that one time or for touching you in a way that if you touched him would be considered flattery. You're tolerant like that. You're not on the warpath. You're not a Jihadist. You're a feminist moderate. You're a nice girl. You'd never ruin a man's life just on a whim.
...
But it's nice to know you could if you wanted to, isn't it? Gives you a little rush, holding that power over men's heads, doesn't it?

Men are being ostracized and driven to suicide or thrown in prison to be tortured to death by other inmates as rapists as soon as a woman points her finger at them. Our media over the past three decades have grown replete with depictions of women as perfect martyrs and men as stupid evil pigs deserving of death or worse, and no-one bats an eyelash anymore. Blue hair is the new normal and I have to wonder if Thunderf00t really can't notice that or if he, like Bill Maher in the past and many others, simply doesn't want to be targeted in the latest pogrom.

For my own part, looking at the world around me, I see no excuse to slack off the FEMale chauvINISM posts.