Atheist Republic sucks

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No idea.



That's some really muddy territory. Much of that began in response to absurd woke feminists nonsense. I mean, have you seen Steve Shives?! I don't know how much of the criticism of people like Anita Sarkisian was warranted. I find it interesting that you chose ShoeOnHead as your example, as she is by far one of the least offensive. The Amazing Atheists has openly said he's distancing himself from all that in recent years. The problem, is that regardless of which side of the debate you fall on, once you establish your feminist/anti-SJW brand it becomes your livelihood and you have to keep producing the content your audience expects, and that means you have to keep digging further and further for things to be outraged about and get all the more absurd to generate it.

“Absurd woke feminists nonsense” I’ve seen clips of the buzzfeed videos that were among the content these atheists reacted to, and while I don’t disagree that they were obnoxious, they did not even remotely represent the mainstream feminist movement and I really don’t think they were a big deal. People who make reactionary content to stuff like that typically play a big role in leading young internet users down the alt-right pipeline.

If The Amazing Atheist really is distancing himself from all that, that’s good, but it doesn’t negate the responsibility him and others have in the aforementioned radicalization. Speaking of which, Sh0eOnHead, has, I gather, indeed moved away a bit from just being an obnoxious anti-SJW— but at the same time, she’s also never really owned up to her mistakes, and still seems fairly reactionary. For example, Big Joel recently made a video on how on a Twitter thread about whether or not meat consumption was really more ethical than zoophilia, she was like “duh, of course it is” and when other people provided rebuttals, instead of engaging in intellectual discussion she simply make a Tweet that shamed the others for having different arguments about the ethics. I also recently heard an anecdote of someone she blocked on Twitter just because he told her not to use the r-slur. Anti-intellectualism and unapologetic ableism.. she’s so progressive.

“…once you establish your feminist/anti-SJW brand, it becomes your livelihood…”. So? That doesn’t mean these content creators should be held any less accountable for their content that, again, radicalizes many young people and is partially responsible for the rise of online fascism.

In a country like Sweden, there probably isn't much point. I gather that religion in general, and the Church of Sweden in particular, are very much on the decline there?

Here in the U.S.A. on the other hand, religious groups are still quite strong and very influential politically -- especially in the Bible Belt.

If religious people are organized but atheists/agnostics/humanists/whatever are not organized, this puts atheists/agnostics/humanists/whatever at a huge disadvantage when it comes to defending the rights of nonreligious people.

Well, what exactly does represent the mainstream feminist movement?

I've read thousands of Marvel comics spanning from the 1960's all the way to last Wednesday. I know the origins and histories. To me, the MCU is a fun adaptation but it does not represent the true Marvel Universe or its characters. But to the average Joe, the Marvel Universe started with Robert Downey Jr in Afghanistan, Peter Parker is some snot nosed kid obsessed with getting noticed by Senpai Tony, Captain Marvel has always been a blonde, and the Fantastic Four and X-Men might as well be from DC.

Likewise, the average person is not spending their time attending lectures at liberal arts universities or reading the works of Virginia Woolf. The only feminism they know is mobs shouting men are pigs, #KillAllMen, and a bunch of jackasses on Buzfeed deriding them for being the same gender as Donald Trump. And they are fed up. The alt-right pipeline does not begin with ant-SJWs; it begins with woke feminist mobs driving people away. The woke mobs have actually done a lot of damage, and now legitimate social activists have dedicate significant amounts of their time and resources to winning back everyone that was alienated.

Try the National Organization for Women.


Okay, but please don't make things harder by speaking of "woke mobs" as mainstream activists.

Also, please support responsible dialogue by encouraging people participate more on message board forums (or at least the better-run ones) rather than just social media. The latter intrinsically tend to spawn mob mentality, alas.

These are matters that are out of my hands. Unfortunate as it is, most of the general public's perceptions is informed by what's on Twitter or Buzzfeed, not by the National Organization for Women. What constitutes "mainstream activists"? What or who determines what is and what isn't "mainstream"? How do you determine which message boards are "the better-run ones"?

Real feminism has never been tried.

/s

The general public is ignorant about political activism and how it works. I would recommend that you learn about this yourself and don't echo the public's ignorance.


Look for the largest and longest-lived organizations. A viable political movement must be organized. NOW is one of the largest and longest-lived feminist organizations, founded back in the 1960's.

A Twitter mob is not an organization -- although, these days, most organizations do have a Twitter presence.

Twitter mobs, by themselves, don't usually raise money for sympathetic political candidates. NOW-PAC (the electoral-political arm of NOW) does.


Decide this yourself, based on your own experience. For example, I suggested that you check out Atheist Zone. If you try it and it turns out to be well-run in your opinion (or at least better than Atheist Republic), please recommend it to your fellow atheists.

I get that.
But being atheist is not being religious.
It's like I'm not a plumber so I'm going to join a non-plumber forum.

/Mats

A "non-plumber forum" would make sense if a bunch of plumbers decided to persecute the non-plumbers in your town for whatever stupid reason.

But thats kinda the point. Atheism is not a belief. Its the absence of a particular belief. So there is no glue to hold a forum of folks together around it. So what really holds the group together is a common anger toward religion. Not all atheists, but a subset who were traumatized by their parents as children (or whatever) because their parents forced religion down their throats might be drawn to such a site. So its group of folks who have anger/hatred in common, rather having a positive belief in anything in common. So if you stumble upon the group - expect anger and hatred.

It would be as if there were a online forum for "Nonplumbers". The members of the site would be a subset of...all of the folks in the world who are not plumbers- but who were ALSO somehow traumatized and abused by members of the plumbing profession at a tender age. So what the members have in common is not really their common absence of plumbing experience as a vocation, but their common emotional damage and hatred. If that makes any sense.

... or atheists who grew up in atheistic families but experienced religion-based bigotry from other kids in the neighborhood, or who, as adults, experienced religion-based bigotry from other adults.

I would hazard a guess that this kind of bigotry isn't common where you live, but it is certainly common in some countries, including parts of the U.S.A.

Also in places where religion is strong, atheists are at a disadvantage when in comes to finding jobs, etc.

I think you're completely missing my point. I'm not talking about what I think. I'm talking about the perceptions of the majority of the general public. Mainstream culture is informed by what is effortlessly accessible to the general public, not some official organization. That is just the reality. Just like the mainstream culture's perception of Marvel and DC are informed by whatever is in the movies not the comics, despite the comics being the source material. I scream until I'm blue in the face that the "Blip" was reversed within 24 hours, but in the movies it was 5 years and therefore in mainstream culture it was 5 years. When future anthropologists are studying popular fiction from the 21st Century it will forever have lasted 5 years, whether I like it or not. Most people get their information from social media and don't even know that the official organizations you're talking about even exist. They are the ones getting fed up with being told that their very existence is some kind of crime, and they are the ones making response videos to what feminist content that is present in the mainstream culture.



So it is up to subjective opinion then? Nobody will agree on what forums are the one they think are the best-run. Any of us could be getting all kinds of misinformation from sites we believe to the "best-run" That doesn't mean squat.

Thomas Westbrook (aka Holy Koolaid) and his family were forced to flee their hometown and move across the country after receiving threats to their lives when they filed a complaint about religious propaganda being illegally pushed by a teacher in his daughter's school. Zoey Westbrook's health class teacher went on a tirade in class about abstinence and how terrible homosexuals and non-Christians are and that they're all going to hell. Zoey recorded all of this. And despite this being a violation of US laws, the teacher got off without facing any significant consequences. The Westbrooks faced several threats of violence. Entire social media pages and groups were created to share the address and pictures of the Westbrooks' home and organize harassments campaigns against them. And when all this was reported to the police they ignored it and did nothing. This was in the US. Now try to imagine what it is like to be an atheist living somewhere like Iran or Saudi Arabia, where people are routinely sentenced to death for being atheists, and maybe you'll begin to understand what atheists have in common.

It still makes no sense to me.
If I were a christian in a hard core muslim society I'd possibly had more in common with some atheists, and vice versa.
I get that some believes or lack of them are supressed in some areas of the world and I understand if fundamental christians or car mechanics get together in a forum, but I don't understand why the lack of believes or interest in a subject would be something to organize around.
Is there a "right planet" forum for NTs?

/Mats

The majority of the general public (if we’re talking about America, anyways) is progressive and aware that modern feminism is not about female supremacy or male genocide or whatever. They realize that a few extremists who call themselves feminists (and which you’re only likely to find on the internet) do not represent the actual mainstream movement for gender equality, and this is because they haven’t fed misinformation by right-wing pundits. I come from a very blue city where it’s the norm for most men in addition to women to say they identify as feminists. Both my mom and dad, for example. Socially progressive Democrat voters, which again make up the majority of the US population, tend to support feminism, and you would not have so many men backing the movement if it actually was telling them that their very existence was a crime.

It’s conservatives by and large that have fallen into the delusion that the modern feminist movement is based on hating men. The relatively small amount of crazy misandrists you’ll find on the internet are propped up by right-wing pundits to fear-monger and further their agenda of suppressing the equality movement.