Kirbmarc wrote: ↑
OK, peeps, this HAS to be said: this place IS becoming a lot more like Stormfront than I'm personally comfortable with.
I'm not kidding around: I've realized that Aneris had been right all along, and there was a thought pipeline of far-right ideas and project in here, just like in the rest of the "skeptic" circles on Youtube and other platforms.
The reaction to the SocJus and its authoritarian excesses was, in the beginning, a large defection of many people with different ideas, different positions in the left-right spectrum, but who had the principles of liberal democracy (free speech, due process, presumption of innocence, openness of discussion, secularism, separation of church and state, etc.) as guiding values.
I'm starting to doubt that this is still the case, at least for many who post here. We've gone from "let's defend Enlightenment values" to "let's defend White Western Culture, which basically means Defending the White Race". Less and less people seem to care for equal standards, open, rational discussion, and solving issues, and more and more for an identitarian defense of an "essence" of the west, which in practice more often than not turns out to be race-based, at least in part.
The process has been fast but gradual. Just in early 2016 this board was still more in favor of Bernie Sanders than of Hillary Clinton, people were talking about how counter the reach of SocJus within the left, we were in talks with social justice activists like Michael Nugent to point out that PZ Myers' brand of "intersectional atheism" was poisonous to civil discussion of secular/atheist issues.
Sure, we always had the Steersbot and its rants about nuking Mecca and Qu'ran piss tests, but most people seemed to see him as an extreme manifestation of tolerance for free speech, as an annoying idiot, an outlier.
Sure, the SocJus fans at FTB called us Nazis and white supremacists, but we all scoffed at them as over-reactive idiots, which, by the way, they were. At that time a characterization of the SlymePit as a haven for far-right thought would have been extremely unfair. We laughed at those who called us Nazis, even ironically pretended to be Nazis, but no one here was even remotely close to Nazism or ethno-nationalism or whatnot.
The SocJus quickly became the Boys who Cry Nazi, accusing each and everyone of being a Nazi, so much so that the word "Nazi" started to lose any meaningful connotation.
Then something happened. I'm not sure exactly of what it was, but I think that by and large it had to do with the 2016 election. During the primaries many were endorsing Sanders, seeing him as (potentially) a source for change from the Clintonite corporate left, which was very SocJus-friendly. And indeed at first it seemed like Sanders was going to criticize some SocJus ideas, like no platforming and ethnic quotas in politics, but he was immediately shouted down as "sympathetic to white nationalism" (which was insane) and he quickly folded into the program.
The anti-identitarian left which many were hoping for never became anything concrete. Instead we got Clinton vs. Trump, and people pissed off by the SocJus started to sympathize with Trump, despite the fact that Trump was (and is) a supporter of woo like anti-vaxxing, or anti-climate change, or pandering to ethno-nationalism in terms of immigration (the Wall, the Muslim Ban).
People started not just to point out that Clinton had ties to SocJus leaders, and that Trump had been portrayed as even worse than he was, but to ironically support Trump and his nativist-friendly policies.
But the irony was short-lived: even though many in the anti-SocJus left were also prominent critics of Trump, from Harris to Pinker to Coyne, they were also tarred as "alt-right"/"white supremacists" and rejected by the leftist American cultural elite, which left people who wished for a reformation of the left leaderless, disorganized, frustrated, while the SocJus left doubled down by assuming the mantle of the Only Legitimate Resistance to TrumpHitler the Leader of White Privilege.
Some people simply stopped caring, others said "well, if Trump pisses off the SocJus so much, maybe he or some of his ideas aren't so bad". There was a lot of criticism of specific stupid ideas of Trump's, but even though actual neo-nazis popped up, there was less room for criticism of the drift towards the far-right of nativist/anti-immigration ideas, many of which were becoming mainstream.
Anti-Trump SocJus accused so many people of being Nazi/White Supremacists that (from Jerry Coyne to Steven Pinker), like in the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, we started to be bored and ignore the actual Nazi-like trends going on. Antifa started to attack people from James Damore to Christina Hoff Sommers, acting as the Boys who Want to Hit Nazis, further muddling the waters, and leading people to reflexively reject not only the false or inaccurate accusations of nazism, but some more serious criticism of real creeping ethno-nationalism.
One of one many of the figures which were highly critical of Trump and of the drift to the right left the board. Welch, Strawkins, Skep Tickle, Jan Steen, James Caruthers, Pitchguest, all people who commented here a lot and helped to shape this place, all left, some with a whimper, others with a bang.
Aneris was the first to openly pose the question of how far to the right was the "Skeptic Movement", which included the Pit, going. There was a defensive reaction of which I was a part of, because we thought that while we were giving all sides an equal representation we hadn't accepted far-right ideas as mainstream. But maybe it was just that the changes had been too subtle for people to notice. Also at that point people were accepting Sargon's "classical liberal" position as mainstream, not Richard Spencer's "white ethno-state".
Things have still changed in the next months. People, from Brive to Keating to Vicky Caramel to gurugeorge to even Lsuoma, started to accept far-right thinkers and far-right thoughts as the new center, the new mainstream, the new normal. Videos from Brittany "Pizzagate Gal" Pettibone, or Black Pigeon Speaks, or Lauren Southern, or Faith Goldy, were passed around freely, their ideas assumed to be simply part of the tapestry of criticism of the SocJus.
Far right ideas like "replacement through immigration" or "ethno-states" were left unchallenged, traditionalist like Peterson were considered basically centrist, the Overton window shifted massively to the right. Sure, there were reactions against Vicky and gurugeorge for their peddling of Holocaust denial, but the core idea that the West is so massively under threat that the only reaction is to embrace ethno-nationalism seems to be more or less part of the DNA of this website.
Now by means of course I don't mean that each and every member of this website has shifted to the right. We still have people like free thoughtpolice or CaptainFluffyBunny who are centrist liberals and critics of Trump, and others like Old_Ones, Sunder, DrokkIt, (occasionally) Karmakin and me who are on the side of the reformation of the left according to Enlightenment, anti po-mo ideas.
But in general the idea that the Western Civilization is not only in need of reformation and maintenance, but under mortal threat from a combination of the Post-Modern left and immigration, has been making roads into the Pit, just like into the Skeptic Community in general.
Even Lsuoma seem convinced that Lauren Southern being banned from the UK is a sure sign that some kind of theocratic islamic state of Great Britain is on the horizon, and so ethno-nationalism might be the only way out. There ARE problems in the UK about criticism of islam, but surely one can't simply embrace the far-right instead of trying to fix things to support liberal democratic values and secularism. There are still plenty of non-far-right secularists around when it comes to Christianity, the trick is to focus less on race and more on religion to make people realize that islam is a religious, not ethnic issue.
I'm not saying that the people who have fallen for a false dichotomy between the SocJus/Regressives don't have their reasons. It's objectively hard to fight to reform things when no reforms seem in sight. But surely to fail into hopelessness and embrace the far-right alternative is a sign of weakness, of letting the mainstream thought to be dominated by Regressives on one side and ethno-fascists on the other.
Pinker, Harris, Dawkins, Coyne and ex or liberal muslims (from Nawaz to Rizvi) are still there. The core of reason and liberal democracy is still there. There's still hope of defending liberal democratic values without tying them to ethnicity and race, to reject the muslim theocrats on a secularist, not "traditionalist" basis. There are some people here who still think this and criticize both the SocJus and the Trumpian right, or ethno-nationalism.
But the risk of drifting into far-right, ethnocentric, "white nationalist" ideas is real. Brive here writes that "borders and traditions" in practice is the same as "defending a future for white children". This wouldn't have been considered normal even on the Pit just a couple of years ago.
Is the drift carrying on? Are we condemned to turn this place into the secular version of Stormfront? I don't think so, I don't think this is inevitable, but surely we have to be aware of what happened, realize how far have the boundaries been pushed.
Otherwise the pipes for Nazism have not only being laid in, but are about to become fully operational.
