The Derp Is Strong

Post Reply
User avatar
L'Emmerdeur
Posts: 5698
Joined: Wed Apr 06, 2011 11:04 pm
About me: Yuh wust nightmaya!
Contact:

The Derp Is Strong

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Wed Oct 18, 2017 10:16 pm

I agree with whoever chose the image for this piece. Stefan Molyneux, who personifies bombastic arrogance, is the real star here.

'New Atheism’s Idiot Heirs: An irritating rhetoric meets the dumbest possible ideology'


In the heyday of the internet message board, let’s say in the 1990s, a certain species of idiot materialized. He was male, aggressively pedantic, self-professedly logical, committed to the hard sciences, prone to starting sentences with “actually,” and almost always devoted to the notion that his disbelief in God imbued him with intellectual superiority. This archetype’s golden years were the 2000s, a decade that saw George W. Bush’s politicized creationism and the use of web forums peak in unison. Once that decade ended, the internet tired of his antics and made him central to a series of in-jokes —“neckbeard” described his less-than-stellar grooming habits; and his hat of choice, the fedora, became the butt of innumerable jokes during Obama’s first term. No longer needed or tolerated, this misunderstood paragon of Enlightenment-core values began a journey that brought him to the worst possible destination: the Republican Party.

The Bush years provided militant atheists and amateur debate enthusiasts adequate fodder for their performative condescension. It seems almost quaint in retrospect, but newish, performative Christianity was being lab-tested at the time. Bush himself was a born-again Christian who cited a vision from God when justifying the disastrous invasion of Iraq, and his leadership inspired zealots across the country to up the ante. In 2001, Jerry Falwell, who had recently accused the show Teletubbies of “modeling the gay lifestyle” to children, blamed 9/11 on pagans and abortionists. In 2003, Judge Roy Moore installed a 5000-pound Ten Commandments monument outside the Alabama Supreme Court, refused to comply with court orders to take it down, and was eventually removed from office as a result.

It was a fantastic moment in which to be a self-satisfied dork with a penchant for explaining things to people.

...

New Atheism and the Gamergate movement of 2014—which sicced vicious online mobs on female journalists and game designers based on spurious allegations of media corruption—overlapped in several ways. They were both male-dominated, the latter almost exclusively so, and they both festered on nerd-oriented internet forums. Both movements resented women and minorities who asserted themselves within those spaces, ostensibly because it provided an unimportant distraction from their respective goals of destroying religion and uncritically consuming entertainment products. The difference, though, was that Gamergate had no basis in reality. The central allegation of that controversy, that a developer slept with a Kotaku writer in order to secure a positive review of her game, was blatantly untrue. No such review existed, which posed a problem for anyone who viewed himself as the protagonist in a battle “vs. FEMINISM.” In order to continue this all-out war on feminists—the curious replacement creationists for a new decade that lacked for them—these New-New Atheists had to break with reality altogether.

The heirs to New Atheism may have a new target and a remodeled ethos, but their rhetorical crutches remain the same. They announce at every opportunity that they revere logic, evidence, and science, even if the opposite is plainly true. We saw this play out with James Damore, the engineer who was fired from Google after spreading a memo critiquing the company’s pro-diversity policies. Damore argued in his memo, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” that biological differences between men and women, not sexism, could account for the lack of gender parity in the tech industry. In the memo, he repeatedly used the favored buzzwords of atheist pedants. He wrote that he “strongly value individualism and reason,” claimed that “the Left tends to deny science” and asked that Google “be open about the science of human nature.” The repetition of these sentiments failed to strengthen his case, which was made from gut feeling and justified retroactively with garbled logic and irrelevant studies. An investigation by Wired found that two of the researchers Damore cited disagreed with the conclusions he drew from their work, with one telling them that “It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me).”

It became more evident that Damore was less interested in scientific truth than giving credibility to his prejudices when he immediately brought his grievances to the right-wing internet. Despite writing in the memo that “some on the Right deny science that runs counter to the “God > humans > environment” hierarchy (e.g., evolution and climate change),” he was willing to be interviewed by campus gadflies Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro, both of whom are climate change deniers. Damore’s choice of interviewers damaged his cause, but it revealed his motives.

,,,

James Damore’s first and most damning interview after being fired was with prolific writer and YouTube personality Stefan Molyneux, who represents the most extreme example of the misuse of militant atheist rhetoric. Molyneux is an enthusiastic Trump supporter, a frequent Alex Jones collaborator, and a fixture in the alt-right. Like Damore’s other acquaintances, he denies climate change exists, but he also subscribes to fraudulent race science, argues that mental illness is a Jewish conspiracy, and believes the Las Vegas mass shooting was the result of a nationwide war on children. Despite all this moonstruck gibberish, Molyneux writes and speaks in the New Atheist style, fashioning himself as a master of logic, reason, and evidence.

...

Molyneux’s latest book, titled The Art of the Argument, is riddled with errors and displays a complete disregard for the conventions of formal logic. He provides incorrect explanations of intro-course concepts like syllogisms and inductive reasoning, but it makes no difference to the Infowars-addled target demographic. For the average Molyneux reader, who was almost certainly explaining Darwin to video game forums circa 2006, rhetoric is less a field of expertise than a trove of context-free buzzwords to throw out during online spats. Simply owning a copy of The Art of the Argument provides the amateur logician with enough confidence to unleash Molyneux’s signature retort, “not an argument!” To anyone with more than a cursory understanding of these concepts (or a familiarity with the Molyneux cult) an accusation that their retort fails to meet Molyneux’s jumbled, self-contradictory criteria for an “argument” is meaningless. To the conduit for Molyneux’s sophistry, its use is akin to a fatality move in Mortal Kombat.

User avatar
Sean Hayden
Microagressor
Posts: 17865
Joined: Wed Mar 03, 2010 3:55 pm
About me: recovering humanist
Contact:

Re: The Derp Is Strong

Post by Sean Hayden » Wed Oct 18, 2017 10:32 pm

I've never heard of him, or I forgot him. I enjoyed reading that though. :hehe:

User avatar
Brian Peacock
Tipping cows since 1946
Posts: 37941
Joined: Thu Mar 05, 2009 11:44 am
About me: Ablate me:
Location: Location: Location:
Contact:

Re: The Derp Is Strong

Post by Brian Peacock » Wed Oct 18, 2017 10:39 pm

Stefan Molyneux is the Davedodo of YouTube.

Article made me chuckle though - but mostly at my own expense.
Rationalia relies on voluntary donations. There is no obligation of course, but if you value this place and want to see it continue please consider making a small donation towards the forum's running costs.
Details on how to do that can be found here.

.

"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice.
There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."

Frank Zappa

"This is how humanity ends; bickering over the irrelevant."
Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
.

User avatar
pErvinalia
On the good stuff
Posts: 59278
Joined: Tue Feb 23, 2010 11:08 pm
About me: Spelling 'were' 'where'
Location: dystopia
Contact:

Re: The Derp Is Strong

Post by pErvinalia » Thu Oct 19, 2017 2:32 pm

Does anyone actually know any gamergate new atheists? It's not an association that springs to my mind very easily. Can't say I've ever thought of the two having anything to do with each other. DaveDodo is the obvious candidate for an overlap, but he's not of the Dawkins mould. He's more like an incoherent drunk. 'Reason' doesn't play much of a role in his ranting.
Sent from my penis using wankertalk.
"The Western world is fucking awesome because of mostly white men" - DaveDodo007.
"Socialized medicine is just exactly as morally defensible as gassing and cooking Jews" - Seth. Yes, he really did say that..
"Seth you are a boon to this community" - Cunt.
"I am seriously thinking of going on a spree killing" - Svartalf.

User avatar
L'Emmerdeur
Posts: 5698
Joined: Wed Apr 06, 2011 11:04 pm
About me: Yuh wust nightmaya!
Contact:

Re: The Derp Is Strong

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Sun Oct 22, 2017 1:50 am

From 'Gateway Pundit,' which inhabits a special corner of the world of derp, somewhere between WND and InfoWars:

'Comey’s Latest Cryptic Tweet Looks Like Death Threat to President Trump!'

You'd need to read the swivel-eyed babbling in its entirety to get the full effect, but the 'death threat' tweet is below.

Image

User avatar
pErvinalia
On the good stuff
Posts: 59278
Joined: Tue Feb 23, 2010 11:08 pm
About me: Spelling 'were' 'where'
Location: dystopia
Contact:

Re: The Derp Is Strong

Post by pErvinalia » Sun Oct 22, 2017 1:58 am

:lol:
Sent from my penis using wankertalk.
"The Western world is fucking awesome because of mostly white men" - DaveDodo007.
"Socialized medicine is just exactly as morally defensible as gassing and cooking Jews" - Seth. Yes, he really did say that..
"Seth you are a boon to this community" - Cunt.
"I am seriously thinking of going on a spree killing" - Svartalf.

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests