Anyone Else Remember Atheism Plus?

I think I said in an earlier post that Gamergate was when everything fell apart. I was wrong. It was Atheism+.
I'll be honest, this article is only tangentially about Atheism+, because I can't really begin to bring myself to read up on Internet drama from 6-7 years ago, let alone make you lot read it, but does anyone else even remember this shit? Or is it just me?

I

Let's backtrack a second. I'm not particularly religious. I make the odd reference to the Bible from time to time, and I say masha'allah and oxala too (at the end of the HSBC post, for example), but that's not because of strongly held beliefs - it's just the culture I was raised in. I think Quakers are pretty cool (they seem like the least problematic sect of Christianity at least, and we all love oats, sweets, and not going to war), and Laughing Stock is definitely the greatest album of all time; I suppose all this makes me culturally Christian, but you still won't catch me in church, nor will you find me reciting Old Testament verse. And yet, I don't think of myself as an atheist, and I especially wouldn't go round letting everyone know I was atheist. It seems a bit gauche to make a big thing of it, for lack of a better word. It wasn't always like this, though, was it?

II

Allow me to veer off into some political theory for a moment. Samzdat has a really interesting series on the concept of social states. Essentially, just as we have governments that take taxes off us and wield structural power (the ability to make laws and get things done), we have social states that confer social taxes and wield social power. I'm going to assume you all know what regular taxes and power are, and simply explain social states, because they're less intuitive. Social power depends on context - it can range from being a big name on campus, to being the main lady at the church that everyone comes to with their gossip, to being the wokest person on Twitter. Social taxes are the hoops you have to jump through to maintain your position in the social hierarchy.

Allow me to tangent again, to the Bible this time. So the Jews are having a fight, Gileadites v Ephraimites. The Gills need to be able to identify who's on their team and who isn't - unfortunately away kits hadn't been invented yet. Luckily, there is a word that Effs cannot pronounce at all - shibboleth. They don't have the Voiceless postalveolar fricative, so they pronounce it sibboleth. The Gills' strategy is therefore clear - as groups of men cross this narrow ford you're defending, you ask them to pronounce shibboleth, and if they do it wrong, you fuck them up. We have taken this concept into the modern world. On the wiki page, for example, there's someone from New Orleans asking non-NOLAns to pronounce Tchoupitoulas (I don't know either) Street or fuck off. Frisians, who speak a language that's almost English but not, used one (Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis; wa't dat net sizze kin, is gjin oprjochte Fries) against the Dutch Habsburgs centuries ago. It's an established method of proving one's allegiance.

Untangent one level - shibboleths are how we pay social taxes. Consider the difference between colored person and person of color. It shouldn't take you very long, because there isn't really one - it's a shibboleth. Yes, yes, "person centering language," "violence against black bodies," sick, mate, I read Coates' stuff in the Atlantic back in 2012 too. The point of the difference is to make sure you're Frisian and not Dutch, sorry, liberal/leftist and not conservative. You make sure you're using the right words by staying up to date on terminology - paying your (social) taxes - and we won't cancel you or ostracise you - fine you or send you to (social) jail. You can find examples of shibboleths from all corners of intersectionality, and suddenly The Discourse makes a lot more sense. Lou goes into this in more detail, but there are more benefits to taxation for a government than just "you get money", and mirroring that, there are more benefits to social taxation for the arbiters of correctness than just "you get street cred", and one of them is increased investment in the state. Who are the arbiters of correctness, while we're on this? There's obviously not a social government of any kind. It's a lot more nebulous, but really it includes all of us who choose to socialise, from the kinds of jokes and opinions you allow between friends, to the things the media proclaim to be good or bad. If you did have to choose a single centre for social power it would be 'the media', though - but whether that's Fox or Facebook or the Guardian is, again, dependent on what circles you run in.

III

Untangent again, to the main point - the issue with being a vocal atheist in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Nineteen is that the atheists already won, sort of. Like I said in the history of the Internet, the fight between the fundamentalist Christians and their atheist counterparts raged for a long time on the web in the 90s and 00s. It was an extension of the culture war going on in real life in the USA, and there was a lot of bad blood. We can vaguely characterise this as a fight between left and right. In the red corner, we have our Midwesterners, our Southerners; our evangelical Protestants - Baptists, Methodists, Presbylutherans, all that good stuff; and with that comes all the stereotypes of "Flyover County" - college football, guns, no gays, etc, etc. In the blue corner, we have our Northeasterners, Californians, Pacific Northwesterners; atheists, agnostic, Buddhists, "spiritual but not religious"; with that comes all the stereotypes of the "Coastal Elites" - college degrees, ghee, gays everywhere, etc, etc.

I said the atheists, the blue corner (trust the Yanks to be the only country to do this backwards compared to literally everywhere else), won, but only sort of. What I mean is that this victory was emphatic socially, but minimal structurally. Dubya, who is the epitome of red state nonsense as far as the blues are concerned, left, and Obama moved in, but I'm pretty sure they still "teach the controversy" in certain schools, and separation of Church and State is still not a big deal to the Republicans. In short, none of the things the atheists were worried about have really changed. "So how is this a win?" They won because you will 100% look like a backwards hick if you are markedly Protestant - I say Protestant because people of color come in Catholic, Muslim, and Hindu flavours so you can't be mean about that. They won because the media of the 2000s was biased heavily in favour of 'religion-is-dumb' people like Bill Maher, Ricky Gervais, Seth MacFarlane, the South Park boys, etc, etc. This was the time period that made Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, deGrasse Tyson, household names. Simply put, it's a bit gauche to be Protestant now, and this is what a social victory looks like. Remember, it was a Culture War, not a legislative war, and the blues won.

IV

Big problem: now what? When we win wars, the losers tend to get royally fucked up in the process, for obvious reasons. The blue team was not this harsh. They did not impose what Keynes called a "Carthaginian peace" upon the reds. They simply ignored them. We'll come back to that.

What happened in the immediate aftermath of this cultural victory was that the blues tore themselves apart. Enter Atheism Plus.

I can't find the video I want. It was a TEDx style conference where one bloke attempts to convince everyone to believe in a new version of atheism. The idea was atheism plus feminism, atheism plus racial awareness, atheism plus LGBT representation, etc. Without being hyperbolic, everyone lost their shit. Here's prominent atheist YouTuber Thunderf00t going off on one.

You see, I haven't been completely honest about the blues. They were a weak, weak coalition, united basically only by their hatred for Protestants. They are easily broken down into two very different factions. One half skew kinda libertarian, or "classical liberal" from back before that meant "right-wing grifter", and that's the half that enjoyed Maher, Gervais, Hitchens et al. They weren't really the California liberals I described above - because this group was likely to include the disgruntled children of evangelicals, they're more conservative than their truly left-wing counterparts. They're the type that vehemently hated ALL theists, from Methodists to Muslims, and that eventually got them in trouble with the other half, because of what I said earlier - people of color are religious in much greater numbers. You might've felt when I was listing them lot in (III) that it was all wrong - no self respecting leftie would agree with those mugs. You're thinking of the other half, from radical liberals to Marxist-Leninists, the ones we'd call leftists today. I could borrow from Scott Alexander here, and call the Gervaists "the Grey tribe", but that obfuscates the problem that I will borrow from Samzdat - these are still the same team. Call them ultramarine and turquoise, grey and blue, it doesn't matter, I'll go with Gervaist and leftist. The point is that the last five or six years of political discourse in these has been these two groups arguing, and Atheism Plus is as good a flashpoint as any for identifying why that happened.

The people behind Atheism Plus did not recognise, or did not care, that there were two precarious groups that an initiative like theirs would absolutely bifurcate and then obliterate. In any case, they deserve our scorn, not for caring about feminism and racism and stuff (that's actually pretty good) but for thinking that shit would work on the atheist community at the time. Check out the political compass below. My Atheism+ man, an obvious member of the green section, was trying to produce a coalition of reds, greens, and purples on a foundation of anything other than "fuck the Bush-types," and that, simply put, could never happen. So where does that leave us now?

V

First of all, the sudden fall from grace of "atheism" as identity marker makes sense now, doesn't it? The war is done, and unless you're English (which I am, so DOO DAH, DOO DAH) one tends not to gloat about winning wars. It's weird enough when you beat someone on a structural level, as we did to Germany, twice, but on the social level it produces a more complicated dynamic. I will write about this more at a later date, but when you have a privilege you will do all you can to escape, lest you be cast as a subjugating other. Having the social high ground is actually BAD if you want to fit in. Don't know what I mean? I'm a Southerner at a Northern uni, for example, and the Southerners obviously have the advantage there, from both a structural (dosh) and social (media coverage) standpoint. So what do I do? Start a blog, and write numerous posts about how no, really, I'm from South London, I promise it's a shithole, I'm just as poor and stupid unprivileged as you! This impulse is everywhere, and this post is long enough without me properly going into it too, but atheists have the social highground, which means you must do everything to run down the hill and meet the theists halfway if you want to have any mates.

This is why Ricky Gervais, South Park, and Bill Maher seem so outdated - you guys already won, you don't have to make fun of the dumb Christians anymore, you are shocking no one (on the vague blue team) with this bullshit. This is why they've turned to anti-SJW humour to make ends meet - they're the ones with the social highground at present. Unfortunately, social power is a weird Catch-22 where if you have a lot you become the oppressor, and being the oppressor is bad for social power, so you lose it all again, which means you're cool, which means you get social power, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Gervais and company are just on the downswing at present. It's weird and I promise I'll explain it better once I've got my head around it.

VI

Second of all, remember social taxes? You pay them by staying up to date on whichever bullshit term is the meme of the day (it's not always bullshit, sometimes I write things I don't mean, promise I'm a socialist, not a Gervaist, don't cancel me). Dig this - none of those played-out attack helicopter memes Gervaists use make sense if you're not up to date on the fact that the debate is occuring. You think some Roscoe-Holcomb-looking-ass motherfucker from Coalwank, KY has any idea about the sex-gender split, let alone the proliferation of new genders available on Tumblr in like 2014? Of course not. To go back to an earlier point, when this guy grew up, colored person was the nice thing to say - I don't think I have to state the alternative - and the whole academic debate on what constitutes the correct word, as well as the reclamation of the mean word, has passed him by. Luckily for him no one has bothered to send publicani anywhere in Kentucky east of Louisville in a long, long time.

Here's what I think has happened. The green quarter up there had the most social power, and tried to raise taxes on both the purple 1/4 and the red 1/4, while ignoring the blue 1/4. The Gervaists (libertarian right) revolted by playing up the similarities between them and the Bush-types, and this is where we get /pol/'s movement from Ron Paul-esque libertarians/apolitical agents of chaos to straight-up Nazis. The proper commies are only just beginning to revolt by placing emphasis on class politics rather than other forms of identity politics, and they're beginning to wake people up to the idea that most of these forms of identity politics have been co-opted by the forces of capitalism already, and are thus basically useless.

The Bushites have it worst, or at least weirdest. No radlib actually cares what they think, and they haven't for about ten years, so there are no real social taxes to pay. Don't believe me? Witness this debacle, where bossman literally says it's pointless to interact with Fox News viewers. Here's the thing - FOX is where this lot get updates on the culture war happening between the Gervaists and the radlibs, along with FaceBook nonsense websites. It's real easy for the media outlets to conflate socialists and radical liberals - I didn't even really see a distinction until last year or so, how the fuck is Roscoe III supposed to cope - and thus draw on the Red Scare rhetoric from so long ago. The Bushites aren't included in the debate, but they know there's definitely one happening because they are kept up to date from the outside.

This is why Trump has been so successful - he appeals to the Gervaists and the FOX-addled red staters by vehemently fighting the good fight on the social stage, reintroducing the blue 1/4 of the compass into the debate as well as cementing the support of the purple 1/4, while allowing Orthodox Congressional Republicans to maintain their structural grip on the USA by being too dumb to actually do anything himself. His concessions to the anti-globalist stance are particularly effective - you can rope in disgruntled socialists who are worried about wages falling (remember how shocked people were about the movement from Bernie to Trump? This is why that happened) and /pol/tards who hear 'globalist' and think 'hook-nosed Jewish bastards'. Trump is the anti-atheism. Just as atheism briefly united a very weak coalition of 'everyone against the blue quarter', Trump unites a very weak coalition 'everyone against the green quarter'.

And what of the greens, these radical liberals? They're eating themselves, basically. Once you introduce this form of politics, everything becomes a competition to see who's wokest, who did the least problematic shit in high school, who makes the MOST space for marginal voices, and so forth. No one wins this game. Furthermore, the most palatable ideas have, as I said, been ripped off wholesale by companies looking to make money off our impulse to be good people. We're all sick of woke brands at this point, right? Zoomers, the generation that roughly started with my birth, are especially done with that kind of identity politics. The radical liberals will therefore civil war themselves into extinction unless they stop doing what they're doing. "Didn't you put yourself in that bit? Are you eating yourself?" Are you dumb? I am full of whatever doners are made of and countless cheap ciders, I'm pretty sure eating me is banned under Defra legislation. I'm trying to search for an alternative, that maintains my team's penchant for not being an arse to marginalised groups, while excising my team's penchant for nuking itself with ever more stringent purity tests. I'm just not sure where that middleground is.

VII

"Fantastic, another incredibly depressing, incomprehensible screed about how we're all doomed! You really are in love with The Last Psychiatrist, aren't you?"

Number one, yes I am, please stop attacking me and my weak heart, but number two, this isn't as depressing as it looks. Think about it. I will once again finish by borrowing, badly, from my sweetheart Alone for a sec -

"Why are you so obsessed with narcissism?" Describe the march of history over the past 100 years.  Answer: Fascism, then Marxism, then Narcissism. What distinguishes the three?  Technology.  What followed fascism?  War.  What followed Marxism?  War.

 "Why are you so obsessed with meaningless bollocks on the Internet?" Describe the march of Internet culture over the past twenty years or so. Answer: Atheists, then social justice warriors, then MAGApedes. What destroyed the Atheists? Atheism Plus, i.e. themselves. What destroyed the SJWs? Facts and logic The tea, sweaty Themselves. What destroys the MAGApedes?