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The short ver of my Greater Theory of Jo* Rog*n is: he is a central distribution point for acquiring & funneling people into the more hard core transphobia, sexism & racism of an entire movement of bad skeptics whose primary organizing principle = 1950s America was peak society.
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He is one of two flavors of self-identified skeptics. One flavor is interested in applying the tools of scientific inquiry to their every day life and challenging all assumptions, which can get annoying, but is fine...
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The other finds that too much work & sorta share a mutual understanding of an imaginary version of America in the 1950s and any thinking that matches that concept they automatically agree with and anything that challenges it they will argue w/on principle. "Just asking questions"
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Of course this means questioning a lot of people on the value or even truth of their beliefs and identities, which is persistent but needlessly asshole-is...
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*persistent and needlessly asshole-ish.
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These 'skeptics in behalf of the status quo' tend to use key phrases to mask the fact that their philosophical approach values white men over all others: western civilization, the west, M*n's R*ghts, etc... It's bad thinking and a bad approach and we shouldn't support it.
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On the bottom of this acquisition funnel are the straight up N*zis. R*g*n is on the top of the funnel, if he realizes it or not. I dunno what to do about that, but this construct to understand this community is much more useful than the *ntell*ctual d*rk web bs.
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It helps me better understand how huge swaths of the atheist movement (which is inside this duel skeptics community) have become racist, why there are a bunch of semi-liberal trans- and homophobes, and how a whole variety of wildly different assholes stick together.
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It does not help me better figure out solutions or how to peel this group's listeners/consumers away from the alt-r*ght.
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There's a pretty large community of skeptics and many don't fall into this funnel and if I had unlimited money and time I'd probably invest some of it in entering the movement and interrogating what differentiates the two groups because that might be useful information.