• CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    Now? Ok whatever, maybe it’s changed.

    12 years ago when I was on there? The racism was recurrent. It wasn’t everywhere, but it was frequent enough and offputting enough to poison the space, and like I said, it’s not a surprise how many prominent New Atheists ended up being reactionary shits. Christopher Hitchens supported the destruction of Iraq, Sam Harris is vile, Richard Dawkins is an asshole, and the people who venerate them without acknowledging (or perhaps because of) their reactionary bents are sus as hell.

    Or maybe you’re not as good at noticing it because you haven’t been forced to become hypervigilant about it. Are you Muslim or from a Muslim family?

    • Flamingoaks@lemmygrad.ml
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      10 months ago

      maybe u are right and i am just bad at spotting it, i have nothing to do with Islam nor have i ever since luckily i was raised atheists. Maybe we are just operating on different understandings of what it mean for something to be built on racism because to me new atheists seem about as racists as any other random grouping of westerners, like racism or Islamophobia doesnt seem to be any more prevalent than in say online gaming discourse or in shitposting spaces, like it seems to me like the racism is there just because a bunch of white people are there and they arent explicitly against racism which is fucked up but its like background levels of fucked up.

      • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        new atheists seem about as racists as any other random grouping of westerners

        Maybe it’s just that discussing religion lets the racism show more clearly anytime Islam is brought up. Perhaps “founded on” wasn’t the right word, but the racism is inextricable from those spaces because they’re so white and refuse to be antiracist.