The End of an Era; A Traditionalist Take on Spinosauruskin's Betrayal

Recently I was made aware of David Sherratt’s [aka. Spinosauruskin] very public feud with Carl Benjamin [aka. Sargon of Akkad] as I was myself drawn into a conversation on this very messy subject with my friend here on Minds, @Xinyue about what this means for the Skeptic community. While I was initially completely pro-Sargon on this event, I found that as I educated myself on what had gone on, that I was in fact less certain about the whole issue. Now I’m not about to subscribe to Spino, I’ve always taken him less seriously, and now he has called his own character as a person and a professional into question, if professionalism was indeed ever his aspiration. He has proven himself an unprincipled hardline leftist, a second-rate thinker, and I think most damming, not even a third-rate comedian, with his Sargon parody account @Hardon_for_Assad on twitter.

*The Ides of March came late this year et tu Spino?

 Maybe still, Spino’s criticism while dished out with the etiquette of a toddler, is a just one. That skeptics are increasingly becoming tribal to win the culture war so called, and that the retrograde right is not receiving criticism both well deserved, and overdue. Perhaps a Vandalic desire to scour the earth of every remnant of social justice, driven both by fear and anger at these subversives that has been set into motion, has blinded us to reason. Let’s say for the sake of argument Spino was diplomatically ill-equipped to express this, he’s only 19 after all.

Still, the anti-SJW skeptic community has seemingly started splitting apart subtly, which is only natural as social justice becomes less relevant, since it has been defeated intellectually, and two main flaws have been exposed. The first is that “dead-centre” centrism allied to skepticism only naturally purity spirals. One can even view the spat between Spino and Sargon as Spino’s attempt at purity testing Sargon, with the final result that Sargon swept aside the upstart with swift condemnation, Sargon said as much in a recent livestream. Purity testing for “dead-centrism” is generally a bad thing since attempting to prioritize everything equally will lead to nothing getting done. Dead-centrism also can be seen in this regard as having no defining values, so it’s naturally reductionist, just like the SJWs that moderate-centrism defeated. Secondly the moral, professional and critical standards of the “community” are fluid, differing from creator to creator, and even for a single content creator, from day to day.

In light of this information, the rout of social justice has resulted in the end of an era, and the need to make centrism great again. My humble solution is as follows: Reject the label of skeptic it doesn’t reflect on reality, but is merely an idealized self-view of the content creator. People have biases, and we will all be better off itemizing our biases and opinions so that we don’t fall prey to them. I’ve noticed that the content creators considered mostly as skeptical rather than anti-SJW are always embroiled in controversy. The Armoured Skeptic, Spinosauruskin, The Satirician and ShoeOnHead are all primarily skeptics and they all share in common that in the past 3 months they’ve all publicly shot each other or themselves in the foot.

Secondly, the ceaseless criticism propounded by hardline centrists is only a more annoying form of idiocy (idiocy being in the Greek sense of refusing to participate in politics, not the modern sense of stupidity). Intellectual iconoclasm and vandalism will not build a better future. The SJWs and their social constructivist critique of society have, in their implementation so far, proved absurd and inhuman, thus we can see that intellectual criticism is only half the battle. If you don’t have anything but criticism, you can expect to be ruled by your inferiors, just as if you never participated in politics in the first place.

It is therefore time to be builders, to ask ourselves what we want for the future and to navigate it by means of Socratic dialectic.