The Further Adventures of the Skeptic Community

The skeptic community is dead, dead at last? No, dead from the beginning, it was always a movement of rarified and perfected nihilism no more genuine than the SJWs it sought to disprove. Allow me to explain my reasoning: In the early 2000s, four people, as far as I can tell, woke up and decided that because it was the current year, that bronze age artefact called religion needed to be taken out to pasture. Never mind the fact that Christianity, the religion of the west, dates to the late iron age, these four, namely Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, branded themselves something suitably edgy, at least for the context of Christendom, — The Four Horsemen — and they defined the kind of atmosphere present on the internet in those early days. Radical atheism spent several long years proclaiming on the rostra of YouTube that God was an immoral monster, and he’s dead now so fuck him. This went on for a good long time until sometime in Obama’s second term or so, when out of a united New Atheism, a division emerged, and a group derogated as Social Justice Warriors began to preach diversity even more stridently than the left side of politics had done since the 1960’s. In reaction to this; some other atheists, out of absolutely no moral conviction of their own, but rather because they realized that the program of the social justice warriors left them out personally and attacked their video game hobby, began to attack the SJWs. These jilted atheists rebranded themselves into the Skeptic Community because the New Atheist label didn’t have much to do with their attacks on their fellow atheists, the Social Justice Warriors. Also, the attacks by the Skeptics on the Social Justice Warriors demonstrated effectively that the SJWs didn’t have a moral position either, but were merely advocating for things that benefitted those with the most deviant lifestyles.

But out of this milieu, a perception arose of Skeptics being moral to a fault because of their uncompromising desire to apprehend the truth. It was a tenet of faith amongst the Skeptics that truth is the highest good, at least from a Utilitarian perspective, which was really the only way they ever were willing to construe values, being as they are, atheist materialists perhaps along the lines of Hume, Bentham or J.S. Mill. And how much this false perception was is exemplified by Kraut & Tea! It has even shown the moral laziness of their philosophy as a whole. That Kraut went to personal lengths to out an alt-right supporter, who went by the handle RageAfterStorm, to her employer shows the traditional fault of utilitarians; the greatest good for the greatest number is inconsistent with a moral obligation in respect of another individual — in this case RageAfterStorm’s right to hold alt-right views meant nothing to Kraut & Tea when he went to lengths to damage her private life. Secondly, and perhaps more seriously, the notion that the truth in the context of materialism is necessarily good is seriously challenged by Kraut & Tea’s inability to effectively refute arguments commonly employed by race-realists, or even to properly represent them. And this is the most disturbing truth lying in the midst of this whole mess about Kraut & Tea. As far as I can tell; if your moral system is predicated on materialism, you are bound to discriminate on the basis of race, colour, class and even creed, because if one looks merely at the material reality we find ourselves in, one is bound more to catalogue the differences between objects rather than the similarities which give rise to the knowledge of forms. As a Platonist I can’t help but find the reductio ad absurdum of materialism in racial prejudice advocated as public policy. This is why I cleave to the traditionalist political movement; the incredible efficacy of scientific-materialism in producing new and life saving innovations underscores it’s own limitations when it sees man the machine rather than the man in the machine.

Perhaps you will ridicule me as a poor kind of philosopher who can only see things right in front of his face, or who feels hostile to philosophical innovation, but I have never thought myself a prophet, nor found an innovator who was not foolhardy, not unlike myself when I first began to philosophize.