Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Radfem as a religion: more thoughts


I've touched on some of the following points in various posts, let's wrap them up neatly and list in one place all the reasons why radical feminism is a cult:

  • It believes dogmatically in all-powerful but invisible and unverifiable entities like "patriarchy", "male privilege", "rape culture" etc. etc.
  • It has its own version of the Courtier's Reply: "Fuck off, this is not a 101 space". If you disagree with or even question radfem theology, the radfems will very magnanimously grant you the benefit of the doubt the first time, and assume that your disagreement is due to ignorance and your deplorable lack of a degree in Womyn's Studies - it couldn't possibly be that you have legitimate points to make. If you persist in your disagreement or questioning, then you're an MRA - i.e. an evil rapist scum.
  • It arbitrarily redefines commonly understood words like "rape" or "privilege" so that the radfems are always right and men are always rapists. It's just like Christian theologians constantly redefining "god" so that a god can be argued to exist, albeit as an increasingly abstract and vacuous concept.
  • It has an all-purpose answer to every question: "male privilege". A man gets custody of the children in a divorce - male privilege. The woman gets custody - male privilege, because now she is responsible for raising them (with the unacknowledged help of the man, who is now nothing more than an ATM for the next 18 years). It's exactly analogous to the Christian's all-purpose answer - "goddidit". I shouldn't have to point out that some pat answer that explains everything actually explains nothing.
  • Like religion, radfem (and especially A+theism) claims to have a monopoly on morality and caring (we care about X, Y, and Z, and those asshole MRA atheists don't) but in reality it is all about tribalism. It's become a high-school clique based on a cult of personality around Myers, Twatson, McCreight etc.
  • It demands groupthink and lockstep adherence to the group ideology above all. Independent thought of any kind is taboo.
  • I've always noticed that Christian blogs, forums and YouTube channels were the most tightly controlled, and either prohibited comments altogether or were constantly on hair-trigger alert to ban any comment (and any commenter) who departed a hair's breadth from the reigning orthodoxy. But the A+theism forums put them all to shame. I've never seen a banhammer go berserk to such an extent.
  • Continuing on from the previous point, remember when Justin Vacula tried to come up with the most inoffensive possible atheist billboard, to see if it would still be banned (it was)? Now there is a contest on http://www.reddit.com/r/antiatheismplus/ to see who can get banned from http://www.reddit.com/r/atheismplus/ most quickly and for the most innocuous and harmless comment. There are some real doozies, but the bottom line is that r/atheismplus is a joke.

Do you have anything to add to this list?

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