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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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I'm just going to say that I do not believe you are a "former leftist and atheist who's cringing at other atheists." This looks like the umpteenth iteration of a particular persona who keeps returning here.

As an atheist myself, I could never help but cringe when atheists responded to the “without God how are you moral” of the Christian evangelicals with the “Are you saying the only thing stopping you from murder is God’s judgment”?

The rejoinder you are complaining about is indeed a certain kind of smug gotcha line that's kind of cringe, but it's a rejoinder to an equally smug and cringeworthy argument. When theists try to play gotcha like that, they invite gotchas in return. This is why atheists who've gotten over their "arguing with evangelicals" phase usually aren't interested in that kind of debate. I'm fine actually talking about why I do or do not believe in God. But the sort of Christian who uses the "How can you be moral without God?" argument (usually followed by some variant of "You don't actually believe there is no God, you're just pretending") isn't interested in genuine discussion, but in seeing who can win the gotcha contest.

I think your Lizzo/Muslim analogy is kind of ridiculous. I don't personally care whether or not Ayan Hirsi Ali really believes in Christianity, but I can see why actual believers would care if someone is just wearing Christianity as a skin suit. You are overthinking the attraction to Islam; it's been pointed out here plenty of times that the left's infatuation with Islam isn't because of any intrinsic qualities of Islam (if it were practiced mostly by white people, they'd be condemning it as a Bronze age death cult). It's purely and solely because Islam is mostly practiced by brown third-worlders.

FWIW this @futuristright-substack character also has an odd habit of referring to himself and his writing in the 3rd person which could be interpreted as either evidence of legit schizophrenia or of poorly executed sock-puppetry.

poorly executed sock-puppetry.

Ding ding ding!

While the writing style and specific hobby-horses are different, I'm getting a distinct Jetirk/JuliusBranson/EuphoricBaseball/DarkRationalist/[insert other alts here] vibe off this guy.

I thought euphoricbaseball and juliusbronson were almost certainly different people? EB was the teen liberation one issue poster and JB was the HBD and the Illuminati schizoposter.

Same guy, using different accounts for different topics. Accidentally outed himself by forgetting to switch accounts. Posted a post under one name, deleted it, then posted it again under the other. I wanted to perma-ban both accounts for sock-puppetry but got vetoed.