again, I'll just point out that you've inferred an entire personal archetype and detailed political philosophy to get mad at based on an astronomy account tweeting picture of a planet with a caption that can be reduced to "consider perspective". it's fair to be upset when Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, or other pop-sci entertainers espouse white supremacy while hiding behind a scientific aesthetic. I don't think it's reasonable to extrapolate from an astronomy tweet that scientist = atheist = nihilist = hypocrite = white chauvinist = fascist. The white supremacy of those individual entertainers is reflective of and inherited from the hegemony of the liberal societies they were raised in. They're not political or cultural thought leaders dragging the Anglophone world into colonizing West Asia out of a personal commitment to science, philosophy, or atheism.

I promise, most of the people by volume who are committed to ethnically cleansing the global south also want to throw scientists, philosophers, and atheists on the pyre, and they have a lot to say about the dangers of society "abandoning morality" and "embracing nihilism".

[–] zed_proclaimer@hexbear.net 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I don't think it's reasonable to extrapolate from an astronomy tweet that scientist = atheist = nihilist = hypocrite = white chauvinist = fascist.

It's already starting half-way down that line of inference, at nihilist and hypocrite. Considering it's a western white nihilist account it's not that large of a leap to white chauvinist (that's the majority of the West).

I think you're in a bit of denial about how evil and widespread these atheist neocon Liberals are and that they want to ethnically cleanse the global south even more than the local chuds. Most Zionists in the west are not evangelical crazies, they're "logical secular Liberal centrists". Fascism arises from the warmonger capitalists, not the fringe lunatics. You don't understand the core of imperialism or fascism if you don't think these types are extremely dangerous and our primary enemy.

[–] porcupine@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It’s already starting half-way down that line of inference, at nihilist and hypocrite. Considering it’s a western white nihilist account it’s not that large of a leap to white chauvinist (that’s the majority of the West).

If you assume this is true about an account that (as far as I can tell) exists to post generic space pictures, you could could just as easily make this argument about any tweet. It's on an American website, so it's probably a white American poster and America's fascist, so the poster must be fascist, so the post is self-reinforcing evidence of the poster's white cryptofascism. Somebody posted about math? Bet they're dogwhistling about the rate of profit and how it must always go up at the expense of the working class. Picture of landscape? I don't see any people in that picture; must be an incitement to genocide. A painting? You know who else liked painting?

I think you're misattributing your feelings about a particular subreddit to the demographics of the United States. Reddit (and X dot com) as a whole aren't reflective of US demographics. Every US president in history has been a Christian. Fewer Americans would vote for a "well-qualified" atheist nominated by their own party for president than would vote for a Muslim across Democrats, Republicans, and independents. 70% of the US identifies as Christian, and the 20% that could be broadly be considered atheist plummets to around 3% if we're going by strict self-identification; that's the highest it's ever been, and its disproportionately younger generations with less political power. On US support for the Zionist genocide on Gaza, Muslims and black Protestants are the only groups with lower support for Israel than the religiously unaffiliated. US Protestants (evangelical and mainline, and excluding black people), Catholics, and Jewish people are by far the most likely to justify Zionist violence and condemn Hamas self defense.

"You have a moral duty to bully atheist nerds for their nihilistic immorality!" (the explicit premise of this post) is an attitude that's always been considerably more popular in mainstream American liberal society that whatever inverse you seem to imagine is happening. Add "socialist" to your list of things that are "poisoning our country" and you've got the makings of a generic bipartisan congressional campaign. It would take a pretty remarkable feat of mental gymnastics to attribute the US attacks on reproductive freedom and LGBTQ people to politically organized Kierkegaard fans, or suggest that the proletarian revolutions that liberated millions in the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China were driven by people embracing faith in the divine and rejecting godless materialism.

[–] zed_proclaimer@hexbear.net 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

The Nazis and Italian Fascists and Japanese Imperialists were not religious zealots. They all espoused scientism and secular theories of racial/cultural conflict. It is not Joe Brandon's catholicism that is driving his Zionist bloodlust and islamophobia, as he's much more extreme than the vast majority of catholics and catholic leadership on these matters. He is a zionist because of the secular Israeli project's influence in the political system and his hollow sell-out nature making him a vessel to be filled with the first monied interest to cross his path. He is a secular fascist, despite being a catholic. Obama was a secular fascist. Trump was a secular fascist. Nixon was a secular fascist. Are you noticing a pattern? It's nothing to do with their christianity, it's their "pro-west" secular views that fascism emerges from.

[–] porcupine@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Obama identifies as a Protestant Christian and regularly attended church. If you were politically active at the time, you may recall a particular controversy about his longtime pastor. Trump identifies as a nondenominational Christian, and is currently selling Bibles. Joe Brandon's Catholicism is more bloodthirsty than say the pope or many European Catholics prefer, but it's right in line with mainstream US Catholic attitudes. Calling the Zionist project "secular" is pretty wild claim I'm not sure you could get any credible "Israeli" to get behind. The Zionist government (and a majority Jewish people in the US) isn't exactly shy about it's position that Zionism is Judaism and vice versa. A German census in 1939 has 95% identifying as Protestant or Catholic, and 3.5% identifying as nondenominational Christians. The Nazi regime's incorporation of Christianity into its political rhetoric and association of atheism with Bolshevism is extremely well documented. "Gott mit uns" wasn't a Nazi PSA about wearing gloves in winter while fighting the godless communists. Mussolini made Roman Catholicism the state religion of Fascist Italy. I'm not particularly well read on Imperial Japan, but they did codify Shinto as the state religion. You seem to equate the big three Axis powers as a single homogeneous "fascism" (a reductive premise I'd disagree with) while claiming it arises from "pro-West secular views", but apart from none of those being secular states, Japan wasn't considered "Western" by any measure until after colonization by the US.

I'm going to bow out of this conversation now, because it's hard to imagine this discussion taking a turn for the respectful or productive when most of your premises are verifiably inaccurate as a matter of historical fact.