What kind of people did Hitchens and Dawkins appeal to in the 2000's?

[wimp]

They thought religion was the root of all evil and the west was about to fall to theocracy due to the religious right, but a lot of what they believed in foreign policy wise (particularly Hitchens) seemed more hawkish than the views of most of the Bush administration.

[Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God]

Teenagers on the internet, many from Christian or pro-Bush households.

Most of Hitchens' fans didn't care about his foreign policy views, but they loved his atheist activism.

[afleitch]

Teenagers on the internet, many from Christian or pro-Bush households.

And as I've said before, Christian colleges wanting a knockabout debate.

It was a wave of, somewhat clunky, deconstructionism lending itself to the old 'edgy atheist' strawman.  It was a response to crass cultural Reagan American Christianity and it's toxic grip on political, media and in many cases family life.

[Samof94]

Teenagers on the internet, many from Christian or pro-Bush households.

And as I've said before, Christian colleges wanting a knockabout debate.

It was a wave of, somewhat clunky, deconstructionism lending itself to the old 'edgy atheist' strawman.  It was a response to crass cultural Reagan American Christianity and it's toxic grip on political, media and in many cases family life.

It hasn’t aged well given that it is too tied to Islamophobia.

[afleitch]

Teenagers on the internet, many from Christian or pro-Bush households.

And as I've said before, Christian colleges wanting a knockabout debate.

It was a wave of, somewhat clunky, deconstructionism lending itself to the old 'edgy atheist' strawman.  It was a response to crass cultural Reagan American Christianity and it's toxic grip on political, media and in many cases family life.

It hasn’t aged well given that it is too tied to Islamophobia.

That is true as Islamophobia was a popular innuendo amongst both Harris and Hitchens (Harris more so and still evident)

The movement is long since dead, Hitchens is dead and it was subsumed into the culture wars / 'muh centrism.' If it had any effect however, particularly amongst millennials in the USA, the rise of the nones also saw the rise of a generally heavily Democratic and left leaning voting bloc. For all the strawmanning (mostly by mainsteam/progressive Christians to be honest) a decade ago, they are now generally part of the same side of the culture war/populism divide.

[Kingpoleon]

That is true as Islamophobia was a popular innuendo amongst both Harris and Hitchens (Harris more so and still evident)

The movement is long since dead, Hitchens is dead and it was subsumed into the culture wars / 'muh centrism.' If it had any effect however, particularly amongst millennials in the USA, the rise of the nones also saw the rise of a generally heavily Democratic and left leaning voting bloc. For all the strawmanning (mostly by mainsteam/progressive Christians to be honest) a decade ago, they are now generally part of the same side of the culture war/populism divide.

To pretend that someone needs to strawman people like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, or P. Z. Myers is utterly ridiculous. Dawkins objects that the ontological argument seems a bit “too easy” to reach a proper conclusion, successfully misreads all of Aquinas’s Five Ways, and objects that he need not have any knowledge of philosophy of religion because his whole point is that it’s nonsense. Harris talks about how sad it is that we may one day wipe out Iran because they’re just too religious, and announces that any secular ideology which kills people ought to be defined as a religion.

[afleitch]

That is true as Islamophobia was a popular innuendo amongst both Harris and Hitchens (Harris more so and still evident)

The movement is long since dead, Hitchens is dead and it was subsumed into the culture wars / 'muh centrism.' If it had any effect however, particularly amongst millennials in the USA, the rise of the nones also saw the rise of a generally heavily Democratic and left leaning voting bloc. For all the strawmanning (mostly by mainsteam/progressive Christians to be honest) a decade ago, they are now generally part of the same side of the culture war/populism divide.

To pretend that someone needs to strawman people like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, or P. Z. Myers is utterly ridiculous. Dawkins objects that the ontological argument seems a bit “too easy” to reach a proper conclusion, successfully misreads all of Aquinas’s Five Ways, and objects that he need not have any knowledge of philosophy of religion because his whole point is that it’s nonsense. Harris talks about how sad it is that we may one day wipe out Iran because they’re just too religious, and announces that any secular ideology which kills people ought to be defined as a religion.

Once again you launch into responding to something someone hasn't said. I said 'lay' atheists/nones were strawmanned in  the US. I'm not talking about Harris et al.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Dawkins objects that the ontological argument seems a bit “too easy” to reach a proper conclusion,

Stopped clock.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This isn't quite the same thing, but one of the dumbest and most poorly aged things from Bush Administration-era liberalism was the fervent belief amongst some that the end game of the Bush Admin was to implement an actual Handmaid's Tale-style theocratic state of institutionalized misogyny. Not that the Bush Adminstration's socially conservative agenda was a threat or that that they had furthered it well, but that the US was just one step away from being controlled by a Christian equivalent of the Taliban. This of course ignores that The Handmaid's Tale is actually badly written shlock that prioritizes shock value over realistic threads, that Gilead does not resemble any type of fundamentalist Christian doctrine, that it's a work of science fiction and that many elements of it do not appear in our contemporary world, and as Virginia once noted in a criticism of the TV series that such a society would be economically unviable and collapse in about a year as women would be completely removed from the workplace and it seems that all men have the jobs of oppressing and guarding women, thus eliminating any type of normal workforce and economy and the fact that for all of its flaws the simple fact that the Bush Admin was willing to appoint women to many key roles is proof that it was not of that nature. But no, all the "proof" we needed was when some random podunk rural church Baptist pastor made a comment that implied supporting the death penalty for homosexuality or when some Republican Congressman quoted the Bible on the House floor, all of which were dutifully compiled in those dumb THEOCRACY WATCH blogs. I think this kind of added to the appeal of "New Atheism" (although not Hitchens for obvious reasons) since it led to a very black and white thinking.

Since most of the Religious Right's agenda from that era is now dead, they've completely given up on gay marriage and things like teaching of Intelligent Design or abstinence-only sex education in schools has really gone on the backburner since then, and since the Trump Admin was a completely different flavor of right-wing authoritarianism, that stuff is pretty much about as relevant as MySpace today, and thus the backlash to it doesn't have anywhere near the following it used to.

[Kingpoleon]

Stopped clock.

I believe the exact story was that “the theologians” had to resort to Modal Collapse to explain why an ontological argument for flying pigs failed. Modal Collapse, he assures us in TGD, is philosophical nonsense.

[Samof94]

This isn't quite the same thing, but one of the dumbest and most poorly aged things from Bush Administration-era liberalism was the fervent belief amongst some that the end game of the Bush Admin was to implement an actual Handmaid's Tale-style theocratic state of institutionalized misogyny. Not that the Bush Adminstration's socially conservative agenda was a threat or that that they had furthered it well, but that the US was just one step away from being controlled by a Christian equivalent of the Taliban. This of course ignores that The Handmaid's Tale is actually badly written shlock that prioritizes shock value over realistic threads, that Gilead does not resemble any type of fundamentalist Christian doctrine, that it's a work of science fiction and that many elements of it do not appear in our contemporary world, and as Virginia once noted in a criticism of the TV series that such a society would be economically unviable and collapse in about a year as women would be completely removed from the workplace and it seems that all men have the jobs of oppressing and guarding women, thus eliminating any type of normal workforce and economy and the fact that for all of its flaws the simple fact that the Bush Admin was willing to appoint women to many key roles is proof that it was not of that nature. But no, all the "proof" we needed was when some random podunk rural church Baptist pastor made a comment that implied supporting the death penalty for homosexuality or when some Republican Congressman quoted the Bible on the House floor, all of which were dutifully compiled in those dumb THEOCRACY WATCH blogs. I think this kind of added to the appeal of "New Atheism" (although not Hitchens for obvious reasons) since it led to a very black and white thinking.

Since most of the Religious Right's agenda from that era is now dead, they've completely given up on gay marriage and things like teaching of Intelligent Design or abstinence-only sex education in schools has really gone on the backburner since then, and since the Trump Admin was a completely different flavor of right-wing authoritarianism, that stuff is pretty much about as relevant as MySpace today, and thus the backlash to it doesn't have anywhere near the following it used to.

Exactly. The Handmaids Tale is about as realistic as pokemon (possibly even less so since magic doesn’t exist in that dystopia) when you really get down to it. Even sudden cultural shifts in real life didn’t come from nowhere. Cuba had already know strongman rule long before Castro and had only been a country for a few decades.

[RINO Tom]

Angry teenagers who were convinced that they were among the first people to ~figure out~ that religion was bad/dumb/whatever and were absolutely ecstatic when they got on this new thing called (ad free) YouTube to find a smart guy agreeing with them.

[Agonized-Statism]

Millennials- particularly white males in Bush-voting suburban areas- were the backbone of New Atheism at the time. There was a shift away from the Boomers' Reagan Era consensus with Bush's disastrous second term, the election of Obama, and the ascendence of the Tea Party and politicians in its mold in the GOP, so there was less of an establishment religious right to fight in pop culture and politics. It was discredited and quickly losing every fight. So, these Millennial New Atheists moved on to new and more relevant battles. A lot of them got sucked into the alt-right through Comicsgate and Gamergate, but the age of the "SJW cringe compilation" itself is in the past because of Charlottesville, COVID, and the storming of the capitol.

It was a wave of, somewhat clunky, deconstructionism lending itself to the old 'edgy atheist' strawman.  It was a response to crass cultural Reagan American Christianity and it's toxic grip on political, media and in many cases family life.

Couldn't have said it better myself!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Stopped clock.

I believe the exact story was that “the theologians” had to resort to Modal Collapse to explain why an ontological argument for flying pigs failed. Modal Collapse, he assures us in TGD, is philosophical nonsense.

Well, no, that isn't why the ontological argument is ridiculous, but Dawkins's instinct that it's nonsense is still (for once) correct.

This isn't quite the same thing, but one of the dumbest and most poorly aged things from Bush Administration-era liberalism was the fervent belief amongst some that the end game of the Bush Admin was to implement an actual Handmaid's Tale-style theocratic state of institutionalized misogyny. Not that the Bush Adminstration's socially conservative agenda was a threat or that that they had furthered it well, but that the US was just one step away from being controlled by a Christian equivalent of the Taliban. This of course ignores that The Handmaid's Tale is actually badly written shlock that prioritizes shock value over realistic threads, that Gilead does not resemble any type of fundamentalist Christian doctrine, that it's a work of science fiction and that many elements of it do not appear in our contemporary world, and as Virginia once noted in a criticism of the TV series that such a society would be economically unviable and collapse in about a year as women would be completely removed from the workplace and it seems that all men have the jobs of oppressing and guarding women, thus eliminating any type of normal workforce and economy and the fact that for all of its flaws the simple fact that the Bush Admin was willing to appoint women to many key roles is proof that it was not of that nature. But no, all the "proof" we needed was when some random podunk rural church Baptist pastor made a comment that implied supporting the death penalty for homosexuality or when some Republican Congressman quoted the Bible on the House floor, all of which were dutifully compiled in those dumb THEOCRACY WATCH blogs. I think this kind of added to the appeal of "New Atheism" (although not Hitchens for obvious reasons) since it led to a very black and white thinking.

Since most of the Religious Right's agenda from that era is now dead, they've completely given up on gay marriage and things like teaching of Intelligent Design or abstinence-only sex education in schools has really gone on the backburner since then, and since the Trump Admin was a completely different flavor of right-wing authoritarianism, that stuff is pretty much about as relevant as MySpace today, and thus the backlash to it doesn't have anywhere near the following it used to.

Exactly. The Handmaids Tale is about as realistic as pokemon (possibly even less so since magic doesn’t exist in that dystopia) when you really get down to it. Even sudden cultural shifts in real life didn’t come from nowhere. Cuba had already know strongman rule long before Castro and had only been a country for a few decades.

This didn't stop people from still insisting that The Handmaid's Tale was Real Life, Actually during the Trump administration too, because something something Mike Pence something something ACB is in a misogynistic cult (which, to be fair, she is). It's the bougie feminist equivalent of the way National Review neocons used to treat 1984, completely ignoring the satirical and hyperbolic aspect of dystopian literature in favor of insisting that your own least favorite dystopia is five minutes away from becoming objective, unexaggerated reality.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The problem with The Handmaid's Tale is not that it's not particularly realistic in many aspects, after all it is a work of science fiction so that's not something you should be expecting from it...it's the fact that its regime at its centerpiece bears no real resemblance to any actual form of fundamentalist Christianity at all, like name any church ever that forbids women from  having their own names or from being literate, considering the Bible actually promotes female literacy. And this has never existed at any point in history, its true female literacy wasn't a big priority or something pushed for in the Middle Ages, but it was never outright forbidden. Also the way the regime both outright prohibits abortion in most aspects but mandates it in others (any case involving a deformed fetus) is clearly just a case of Margaret Atwood trying to just up the awfulness for awfulness's sake. Which would be fine if Atwood's goal was just to write a sci-fi dystopian novel, but she actually intended for it to be a commentary on the growing influence on the Religious Right and the Christian Coalition (really shows how things have changed...when's the last time you even heard about the Christian Coalition as an advocacy group?) so in that case coming up with such a cartoonish regime instead of what one would likely look like kind of defeated her own point. Which is probably why the book fell into relative obscurity and the film version was all but forgotten until some early Extremely Online liberals decided that it was a blueprint for what the 2010s were going to look like if Bush got a second term. Which of course is also what led to it being well known enough for the extremely overrated Hulu series, which I found actually pretty boring and lost interest just a couple episodes in.

[darklordoftech]

This isn't quite the same thing, but one of the dumbest and most poorly aged things from Bush Administration-era liberalism was the fervent belief amongst some that the end game of the Bush Admin was to implement an actual Handmaid's Tale-style theocratic state of institutionalized misogyny. Not that the Bush Adminstration's socially conservative agenda was a threat or that that they had furthered it well, but that the US was just one step away from being controlled by a Christian equivalent of the Taliban. This of course ignores that The Handmaid's Tale is actually badly written shlock that prioritizes shock value over realistic threads, that Gilead does not resemble any type of fundamentalist Christian doctrine, that it's a work of science fiction and that many elements of it do not appear in our contemporary world, and as Virginia once noted in a criticism of the TV series that such a society would be economically unviable and collapse in about a year as women would be completely removed from the workplace and it seems that all men have the jobs of oppressing and guarding women, thus eliminating any type of normal workforce and economy and the fact that for all of its flaws the simple fact that the Bush Admin was willing to appoint women to many key roles is proof that it was not of that nature. But no, all the "proof" we needed was when some random podunk rural church Baptist pastor made a comment that implied supporting the death penalty for homosexuality or when some Republican Congressman quoted the Bible on the House floor, all of which were dutifully compiled in those dumb THEOCRACY WATCH blogs. I think this kind of added to the appeal of "New Atheism" (although not Hitchens for obvious reasons) since it led to a very black and white thinking.

Since most of the Religious Right's agenda from that era is now dead, they've completely given up on gay marriage and things like teaching of Intelligent Design or abstinence-only sex education in schools has really gone on the backburner since then, and since the Trump Admin was a completely different flavor of right-wing authoritarianism, that stuff is pretty much about as relevant as MySpace today, and thus the backlash to it doesn't have anywhere near the following it used to.

I suspect a big part of it was that it seemed hypocritical for Bush to say that we need the PATRIOT Act and to invade Iraq for protection from “Sharia Law” while pushing for a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage, pushing schools to teach abstinence-only, and covering nudity on statues.

[HisGrace]

This didn't stop people from still insisting that The Handmaid's Tale was Real Life, Actually during the Trump administration too, because something something Mike Pence something something ACB is in a misogynistic cult (which, to be fair, she is). It's the bougie feminist equivalent of the way National Review neocons used to treat 1984, completely ignoring the satirical and hyperbolic aspect of dystopian literature in favor of insisting that your own least favorite dystopia is five minutes away from becoming objective, unexaggerated reality.

Well I think the difference is a society like 1984 is possible today with the tech we have, albeit it would likely have to be in a geographically small country (like Britain where the novel is set). North Korea sounds pretty close already.

Not overly familiar with Handmaid's Tale but I would imagine life under the Taliban or ISIS is not all that dissimilar. The problem there is making the villains stand-ins for socially conservative Christians which is a ridiculous strawman since even if they got their way on every single social issue the world they'd build wouldn't be remotely like that.

[VBM]

Free thinkers

[°Leprechaun]

Free thinkers

That pretty much sums it up.

[Samof94]

Millennials- particularly white males in Bush-voting suburban areas- were the backbone of New Atheism at the time. There was a shift away from the Boomers' Reagan Era consensus with Bush's disastrous second term, the election of Obama, and the ascendence of the Tea Party and politicians in its mold in the GOP, so there was less of an establishment religious right to fight in pop culture and politics. It was discredited and quickly losing every fight. So, these Millennial New Atheists moved on to new and more relevant battles. A lot of them got sucked into the alt-right through Comicsgate and Gamergate, but the age of the "SJW cringe compilation" itself is in the past because of Charlottesville, COVID, and the storming of the capitol.

It was a wave of, somewhat clunky, deconstructionism lending itself to the old 'edgy atheist' strawman.  It was a response to crass cultural Reagan American Christianity and it's toxic grip on political, media and in many cases family life.

Couldn't have said it better myself!

Exactly. The shifts in the 2010’s made that way of thinking less attractive.

[Samof94]

This didn't stop people from still insisting that The Handmaid's Tale was Real Life, Actually during the Trump administration too, because something something Mike Pence something something ACB is in a misogynistic cult (which, to be fair, she is). It's the bougie feminist equivalent of the way National Review neocons used to treat 1984, completely ignoring the satirical and hyperbolic aspect of dystopian literature in favor of insisting that your own least favorite dystopia is five minutes away from becoming objective, unexaggerated reality.

Well I think the difference is a society like 1984 is possible today with the tech we have, albeit it would likely have to be in a geographically small country (like Britain where the novel is set). North Korea sounds pretty close already.

Not overly familiar with Handmaid's Tale but I would imagine life under the Taliban or ISIS is not all that dissimilar. The problem there is making the villains stand-ins for socially conservative Christians which is a ridiculous strawman since even if they got their way on every single social issue the world they'd build wouldn't be remotely like that.

North Korea goes well beyond 1984 by any standard.  Fascist Spain was what catholic fundamentalists did when they took over and it looked very different.