#Thunderf00t

[naturegirl1999]

Here’s a video explaining why knowledge is so important

[sistersatan]

Elon Musk DEBUNKS the Tesla Semi, BOOED, Twitter Bannings, and Tesla CRA...

[eltristanexplicitcontent]

Elon Musk, War Profiteer!!!?

--->  Elon goes off his Nootropics :-/

[eroticcannibal]

I voluntarily culturally genocided myself when I was a teenager when I left my religion and it was awesome. I wholeheartedly recommend voluntary self-cultural-genocide to anybody!

Imagine thinking not knowing what cultural genocide is is some kind of flex lmao

[max1461]

To my knowledge, neither "the majority of atheists are right-wing" nor "the majority of New Atheists ended up becoming right-wing" are true. I think these statements came about by exaggeration and discourse telephone from an initial observation that a number of the most prominent atheist/skeptic YouTubers (among them TJ Kirk and Thunderf00t) took a noticeably right-wing/"anti-SJW" turn around the time of GamerGate.

Anyway, I've seen a few people on here dismiss the New Atheism/Alt-Right connection as entirely a product of the imagination of pro-religion discourses, trying to disparage atheism for a left-wing audience by linking it to the right. Obviously there was some of this, but people claiming this is the whole story are just incorrect. There really was a stark and sudden right-wing turn in YouTube skepticism around 2012 or so, I was there and remember it clearly. You can go back and check, the videos are all still up. This is the climate on the platform that early "breadtubers" like ContraPoints and Hbomberguy were explicitly reacting to.

Obviously this isn't a point against atheism or skepticism. I am an atheist and a skeptic.

I'm just pointing this out because I have seen what I basically think are attempts to revise the received narrative by parties who were not actually there, and although the received narrative (something like "New Atheism became the Alt-Right" or "New Atheism became subsumed into the Alt-Right") is in fact wrong, the revisionists are also plainly incorrect about a bunch of stuff.

I think this is related to the whole "I don't do video, I only do text" sentiment on here. You guys don't know what was going on with video cause you're hardcore textheads. That's fine, but most people aren't, and the stuff that was happening with video was a big deal. You've gotta account for that.

[read-marx-and-lenin]

Would you consider making those strong philosophical arguments? As an atheist, I vehemently oppose religion as a worldview and as an institution, and while I do recognize a lot of pitfalls (impossible to tell which religion is correct, fallacious arguments about the afterlife, how it's a tool of class domination), I'm not sure what you mean by strong arguments.

There is a long history of atheist and anti-religious philosophy, both on the left and within other social and political currents. I am not an expert on religious philosophy myself and I would much rather you defer to others more knowledgable than I on the subject. The Marxists Internet Archive has plenty of works by various authors on the subject of religion, and beyond the left there are plenty of works by atheist writers arguing either in favor of disbelief or against arguments put forth by religious writers. I'm not asking for anything new, I'm just disappointed by how common it is for (primarily Western) leftists to shy away from directly critiquing religion as a concept and instead falling back on the same old "religion is fine, it's just Institutionalized Religion™ that's the problem" type of messaging. Atheism gets a bad rap in our circles, probably because so many folks still associate it with "New Atheism" or so-called "Reddit atheism" and folks like Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, or Thunderf00t. Atheism is not bigotry and it is not the sole purview of cishet white men.

By "strong arguments" I mean arguments that directly address the irrational and immaterial foundations of a faith-based supernatural worldview. A belief in divine powers that supersede natural law is fundamentally incompatible with a naturalistic and scientific worldview. Science is based on one major fundamental axiom that is necessary for the scientific process to produce useful knowledge, and that axiom is that all phenomena in the universe are governed by fundamental and unchanging natural laws. If supernatural forces exist that are untethered from any such laws, then science is rendered unable to produce useful knowledge as any observation cannot be trusted to be the result of natural processes alone.

If one believes their religion to be scientific, then any claims made by the religion must be falsifiable and understood as governed by natural law. There cannot be any God of the gaps, there cannot be any claims of omnipotence or omniscience, there can only be natural phenomena and theories explaining the nature of said phenomena. If your gods are entirely natural in origin and you believe you can prove their existence, then great. You're not relying on faith or any other sort of irrational or immaterial argument. If worship were involved, I would still question the point of that, but I wouldn't classify your belief as religious in the traditional sense.

However, if you do truly have faith in a divine, supernatural force that supersedes natural law, then that belief is logically incompatible with a scientific worldview. The concept of non-overlapping magisteria is just a bit of nonsense to avoid having to deal with the fact that claims are either falsifiable and thus subject to scientific inquiry, or unfalsifiable and thus indistinguishable from their own antithesis. If God hides from prying eyes, then how is that any different from there being no God? If God doesn't hide, then where is he? If God interferes with the natural world, then how can we distinguish between natural and supernatural phenomenon? If God doesn't interfere, then why should we care about God?

Prophecy and divine revelation are also irrational. If there are facts about ourselves and the universe that cannot be found through observation of the natural world but can only be revealed to certain special individuals, then how can we distinguish these facts from fiction? If the claims of the prophets are falsifiable and can be tested, then what makes them supernatural? Plenty of scientists have claimed ideas came to them in dreams, but they didn't then write a paper that said "I dreamed this, therefore it is true." They did the work to demonstrate to others that these ideas are rigorous, logical, and backed by observation. Did God give them these ideas, or was it simply their own minds that came up with them? If there is a way to distinguish between the two, then let us distinguish them. If there is not, then there is no point bringing God into the matter.

If the existence and non-existence of a phenomenon or substance are indistinguishable from each other, then non-existence should be assumed until such a time at which we can distinguish between the two and determine whether or not the thing exists. If someone wants to claim that humans have souls, that there is an afterlife, that prayer or magic or sacrifices do anything meaningful, then they would need to define their terms carefully and propose a means of testing their claims, because unfalsifiable claims are indistinguishable from their own antithesis.

[greek-orthodox-priest]

hi

hello. this is very nice and... wait a moment... ah... who is this...

📢🚨 YOUTUBE ATHEIST SPOTTED!! 🚨📢

former malaka "THUNDERF00T". is now a QUEER GREEK ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN. alleluia!

[leviathan-supersystem]

massive W for me that even though i used to be an insufferable nu-atheist (arguably i am again, reviews are mixed) the moment thunderf00t started his weirdo islamophobe anti-feminist shit i dropped his ass immediately. maybe you went don't the skeptic-to-anti-sjw pipeline but i'm different.

[brightbrightlover]

why is ludinus just a top tier reddit athiest. like i know he was watching christopher hitchens compilations when he was harassing priests in the savalirwoods. his ass got mad when breadtube started making fun of sargon and thunderf00t and vowed to get revenge

[memecucker]

re new atheists: i assumed a lot of the reputation at least now was based on how a lot of their personalities (eg amazing atheist, thunderf00t, etc) had anti-feminist phases and mocked socially progressive stuff eg trans rights (obviously religious conservatives are way worse though)

Yeah that was a thing (though hasn’t The Amazing Atheist become much more left wing despite starting out as a libertarian? Idk about thunderf00t but from what I’ve heard he’s shifted his attention towards science education rather than social issues beyond science or religion so idk about his overall politics now) but when people talk about the vitrolism i dont think they’re referring to Gamergate era culture war stuff since that came after the peak of youtube and Reddit atheism discourse from what i remember

[greatwyrmgold]

I just started watching KamiKatsu. It's hard to describe! It's like someone stuck Konosuba, a Re:Zero RPG Maker fangame, a Unity asset flip, and the journal of a young left-wing thunderf00t fan trying to work through some stuff, then had one guy stitch that slurry together into a full cour in a single week.

KamiKatsu is a story about Yukito, a cult leader's son whose last thoughts are a wish to reincarnate in a world without gods or religion, because said cult made his life a living hell (and also ended it in a weird barrel ritual). As requested, he ends up reincarnated in a world with no gods or religion...or adventurer's guilds or RPG mechanics or anything like that. However, it does have two things that are kinda religious: A totalitarian government which enforces arbitrary rules with absolute moral certitude, and the god from Yukito's dad's cult, who he accidentally summons to the other world while almost re-dying at the end of episode 1.

The most important thing about KamiKatsu isn't its story, though. It's the budget, or rather the patently obvious lack thereof. There are two ways a studio can react to this kind of issue: Either do the normal cost-cutting measures all anime needs to use, just more, or do some extreme cost-cutting measures that make the anime artistically distinct. KamiKatsu goes for the second route, and while it sometimes just looks cheap, it looks absurd often enough that I'm willing to overlook that. I'm particularly fond of the pixel-art doodles that pop up to backfill fight scenes, daily chores, and so on.

(KamiKatsu is the cheapest-looking anime I've ever seen dubbed.)

But the story isn't bad. The first episode's pacing feels a bit rushed, probably so they can get to the bit where Yukito accidentally summons a god in the first episode, but I like Yukito as a character. He's consistently watching for the plot hook that might signal the fantasy journey he's been anticipating for weeks, which is funny, but he's also content doing manual labor and getting drunk alongside people who he gets along with. I also enjoy the supporting cast, and the world they inhabit. It's not a deep world, but it isn't pure nonsense and it has some interesting ideas that mesh together into a coherent whole.

Speaking of interesting ideas that mesh together into a coherent whole, themes! The left-wing thunderf00t fan thing I mentioned was a reference to this bit. The fantasy world Yukito ended up in cleanly divides religion into two separate entities; you have the institution in the empire's absolute authority, and the spirituality in . It's making a strong statement about organized religion—that it has both good and bad aspects, which aren't closely linked. You can have the good without the bad. It doesn't seem super deep, and I don't agree with everything it seems to be saying about religion. Despite that...it's clearly trying to say something, that something is mostly positive, and it's a bit nuanced. Not just "religion good" or "religion bad," but "this part of religion good, this part bad". It would have given me something to think about in my shitty teenaged atheist phase, and there are a lot of shitty teenaged atheist otaku out there.

Also the jokes are consistently funny, and not just in the charmingly-shoddy sense prior paragraphs implied. Yukito reincarnated in a world that, for all its hardships, is absurd in a lot of ways, which are leveraged for comedy. It's no One Punch Man or Kaguya-sama, but it's consistently funny. And while it occasionally has dramatic bits right next to serious ones (like when it switches rapidly between Mitama being a goofy god and being a vengeful one), it generally avoids having the humor step on the drama's toes or vise versa.

KamiKatsu should suck. The story is a mash of stuff that, on paper, sounds absurd at best and incoherent at worst. The animation ranges from mediocre to baffling. And yet, it's enjoyable.

Is this an anime recommendation post? I have no idea!

[cali]

thunderf00t wouldve stopped putins ILLEGAL war of terror

[macwantspeace]

Dumbest rebranding in History - Thunderf00t Xit Twixxer

[xylophonetangerine]

So glad that everyone's hating on Musk now because for a while it felt like it was me, Thunderf00t, and his 700 videos about Anita Sarkeesian against the world.

[max1461]

Imagine if we got youtube guys thunderf00t and popculturedetective in a room together. we could suffer like its 2014.

[coreytasticc]

Adamsomething and Thunderf00t are the same person.