Thoughts on The Armoured Skeptic, and the other 'Rationals?'

Subject says it all.

Other urls found in this thread:

rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
youtube.com/watch?v=5HLC9w1OBKA
youtube.com/watch?v=rZQqyuRL6yY
freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/05/05/i-officially-divorce-myself-from-the-skeptic-movement/
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

are you implying we don't want all white people to get thrown in the gulag?

I try to pay as little possible attention to attention whore twits are possible, but that's the second time the names armoured sceptic and shoe0nhead have come up this week.
They got paid to shill some shitty new "anonymous" social network, which turned out to be 100% botnet.

They're liberals.

cenk uger tier liberals

some of skeptic's videos are enjoyable though

Lets face it, there isn't a lot of critical thought going on there if thats the case.

I'm lucky that when I was 15 I found guys like theAmazingAtheist. He might be an unfunny, autistic, close minded liberal but holy shit is he millions of times better than all these other celebrities.

Butthurt centrists steadily sliding right as the centre crumbles but don't want to be associated with religious fundamentalists.

I'm considering checking out his channel again. I used to like some of his shit before I was commie, but I stopped watching because "muh religion". Now that idgaf about christianity, I might be less butthurt by his phantasmal fedora.

To be fair, a lot of what he says isn't all that extreme. He brings up many examples of how its hypocritical for America to say that its secular and built on rationality and human rights when it turns around and immediately proves this to not be the case.

As an internet celebrity he has to contend with a lot of creationists, homophobes, the progenitors to Stormfags and "Christianity is the most minority in the world" types. So of course when he makes sweeping claims about the corrupting influence of religion it sounds crazy, but it makes sense when you think of the type of people he comes across everyday.

I always liked his political stuff. From day one he knew Obama was full of shit and in many ways could turn about to be worse than Bush. He does an interesting discussion on the presidential debate were he says Turmp is more liberal than Hilary.

I thought (when last I listened to him) he voted hoping Obammer would just be Bill Clinton tier, and was dissapointed. I remember in 2008 I refused to hold any real expectations for him, as politicians rarely do as they say, and if so, do it in an unsatisfactory way.

I dunno, maybe I joined the conversation late but it seems like he really fucking hates Obama now.

For sure. Don't know how either Biden nor Romney would have been though. I'm not a burger, but I don't think I'd vote at all.

It's a common problem. It's very easy for people to conflate the perception of skepticism with actual skepticism, because so much of it is based on social reinforcement providing shortcuts to all that pesky research and analysis.
rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
See their pages on anything vaguely /idpol/

This doesn't mean, in any sense, that skepticism is a bad philosophy. On the contrary, it shows its necessity perhaps most clearly of anything when "self-professed skeptics being lazy or complacent" on a topic is indistinguishable from "people rejecting skepticism wholesale"

Scientific (materialist) socialism requires skpeticism. if we lack the tools to effectively describe and predict how the physical world operates, we can not hope to optimally shape material conditions.

youtube.com/watch?v=5HLC9w1OBKA

calling yourself "armored skeptic" is already a huge fucking red-flag.

Worlds like "rational", "logical" "skeptical" etc. don't mean shit at all because little unread kids who think they're big use them to make themselves look intelligent.

It goes to show how compliments have a tendency to mean nothing eventually.

but should skepticism be our goal? should it be our focus like it is for liberals? I don't think we are capable of really moving past ideology and the more we think of ourselves as "skeptics" the more we set ourselves up to have a Sargon-tier understanding of the world.

A bunch of dolts that should be beaten over the head with The Dialectic of Enlightenment.

amazing atheist is a dumbass but that guy is stupid too but less

Are you like 14?

We shouldn't call ourselves "skeptics".

But we should try to act skeptically.

they're fucking stupid but I understand where they're coming from. Them, Holla Forums, and various neo-rxn types are the corrupted version of the sorts who will proudly share memes from "being liberal" on their facebook feed and say shit like "the truth has a liberal bias." They want to be politically aware but are not willing to put in the effort. As a result you get this trash

...

The internet seems to be having a war over who is skeptical and who is rational. You have no idea how many creationists, neo-nazis and MRA's who have assured me that as "rationalists" they have reached their conclusions through clear minded and concise logic.

Its fucking retarded. But like pepe that doesn't necessarily mean to put these tools aside. Just be skeptical of their usefulness.

Well duh. That's the problem
"Skeptical" in this age has come to mean something "good". When things come to mean something positive they lose their meaning. Who would have be strange enough or humble enough to say that they and their positions are not "x good thing"?

Every side will say they're "rational" become its supposed to be good.

The word is fucking meaningless. Same with "logical" and "critical". We should just ignore this bs. We try to be critical and careful but we should not come to believe that we are the embodiment of such things.

"rationalist liberals" are basically the new internet centerists. They place themselves between "far left/regressive left" (i.e SJWs (i.e liberals)) and the "alt right" (i.e reactionaries).
It's a perfect example of how idpol is used to skew real politics that affect literally everyone.

It's like how Holla Forums uses spooks and materialism, identity signifiers.

That's really not comparable

It is if you look at the implicit meaning, that what is meant by their meaning.

I don't see the problem tbh. He doesn't even support Trump unconditionally, he just prefers him to Hilary youtube.com/watch?v=rZQqyuRL6yY

Although I do agree, I hate anti-feminists and their arguments don't make any sense although the video you've linked does more moralising and "isn't this guy a weirdo" more than anything else

You do realize that wiki was actually pretty based about identitarianism before the rise of Atheism+, during which Rational Wiki was one of the "assets" of the skeptic community lost to the A+ circlejerk, and all the articles concerning "issues" important to their vacuous ideology have been gradually wallpapered over with foaming-at-the-mouth SJW PC by these invading charlatans, right?

Furthermore, surely you are aware that A+ has gone so far as to literally declare they are "not skeptics":
freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/05/05/i-officially-divorce-myself-from-the-skeptic-movement/

Retard fedoras who think babbling about "muh atheism" centuries after the Enlightenment makes them modern luminaries.

freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/05/05/i-officially-divorce-myself-from-the-skeptic-movement/

Kek, it was only a matter of time

They're almost entirely toolbags who saw The Amazing Atheist doing his thing and thought to themselves "hey I can do that too!" Some are alright though. How much time they spend making original content vs making response videos tends to be a good measure of their quality.

Armored Skeptic isn't painfully unfunny but he's like one latte short of being Bill Maher levels of smug liberal.

Shoeonhead (Armored Skeptic's girlfriend) is to the "rationalist" community what Jacklyn Glenn was to the atheist community, minus the plagiarism and cuntiness. She's the token girl who mostly just repeats shit that everyone already said several years ago.

TL;DR has an awful voice, but he's a rare one who actually cites sources.

Thunderfoot is cool when he sticks to science. He probably has some kind of autism because when he goes after idpolers he goes way farther than he needs to and just winds up insulting people. No sense of restraint.

Chris Ray Gun has such an annoying voice and face that I am completely unable to absorb any of the content of what he says. Something about him just fills me with a blind rage and all I can think about is wanting to punch his face until I break too many of my bones to continue. So I have no idea what he's about tbh.

Sye Ten (formerly Sye Ten Atheist) does a great job lampooning a lot of idiots in his cartoons, and from what I've heard of him he seems like an alright dude.

Darkmatter2525 is another cartoonist loosely associated with them. His old stuff is a whole lot of very solid conceptual debunkings of various religious claims, but he's moved toward very different content recently. It's pretty pretentious and it seems like he's doing that thing where he thinks he's original but he's just rehashing ideas that have already been well developed by philosophers without realizing it.

So much this. His videos have just been pissing me off recently with how drawn out they are yet with so much little content at the same time, yet still holding the attitude of 'deep'.

THIS! Sargon is a perfect example, where he started off making reasonably short videos based on his careful analysis of extremely lengthy SJW "academic papers" and "scientific studies" (supplemented by his extensive knowledge of classical-era history), contrasting them with the breezy soundbites their authors yap into the popular press.

Over time, he's been doing more and more videos consisting of replies (incorporating most or ALL of the original video), MundaneMatt-style headline reading (with little or NO verification, though he is honest about this), or mindbogglingly lazy livestreams.

At least most of these people have avoided the ultimate laziness graveyard of once-creative channels on Youtube: LPs.

Many of them probably haven't even held a work by Marx. There is a screencap somewhere around here talking about how Sargon never really questioned his beliefs and I get the same from this whole anti SJW circle jerk.

Sargon has a gaming channel. Also he's been working on a game for years.

I mean doing that 100%. Like Egoraptor, who went from cartooning, to yapping at a mic while he fails atplays vidya.

...

The thing with liberals, unlike conservatives, is that the ideology they grew up with is the dominant one. They don't ever face challenges or have to really examine their ideas because liberalism has "won" and keeps on "winning" against its alternatives. Anyone who's not a liberal can be dismiss some type of illiberal ideologue: regressive want to return to the past, progressives want to change things for change's sake, etc. There's no real pressure to actually confront any other ideology because they don't see the others as a threat, just a subject for derision. Smug liberals are in the same headspace as that asshole who wins a game of mostly luck and never shuts up about it.

I get more of a kick from picking through Black Pigeon and Millenial Woes shite than through this stuff.
The youtube atheists do not interest me, listening to restrained speech impediment and image of despair respectively is at least a bit of a larf.

Didn't he fail to make a game after reciving bunch of donations for it?

Yeah, but he refunded it. Still lame tho.