It's a weekly "serious discussion/ mediated debate" on Australia's public broadcaster, fielding questions from the audience. Germaine Greer, Zizek, Dawkins and others have made appearances.
https://www.abc.net.au/qanda/
Remember the whole Four Horsemen shtick, that presentation of
well-spoken university types (Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher
Hitchens and Sam Harris) as avenging angels of the apocalypse as they
gave lectures about ideas (‘science is good!’, ‘blind faith is bad!’)
you could hear from your average high school teacher – or, indeed,
vicar?
Non-American takedowns of Dawkins, whether by this guy or mediocre
limeys like Sam Kriss kinda miss the point as to why Dawkins was as
popular as he was: because of what America was like during the Bush
years, and because America was(and remains) the most powerful
English-speaking country. Americans as it turns out, did and are still
not guaranteed to have science teachers and (lol) vicars who will tell
them that. The fact that Americans finally catching on to the fact that
Dawkins was something of a dumbass coincided with the Obama years is not
an accident.
Well Dawkins is British and was pretty widely known as a popsci public-intellectual persona dating back at least as far as the 1970s, it's not as if he somehow came out of nowhere, in fact the only one of the "Four Horsemen" who really came out of nowhere was [Harris](https://rhizzone.net/articles/sam-harris-fraud/).
If anything I'd say that in the bigger picture, Dawkins' rise and fall as a mainstream persona has ultimately had more to do with the past several decades' worth of rising/falling mainstream liberal opinions on sociobiology (with which his whole "selfish gene" schtick has always formed a nifty ideological complement) than it did with the relatively short mid-aughts flare-up of "New Atheism" proper.
It wasn't so much about being anti-Bush and anti-Iraq war specifically so much as being opposed to the role American evangelical Christianity and fundamentalism played in politics at the time, which Hitchens was and Harris was at the time before he decided to make common cause with those types out of hatred of Muslims.
The shared opposition to that is what united New Atheists politically, which is why they fall apart when it became apparent who was in it for a commitment to progressive politics and who would would have been fine with a Bush administration that did most of the same things but had secular humanist branding.
Hitchens supporting the Iraq War for one thing, I don't thinkl Dawkins got onboard that circlejerk. Also see how the "skeptic" YouTubers went from shit talking fundies to going to war with SJWs and then splintering
So anyone who was pro war is a neoconservative?
Plus, intent is important. Given his Marxist leaving, I am confident that Hitchens actually wanted to help Iraqis. I very much doubt that of Bush, Cheyney, etc.
The term "neoconservative" was actually coined by longtime Socialist Party of America activist Michael Harrington (who split from the organization and founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, which became the Democratic Socialists of America) specifically as a pejorative for his old Trotskyist SPA comrades like Irving Kristol and Jeane Kirkpatrick, whose anti-Stalinist and anti-"totalitarian" ideology was all-consuming enough to prompt them to support US Cold War military actions like the war in Vietnam, and eventually by the 1980s had led many of them to align themselves with the foreign policy of the Reagan administration.
So acting like Hitch's Trotskyist credentials somehow make him immune from the charge of neoconservatism isn't merely wrong, it completely misses the point of what neoconservatism is and where it came from.
Just from twitter: [didn't watch the actual clip, just the headline was funny and relevant enough](https://twitter.com/thepunkrockmba/status/1238462908666789888)
Erm, uh, yeah, no, I can't go that far. Sounds more like the metal community is getting older and the long-shamed nu metal wing is feeling out its numbers. Good for them.
Personally speaking, I find most metal boring or too campy, so whatever.
I like, metal, not a huge fan of nu-metal, but just like other music I'm not a huge fan of, I don't hate it or something. It is a bit like the nickleback hate, more a joke than anything serious.
I´m pretty sure Dawkins never did a meat-only diet.
Dawkins is not a vegetarian, but he said a few times that he considers vegetarianism to be morally superior, and that he only eats meat because it´s societally accepted as a norm, and he doesn´t manage to break out of social norms or something.
Doing a meat-only diet would be very much contrary to that position of his, because that would break out of societal norms even more and it would do so in a way that he considers immoral. So pending further evidence, I do not believe that Dawkins ever did a meat only diet.
I feel like the swan was an early version of jorp's dragon of chaos. Both were drawn to their winged foes like flames of reason towards a moth, only it was a big fucking moth with ice powers. The Moonlight Butterfly from Dark Souls, perhaps.
I had never seen [the person in question] referred to as “Jorp” before this moment, but now that I have, I’m not sure I can refer to him any other way.
absolutely incredible
Non-American takedowns of Dawkins, whether by this guy or mediocre limeys like Sam Kriss kinda miss the point as to why Dawkins was as popular as he was: because of what America was like during the Bush years, and because America was(and remains) the most powerful English-speaking country. Americans as it turns out, did and are still not guaranteed to have science teachers and (lol) vicars who will tell them that. The fact that Americans finally catching on to the fact that Dawkins was something of a dumbass coincided with the Obama years is not an accident.
That is pretty fucking unfair to nu metal.
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Death by swan.