austin wrote:I really don't know what the SJWs are after at the end of the day. Say they could succeed in getting rid of Dawkins, Harris, etc., banishing them from the atheist movement, shunning them from TAM and other conferences, etc. What would we have in its place. Greta Christina pontificating about the right for feminists to tell naught rape fantasy stories, but shunning men for enjoying them. What is the point. Hearing annoying talks from the likes of Avicenna, Alex Gabriel and the Canuck, I'd want to vomit or take speed to stay awake at one of those conferences. I think I'd become a Christian again, if that was all that there was to offer. Of course not, but you get the point.
In the very unlikely event they 'win' and the Big Names are
damaged to the point they all but vacate visible roles in the atheist/skeptic community, it will be a pyrrhic victory. The SJW 'leaders', and the entire movement really, will have been exposed as dogmatic zealots in the eyes of enough atheists and skeptics that any beachhead they may have had in the community will be lost. There will be no PZ Myers as keynote speaker (or any speaker) and no workshops teaching about social justice activism at the big tent cons, or even the smaller cons. It will be only at explicit SJW cons, where speakers sometimes outnumber attendants and talks are given mostly to empty chairs, that they can have a big role.
I don't think Peez and Co. have any real battle plan. They're just lashing out. They know their numbers are relatively small. But they believe they are the chosen ones, the conscience of the community and the moral exemplars. They expect to be treated like the priest class of the community. And when a priest is disrespected by a member of the nobility, all they can do is point their fingers in rage and shout 'heretic!'.
That's not to say the SJW movement doesn't have real power and isn't dangerous. They have two big weapons: a disproportionate number of SJW journalists and identity politics university departments around the world. Whenever there's a battle, there will be SJW journalists ready to write deeply slanted narratives in widely read publications exclusively from the SJW point of view. And identity politics university departments, with funding completely disconnected from the objective value of their work, will keep churning out the specious propaganda that SJW's use as 'intellectual ammunition'.
