swimming rightward
a theory about why the rationalist community has trended a bit more right wing over time that ive considered for a while now, though i doubt im the first one to have this thought.
a lot of the community in the late 00s/early 2010s were drawn from internet atheist circles, like me. but the thing that was selected for there wasn't nonbelief in god, or even skepticism qua skepticism, but something like, unsual amounts of irritation when one sees the dominant culture endorse a take that is obviously bad. at the time, the obviously bad but endorsed takes were things like "homosexuality is a sin and therefore bad", "intelligent design", and when christians refused to actually follow the teachings of jesus in terms of things like turning the other cheek and loving thy neighbours and not caring about the logs in their own eyes.
there will always be people who experience unusual amounts of irritation when they see the culture endorse (or passively accept) a take that is obviously bad, and this is great, because those people are great. but internet christians don't really exist anymore? instead the obviously wrong things that most internet goers see by default are terrible strawmanny sjw takes: "IQ is a fake white supremacist notion", "there are no biological differences between men and women", "indigenous people get to do the blood and soil thing but no one else gets to do that for unexplained reasons". so the people who show up now tend to be kinda mad about the sjws.
i am not saying that the sjw takes are unusually bad1; lots of other popular communities have even worse takes. but bad social justice takes are unusually endorsed by cultural gatekeepers, the way e.g. k-pop stans aren't, and that's the thing that lots of protorationalists really can't stand.
after coming up with this theory, i became a lot less sad about the community becoming [edit: more] right wing. because it makes it a lot easier to believe that the new people are still my people in the most important ways. and it doesn't seem unlikely to me that the bright eyed youngsters finding the community in 2030 would be irritated by and unusually fixiated on disproving an entirely different set of popular beliefs trendy in the culture by then.
actually, i think that the non-strawman versions of the sjw takes listed are all actually geninely really interesting and merit at least some consideration. ive been reading up on local indigenous history recently and it's the most fascinating topic i've rabbit holed in on in ages.↩