Video discussion of this event by Steve Shives (known for his star trek videos but also does politics) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6aMQAv-JYpk
this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
462 points (98.1% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
39867 readers
5312 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What a fucking fall from grace. I used to (possibly wrongly) believe he was a very intelligent man but the more he opens his mouth the more convinced I get that he is an absolute moron.
I firmly believe the only reason we still (at least kinda) respect Hitch was because he's fucking dead, and we didn't see him show his whole ass like the rest of the "new atheism" movement....
Christopher "Fuck it man, waterboarding is nothing, do it to me brah, oh no, it actually does feel like I'm drowning, oh well, I guess the propaganda damage I did is irreversible, I guess I shouldn't have been such a cocksure arsehole" Hitchens?
That one ?
At least he put his damp cloth where his mouth was. And then conceded he was categorically incorrect and it was absolutely torture. I disagree with a lot of his takes (Iraq war was justified?) but that one I actually respect him for
yeah, it's more that he put in shitloads of effort into doing damage, and then not doing much to reverse it; but you're completely right that at least he fucking went through with it
Hitchens is considered as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism. He laid the ground work for shit heads like jordan peterson. I have no respect for him either, I believe you are right he just died before everyone figured out he was an asshole too.
I mean, his support of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was pretty controversial towards the end of his life. I think many gave him a "pass" on that due to his illness at the time. But I do recall some starting to question even then, his inconsistency of "religious wars bad, unless it's against religions I don't like" (at least that's how it came across).
I mean, "theocracy bad" is a fairly normal secular POV to have; it's just that some of these things go out of hand and turn into quagmires. The problem is that invading a foreign country hardly leads to establishment of long term stability and the desire of the invadees.
There’s definitely a minority of people who are of the opinion that he was always a grifter, but just because a lot of people agreed with him they didn’t examine what he said too closely. For example, his takedown of Mother Theresa is full of inaccuracies and lies, but still commonly gets cited as if it’s gospel
His support for invading Iraq was pretty bad.
Yeah, like when he stopped talking about evolutionary biology and started talking about how awful islamic people are, right?
...
right?
That's at least one bullet point in a very long list.
I mean I got more, it's just the first that came to mind.
spoiler
My fellow Earthicans, as I discuss in my book "Earth in the Balance," and the much more popular "Harry Potter and the Balance of Earth," we need to defend our planet against pollution. As well as dark wizards.He didn't get enough attention when he published the subtler book so he had to act out to get attention
"religion in general" imo is an understandable target
to write a book about? sure. to "defend our planet againt"? that's a bit of an overstatement
a lot of awful things happen just today (not to mention historically) because of religion, tbf to be more precise, due to religious justifications
sure, and in 1958 they started killing all the sparrows in china and 15 million+ people starved to death. It's not ~~religion~~ atheism that caused that one; turns out that people fuck up whatever they want to and blame it on whatever; it doesn't mean the thing they are blaming caused the thing that happened
They didn't say all bad things happened because of religion. Your example has nothing to do with religion at all, it was pure human stupidity, but when religious people do pure evil with the only justification being "because my religion says so", you can't not attribute it to religion if you want to be honest.
so when a schizophrenic kills a busfull of orphans and says Jesus told him to do it, the pope is to blame?
no, not the pope - religion, like we were saying before
tbf which includes the pope
because there are justifications someone could cite for killing people
Do you think all religious wars were done and are done exclusively by schizophrenics?
No, I think "religious" wars are done for the acquisition of resources and use religion as propaganda to obtain support
It's very convenient if for every example of religiously motivated atrocities you can just say "Nuh-huh, when they say 'I do an atrocity in the name of my religion because my religion says that I should' they actually secretly do it for some other unrelated reason".
But even in this version of reality you propose, when nobody was ever motivated by religion to do anything bad, when someone says "let's go kill all the heretics and steal their shit because our god says so", killing the heretics still comes first, and it wouldn't be as effective as "let's go kill our neighbors and steal their shit because I want their shit". If religion gives an excuse instead of justification, it's still just as bad.
But I reiterate that we don't live in your magical reality, and religion is both motivation and justification for a lot of shit.
Anything can be abused as an excuse, that doesn't make the thing being falsely accused of being the excuse is to blame. Otherwise atheism is responsible for any suffering caused by an atheist.
Nobody ever started a war in the name of stamp collecting. Nobody ever raped a kid and used "but I'm a leader of the local board game club therefore I shouldn't be punished" as an excuse. Nobody assaulted a person because their local woodworking club disagrees whom that person should and shouldn't love.
Nobody ever did any of that in the name of atheism either. Because there is no sacred book of atheism that says that we should let 13 years old rape victim die in childbirth because the atheist doctrine doesn't believe in bodily autonomy.
If your thing eagerly provides easy and available excuse to do the atrocity your thing is bad and shouldn't exist. But to reiterate the point that you keep glossing over, your thing provides excuse, justification, motivation, direct orders, all of it, the whole package.
how about "I am the executive of a film studio"? did they use that as an excuse? "I am rich as fuck"?
What about the purges against religious people carried out by communist dictatorships? That's not in the name of atheism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Soviet_Union
atheist doctrine doesn't believe in anything. you can say whatever you want as part of it and it will be due to "religion is wrong, thus doing X has no moral consequence, there is no god"
you can blame anything. Cartoons, video games, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
okay so you concede that religion is a bad influence, and we should also fight against these other bad things, right?
literal whataboutism
Im saying the opposite, anyone can blame anything for their actions, it doesn't mean it's correct to blame it on that
yeah. all my religion wants people to do is eat good food and throw cookouts (preferably by the sea) where you invite the whole neighborhood AND THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART DON'T GIVE THEM FOOD POISONING we already had cults do food poisoning around here and i want to try something original.
we could probably do better by going vegan but my diet really doesn't work with that and it's my cult and i'm gonna be selfish about one thing.
Rajneesheen't
We need to stop imagining that being an expert in on practice or discipline means you have even the slightest utility outside your area of interest. We are constantly inviting "experts" to babble outside their area of expertise only to be shocked when they say something stupid.
They correctly answered the easiest question in the universe, but because it wasn't very popular thing to do we collectively decided that they're smart af.
I stupidly believed Bill Maher was credible at one point.
Unfortunatly that was more or less what got my attention. He said "jesus bad" and thats all my dumb adolescent brain needed to hear.