I’d say that atheism had already set the “conservatives not welcome” baseline way back when, and this resulted in the community norms evolving accordingly. Granted, these days the trans stuff is more salient, but the reason it flourished here even more than in other tech-adjacent spaces has much to do with that early baseline.
Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson have both said that the intellectual case for atheism is strong, and both remain very popular on the right.
Sure, but somebody admitting that certainly isn’t the modal conservative.
I wouldn’t call the tone back then “conservatives not welcome”. Conservatism is correlated with religiosity, but it’s not the same thing. And I wouldn’t even call the tone “religious people are unwelcome”—people were perfectly civil with religious community members.
The community back then were willing to call irrational beliefs irrational, but they didn’t go beyond that. Filtering out people who are militantly opposed to rational conclusions seems fine.
I’d say that atheism had already set the “conservatives not welcome” baseline way back when, and this resulted in the community norms evolving accordingly. Granted, these days the trans stuff is more salient, but the reason it flourished here even more than in other tech-adjacent spaces has much to do with that early baseline.
Sure, but somebody admitting that certainly isn’t the modal conservative.
I wouldn’t call the tone back then “conservatives not welcome”. Conservatism is correlated with religiosity, but it’s not the same thing. And I wouldn’t even call the tone “religious people are unwelcome”—people were perfectly civil with religious community members.
The community back then were willing to call irrational beliefs irrational, but they didn’t go beyond that. Filtering out people who are militantly opposed to rational conclusions seems fine.