When even the king of renegade ex-trot neocons has a better sense of Soviet history then 99% of progressive radlibs in the west

    • Hotspur21 [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      As weird as it is, I would not be a communist today without hitchens. I was raised very conservative religious and his shit helped me shake the only way of thinking I knew. Obviously not stanning hitchens at this point in my life but I really can’t bring myself to hate him despite his multitude of dogshit opinions

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Also, anyone else have their atheist phase at 15 , buy Hitchens and Dawkins books, but never actually finish them?

      I read Dawkins because I was very excited to ingest the antidote to a childhood's worth of Catholic orthodoxy. What I got out of "The God Delusion" was little more than 400 pages of self-aggrandizing bullshit. That pretty much killed my interest in "New Atheism". I got PZ Myers-pilled and just went all in on modern academics - math and physics mostly - holding to the belief that these rhetorical fights were for dorks and losers, while scientific inquiry and logical proof offered much firmer ground to build on.

      Then I got deep into that and discovered how gutted and hollow academia was... Even then, you could hold up a piece of technology and know how it works if you dove deep enough into the manuals. That offered so much more value than anything religious institutions (or the jerk-offs doing anti-religion) had to offer.

    • ZoomeristLeninist [comrade/them, she/her]M
      ·
      2 years ago

      had a professor in a molecular biology course post assignments where we had to read and answer questions on the selfish gene. i did the first assignment and thought the first few chapters were interesting but i didnt do the other chapters bc i already knew dawkins was cringe