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The Flying Spaghetti Monster thing was really a microcosm of Internet Atheism

1) Russel's Teapot but more smug
2) Misunderstanding the phrase "correlation does not imply causation" to be smugly anti-global warming
3) Smug jokes in order to be xenophobic against Muslims in order to pretend to be smart

Every time I remember that shit I'm so embarrassed it even existed
Hypolite Petovan
@silverwizard I was aware of 1) but not about 2) and 3), definitely depleting my sympathy for it. It does also begs the question about the Church of the Subgenius.
@silverwizard
silverwizard
@Hypolite Petovan The details are kind on the wikipedia page - which is pretty soft on the FSM though so uh yeah.

But basically - they would say "The number of pirates has decreased and the temperature of the earth has gone up - so it's pirates that cause global warming". It was... bad.

The whole "I want to wear a colander on my head in my driver's license photo was a direct result of anti-Hijab stuff.

The Church of the Subgenius I am aware of less bad things in (other than inspiring *real* UFO cults)
@Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan
@silverwizard Interesting, I thought the colander campaign was meant to ridicule the anti-hijab policies, I guess I got it very wrong.
@silverwizard
silverwizard
@Hypolite Petovan I mean - a lot of it is a matter of who was doing. But uh - maybe don't look up Thunderf00t or The Amazing Atheist these days.

But also - people were seriously getting the photo taken with the colander and then mocking the government for it - and that was a lot of the high profile stuff I saw. But also - I was a Canadian university student in a tech university - and so I have a cultural context.
@Hypolite Petovan
Martijn Vos
@silverwizard @Hypolite Petovan "These days"? Wasn't Thunderf00t also part of the Gamer Gate harassment campaign?
@Hypolite Petovan @silverwizard
Spencer
Your read on 2 is... interesting to me. I'm not sure I agree. I always understood it, like much of their persona, to be deliberately, hyperbolically silly. The movement arose, after all, as a response to Kansas attempting to force "intelligent design" to be taught in schools—my read is that they used "pirates cause global warming" as a way to illustrate the absurdity of conflating correlation and causation.

Of course, when your MO is "claim to believe absurd things with a straight face," that can get into weird places.

Since you seem to have had a much less savory experience with these folks, I'm curious what you saw regarding climate change activism. Did you see Pastafarians actually pushing back on climate change?
silverwizard
@Spencer @Hypolite Petovan I would talk about climate change and environmentalism and have them make jokes about pirates in order to end conversation
@Spencer @Hypolite Petovan
Spencer
Oof, yeah, that's baaaaaaaad
Martijn Vos
@silverwizard @Hypolite Petovan I saw it mostly as an internet joke. Sure, it made some points about atheism that I (as Christian) obviously disagreed with, but I wasn't offended by it.

Of course the point about pirates was wrong, because there's actually a lot of pirates today. See the Somalian pirate scare from a decade ago or so.

You make some good points though. Especially about the anti-hijab stuff. Though I don't object to fighting overly strict ID photo rules.
@Hypolite Petovan @silverwizard
silverwizard
@Martijn Vos @Hypolite Petovan So that was kinda the thing. The FSM was very much a Motte and Bailey where it's couched in an anti-creationism joke (redo of Russell's Teapot), and then can go "Oh, Christians make stupid claims about natural disasters all the time! So let's say Global Warming isn't real because pirates". And that's one motte where people could say that it's just a correlation joke - but then there's a second motte where people can claim that there's no global warming, with both things being fairly benign and some of the points being good - but the rest of it is real bad.

And then the joke about hijabs and stuff is easy to defend as "religious people get exemptions" and "photo id rules are bad" but quite easily becomes "hijab wearers are bad because they are asking for a special privilege" and even that is easy to couch in anti-religion.

And I have no doubt certain right wing elements did this on purpose.
@Hypolite Petovan @Martijn Vos

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