James A. Lindsay—an associate of Peter Boghossian’s in providing the intersectionality lobby exactly the publicity they deserve—comes up in a most informative recent item about what happened when intersectionality hit knitting.
Knitting? Yes. Quite the yarn. Read and enjoy. So just this for now:
Where does a purity spiral end? Results may vary. “I get lots of emails these days from people in all kinds of walks of life where this is happening,” said James Lindsay, one of the three grievance studies hoaxers, and a long-time foe of intersectional social justice ideology. “I get reached out to from Dungeons & Dragons societies, rock climbing, from religions.”
Lindsay pointed to the atheist movement of the mid-2000s, from which he’d come: a community that once had the wind in its sails, but had imploded into infighting by 2011, as half of its members jagged off in an social justice direction. Soon enough, the likes of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins were being problematised as stale, male and pale. The rules on who could speak became more byzantine, and, eventually, half the audience stopped bothering. These days, there are effectively two communities bearing the New Atheism tag, each much weaker and less coherent.
Gavin Haynes, “How knitters got knotted in a purity spiral” at Unherd
Gavin Haynes’s BBC radio program on the diversity meltdowns The Purity Spiral, will also be available Sunday and following: “Gavin Haynes heads into the eye of two unlikely moral storms. He discovers bitter rows over diversity and racism in the world of Young Adult literature and Instagram knitting.”
We miss the New Atheists. They made absolutely everyone else look so sane and reasonable.
See also: Which side will atheists choose in the war on science? They need to re-evaluate their alliance with progressivism, which is doing science no favours.