It is disheartening how many atheists start out railing against the oppression of religious institutions, and then turn out to be misogynists, bigots, and pond scum in general. Not all atheists by any stretch, but an awful lot of them on YouTube to be sure.

Well, what happens is they start thinking they can also apply logic and critical thinking to feminism, but feminism is exempt from such scrutiny.

I think everyone is susceptible to tribalism, including atheists who are religious about not being religious and think all religions except theirs should be banned.

Really, whatever gives a dude some comfort. As long as you're not hurting other people for imaginary reasons.

A smug sense of superiority is a gateway drug to redpills.

I think a lot of what would be considered the more extreme atheists would probably settle for reworking/revoking the cushy exemptions/land deals churches enjoy and better ways to protect separation.

Not watching this. He's that mix of insufferable and boring that seems really common in popular youtube people.

Yeah, turns out I dated one/ran in friend circles with a few (shockingly in gamer circles, I know), though I didn't find out until after the fact. Then I got bored and went out to interview/meet other Otherkin as an aborted writing project. There were a bunch out there at the time, some were pretty cool and had their lives together/jobs/adult life going for them, others were fucking bonkers, and most were just white painfully smart-but-average middle-class kids desperate to be unique so they took a series of perfectly normal traits and decided together they made them special creatures.

I've thought about writing a piece called "Everything I learned about identity politics I learned from the Otherkin" because what I saw there mirrors a lot of the current battle between people who are finding a place with their identity and those whose identity is based on being so desperate to be unique that they invent their own labels/identity to make themselves unique, and if anyone else joins them they'll make a new label for themselves.

I believe there's nothing wrong with people who want to identify in a weird way, it's just about people not using their label as a substitute for a personality or an self-identity, that's when people tend to go off the rails.

Man, that must have been nice OZ! All I had were lesbians and communists. I didn't meet my first real-life, out-of-the-closet Otherkin until I was in the Army.

Well, unless you count me, that year in middleschool when I was an Otherkin.

I encountered all of those (and so much more) in Madison, WI when I went to college but I hadn't heard "Otherkin" until fairly recently to describe it as a whole: people I lived with were just Animals, Faeries, Wizards, etc. etc. I don't have any doubt that they described themselves as Otherkin though. But it was kind of tricky in the wintertime; despite myriad vintage stores everybody from the jocks to the otherkin all wore the same black North Face Jackets on the way to classes.