WTF Happened to Penn Jillette?!
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The guy used to be an independent thinker and now he's a dyed in the wool NPC captured by the mind virus!
He's (or was) a Regime Libertarian:
It's easy to be a "free thinker" when you're making fun of Christians from "flyover country", because they'll generally keep going to your shows and have no leverage in getting your contract terminated. Not so easy when it comes to making fun of blacks screaming "racism"
Unless he's changed he used to defend Christians. It's one of the reasons some liberals considered him different. He would say the vast majority are good people and misunderstood by Hollywood.
I remember him being a mainstay in New Atheism in the early 00s. Think he even did a Bullshit episode on Christianity.
Yeah he's an atheist but he wasn't edgelord atheist.
Yea. Him and Glenn Beck used to have good discussions
Penn just said in the article he wished everyone would believe in Christianity more than what happens now.
Depending on the subtext, he might be digging at Christians for not behaving how he thinks they should.
That's a good phrase, never heard it before. I especially liked the "His magazine..." part.
It's a favorite phrase of Lew Rockwell, who as far as I can tell coined it in this 2005 article.
I think the trick is that, these people were always like this, just picked more acceptable targets. As the Overton window shifts, and as people like us get more "extreme" - even if we stay in the exact same place - what these "free thinkers" feel the need to call out starts looking more and more deranged.
Basically, they probably didn't change...they just went mask off and felt they could (and should, to be a Good Person) talk about things that make them look (to people more on "our side") like absolute slobbering retards.
It's not a shift in their personality or opinions, it's a shift in what Free Thinkers should think freely about. Similar things happened to the "skeptic community" and the like. "Skeptics" went from calling out a lot of normie stuff to, ironically, calling out "conspiracy theories," and anyone who doesn't buy into the the normie stuff.
A lot of "free thinkers," especially self professed Free Thinkers, were never actually thinking that freely. Ironically, they were adopting the acceptable opinions of the "free thinker community."
Maybe not "free thinkers" so much as "fedora wearing atheists".
I saw a microcosm of that on Digg where a bunch of "free thinking atheists" started gaming the moderation system to boost their socio-communist ideas. For all their "free thinking" because they rejected conformity and the constraints of "morality and Christianity" but enforced upon themselves the dogmatic beliefs of atheism and socialism.
LGBTQ123 community too. They're so liberal and free thinking but you hit the programming/brainwashing tripwire and boom, it's all NPC talk and conformity.
I feel like atheism is like libertarians. It has no protect from bad actors.
Libertarians are plagued by retards not understanding economics, and just thinking "whatever I want should be legal, I'm libertarian". Left libertarians don't exist. If you just want drugs and abortions, but are otherwise pro-government, you aren't libertarian, you're a degenerate.
Then there are the grifter fags that try to boost individual elements of libertarian ideology - that do not work in a vacuum. Free migration in a welfare state is just parasitism. Free market ideals only work when EVERYONE does them - when the rest of the world is engaging in protectionism and economic warfare, you must as well.
Like GRRM, Penn proves that intelligence oft isn't fungible, and weakly correlates with virtue. The responsible man opposes Biden and Newsom, simple as that.
Now that there are dozens of additional studies showing that mask mandates are useless at preventing transmission of flu viruses, has he ever recanted his statement?
(I said "additional" because the CDC, of all places, had already released a meta-study in 2018 that observed these types of viruses using data from the previous 40 years, and concluded that there was no perceivable difference between populations that imposed mask mandates and those who didn't. We'd known for decades that they were useless, long before covid ever appeared, and long before the CDC confirmed prior observations.)