A few of the details of the construction of this argument make me uneasy (in a roughly parallel way to the discomfort mentioned in section V). Particularly the

A few of the details of the construction of this argument make me uneasy (in a roughly parallel way to the discomfort mentioned in section V). Particularly the assertion (end of section IV) that: > Likewise, when a religious person attacks atheists who are moral relativists, or communists, or murderers, then all atheists have to band together to stop it somehow or they will have successfully poisoned people against atheism. This seems like a bit of a major step. While I agree that "weak men" are a slippery trick to argue against a movement, I don't think that they necessitate a total defense of all aspects of the movement. Saying that atheists should defend murderers or Christians should defend the Westboro Baptist Church because they share the label of Christian is taking a good base idea and following it to false conclusions. What I took out of the argument around "weak men" was that communities need to be more self-policing rather than more broadly defensive. I was waiting for the point where Scott Alexander would say "thus Christians must declaim the Westboro Baptist Church instead of allowing themselves to be lumped under the same label." Additionally, there are parallels drawn between feminism and mens rights ideas that seem to be false-equivalencies, or at least false-parallels. In the comments I encountered a blog post that addresses some of these uneasy feelings I had https://heartheretic.blogspot.com/2014/06/talking-about-problems-is-not.html https://heartheretic.blogspot.com/2014/06/talking-about-prob...