We have a problem. People have learned that they shouldn't use a free VPN. By that logic you shouldn't use a free ad blocker either. People don't understand the details enough so they operate on broad ideas.
Remember that bit in Pretty Woman where they are in the big business meeting and you find out that the goal is to buy the company and sell it off piece by piece because the company is worth more on parts than as a whole? The good guy in the movie is the one that decides to use the ship yard to make ships instead. Make instead of destroy.
Most people never pay attention to that part of the movie. But I did. That's a private equity, aka hedge fund, aka corporate raiders company he owns. He makes money by buying a company and destroying it to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. Everyone loses and he gets richer.
Private equity, where the profits don't trickle down, and you can't buy shares so the wealth concentrates even more while also making a profit from running a company into the ground and having it collapse in bankruptcy.
People don't realize the systemic risk this puts the world economy at when a sizable chunk of the world economy is held by people individuals who are only finding new ways to make the most money and have zero obligations society.
"This isn't about a community no matter how much you'd prefer otherwise."
Except that it was/is about the community/movement/group collectively known as skeptics. Go back the the beginning of the conversation. I mentioned materials and the reply came back about how it was all transphobic misogynist stuff. Well there is nothing inherently transphobic or misogynist about the application of epistemology, logic and spotting logical fallacies
so the complaint must have been about the people. Then the conversation explicitly mentioned people by name as representatives of the community. So no matter how much you try to say it wasn't about the community it was.
"This was a conversation in a public forum. The word "sceptic" has a generally understood meaning."
There are lots of "generally understood" groups that go by existing words that aren't understood at all by the general population. To many people atheists are Satan worshipers, trans people are bathroom predators, and geologists are part of a massive cover-up about the truth of young earth creationism. But we know that these "generally understood" meanings are completely false. In a dictionary a word can have more than one meaning and context matters.
The community has explicitly rejected the people you named because they aren't in keeping with positions the community holds. If the community says they don't want these people in the group but you insist on saying they are part of the group then you are making a bad faith argument.
Communities get to decide who is an isn't part of the community. You specifically mentioned trans issues. Two of the pods I named had trans hosts. Dawkins had his AHA award pulled because of trans comments. Skeptics aren't being the people you said they were. You can either change your mind or stick to your beliefs despite the evidence.
Don't you find it's usually better to frame your opponent's position in terms they would agree with? You're using skepticism in a way that does not comport with today's use by the community. Community exchange over time. Community exchange over time.
Given your unwillingness to accept that you aren't as informed on the topic as you think you are I can see why you have the ideas you do.
Sam Harris has never been part of the rationalist or skeptical culture. He is much better known in the atheist and the "intellectual dark web". In the skeptical community he is generally regarded as a close minded person who is too busy kissing the butt of people like Ben Shapiro and selling meditation.
Even before Elevatorgate Dawkins was on the outs for being a sexist & misogynist who was contributing nothing to the movement except harm. If you are using him as an example you are operating on information that is more than a decade out of date and it might be time to update your priors.
See my reply to Diplomjodler3. One of the temporary hosts of Skeptoid was trans. You have some very uninformed ideas about what skepticism is and what it isn't.
I think you have a very uninformed idea about skeptical content. Go find Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, Skeptics with a K, Be Reasonable, Skeptoid, Bayesian Conspiracy, Squaring the Strange, Monster Talk and others. There is trutherusm crap and then there is looking at evidence.
Captain D is a fan of this stuff. He attended The Amazing Meeting, a skeptical conference held by the JREF, back when James Randi was still alive.
I've enjoyed every video I've ever seen by him, but always forget to subscribe to him and YouTube never recommends his videos to me even though it's filled with all kinds of other skeptical materials.
I deleted my archive when they started sending those emails. I could see nothing good was going to result from ignoring them or giving them permission to keep it.
His DNA doesn't need to be in any system. These days there are professionals that take DNA results and comb through the databases to find close relatives that are in the system. It's how they caught the BTK Killer.
I can't wait to find out how toxic this is.