There is a commenter over at the Orthosphere who delights in telling Christians how deluded and stupid they are. Others engage with him, and I did in previous days but no longer do. He is one of those most irritating of opponents in that he verges on rationality, and does occasionally present a very good argument, leading you to think that he might be persuaded, if only I could find the right entry point or the right words to smack this SOB with. Someone who is a better man than I might succeed at this, but I have abandoned that cause long ago.
Yet about a week ago a new thought occurred to me, and I have turned it about in my mind. He is a throwback. His approach was common in the New Atheist movement, or the Humanist groups of the early 2000's. Scott Alexander of ACX has written about how this group which he invested too much of his intellectual effort in just became intellectually lazy, emotionally vicious wokesters. The smart ones are gone, and the smart ones will even tell you quite clearly why they are gone. If you listen to Stuart Ritchie, Tom Chivers, Razib Khan, and even (subtly) Tyler Cowan, all of whom are in my sidebar, you will hear that they also came out of such groups but grew disillusioned. Someone else can write that up if they like, and I don't doubt that someone has. Yet clubschadenfreude has been a keeper of that flame, and there is a sort of honor in that, especially in a group that includes trad Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Western Canon, Augustinians, and the like. He is a dinosaur now, even though he is a late dinosaur whose arrival is remembered with annoyance by the brontosauri.
We appreciate the sentiment, if not the thinking and arrogance.
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My supervisor is a nice German lady living in Nuremberg. We have video calls a couple of times a week, and after the business part is done, we chat. Her English is excellent - I think she spent part of her youth here in some kind of exchange program - and I sometimes forget that she doesn't know every idiom I throw at her. We were talking about that and cross-language borrowing, one day, and I said there was a German word that had shown up in our political discourse lately.
"What's that?"
"Schadenfreude."
"Oh dear!"
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