Anti-Pseudoscience Puritanism

A purity culture within skeptical and scientific communities where opposition to pseudoscience becomes so intense that it transforms into a crusade against the impure—treating not just pseudoscientific claims but those who hold them as enemies to be purged. Anti-pseudoscience puritanism demands perfect orthodoxy in distinguishing science from pseudoscience, treats any ambiguity or uncertainty as weakness, and engages in public rituals of condemnation for those who fail the purity test. It's the skeptic community that turns on its own members for insufficient zeal; the debunker who treats anyone who entertains an unproven claim as contaminated; the science advocate who sees the fight against pseudoscience as a holy war. The irony is that in becoming puritanical, it abandons the very scientific values it claims to defend—open inquiry, proportionality of response, and the distinction between being wrong and being bad.

Example: "The skeptical forum turned on a member for suggesting that maybe some alternative medicine had value—Anti-Pseudoscience Puritanism, treating any deviation from orthodoxy as heresy rather than just disagreement."

Anti-Pseudoscience Puritanism by Dumu The Void March 14, 2026

Evidence-Based Puritanism

A purity culture within communities that elevate "evidence-based" as the supreme standard of legitimacy, where proper relationship to evidence becomes a test of virtue and belonging. Evidence-based puritanism demands that true members base all claims on approved kinds of evidence (usually quantitative, experimental, published in high-impact journals), treat other forms of knowledge as illegitimate, and maintain the purity of evidentiary standards against contamination by alternative ways of knowing. Members compete to demonstrate their evidentiary rigor, their commitment to "what the evidence shows," their willingness to dismiss anything that doesn't meet their standards. The result is a community that claims to value evidence while being dogmatically closed to the full range of human knowledge, treating "evidence-based" as a club rather than a commitment.

Example: "She cited decades of community experience, and they dismissed it as 'anecdotal'—Evidence-Based Puritanism, where only their kind of evidence counts, and anyone who doesn't have it is simply ignored."

Evidence-Based Puritanism by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal March 14, 2026

Iron Law of Bizarro Queer Puritanism

An internet rule dictating that those who condemn and demonize fan service for normal, sane people often define themselves as queer or as LGBTQ "allies".

Such individuals will often engage in gaslighting tactics, equating physically attractive female characters to pornography or maintain that ugly or masculine-looking female characters are better because of "realism", even in otherwise fantastical settings and despite the escapist nature of fiction. This is a bizarro mirror image of conservative Christian puritanism that such people often found themselves opposed to in previous decades.

"OMG, what do you care what Mary Jane Watson looks like? Shut up, your porn-brained incel!"
"You have pronouns and pride flags in your twitter bio and your likes are full of futa. The Iron Law of Bizarro Queer Puritanism remains undefeated."

Iron Law of Bizarro Queer Puritanism by JD_543975834 January 1, 2024