Preamble: this thread isn’t directed at everyone who reads it. I trust the individuals of the Dope community to be by and large smart and honest enough to self-identify.
There’s the modern concept that the right invented of the Social Justice Warrior: a breed of ridiculous person who screams their head off over every perceived injustice and goes out of their way to take offense to the majority of everyday existence. Conservatives use it to piss on the concept of trying to create a fairer world where humans feel like they have human rights.
There’s been a lot of good work being done lately by a vast group of protestors and demonstrators doing things like going after police brutality at the risk of their own health and safety. It’s made me proud to be an American again, and prouder to say I’ve joined them in whatever limited ways I can.
But. Things have started to spin out of hand, and it really, really, really needs to stop. I know I’m going to get pegged as a concern troll for this – especially since straight white cisgendered males don’t get to have opinions on things anymore, which bullshit y’all can really also knock off, by the way – but I’m a BLM-marching, Planned Parenthood donating, pro-UHC-protesting, public-education-demonstrating-in-front-of-the-Supreme-Court speechmaking liberal fooldaddy. I’ve got enough Real Liberal cred to survive whatever attacks come my way. If your first instinct upon reading the first couple sentences of this paragraph was to get your hackles up and assume I was a Republican in disguise, it’s likely this rant is for you.
You’ve heard the phrase “tilting at windmills”? We are literally attacking statues. We’re changing the name of centuries-old institutions because they acknowledge the existence of a famous and respected son of the university’s area who happens to have been on the wrong side of history. (The Redskins need to change their name because it’s racist. Washington & Lee has the word “Lee” in it. If you don’t see the difference, you are a moron.)
We had “yell at Drew Brees” day where a football player got copious death threats because he failed to understand something. At least that ended once he literally broke down in tears explaining to his friends that he didn’t hate them. DeSean Jackson quoted Hitler, and people rightfully castigated him for that, but only for a few hours. It quickly morphed into yelling at various sports-related figures for NOT yelling at DeSean Jackson fast enough. (By the way, if there’s a list of unwritten Twitter rules, “don’t quote Hitler” isn’t on it, for the same reason that “no machetes” isn’t in the rules of chess. Don’t quote Hitler.)
When you guys do this shit, it makes us all look like idiots, and it validates the Republican idea of the SJW. It gives them a plethora of targets to point at and try to discredit the notion of social justice as a whole. Here is the point in easily digestible tweet format, brought to you by an Actual Black Person.
Also, this isn’t that thing where some people are offended that two problems exist at once. It’s not “how can you possibly focus on COVID when just as many people die of starvation?”. It’s “how can you possibly focus on attacking statues when statues don’t do anything and there are real problems, you ridiculous imbecile?”
Make Social Justice Great Again. Stop being idiots. Stop attacking statues. Stop wanking about changing names to disavow the existence of historical figures. Stop yelling at football players. Stop yelling at people who failed to yell at football players. Those things hurt no one. And for Christ’s sake stop robbing Target. Your hearts are in the right place (well, except the looters), but focus that energy on things that actually matter. The protests against police brutality and institutional racism have been some of the most fantastic human endeavors it has been my privilege to see. The stupid SJW shit is stupid. Stop doing it. Thanks for reading.
