I’ve commented on SJWs on this board before, and the essence of what I said is below.
As it happens there’s apparently a new study out which lends some support to this view. From the abstract:
The study is behind a paywall, but there’s some more detail at Reason.com
The bracketed ellipses represent the details of the studies which established those conclusions. I left them out for copyright concerns, but worth reading the article.
I would add (from my own observations, no formal study data offered in support here) that there are those who will make an adversarial stand against injustice when the situation requires it, but whose default attitude is one of being at peace with all people; and then there are those who really really need a designated Enemy, someone to hate and blame for all social ills.
Both the left and the right do the “designated Enemy” routine; the right identifies and blames some marginal social element and demonizes them and demands more law and order and more authoritarian power to protect the rest of us from them; the left identifies one or more clusters of oppressed people and, through defining other people in terms of who they are not, targets the folks who are not subject to those categorical oppressions and blames them. The latter is, at least, targeting people who aren’t exactly lacking in resources and social currency, but it’s still scapegoating and it still offers up a culprit for the rest of us to hate. And as long as people can bond together to hate someone else they don’t have to examine their own interactions and behaviors.
That this may exist isn’t controversial – any disagreement is probably about how prevalent it is. It’s entirely possible that there is, in fact, close to as much injustice in the form of various bigotries in society as liberal-ish folks like me suspect, and it’s also entirely possible that we’re mostly motivated by the phenomenon you bring up and mostly deluded about these claims of injustice. Or somewhere in between.
But that some folks look for battles to fight shouldn’t be surprising or controversial to anyone, and isn’t for me. The same phenomenon presumably applies to all ideologies in various forms, with different issue/philosophical battles that some might go looking for (even, for example, in perhaps looking to “battle” against those who make assertions about injustice).
People probably wouldn’t recognize the phenomenon in themselves – if I’m guilty of it, I probably wouldn’t know it. I hope I’m not, and I wouldn’t describe myself as fitting those criteria in your snippets… but I wouldn’t know if I did. Same goes for folks on any other ideological side.
I certainly agree with that. The original example I cited was a religious one.
But the point is that while it may sometimes be difficult to apply it to any specific person, the notion that it exists as a societal phenomenon is reasonable.
Does that same term apply for people who look for “War on Christmas” battles to fight? Those who look for things to falsely label as Sharia Law Coming to the US? Those that look for other supposed affronts to Christianity in the US?
Or, is that a different term? That is, is someone who gets outraged when Walmart greeters say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas – is the outraged person also an SJW?
I recall a book written by a University of Texas professor in which he discussed how some people who feel guilt over something (the example was some women who have had abortions) may compensate or “atone” for those feelings by becoming a moral zealot in another area - an example in the book being, becoming fanatical about not wearing fur clothing (which is ‘animal cruelty.’)
A fake religious version of SJW needing its own term, quite possibly.
There ***are ***some affronts to Christianity in the US, yeah, but the Christmas wars usually aren’t one of them.
I guess my quibble is with the term. The second guy is basically an asshole, and you want to label him (ironically?) with a name that implies he’s doing something good (fighting for social justice). It’s like ranting against tailgaters and calling them “really good drivers.” Damn I hate those RGDs, always riding my ass on the interstate.
“Men’s Rights Activist” is a technically good-sounding name, too. Many good-sounding things have developed negative connotations.
Cyril, the problem with your analysis is that it ignores the fact that social injustices very often are latent, hidden beneath the surface, etc. This is what micro-aggressions are, for example.
They’re very often not immediately apparent to the people committing them or to the people suffering from them. And this isn’t because the people suffering from them are too stupid to notice them, but because they’re so ingrained in society that no one thinks twice about them.
Consider a poisoned water supply. Let’s say there’s some chemical in the ground produced by a given community’s staple foodstuff, that’s leaching into the groundwater that has supplied a community farther down the hill with drinking water for hundreds of years, a mineral resource that (on broad average) shortens lifespans in that area by five years (obviously individual cases will be different, we’re talking about averages here). For a long time nobody notices any real difference with their neighbors, because the information necessary for a big-picture perspective on this hasn’t been collected yet. After several centuries, with the advent of modern intellectual and methodological practices, someone collects this data and notices that hey, people in this area aren’t living as long as everyone else. But no one knows why yet, and people come up with a lot of different hypotheses, from genetics to cultural factors (diet, for example) to just pure chance. But these are assumed to either be beyond anyone’s control or something that can’t be changed by anyone except those who suffer from it, so not a whole lot of people are inclined to spend a lot of time worrying about it.
Finally, our understanding of plants and ecology advances further, and someone notices that the plant that these people up the hill are growing as their major food crop, is one that has recently been discovered to produce a herbicidal chemical that gets in the soil–a chemical that, from other research, is known to also negatively impact human life spans. The person who figures this out goes to the community that’s being impacted and tells them about this, and they’re understandably upset and want the community uphill to start using different crops. The same person then goes to the community uphill and says, “Hey, I know you didn’t mean to do this, and I know you didn’t realize you were doing this, but you are doing this and so you need to stop.” They completely lose it, demand to know why they’re being “punished” (they’re not, they’re just being told they need to stop doing something that harms others) and why they should have to go out of their way and change what they’re doing. They then start spewing those old, now-discredited explanations that were put out speculatively before anyone knew for sure, insisting that the real reason for the difference is things like “genetics” or “culture” or pure chance, etc. They’re wrong, of course, but that doesn’t matter because not changing is easier than admitting that they’re the source of the problem and so they’re the ones who need to change.
Then they realize that the person who made these discoveries and is communicating them, isn’t from the community that’s being impacted–in fact, he’s from the uphill community–and so they ask him why he’s inserting himself into something that doesn’t concern him, why he doesn’t let those people down the hill figure out their own problems, etc. Some even go so far as to call him a traitor.
Cyril, your argument against “social justice warriors” (a term I refuse to consider an insult when applied to me) is what those people at the top of the hill are doing.
Cite?
Remember two things before you answer. The Constitution and the country is roughly 85% Christian.
Only 85%? To some, that is the affront.
The baker is happy the mouse is gone. The cat is hoping there will be more mice.
This fable is almost certainly from pre-industrial times. Know what that means? THE CAT IS RIGHT.
In a society where there are a shit-ton of mice, I’m not sure it matters whether the cat is happy or sad, as long as the cat keeps killing those mice.
Bringing it home, this whole thing seems like a way to smear and dismiss folks who are working against social injustice: “But they LIKE their work!” you complain. “HOw can we take them seriously?”
Whether they like or dislike their work is immaterial. All that matters is whether the injustices they see are real or imagined. Efforts to determine that are impaired, not facilitated, by trying to dig into their motives.
A large number of people will self-identify as “Christian” on census forms, etc., but in reality are not adherents of the Christian doctrine, so, “Christian” in name only, not in actuality.
And given that the Constitution says that the government shall not promote religion (1st Amendment,) I’m not sure where you get a Christian Constitution out of it.
Unless you’ve got an official definition of “Christian” to present to us, there is no practical difference between the two.
Ah, no true Christian then?
What tests do you propose to determine whether someone is in reality an adherent of Christian doctrine?
If you are arguing that being a christian is to be christ-like, then I would agree, but in that case, then that brings the percentage down to pretty much 0%.
I don’t think that that was his point. More that many christians consider it an affront that other religions get the same sorts of protections under the constitution as Christianity does.
Hmmm…no, I don’t think so. Your definition of “social justice warrior” seems to be assumed to be inherently disparaging based on some arbitrary criteria you created for whether the conflict is “any of their business”.
And I find these arguments dubious at best. As it is usually the person or group on the receiving end of the SJW’s outrage, it come across like a bunch of frat guys arguing for their right to wear blackface at their annual “Ghetto Theme Party”.
What makes the Social Justice Warrior (as I understand how you define the term) insufferable has nothing to do with being a guilt-ridden busybody. It is the use of “political correctness” as a weapon to label people or groups as “racist”, “homophobic” or other terms in order to derive power through intimidation and public scorn.
There’s nothing wrong with seeking out and fighting injustice for it’s own sake. What is wrong creating witch hunts to attack and shut down rational discussion with those who don’t agree with you.
Also, there are many times when it is the SJWs, who, in their desire to fight bigotry, end up promoting ignorance. For instance, Cracked ran an article criticizing an Australian TV ad for depicting black people eating fried chicken, calling it racist, not realizing that in Australia, fried chicken doesn’t have the same racist connotations it does in the USA. So the American SJWs were displaying the same “America is the center of the world, and the world thinks like us” attitude that they often criticized others for.
I sadi nothing about a Christian Constitution.
It was to remind you that some Christians want things that have been declared unconstitutional.
So what are these affronts you claimed?
What a strong example-an old Cracked tossoff. :rolleyes: