In influence? Come on. I agree with you on the rest but influence? Getting gay police kicked out of the Toronto Pride march…getting Jewish marchers kicked out of the Chicago one…a handful of people getting Evergreen on the map.
And speaking of Canada:
The social justice movement couldn’t have asked for a more obedient little soldier than me. But it was this divisive shit that alienated me and drove me away from that entire narrative. Dedicating my whole fucking career to overthrowing various systems of oppression only to receive a nearly daily litany of ‘‘10 Reasons White Allies Suck’’ or ‘‘Hey You’re Doing it Wrong’’ or ‘‘Why I Will Never Trust Anyone Who Calls Themselves an Ally.’’
Then, when so-called friends presumed to shame me for my opinions on certain feminist narratives regarding sexual assault? When a fucking man embarked on a social media campaign of near-harassment to teach me how I should feel more hateful toward all men?
Seriously, fuck those people. As I told my buddy the other day, we need less protesting, less social media outrage, more lobbying and targeted legislation to address inequality. Retweeting something is at the bottom of the barrel in terms of effective strategies for change. It’s pretty bad when your noise machine falls on the deaf ears of someone who fundamentally agrees with you about the need for social change.
I’m not following her logic, here. Can someone help me out?
Being not fond of getting my information in a real-time format, I looked for some kind of transcription. Found on on, ahem, the Daily Stormer. Reading the words, one can see that the speech was unscripted. Sometimes that leads to logic that flows poorly.
But the end of the linked page is a bit disturbing
This is why ever little misstep by anyone gets amplified.
I think I get it now. Trudeau implied that Canada was a safe haven for people of color, the speaker contends that it isn’t. I find nothing fundamentally wrong with the argument framed my way, but everything wrong with the way it was done here. I’ll have to admit I laughed at the pictures of Trudeau so earnestly being liberal and totally OK with people of color. It’s true there isn’t a much more ridiculous target to choose.
I guess my question is, who is giving these people a platform and why? I do believe they are in a minority, but I saw a lot of it at least tacitly reinforced among many liberal friends of mine (not this, in particular.) While I don’t believe any of the people I know would say, ‘‘Oh yes, clearly using Beyonce lyrics to talk about racial equality is cultural appropriation,’’ I’m not confident that they couldn’t be persuaded. I still remember the uproar over this Meryl Streep debacle on my FB feed. don’t really understand what’s happening.
I have lived most of my life refusing to believe that most people are dumb. People, I have contended, have untapped innate capacities to think in a lot of creative ways. Indeed, many people making these types of claims are highly educated.
I just don’t know what to think anymore, because this is obvious bullshit to me, and I don’t see how it’s not obvious bullshit to everyone else.
(This applies also to credulous conservatives, not just liberals, of course. Gross stupidity, indeed, outright contempt for critical thinking, is a cancer spreading its way through the nation regardless of political affiliation.)
As ugly as this sentiment is, I think there’s a lot of truth to it. That idiot woman screeching from the back of a pick-up truck (who, incidentally, was the head of BLM Toronto, at least at the time the video was shot) said, with utter conviction that Justin Trudeau (Justin Trudeau, of all people!) was a white supremacist terrorist. Now, if Justin Trudeau, who’s basically an anthropomorphic sweater-vest, is a terrorist, what are ISIS? Words are flexible, but they’re not infinitely flexible. If we allow the definition of ‘terrorist’ to expand to the point where it encompasses both Justin Trudeau and an army of God-boggled psychopaths who crucify children for not fasting during Ramadan then we might as well expunge the word terrorist from the lexicon altogether because by that point it would be completely fucking useless.
Similarly, if Justin Trudeau is a white supremacist, what you call the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan? Supremacist-squared? A double-plus supremacist? A Decepticon? Seriously, what would you call him?
These people are ridiculous, and their abuse of language really does empower genuine supremacists if for no better reason than they make the word supremacist mean less.
They make the words mean less and they undermine legitimate arguments against oppressive policies and systems. It’s a total strategy fail. If this woman wanted real results regarding police violence, instead of screaming that he’s a white supremacist terrorist, she would be having a sit-down with one of Trudea’s aides.
That’s why Bret Weinstein referred to these people as anarchists. They don’t want solutions, they just want to rail against the system.
In a normal society, this woman would be marginalized by means of indifference. We would simply let her howl and ignore her. It is the RW that latches on to her rant and shouts about what dumbshits the left is. Which is not to say that the converse does not also happen. The question is whence the fuel to the engine of divisiveness is most eagerly being fed.
No, the concept of the SJW is inextricably tied up in the idea that being a douchebag about social justice is wrong.
Well, sure, you should take a break every now and again, talk about the weather, or hockey. But the weather is harder for poor people and hockey is racist.
Speaking of cis-hetero white men who demonize all cis-hetero white men, I wasn’t remotely surprised to see what side of EvergreenPZ recently came out for–but was a little surprised when there was some push back from his hallelujah chorus.
When I graduated with my MSW in macro studies at Penn, I received a t-shirt with the program name emblazoned on the front, and the words ‘‘Social Change Agent’’ scrawled across the back. I was proud to wear that shirt. At the time, I viewed ‘‘SJW’’ as nothing more than a pejorative term directed at people like me and my fellow graduates. My fellow graduates, 145 strong, going off into fields as diverse as nonprofit management, community organizing, lobbying, legislature and political activism, fundraising, and a host of other activities with the intent of upending the status quo and realizing a more just society for everyone. I was proud then and I’m still proud, to have acquired a unique professional skill set that works to promote systemic change whether the rest of society values it or not.
Here’s the thing: The foundation of this skill set is critical thinking. It requires reasoned, exhaustively researched strategy, and collaboration with all sorts of folks, from the constitutent in need to the corporate executive. It requires the ability to analyze the potential influence of numerous environmental and social factors, and the the good common sense to discard ideas that are stupid and replace them with better ideas. Most importantly, it requires the ability to communicate the problem and the potential solution, to connect with new audiences, and to persuade them to give a damn about your cause. It requires constant self-evaluation: ''Is this current approach actually working?" Because after all, what is the point of going to all this trouble if your approach has proven ineffective?
The SJWs in question, the examples cited here, the caricature-turned-reality that righties love to mock, these people are not thinking critically. What they are doing is embarrassing people like me.
I once remarked ‘‘You can’t be a social worker without being a little bit angry,’’ and I think it is still true. Something has to get us up every day and get us in the door, when you are busting your ass to change social attitudes about sexual assault and some random asshole discounts your entire life’s work with one snarky comment, sure it pisses you off, it fuels the fire, it keeps you swinging. But I should have added a corrollary to my quote: ''You can’t be an effective social worker without critical thinking." The minute your anger short-circuits your reason, the terrorists have won.
Now I am in the uncomfortable position of having to take attention away from the actual work I’m doing and play defense because of these assholes who think screaming unwarranted personal insults through a megaphone in an way equates to social justice work. Because righties would love to believe that I am these people, and these people are me, that we are all the same, that the idea that our society is systemically unequal is ludicrous, because look at these crazy fucking idiots, who could take them seriously? It’s a waste of my time to have to do this, and it’s a waste of my time to have to explain to you, a person ostensibly on the same ideological page, that endless apologist crap in defense of these idiots is not doing us any favors.
But I’m doing it, because I care about the outcome. I have friends buying into this bullshit, plenty of them who shared that stage with me on graduation day, and I don’t understand how such intelligent people can be so brainwashed. Maybe we are going to see a massive schism on the left, the side who believes in critical thinking and the side who doesn’t. If that’s the ‘‘left eating the left’’ then hand me a fork.
I have to admit, much as I usually am entertained by Drunky’s drive-bys, I wonder what’s rolling around in that head of his, for real. There’s something that reminds me of that person who can’t deal with serious subjects, so he throws out jokes as a defense mechanism. Yeh, I know who you are.
Who is PZ? I’ve never heard of this person.
A biologist and blogger who was once a really well-known presenter of science and opponent of Young Earth Creationism who has over the past few years transformed into a SJW that epitomizes almost every negative stereotypes of the group. Once rather respected in the atheist and skeptic world, now mostly seen as an angry clown.
Well, OK. And I need to give a shit about him because you do?
Why yes, yes you do. By posting a link to an entry by a rather famous (in many circles) and prominent SJW in a thread created specifically for posting links to the antics of SJWs, I was deliberately and consciously choosing to make you, elucidator, care about it.
If you aren’t interested in the topic that is the express purpose of this thread, why not just leave it, instead of shitting it?
(On a slightly different note, here is one of PZ’s more infamous and illustrate posts.)
What is supposed to be “infamous” (much less “illustrate”, whatever that’s supposed to mean when used as an adjective) about pointing out the unremarkable fact that journalists and politicians find it more comfortable and profitable to focus on tragic nonviolent deaths of beloved celebrities than to engage publicly with troubling and complicated systemic issues of crime, law enforcement and race?
It is illustrative in how–when the body was barely cold and everyone else was posting how awful it was, he had to make a post about how dare a rich white man (the worst group on Earth) have the gall to kill himself and take the attention forever away from this " Michael Brown" guy, who will never be mentioned again!
Well, goody for you, you found an asshole! I’ve been on the left since I was old enough to know better, and I never heard of this guy. Hardly know much about Evergreen, but I was at Berzerkely in '67, so I’m kinda hard to impress when it comes to left wing crazy. People can take a good idea too far? Sure. They can also take a good idea not far enough. Which is worse, ya think? Who got more people dead, Kissinger and Nixon, or Angela Davis and Huey Newton?
And the people I knew? They went on, some graduated, some did not, some are mathematicians, others are carpenter’s wives. The sky did not fall. Can’t even count the number of times I read how campus lefties were going to destroy everything! And soon!
Its been a while now. So, tomorrow?
again. Myers’s critique is clearly aimed at the journalists and politicians who were exploiting the news value of Williams’s death, not at Williams himself for having tragically committed suicide. It doesn’t really seem fair to blame Myers for your own reading comprehension problems.