I can’t believe you are seeking to suppress my speech. Please stop violating me.
My mistake–clearly you should be made the arbiter of what opinions people are allowed to express and who is allowed to listen to them. This can in no way can go wrong, and in no way makes you a petty little fascist prick.
Clearly, we can’t have a conversation without you becoming insulting and attacking me. I am not sure how we can have a society that engages in the free exchange of ideas when people behave as you do.
Seriously though I can piss off as Chimera requested. I was really bored and now I am not. I thought it might be fun, entertaining even, to shit on people with different ideas than my own. Unfortunately, I could only get maybe 5 posts out of it. I guess it isn’t that entertaining to me.
Are you honestly, really that blind to the irony of what you just said? About a post where I was criticizing your support of shouting down the speech of people you don’t agree with, even when they are speaking to an audience that wants to hear them? I hold you in contempt because you oppose a free exchange if ideas, and I really do think that you are too dumb to be able to understand that.
It seems your definition of ‘‘cult’’ is the same as my definition of ‘‘a group of people that like talking to one another.’’
I honestly wonder if people criticizing this thread have read through it. We’ve had some nuanced, at times heated discussions about the various examples here, it’s not like we’re all walking in lockstep.
I place a distinction between people supporting basic human rights and people supporting “social justice.” If someone is working towards things like marriage equality, stopping gratuitous police violence, and many other subjects, then they deserve support. It is the people saying things like “white people can’t wear dreadlocks” and “white people can’t do yoga” and “white people can’t make ‘ethnic’ food” and “the term ‘black hole’ is racist” who are fools at which you should point an laugh, long and loud. I don’t see this as a thread about saying “look at those idiots that support gay marriage,” it is a thread about saying “look at those idiots that say white people can’t like kimonos.” And someone who can’t see the distinction between the issues? Probably one of the idiots.
(BTW, each of the above examples was a real incident, not some straw man I made up.)
As long as you recognize that ‘‘social justice’’ has become a pretty broad term that encompasses everything from lobbying for LGBT rights to acting as the cultural appropriation police on Facebook. I try to stay focused on the former in my social justice work, but it is still social justice work. I have a t-shirt from grad school I proudly wear that says, ‘‘Social Change Agent.’’ We talked about stuff like cultural appropriation from time to time, but by and large the program was focused on big issues in systemic inequality, such as disparities in health outcomes, unequal application of the law to people of color, and the impact of social policy on poverty in the US. Some people who use ‘‘social justice’’ as a smear are unwittingly conflating people like ‘‘marble supremacist’’ with people like me (and certainly there is a lot of overlap - usually people looking at the big issues will also speak out about the other stuff, especially on Facebook.) Others who use ‘‘social justice’’ as a smear genuinely hate the concept of equal rights and see no meaningful difference.
Most of the things presented in this thread (that I’ve seen, not that I’ve read the entire thing) are the indefensibly stupid side of the broader movement that is social justice work. But it bears reminding that a lot of the people focusing on stupid stuff are also probably doing more important stuff in their day to day lives. To a certain extent they go hand in hand. It’s difficult to have someone passionate about a key issue without them caring about everything to do with the issue, even if it seems minor or irrelevant or over the top.
Also, what a lot of the people on the “deserving pejorative” side of “social justice” seem to be wanting is “poetic justice”, not a gain of equality. It seem that it isn’t enough to want an end of discrimination, they also crave “white tears” to go along with it.
I think I’ve heard of such people – a few extremists on twitter, perhaps – but they don’t seem nearly as common even as open white supremacists, much less representing any significant portion of actual liberals.
So, who told you about all these dreadful incidents and statements by Social Justice fanatics? Do they have a newsletter for you to subscribe to? Who is the Alex Jones of SJWs? Their Rush Limbaugh, their Sean Hannity? Outside of yourself, where can I get the latest info on their threat?
Sometimes it’s about revenge more than equality, yes. Or, if not revenge, just an endless venting of rage. In many cases it stems from personal trauma. I made a post about this fairly recently.
The man I largely regard as my social justice mentor is in his eighties now and has spent a lot of time thinking about this. He’s a conservative, grew up on the mean streets of Philly, has been shot and stabbed multiple times, did a stint in prison, marched alongside MLK, was a major strategic director of MOVE, married a white woman (which is relevant because it’s controversial in his circle) obtained his law degree and started his own charter school. I don’t think he’s perfect, but I was always struck by his reasonableness. Even if people in our class said things that were unwittingly offensive, he never flew off the handle. He just explained his point of view. You get someone who’s lived that long, who bleeds that much history, and nothing they hear can phase them. And he had this saying: ‘‘If everything is racism, nothing is.’’
I’m sure he was not always so calm and rational in his approach, because he had a lot of shit to deal with first. And he still lived with the pain of having to explain to his son how to take a bullet. It was advice that saved his kid’s life when he was shot outside of a convenience store. But he took all of that injustice and created something meaningful from it, including a teaching legacy that changed the life of this white girl from the Midwest. And if he had only been angry, only seeking ‘‘white tears’’ as you put it, he never would have reached me.
One particular sighting that sticks in my memory was an open thread at John Scalzi’s blog on the night of the election, where someone was looking forward to all the white tears they would see the next day. IIRC, they didn’t culpa any mias afterwards.
Really? John Scalzi? Wow, in all the years I have been slavishly reading his blogs, I didn’t know anything about this bombshell! Wow! John Scalzi, no shit? Well, sumbitch! John Scalzi!?
By 2020, I predict we’ll see a movie set in Tennessee in the 1920s where a diverse group of Klansman oppress a diverse group of victims for reasons which are never made entirely clear. Fortunately, the Filipino-American female President Harding saves the day.
Did you see that documentary, Mississippi Burning? Where the FBI shut down the Klan and ushered in an era of equality and freedom?
So random internet person was being obnoxious? Why does that stick out in your memory? Random internet person being obnoxious seems like pretty much the most mundane and common event in the universe.
Oh, go bacon a cat.
Every comment made on the internet anywhere, any time is pretty much some random person on the internet. So why pick and choose which examples are acceptable to notice and which aren’t? Why can some random person on the internet saying that all black people are criminals be allowed to stand as evidence of the existence of racism, but some random person on the internet gloating over white tears can’t be allowed to stand as evidence of the existence of SJWism? The people opposed to the very existence of this thread are sure going out if their way to rationalize away, special plead, and No True Scotsman every example given.