I know you’re being facetious, but in a way, yes, that’s how I feel. However, it’s not so much “keeping it to yourself” as “not going out of your way to tell everyone that’s what you’re doing so everyone can see how good you think you are.”
To continue with my example before, if you don’t want to get married because your gay friends can’t, that’s fine. Your choice. But don’t make big public statements about it. If someone asks, sure, it’s not unreasonable to say that’s your view, but putting big Facebook statuses up about it or starting entire Reddit threads on the subject is virtue signalling - it’s not about the marginalised group, it’s about you.
To put it another way: If you, as an average individual, make a large donation to a charity, it’s generally considered poor form to go around telling everyone “I donated $10,000 to [cause]”, even if that $10,000 means the organisation can buy clothes for all the orphans or provide a life-saving operation or whatever.
I personally will have infinitely more respect for the person who volunteers at a LGBTQ+ outreach centre, donates their time and skills to help members of a marginalised group (maybe teaching Aboriginal kids to read, or fixing stuff at the homes of the elderly for free, or spending some time helping a farmer get ready for a drought) and just gets on with it than someone who says “LOOK AT ME! I’M A GREAT PERSON BECAUSE I HELP ABORIGINES/OLD PEOPLE/ENDANGERED ANIMALS! I’M BETTER THAN YOU!”
And again you call other people ‘simple’ when you’re too fucking retarded to understand, simply don’t agree and/or are unable to explain anything in a rational manner.
You’re a Nazi Sympathizer and a low grade moron. Maybe someone else can tell me what, if anything you have ever contributed on this board, otherwise I’ll just put you on ignore and be done with your idiocy.
If that is what you think when people advocate for social change, then it is little wonder that everyone you see that advocates for social change is an SJW.
Seriously, if someone makes the sacrifice of not getting married until ssm is legalized, it will have zero effect. Not a single person or politician will not icte that Bob and Sarah didn’t marry each other because Steve and John can’t. There is no advocacy, and really no point whatsoever for their sacrifice.
It is only be telling others of the sacrifice that they have made that thy can advocate for the social change that they see as beneficial.
That’s not virtue signalling, that’s advocating for policy change. How is that even possible if they don’t tell anyone?
Not everyone that advocates for social change is simply an attention seeker as you claim in your last paragraph. If everyone acted the way that you wished them to, then social change would never happen.
There is another data point with regards to biological differences between the sexes. Thank you.
The retard is you. Your stupid ass thinks that anyone who thinks not attacking people for political reasons is a good idea is actually a Nazi. I suppose the US SC are Nazis. I suppose the ACLU are Nazis. The only Nazis here are the people who are advocating violence as an acceptable tactic in politics.
Unlike you, I’m not governed by hysteria or emotions. I actually think about the concept.
I am an engineer, and in my province nurses and teachers make more than engineers on average. They also have much better retirement plans and 100% job security. They also don’t have to travel for work, or work a month of straight 12 hour days to make a deadline.
In any event, I am just trying to understand the logic here. Is it that women’s brains and men’s brains are 100% identical, and therefore any differences at the population level must be due to social factors like patriarchy and discrimination? There is absolutely no room for the possibility that women and men simply gravitate towards different things because of evolutionary biology?
And has it occurred to you that if women outnumber men 62/38 in college graduation rates it will not take long before our professional classes as a whole are dominated by women? And if men and women are not different in any meaningful way, wouldn’t you have to say that such a disparity means men are being discriminated against? If not, how do you explain the difference?
octopus is one of the most reasonable people I often totally disagree with. For whatever that’s worth. Sometimes I think if some people would give a little more benefit of the doubt toward the people they are stereotyping, it would be good for the board. There are some people who are complete wastes of energy and space but not everybody with a contrary or even controversial opinion deserves that label.
Although, folks constantly declaring they are the only reasonable people in a sea of emotionality make me LOL. Everyone reasons from emotion. EVERYONE. People lack the cognitive capacity to make decisions without emotion (we know this because we’ve observed what happens when emotions are broken.) In fact, people make most of their decisions based on their gut and rationalize their position post-hoc. First gut instinct, then emotion, THEN a cognitive framework for justification. (See: Descartes’ Error by Damasio for further illustration. Also Moral Minds by Marc Hauser.)
As someone who works in development, I can assure you that the vast majority of people who donate money want public recognition. Selling ‘‘naming rights’’ for capital projects is common. Every room in our new building has someone’s name on it. Sr. Weasel’s grandparents donated an obscenely large amount of money to a local hospital, which included naming rights to the program itself (‘‘Weasel Center for XYZ’’) and our family attended the sign lighting ceremony – the sign being a huge light-up display on the front of the hospital building. The recognition sign was bigger than the hospital sign. The hospital actually had to order a bigger sign for the name of the hospital, because the donor sign was too large. I still have random strangers ask me about it when they learn my name. The Weasels want a legacy. It’s human nature.
Is it a little grotesque? Did we roll our eyes? Sure. But here’s the thing. The people in that hospital are better off for the donation. They are better off regardless of whether the donor got recognition. Likewise, my SMIL has a habit of announcing, at every possible opportunity, what a generous and compassionate person she is. You never saw so much virtue-signaling in your life. At first it is very off-putting. But she’s not wrong. She is an incredibly generous and compassionate person, and her beliefs are sincere.
Maybe we should spend less time criticizing people who actively do good in the world and more time asking ourselves how we measure up. I can tell you compared to my loudmouthed SMIL I am pretty much worthless as a force for good.
Also whoever upthread remarked that psychology offers poorer job prospects than engineering, that is news to me. Every Ph.D-level psychologist I know, and I know a lot of them, including my husband, makes good money. Of course, the average acceptance rate for Ph.D programs is 4%, which is something to consider when you pick your college major. (It takes a lot more time to get a psych Ph.D. than a Masters in engineering though. It took my husband 7 years of grad school, vs. 2 years for my engineering friends.)
And could you explain these social forces in more detail? Just what is it that causes 75% of new veterinarians to be women, for example? Are young boys actively being socialized to not want to help animals? Is there some sort of stigma attached to a boy who wants to be a psychologist? Shy do you think it is that when children are allowed to choose options in school, we see similar splits in gender that we see in academia? Why is it that there are more boys in the computer club and shop class, and more girls on the yearbook committee and in the arts classes?
For that matter, if it’s all just about girls being socialized against science and math, how come women aren’t under-represented in math in college the way they are in engineering?
How many mental flips and twists do you have to do to ignore the plain evidence that sexual dimorphism exists on many levels, that gender is a lot more complex than just reproductive parts and muscle strength, and when left to their down choices the genders rarely split evenly when it comes to interests and jobs?
My company has had an overt policy requiring that we strive for a 50/50 split betweeen men and women for new engineering hires. We go WAY out of the way to make that happen. We send recruiters to colleqges to atttract women. We advertise our female-friendly policies, we have generous family leave, a women’s support network, you name it. Our HR department is probably 90% female. And yet, here we are with about 25% women doing actual engineering. And mysteriously, the graduation rate of female computer engineers is about 25%. It’s all such a mystery!
Thanks for the input, but based on the abhorrent politics and the repeated insistence that I and others have to be simple minded for not seeing his side or agreeing with it, I think I’ll leave him on ignore.
And I don’t see how this isn’t the same slacktivism you condemn. Nor do I think it is useful, since it only further ostracizes these people who are coming from a good place, even if they are wrong. Seems better to try and help them see where they’re going wrong.
Not that I even do that, because I just don’t see it as that big of a problem. I don’t even know about most of these things. They affect basically nothing. The big issues are Nazis and getting Trump out of office–which requires convincing people that Trump is bad before Congress will listen.
I mean, if you’re doing this as a way to reach out to the right, by establishing a common ground so they will listen, great. But I don’t see how it actually helps in stopping these “leftists being dumb.”
If more women want to be in STEM, sure, I’ll support that, but I gotta tell you, it pisses me off more that female-dominated fields, on the whole, tend to be more undervalued, and that ‘‘we need to get more women in STEM’’ carries an inherent value judgment that STEM is superior to typically female dominated professions such as social work, nursing or teaching. It’s not like my career requires less intelligence, education or concrete skill than that of an engineer, and yet I get paid significantly less.
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Seems better to try and help them see where they’re going wrong.
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These people, when they hear you try to say that they are going wrong, will launch a smear campaign against you and everything you hold dear, will impugn your motives, will accuse you of tone policing, and are beyond all hope of reason. It’s like arguing with a racist. These are not ‘‘good people,’’ at least not insofar as their shitty behavior should be excused.
[QUOTE=BigT]
I mean, if you’re doing this as a way to reach out to the right, by establishing a common ground so they will listen, great.
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This.
Also because I like to find out what other people think and use it to challenge my own assumptions, and maybe learn some shit. I don’t assume that I know everything and that everything of value there is to learn is knowledge to be dispensed only by liberals. I know that really bothers you. I don’t know what to tell you.
Today I spent all day in training so that my org can improve the quality of services we provide to LGBTQ survivors of domestic and sexual violence. One of the big topics of the day was intersectionality, and so I’ve spent much of my day thinking, ''What ways have we failed in this dialog on privilege and intersectionality, and how can we do better?" The first part, how we’ve failed, I have a pretty decent idea, which is that we ignore it. When people of color write call-out blogs to ‘‘White People’’ they are ignoring intersectionality as much as white feminists ignore black women or the Human Rights Campaign ignores trans folks. I am white (privileged), straight (privileged), cisgender (privileged), but I am also chronically ill, psychologically and neurologically disadvantaged (PTSD, major depressive disorder, epilepsy and ADHD), come from a poor background and spent the first 17 years of my life in an abusive environment (not so much privileged.) And that oversimplification of identity is one of our huge messaging problems when it comes to identity politics. It’s something we understand internally but people not directly involved in the social justice movement aren’t getting it. I only understand that because I’m bothering to listen to the right.
As far as the second question, ''How can we do better?" I can’t answer that question until I understand how the skeptics think. I’m playing the long game.
Anti-fascist protesters(yes, I know the term is made up but we have nothing else to call them yet), assaulted and caused the hospitalization of two journalists:
Basically he ran into the crowd with nothing but an iPhone, began filming people grieving, refused to stop, never identified himself as a journalist, was pushed back and insistently charged back in to film when someone got tired of his aggressive shit and hit him.
Edit: And I got that link from Jake Tapper’s twitter feed, so if you click Adaher’s link, you’ll find it there.
