How do you distinguish folks who honestly push for social justice from SJWs, whatever they are?
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Why is being in favor of social justice NOT the same thing as being a Social Justice Warrior? It seems the label is being applied in the same way as “politically correct,” as if there’s something wrong with being concerned about how our actions impact others, or pushing for civil rights.
[aside]As someone who grew up camping all over the country, I cannot see BLM without thinking “Bureau of Land Management.” :smack:[/aside]
I think it depends on whose doing the labeling and what their personal beliefs are. If “they” disagree with you, well then, you’re just an SJW.
I’d say that it goes further than that. When “they” wish to disparage, belittle, and mock you, then you’re just an SJW. It’s intended to be contemptuous at best.
It’s certainly intended to be contemptuous. It’s just that sometimes the only way you’d even know it was supposed to be contemptuous would be if you knew it was supposed to be contemptuous. It’s like a Homer Simpson thing where he’s saying something true but you can tell he doesn’t think it’s true because he’s talking stupid.
Oh, the social justice warriors fought for marriage equality and now they have it, so they’ve moved on to some other cause, and they’ll probably move on to some other one after that.
Yeah? You think? You think that very slightly inflated version of a true statement?
Thank you! I’ll finally have an opinion on it! 
If I had my own opinion, which I don’t because I’ve never had an opinion of my own in my life, I might suspect that legalized polygamy would be a gold mine for lawyers, but I’ll wait for Cecil to clear it up for me.
Not always so simple. And much easier when commenting about societal forces and trends than about individuals. (More below.)
I once saw where a certain historical religious figure, who was known as a religious zealot and heresy fighter, commented on the difference between himself and another contemporary religious figure who was known as an even bigger zealot and heresy fighter. He said the difference wasn’t just in degree, but was more fundamental, as in the following illustration.
There was a baker who had a persistent problem with a mouse running around in his shop. He couldn’t catch it, and he finally went out and got a cat, which caught it and ate it. At that point the baker was happy and the cat was happy. But there was a difference. The baker was hoping that was the last mouse and there wouldn’t be any more. The cat was hoping there would be all the more mice, so that he could catch and eat all the more.
So too there’s a fundamental difference between a person who sees injustice (or heresy, as the case may be) and feels the need to fight it and so goes out and fights it, and someone who has a need to be an injustice (or heresy) fighter, someone who needs to feel that he is nobly battling the Forces of Evil. The second type would be what’s meant by the term SJW, a guy who is always looking for an injustice to fight, so he can get that righteous glow.
And one crucial difference is in how one assesses a given injustice (or heresy). The guy who is dragged into fighting injustice has no incentive to exaggerate or otherwise incorrectly assess the level of injustice he’s contemplating. Not so the person with the psychological need to be an injustice fighter - he has every incentive to exaggerate to himself the scale and scope of the evil that he’s fighting, so as to make himself all the bigger hero in fighting it.
And this has practical relevance in assessing the issues and public policy. As noted earlier in this thread, many times there are competing interests at stake. Moving too much in one direction risks harm in the other. Protecting the interests of one class of people risks harming the interests of another. Something has to give. And here is where you need a rational and unbiased assessment of the benefits and harm to the various interested parties. And if you have a situation where SJWs have seized on one issue as the primary area of their focus, with the attendant need to exaggerate the scope and scale of this particular injustice, then the scale gets improperly tilted in the direction of preventing that injustice, at the expense of other competing interests whose needs are not the focus of a social justice campaign.
This is what I was suggesting was in play here, in my first post to this thread.
There’s some truth to this. But it’s not as illogical as may seem.
To the extent that facts and logic would dictate that X is true and Y is not, then all else being equal any random person would be more likely to believe X and reject Y. If he doesn’t, then there should be some reason for it. Maybe the guy is ignorant of the facts, maybe he’s not capable of logical reasoning, maybe he’s biased. Of course, it depends on how conclusive the facts and logic are. The more the facts and logic leave some ambiguity, the more it’s possible that the one who disagrees with X might simply have a difference of opinion. The more the facts and logic are overwhelmingly conclusive of X, the more likely it is that the one denying X is ignorant and/or illogical, biased etc.
And the same applies even more so to groups. Because as noted, the above only holds all else being equal. But all else is not equal, and especially when it comes to individuals. Maybe there’s some reason specific to this individual, based on his experience, psychology, whatever that leads him to a different conclusion. But if you’re talking about why it obvious that X is true but 50% of the country disagrees with it, then it’s all the more question as to how could so many people be wrong. And this is where it’s even more valid to look for a common shared factor other than facts and logic which have led so many people to the wrong conclusion.
As a general rule this appears to be completely uncontroversial - I would bet there is not a single poster who participates in these types of discussions who has not at some point done something of this sort. (Pick a random political thread.) The suggestion that the need of SJWs to find, exaggerate, and fight certain SJ issues might be one force capable of influencing public attitudes is just a sub-set of this concept.
As above, it’s easier with groups than with individuals. I mean, it’s not hard to imagine where, based on the description above you might be able to speculate that some individual or another is motivated - whether in whole or in part - by SJW motivations. But it’s a lot easier when all you’re doing is speculating about forces influencing public attitudes, as I as doing here.
I think your analogy misses the point. For one thing, you can get rid of mice in a bakery, but social injustice has no clear endpoint in sight because humans will always be dicks. Look at the most profound social issue of our generation: gay rights. Do gays have full rights now that they can marry? For some people, they want to stop progress there. They lost marriage, they can accept that, but no more. But there will always be gay adoptions, or gays as scout leaders, or gay teachers, and there will be people fighting back to say “this far, no more!” to all the gays who want full and equal rights.
Even looking at last generation’s fight of feminism and women’s rights, we’re still far short of full equality. Look back another generation and you see the win on Civil Rights for blacks and minorities, but even now, decades later, they are disproportionately poor, over-represented in jail, and a severe minority in power and influence.
SJWs, the way you classify them, realize that the fight doesn’t stop just because you get one win or a handful of wins. Societal transformation takes much longer. Maybe some do it because they like fighting, like some of us post because we like debating, but that’s ok because we’ll never run out of things to fight or debate about
I don’t see how that relates to the point I’ve made here. Which is - again and in brief this time: whether a person is motivated to fight injustice by the injustice itself or by their own personal need to be an injustice fighter will influence how they weigh the injustice they’ve chosen to fight against other competing concerns.
These reason why it relates to your point is that I don’t believe there’s anything wrong about the SJW who moves from injustice to injustice. There are always injustices, we’re not at some magical point in time where once we win that last battle, we’re done. The SJW sees that and is motivated by that, going from one to another with equal fervor. The self-motivation you described is reflected by actual real world injustices that must be corrected
I’m not sure what you’re saying. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with moving from injustice to injustice, per se.
As above, the issue with the SJW as relates to this particular issue is that he will tend to over-weigh the specific injustice that he’s chosen to be a hero about as compared to other considerations involved.
The part about them moving from one issue to the next simply implies that when the attention of SJWs turns to a given issue then the importance of this particular issue will come to have disproportionate weight that it did not have before SJWs seized on it. Thus the solving of one social injustice will cause another “lucky” social injustice to get magnified in proportion to other injustices, if it happens to be the one that is seized on by SJWs.
This is a classic ad hominem. Rather than addressing the merits of the claims, you’re imputing motives to SJWs and then using the motives you imagine they have to diminish their concerns.
Those motives have nothing to do with the merit of the concerns. It doesn’t describe the concerns. It doesn’t lead to understanding.
The imputation of ignoble motives to those you disagree with serves no productive purpose.
It’s not any sort of ad hominem. It’s a suggested explanation of why one problem might be currently overweighed as compared to other competing concerns.
If you look at my original post on the subject (post #12 in this thread), I laid out the issue as being one of competing discomfort of two groups of people, and questioned why the discomfort of one people seems be being given priority. So I suggested two possibilities, one of which was that the discomfort of the one group is currently the beneficiary of a SJW campaign, while the other was not.
Agree or not, it was a valid and substantive point, and has nothing to do with ad hominems.
That’s just a restatement of the problem. If you think the prioritization of the two competing groups is correct or incorrect, you should explain why: telling other people that they’re prioritizing wrong because they’re biased doesn’t tell anything about the merits of the prioritization.
Show first that one concern is overweighed in the first place, and then anyone who’s interested (a small group I am sure) can trace your analysis of the motives of the group that you’re calling incorrect. But your “why” is an attack on motives, not an attack on the merits.
Did you read that post?
I first laid out that it’s two groups with largely similar and competing concerns (which would make them even) and then pointed out that the majority is the cis people, which should ostensibly mean their concerns win out. So that’s exactly what you recommend.
Going on to then speculate as to why society or parts thereof might be weighing things differently is not an ad hominem attack. It’s countering a potential objection: “if you’re so right, why doesn’t everyone see it that way?”
An ad hominem response is where you fail to address the issue altogether in favor of just attacking unrelated personal characteristics of the opponent. That has nothing at all to do with what was done here.
First–no, I didn’t go back to reread that post, relying instead on your summary. You’re right that the first part of the case you made, in that post, is valid (although ridiculous). The latter part is the ad hominem part.
You don’t effectively address an imaginary appeal to popularity with an ad hominem. That’s what you tried to do. And it’s what you continued in post 166, 168, 170, etc.
You don’t effectively undermine a valid argument by incorrectly calling it “ad hominem”. That’s what you tried to do.
Nothing in post 166, 168, 170, etc. is valid.
The “competing concerns” aren’t similar, at least from my perspective – one group’s concerns are largely due to bigotry (whether the source of the bigotry is ignorance or hatred/disgust), while the others’ concerns are largely about safety. If transgender people weren’t at serious risk of being assaulted for using bathrooms in public places, then this wouldn’t be nearly as large of an issue, and the concerns might be closer to being similar (and similarly about discomfort, even if one side’s discomfort largely comes from bigotry).
That’s just rehashing the thread again.
At the time I made the post about SJWs I don’t think the issue of safety had come up yet, and at any rate my comment about SJWs was in the context of my having laid out the issues as being competing discomfort.
Subsequent to that post, someone raised the issue of safety and I questioned whether safety was an issue with using birth certificate bathrooms specifically or possibly the risks were the same or greater with using the gender-identity bathrooms, and then UP claimed to have some secret sources that she had posted elsewhere but declined to share here, and the rest is history.
But again, the comment about SJW was not addressing the safety aspect.
Cool. There are LOTS of them out there. Mormons, Muslims. I think you probably know that they will tell you they would like equality of marriage too.
The point is this - IF they tell you they want it, will you live up to your beliefs and support it too?