Maybe we can use something similar… 
… 
Maybe the social justice movement doesn’t think enlisting morons would actually be helpful. Maybe they think it would be counterproductive to rely on people who aren’t actually committed, and in any case a poor use of their oh-so-limited resources. Maybe they realise “useful idiot” is a tactic the bad guys use.
Maybe they’re not relying on something as facile as body counts, and actually value intangibles like degree of commitment, ideological purity and lack of obstructionism. Maybe they just don’t want to hang out with a buzzkill. Maybe they’re not all that into Vulcan cosplay.
Sorry - I still have no clue what he’s trying to say, seriously. I first thought it was about people making incorrect snap judgements about things like the BLM protests and how bad it was for the majority to tell the minority how they should feel (as I wrote in my earlier post). I was obviously incorrect.
Now it seems to be about picking charities or creating new pepperoni?
I have no history or knowledge of the OP or the pit thread, so I assume there is some veiled subtext in this mud that I’m not seeing.
I would be appreciative if you or someone else - in a single sentence - could articulate WTF this post is about? I’m curious now.
Do you think you’ve actually said something there? ‘They’re separate causes because they’re separate causes’ is meaningless.
ETA: to clarify that that’s not a direct quote. It is however the only meaning I can find in what I quoted.
It’s extremely ironic that you say we aren’t listening. I went over and read the pit thread. It’s exactly like this one. You end by circling back to where you started. Because… you’re not listening. Worse, you keep asking people to explain their positions to you, they do, carefully and fully, and you complain that nobody is willing to explain anything to you.
Let me try. You’re wrong. Everything you are saying is wrong. The stuff you proclaim to be obvious is wrong. You need to wipe your head clean and listen.
Social justice is not a thing. It is an attitude, the combined thoughts and actions of hundreds of millions of people. It must be ingrained into society so that it becomes the default position, the automatic response, the one that requires no extra or special thought. And deviations from the default must be noticed and if possible punished.
Nobody knows how to do this. There are no plans, no pathways, no manuals, no instructions, no check-off boxes. You are correct in saying that it is achieved by “the combined effect of a million actions taken by thousands of individual people, over a long period of time.”
But you are completely wrong in saying “You can also find people who, though well-intentioned, took actions were either irrelevant or accidentally made Goal A take longer to accomplish. Had they understood that that was happening, they could have NOT done so, and helped out instead.”
This is exactly the check-box fallacy. You cannot know which actions helped, which hindered, which made progress slower or faster, which were irrelevant, until history looks back at the era. And even then every two historians will come to different conclusions.
I can make this even plainer.
a) if something can be done today, do it today.
b) If something will take time, start working on it today.
c) a and b are in no way incompatible.
d) there are no cheat codes to make the future happen easier and faster.
It occurs to me that you might respond to that by saying that I said only that they’re inseparable, without supporting that sufficiently to avoid a similar charge. So here is why I’m saying that.
Since before the United States of America existed as a country, the dominant culture has considered the lives, persons, minds of black people* to be worth less than those of white people. This attitude was enshrined into law before the country was created, and continued in force of law for long after its creation, including in the form of segregation laws continuing long after the abolition of legal chattel slavery. But the laws didn’t create the attitude, though they certainly encouraged it; the attitude created the laws.
Over the past 400 years, we’ve succeeded, gradually, in getting rid of first legal chattel slavery, and then eventually and in many cases fairly recently getting rid of laws explicitly and overtly enshrining racism. We’ve even to some extent made it considered impolite (though not in all social circles) to explicitly and overtly express racism. However, the results of those practices remain. They remain in differences in wealth, which are passed down through generations and which are also still affected by current conditions; in differences in health, which are also passed down through generations but which are also still currently affected by such things as greater exposure to pollutants and lack of good medical care; in differences in chances of winding up in jail and in length of sentences; in differences in access to education; in differences in access to jobs, in part because of differences in access to education; as well as in remaining deliberate acts of racism because yes, we do still have overt racists, and in unconscious acts of racism because people swimming in the water get wet, like it or not.
And all of these things are entangled together (which is, generally, how reality actually works). People with poor educations are likely to have trouble getting good jobs. People with brain damage from pollutants are likely to have trouble in school. People who don’t have much money are likely to get poor medical care. People who are sick are likely to have trouble in school and to have trouble holding down jobs. People whose families have inherited wealth are likely to get better medical care and better educations. Picking one item out of the list and saying it’s higher priority than the others doesn’t make much sense because success at fixing that one depends on also working on the others.
Fixing this, or at least improving it, requires changes in material conditions.
It also requires changes in attitude: partly because the negative attitudes in themselves do damage; and partly because we’re not going to get approval for changes in material conditions without first changing attitudes.
Let me repeat that: we’re not going to get any useful change, whether it’s in the chances of police killing people or in any of the rest of this 400-year-old problem, without changing attitudes. Changing the attitudes is inseparable from changing conditions.
Changing attitudes is inseparable from saving lives.
Taking down statues of people who were and are honored for enforcing or attempting to enforce racism is part of changing attitudes.
*and others, but the focus in this conversation seems to be on BLM, and some of the above doesn’t apply to others