So, like with “rationality” and “Hollywood rationality”, we could have “social justice” and, uhm, “tumblr social justice”? Maybe this would work.
My main objection would be that words “social justice” already feel like a weird way to express “equality” or something like that. It’s already a word that meant something (“justice”) with an adjective that allowes you to remove or redefine its parts, and make it a flexible applause light.
Historical note, as I understand things—the emotionally abusive power grab aspects didn’t happen by coincidence. A good many people said that if they were polite and reasonable, what they said got ignored, so they started dumping rage.
I propose an alternative explanation. Some people are just born psychopaths; they love to hurt other people.
Whatever nice cause you start, if it gains just a little power, sooner or later one of them will notice it and decide they like it. Then they will try to join it and optimize it for their own purposes. You will recognize that this happened when people around you start repeating memes that hurting other people is actually good for your cause. Now, in such environment people most skilled in hurting others can quickly rise to the top.
(Actually, both our explanations can be true at the same time. Maybe any movement that doesn’t open its doors to psychopaths it doomed in the long term, because other people simply don’t have enough power to change the society.)
I’d expect rage to be better at converting people already predisposed to belief into True Believers, but worse at making believers of the undecided, and much worse at winning over those predisposed to opposition.
The rage level actually drives away some of the people who would be inclined to help them, and has produced something that looks a lot like PTSD in some of the people in the movement who got hit by opposition from others who were somewhat on the same side..
Still, they’ve gained a certain amount of ground on the average. I have no idea what the outcome will be.
As far as I can tell, there’s very little in the way of physical threats, but (most) people are very vulnerable to emotional attacks.
As I understand it, that’s part of what’s powering SJWs—they felt (and I’d say rightly) that they were and are subject to pervasive emotional attack both from the culture and from individuals, and are trying to make a world they can be comfortable in.
That “as I understand it” is not boilerplate—I read a fair amount of SJ material and (obviously) spent a lot of time thinking and obsessing about it, but this is a huge subject (and isn’t the same in all times, places, and sub-cultures), and I’ve never been an insider.
That would be one option. Or (this is different because “Hollywood rationality” is not actually a variety of rationality) we could say that both those things really are varieties of social justice, but one of them is social justice plus a bunch of crazy ideas and attitudes that unfortunately happen to have come along for the ride in various social-justice-valuing venues.
I don’t think “social justice” is just a weirdly contorted way to say “equality”. The addition of an adjective is necessary because “justice” simpliciter covers things like imprisoning criminals rather than innocent bystanders, and not having kleptocratic laws; “social justice” means something like “justice in people’s social interactions”. In some cases that’s roughly the same thing as equality, but in others equality might be the wrong thing (because different groups want different things, or because some historical injustice is best dealt with by a temporary compensating inequality in the other direction). -- Whether such inequality ever is a good approach, and how often if so, is a separate matter, but unless it’s inconceivable “equality” can’t be the right word.
Still, I’m not greatly enamoured of the term “social justice”. But it’s there, and it seems like it means something potentially useful, and it would be a shame if it ended up only being applicable where there’s a whole lot of craziness alongside the concern for allegedly marginalized groups.
So, like with “rationality” and “Hollywood rationality”, we could have “social justice” and, uhm, “tumblr social justice”? Maybe this would work.
My main objection would be that words “social justice” already feel like a weird way to express “equality” or something like that. It’s already a word that meant something (“justice”) with an adjective that allowes you to remove or redefine its parts, and make it a flexible applause light.
Historical note, as I understand things—the emotionally abusive power grab aspects didn’t happen by coincidence. A good many people said that if they were polite and reasonable, what they said got ignored, so they started dumping rage.
I propose an alternative explanation. Some people are just born psychopaths; they love to hurt other people.
Whatever nice cause you start, if it gains just a little power, sooner or later one of them will notice it and decide they like it. Then they will try to join it and optimize it for their own purposes. You will recognize that this happened when people around you start repeating memes that hurting other people is actually good for your cause. Now, in such environment people most skilled in hurting others can quickly rise to the top.
(Actually, both our explanations can be true at the same time. Maybe any movement that doesn’t open its doors to psychopaths it doomed in the long term, because other people simply don’t have enough power to change the society.)
And then they complain when anybody else is ‘uncivil’.
I called it an emotionally abusive power grab because that’s how I see it.
Nonetheless, I still think they’re right about some of their issues.
I’d expect rage to be better at converting people already predisposed to belief into True Believers, but worse at making believers of the undecided, and much worse at winning over those predisposed to opposition.
The rage level actually drives away some of the people who would be inclined to help them, and has produced something that looks a lot like PTSD in some of the people in the movement who got hit by opposition from others who were somewhat on the same side..
Still, they’ve gained a certain amount of ground on the average. I have no idea what the outcome will be.
Well, if you can vaguely imply that it might be physically dangerous to disagree, a little rage can work wonders.
As far as I can tell, there’s very little in the way of physical threats, but (most) people are very vulnerable to emotional attacks.
As I understand it, that’s part of what’s powering SJWs—they felt (and I’d say rightly) that they were and are subject to pervasive emotional attack both from the culture and from individuals, and are trying to make a world they can be comfortable in.
That “as I understand it” is not boilerplate—I read a fair amount of SJ material and (obviously) spent a lot of time thinking and obsessing about it, but this is a huge subject (and isn’t the same in all times, places, and sub-cultures), and I’ve never been an insider.
That would be one option. Or (this is different because “Hollywood rationality” is not actually a variety of rationality) we could say that both those things really are varieties of social justice, but one of them is social justice plus a bunch of crazy ideas and attitudes that unfortunately happen to have come along for the ride in various social-justice-valuing venues.
I don’t think “social justice” is just a weirdly contorted way to say “equality”. The addition of an adjective is necessary because “justice” simpliciter covers things like imprisoning criminals rather than innocent bystanders, and not having kleptocratic laws; “social justice” means something like “justice in people’s social interactions”. In some cases that’s roughly the same thing as equality, but in others equality might be the wrong thing (because different groups want different things, or because some historical injustice is best dealt with by a temporary compensating inequality in the other direction). -- Whether such inequality ever is a good approach, and how often if so, is a separate matter, but unless it’s inconceivable “equality” can’t be the right word.
Still, I’m not greatly enamoured of the term “social justice”. But it’s there, and it seems like it means something potentially useful, and it would be a shame if it ended up only being applicable where there’s a whole lot of craziness alongside the concern for allegedly marginalized groups.