On Alexander Hamilton and Disney Movies · 2:40pm Apr 23rd, 2016
The more I look into the man, the more I realize he's my goddamn spirit animal for a lot of reasons.
Mostly I just wanted to settle in on one quote right here;
In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.
This is huge for me.
I've been talking... fighting, honestly, with a lot of self-proclaimed SJW friends of mine. I don't use that term as a pejorative -- that is the label they have chosen to proudly represent themselves.
And one thing that constantly infuriates me is this mindset that "I am right, I have the moral highground, and my opponent isn't a bad person. Therefore they simply don't understand my point of view yet". It's this incredibly condescending mindset that someone can't disagree with you and still be a sufficiently educated human being.
Stop explaining to me, I already understand. I just think you're wrong.
I must admit, I've been having a bad week of it. It seems most of my remaining highschool friends and old acquaintances have been enveloped under this banner, and I have a moral failing for not siding with them.
But it's that quote that summarizes my viewpoint so succinctly.
If you believe in your cause, truly believe in your cause, you don't organize a rally of fifteen people to camp out on your local university campus with angry expressions, accomplish nothing, and believe you've won a moral victory. You go into politics and you find a way to make your ideas palatable and legislative. You go into business and provide funding for efforts and causes you believe in. You become a journalist and do your damned best to educate people about the issues you think matter, or support the people who are doing that. Or the last one, the one I'm shooting hard for.
You know what my idea of a successful social justice movement is?
Zootopia. Just grossed $900,000,000 to date. Every one of those dollar signs ends up representing a person who was influenced by that movie's message, and it's got a 98% audience "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning I'm inclined to say that of all those people, about forty nine in fifty came away receptive to its message.
And it had one hell of a loaded allegory for racism behind it, didn't it?
For a lot of kids, and we were all kids once, are going to grow up with Zootopia being the definitive movie of their childhood, and that loaded message is going to go along with it. To the parents, too.
It's something I've been preaching for years, now. Real societal change is in immersion, and immersion for the past century has been through media. From radio to television to the internet, we've finally worked out how to mass-manufacture storytelling.
Because what storytelling is, at its core, is a teaching tool. A message delivery system. And if you make it entertaining enough, people won't even realize they've learned the lesson you're trying to teach. Songs and stories predate agriculture in human society for that very reason.
How many more minds have been changed because of an Aesop's fable than from the fiery conviction of a preacher for the other religion?
So no. I don't think your message or your ideals are wrong, SJWs. But I think if you push against people, all they're going to want to do is push back. Even if you're right, even if they'd been inclined to believe. And I think if you genuinely believe what you're preaching, rather than the desire to preach it, you'll know that's a bad thing. Because it's not that I don't agree with your end goals; gender equality is important, being trans was a punchline in the mainstream until very recently, income inequality is at staggering levels, racism is fucking bullshit and sexual assault is way too common, now and forever.
It's that simply getting angry about it, no matter how loud you are about it, accomplishes nothing. The mere act of being outraged accomplished nothing and contributes less. Simply cherrypicking language and trying to tear apart subtext in everything -- and that's coming from someone who is trained at media deconstruction -- doesn't produce anything to advance your narrative, it only criticizes someone else for putting their own out there.
It should be said that I'm mostly writing this for my own benefit, to get my own thoughts on the page. Otherwise I would be dying of the irony that I didn't wrap this neatly up in a little narrative. Might have to get around to doing that at some point...
Of course, the last time I posted a blog like this, it ended badly. But I prepared another Alexander Hamilton quote for that, all nice and proper for you.
A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous.
If only everyone could understand this.
Amen.
And no kidding about Zootopia, what an amazingly well timed movie.
ADDENDUM #1: In the immortal words of Zach Wiener; "Come on, hatemail"
ADDENDUM #2: I promise to stop writing the "I am the biggest idiot" series of blogs I've unintentionally started here, I'm just having a rough week of these people.
EDIT ADDENDUM #3: I'm going to bed, it's 1am. Aragon's said -- """"Volunteered""" -- he'll watch over the comments section in my absence. If I wake up to a flame war I will be very, very amused reading it all. What? I'm not one for echo chambers. Just no one call the mods, or they'll get miffed at me.
I'm going to comment first and say that there's an argument one can use against this -- that of the SJW message needing to be rude, because otherwise, it gets ignored. Appealing to the respect policies that usually rule politics is said to be something that only benefits those already in power, so they gotta think out of the box.
In layman terms: if they're not being rude and they try to be polite, then they can be rightfully ignored by The Man. But if they're angry, and rude, and annoying, then you can't ignre them -- they're not playing by your rules. You will listen to them. Because that's the only way to do it.
Likewise, this argument continues with the idea that, when people accuse SJWs of being overly rude, they're actually just uncomfortable. The message they're screaming goes against the status quo that "the polite ones" like so much. But they can't attack the message without looking like the bad guys -- so they attack the form of said message. You dislike what they say, but to hide that, you attack how they say it.
That is an argument. I don't think it's a great argument, though.
Please have in mind -- so far, I haven't said what my opinion is. I've just predicted some people's reasoning against this blog. To those people, I'd like to preemptively answer: by reasoning this way, you're making rudeness not just a means to an end, but the end itself of your entire rally. You're making sure that the people who already think like you think even more like you, but you're rejecting any kind of outsiders.
You're denying the idea of an argument and closing it before it even starts. What this does is not good for your movement, because you create enemies. It makes sure that whoever had doubts about you sees you as somebody who can't reason. This is not convincing anybody, this is just alienating others.
Because that message says: you are wrong, and nothing you will ever, EVER say will be right. As such, I refuse to talk to you. I'll just scream words at you and insult you, and that's the best way to fight, and that's the only way society can't advance.
I call bollocks on that.
To win this fight, social justice needs allies. Pumping up your own members in exchange for creating more enemies is not helping the cause. It's damaging it.
So be fucking polite, God dammit. Otherwise nobody will ever listen to you. They'll just write you off as background noise.
Being a lover of history, I don't defend the change of the $20 bill. Obviously slavery is/was bad and Harriet Tubman and the whole underground railroad was good you'd have to be retarded levels of racist not to believe so.
Obviously the Trail of Tears was another instance of Native Americans suffering at the hands of Americans.
But! There were seceding threats in the 1830s. Andrew Jackson shut that shit down. Deeds of certain eras you have to take with a grain of salt and look at in the moral context of the time. Slavery is a fine human tradition, we just call it differently when white people are victims of it.
SJWs warp a lot of events and policies and judge them by today's sociopolitical atmosphere, without taking any of the juggling (or any fact that inconveniences them) that surrounded whatever was done.
A coworker of mine (Lumbee Indian) recently had his entire worldview shaken when he accused me of A) being white. I promptly notified him of my Czech Romani ancestry. To the government, he can fill in his ancestry and get special recognition as a protected minority. He calls it racist because he has to file as "Other" since his ancestry makes up such a miniscule proportion of our nation's population that to list it alongside Caucasian (A ridiculous label in and of itself, because maybe 1% of those identifying by it are actually peoples that come from the Caucasus Mountains region in Russia.), African-American, Asian, Mexican, etc would be absurd. I get informed that I can file as Czechoslovakian or "Romanian" but not both and asked if I meant my family was originally from Romania and emigrated to Czechoslovakia then to America. And then I asked him why, if everything is so geared to protecting "white" races and elevating "white" races over nonwhite minorities that even if I correctly filed I would not receive the same "personhood" status or protections as he. By cold logic, we've been far more "useful" to the eponymous White Man. When the White Man first came to America, we were the most skilled tradesmen in all of Europe. We raised the best jewelers, tinsmiths, builders, we raised and bred the finest horses, we were the finest weavers and dyers of cloth, and we "donated" some of the most useful words from our language that you still find in the English lexicon today. While that was going on, his people were running around in deerskin underwear and at the very beginning of a very particularly bloody back and forth between the Native American people as a whole and the White Man.
In the 1930s and 40s, they were a protected people and being Native American was a point of pride for American citizenry.
So I asked him why, if we're still the still the most reviled race on the face of this Earth, and were one of the races most affected by the Holocaust (4,000 people died on the Trail of Tears that affected his people, and the march was necessary because his people had an antagonistic relationship with the White Man. 500,000 of my people died in concentration camps. That's the number that reached the concentration camps, the actual number is probably far higher. If you killed a Jew you had to file paperwork and it was recorded. We were dragged out into the woods and shot. Because the White Man didn't like us.) the same question I ask any minority that just bitches and complains. Why, if we have suffered so much more than any one of them that complain, do I not blame the White Man for any and every problem I have in my life?
Y'know, that's twice now I've seen thought provoking blogs today and had no idea how to respond.
It's an "Us and them" mindset that results from a situation like this. That dehumanizing thought process that makes good people feel justified in doing horrible things to other good people. My favorite quote to illustrate how it should be goes something like this:
"Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. I am part of mankind, therefore any man's death diminishes me." - Ernest Hemmingway
I think a lot of the problem with the whole SJW mindset stems just from their naming scheme. Take Feminism for example. Right there in the name they segregate and alienate a huge group of people who might support them, half the entire population even. Not only that, but it's the half of the population that they've defined as having all the power to change things. Feminism becomes a girls club, when their mission statement is to have men and women stand together as equals. Anyone who isn't with them is against them, but they have a big sign on the door that says "No boys allowed".
Names are far more important than we give them credit for, and if we really want equality around here we need to start by fixing them. Forget the gay rights, black rights, women's rights, and all the other "x rights" movements. They're all fighting for the same ideal, and they should do it under one banner. What ever happened to "Human rights"?
... maybe look into him more, dude. Alexander Hamilton was a complex individual, but one of the central tenets of his political philosophy was "government by the monied elite, for the monied elite." He hated democracy. Hated it. And many of his high-minded ideals fell apart the second they encountered reality. He did a fair amount of good in his life, and he didn't deserve to get murdered by Aaron Burr, who was worse (Aaron Burr was a literal supervillain who had a plan to build an inland empire in the US ruled by himself and his heirs) but Hamilton's politics were kind of jacked up even by the standards of the time.
Basically, the musical is amazing as a piece of art but total garbage as a piece of history. I almost threw a book across the room when Eliza started singing about how he'd have done "so much more" for the cause of abolition had he lived. Hamilton's political fortunes were largely sustained by tapping into his wife's families money, and the Schuyler fortune came from slavery. He also spent the last two decades of his life doing jack and shit about that little problem even when given the chance. The other members of the New York Manumission Society had a lot to say about that, because when they approached their famous buddy with friends in high places about advancing their cause they got the brush-off.
Hmm.
Speaking only for myself, on the one hand, I've been in this position myself.
On the other hand, I also often find myself in a position where it seems like the people I'm arguing with literally can't comprehend the simplest words.
"2 + 2 = 4."
"Murc, you're an idiot; 2 + 3 doesn't equal 4, it equals 5."
"No no, 2 + 2 = 4."
"It doesn't. It equals 5. 3 added to 2 is equal to 5."
"... yes, it does; but I'm not talking about 3. I'm talking about 2."
"Right. The number between 2 and 4."
"... no! The number between 1 and 3!"
"Why are you yelling at me? I know what the number 3 is. It doesn't make 4 when you add it to 2."
"Arrgh!"
And it's like... am I just explaining things badly? It seems like I must be. So I keep trying to explain, and the end result is people get mad because they think I'm just re-iterating this very wrong thing over and over, but their rebuttals seem insane to me because they're rebutting things I literally have not said.
So I dunno.
Well... do you?
Because that seems like the point to which all others are subordinate here.
Why not? University sit-ins have a long history of accomplishing things. They don't always work; sometimes you only get like fifteen people and nobody gives a shit.
Sometimes you get a few thousand, the university massively overreacts, it goes viral, and people get fired and policy changes.
I would submit that you have things backwards. Politicians trail social movements. They do not lead them. That's never happened in a successful way in this country, ever.
This does not mean that one shouldn't go into politics with the intent of creating change. Indeed, despite their caricature as amoral greedheads that's why most politicians do it. But politics involves compromising yourself. Heavily.
Zootopia is an excellent movie, but it is an end state, not a beginning one. Zootopia doesn't get made without a lot of people doing a lot of pushing for a very long time.
Fiery conviction works really well given the proper audience. The entire Protestant Reformation was based on fiery conviction and it moved the hearts of hundreds of thousands of people, even when it was preaching stuff that was utterly terrifying. (Calvinism, I'm looking at you.) All three of the American Great Awakenings involved fiery preacher-men converting folks from other denominations by the thousands and the millions.
It's worth noting that this is, often, part of a deliberate political strategy. If you think you have the better argument, you want pushback, because that gives you the chance to win.
It also forces people to choose sides, which is an essential part of every single successful society-wide social movement. The two greatest success stories in modern American history on that score are the gay rights and civil rights movements, and they both achieved their victories by deliberately engineering scenarios in which people couldn't just be comfortably passive anymore; they had to pick a team, and the gamble was they'd be good people and choose correctly.
That absolutely doesn't always work. But it is usually necessary, especially if you want to achieve change fast rather than at a glacial pace.
... isn't criticizing someone else for putting their own narrative out there precisely what you're doing here?
For that matter, it seems like this statement is doing precisely what you accuse others of; it assumes bad faith.
I dunno, man. It seems like telling people they're not allowed to get angry and then do something with it is counterproductive. Anger is an effective and necessary organizing tool. It's also often justified. One of my favorite writers is often castigated for his "refusal to engage" with his loudest critics, and his response to that has always rung true: "I'm not going to debate my humanity."
It seems wrong of me to tell people "You shouldn't get angry and shout and stamp your feet when people tell you to your face you're human scum, and just because they're wearing a three-piece suit and using civil language doesn't mean you're obligated to do the same thing in return."
This is, of course, highly context dependent. If someone has been invited to a formal exchange of ideas with the environment and rules laid out long-beforehand, showing up and flipping the table is certainly not appropriate. But "hey, these people are doing something that's total bullshit, and we're gonna call them out on it, and we're gonna do so loudly, and we're gonna call a spade a fucking spade, and we're not gonna apologize for using words like 'fucking' and 'bullshit'" seems like something that's not only okay to do, but necessary to do.
3890782
Mmm, I think you've characterized the argument somewhat, Aragon, at least in the form I often see it made.
The message doesn't need to be rude, but it does, I think, need to be disruptive. I know you're... Spanish, right? I don't know how politics work there, but in a specifically American context there's an enormous status quo bias. Messages that challenge that status quo generally need a certain amount of disruptive punch behind them in order to attain any amount of visibility at all.
Indeed, that goes to what I said earlier about trying to provoke responses that make people choose sides. A lot of people are comfortable ignoring things like endemic structural racism; they're less comfortable being on the side of people setting dogs and fire houses onto unarmed protestors, even if those protestors are, technically, criminals. It makes them squirm.
There's also the fact that rudeness is relative. You can be unconscionably rude will wearing a fine suit and using entirely civil language and never raising your voice. Some of the rudest remarks I've ever seen have come during Question Time in the British parliament from people with cut-glass accents using five-dollar words. People said that King was rude, that Ida Wells was rude, that Harvey Milk was rude.
Okay, here's the thing.
This is often 100% true.
It just is. Respectability politics isn't something that people made up. It's an actual rhetorical weapon honed and developed over the course of, literally, centuries. It's a tool designed to de-legitimize not just arguments, but the people making them, by saying "you are not a part of civil society, and because you're not, we don't have to listen to a goddamn thing you say."
It's generally very easy to tell when it is being used this way, because the people using it will deploy it and only it. If someones only response to you saying "income inequality is fucking bullshit" is to say "Such language! You seem very angry" then that's essentially an open admission on their part that they don't have an argument.
... think you've made a logical leap here.
Wait, what? How do you get there from where you started? Indeed, the nature of the objection you outline leads directly to the opposite conclusion; that people who are eager to have an argument can't do so because people keep spending all their time tone policing them in order to avoid it.
Er, again, I don't know how you got there. Refusal to engage is sometimes warranted; there are, in fact, people not worth talking to, and "I refuse to debate my humanity" is a legitimate position to take when confronted with those who would deny you it. But this seems very strawmanny. It isn't actually the position you outline early in your post; it seems like you're saying "The argument that rudeness is necessary leads inevitably to just uttering long strings of expletives with no content behind them."
And nobody is actually saying "merely uttering long strings of expletives with no content behind them is the best way to fight."
They seem to ignore that idea.
wnd.com/files/2015/12/london-protest.jpg
Confirmation bias is real. People will literally entrench their ideas even more as they are being proved wrong by factual evidence. Which is to say, showing people evidence that they are wrong actually convinces them that they are right. So it's not really your fault if you can't convince people, it's our basic psychology trying to defend our view of the world. Humanity likes change, but it loves being static, because that's easier. After all, if even one of our ideas are wrong, it tends to send us into a panic mode thinking that everything must be wrong.
As for Alexander Hamilton and the 20 dollar bill, it's simply another case of "let's change the face of our society without actually changing the society itself." People are still going to be angry, racist, and divisive, it'll just be about different things.
3890971
I think it was more rhetorical than logical (though big difference that makes, from an outsider's perspective, I suppose) -- so let me make a more detailed point. I think we aren't really disagreeing here, actually.
Most of the time -- if not all -- I tend to agree with the nominal points that the SJW make. Nominal, as in yeah, I agree with the spirit of the thing, and probably a couple of their points. But I dislike how they say it. Problem is that I tend to see more extremists than actual legit people with actual legit beliefs, so I'm extremely exceptical of people who unironically call themselves that. Even if I refer to myself as a SJW pretty often.
That has nothing to do with the point, though. My point was: I don't think that the message of people who fight against the status quo can't be disruptive. I say that they can't be rude. I'm not condemning every single person who ever rallied against shit like the wage gap; I'm talking shit about the ones who instead of trying to explain the problem, merely insult at everybody and call it a day.
Disruptive doesn't equal rude, is what I mean. I agree that a lot of the time, this argument:
is true. But sometimes, it's not.
And that's where the problem lays.
Thing is -- indeed, by making sure one doesn't obey the whole "respect your opponent" rules when debating, it's impossible to ignore one's message. But by doing so, you're also giving your opponent a weapon: it doesn't matter if they don't have any other argument. They don't need any other argument.
I'm not discussing messages, I'm discussing fucking PR. If you want to win at anything, you need to play the game. You need for people to side with you, and you need to make sure whoever is opposing you can't have the winning hand.
The problem about disregarding the entirely of the political/debating/rhetorical system society has been building for ages, in favor of making sure your message is loud and clear, is that a lot of people aren't going to listen. They're going to find you annoying. Call it unfair, call it stupid, call it bullshit, and you might even be right -- but that doesn't make it less of a reality. People plain don't listen to annoying stuff, because how can this opinion be worth a damn, if whoever is defending it isn't smart enough to say it in a way that doesn't make me roll my eyes?
So they (the public, the masses, the people your message is supposed to reach) don't listen. And then they associate the message with the form. So the message is not held up by the messenger. It's the opposite.
Which means that whoever is trying to preach the same message is going to be held back by whoever said it before.
Exactly. So, deny them that argument! The SJW movement is huge, there are a lot of people who are going to feel identified with it. It appeals to the young people, it appeals to most of the minorities, and rhetorics-wise it's one of the most powerful messages out there, because it's pretty fucking easy to word it in a way that makes you look like the absolute good guy. It's hard to fight against progress, that's why progress happens. While the world is not by any means an utopia, it is true that if we look back, History tends to agree with the most progressive members of society. Slavery went away. We don't think black people have no souls anymore. Democracy exists.
Shit, it's not perfect, but it's better than what we had before. It gets better, if you keep trying to use the system to fight society's bullshit. There's still racism, there's still slavery, but they're not official anymore, and they're sloowly going away.
So yes, my point is that you can be disruptive, and make a statement, and make sure that people listen. We need that, because that's how the world evolves, yes -- but play the game. You're arguing against people who have played the game for years, and absolutely everybody agrees with them. People who play the game are Respectable, and Intelligent, and Know Better. With capital letters. The people who talk about the patriarchy or systematic oppression probably come from Tumblr and are thirteen years old.
I'm fairly sure I'm doing rethoric leaps here again (absolutely my fault -- I can't concentrate fully for external reasons, nothing I can do about it, really sorry) but the main message I'm trying to convey is: I'm not against being disurptive, or against fighting for change, or against pointing out all the shit that goes on nowadays. I'm against doing all those things in such a way that your message is linked to a group that is, frankly, ridiculed and not taken seriously at all.
So rally and support gay rights, in a perfectly legal way. Be peaceful. Vote. Wear a suit, study Law, become a politician, and beat them at their own game. They have no arguments, so they attack the way you word your thoughts? Make sure they can't do that either. Force them to admit they have nothing to say. Get the public's approval. Fight dirty. Be fucking smart about it.
I know! This is partly why I didn't explain myself earlier. See, in Spain we had the same situation till last year: a horrible pro-Status Quo bias. We had, supposedly, political pluralism -- as in, more than just two parties that we can choose for the Government -- but in practice, there were only two parties. The Main Right and the Main Left, so to speak. And they were always the same, and they never dared to make any change, and it was absolute bullshit.
Till last year.
Because all of a sudden, a party that's perfectly legal and proper, ran by young people, appears out of nowhere from the left, with messages that can be perfectly defined as SJW as fuck. Then something weirdly similar, but from the right. And the young vote goes crazy, and the political situation of Spain goes bonkers. Come the elections? And suddenly there aren't two main parties that monopolize the politics of the country. There are four of them. We still have no official Government, because the votes were split in such a way that none of the major parties can just ally with each other and rule.
Think about that for a second. Suddenly, votes matter a lot. Barcelona's mayor is a prime example of a SJW, for fuck's sake, and now she has official power and there's nothing their oppositors can do about it. One party that went serious about this, for real, with good PR? Spain's political situation changes forever, those who had held power for generations find that they can't just rely on political inheritance anymore, and the progress that we're making is off the rails.
That's why I'm so vehement about this: not being overly, exaggeratedly rude, to the point where the message becomes a parody of itself, works. It works really damn well. Because you can use the fucking respectability politics against the guys who held the power, too, and then what?
Then the elections come, and whoops looks like we're actually changing the world. Who would've thought. I don't know enough about American politics, but from what I've heard, Bernie Sanders seems to be doing exactly this (I think; I might be wrong). And while the media is apparently shutting him out, he's still making a hell of a noise... Enough that he appears on Spanish TV. The world is aware that he exists. He's taken seriously. People listen to what he says. Etcetera etcetera.
A common misconception that Alexander himself certainly didn't help. He wanted to imitate British government, but his ideal of a monied aristocracy was from early in his career, where he performed a six hour filibuster at the Constitutional Convention for such a notion, and later in his career where Jefferson took some very choice quotes from some jokes Hamilton made in poor taste...
Which is why he's my spirit animal. Because he made a bunch of jokes but, because of his abrasive personality, people took it as a serious threat. Especially because his response to his poor public perception was to work harder.
As to high minded ideals not standing the test of reality? Besides the Federalist Papers -- which is saying something indeed -- Jefferson and Madison both did their very best to dismantle the financial systems he had set up, and both failed. One man returned weeping with joy at the beauty of the system he had come to study, and said any changes made to it would be 'ruinous'.
He's largely demonized because of how tetchy the colonists were, at the time, to centralized government. Understandably so!
Hamilton was emphatic for democracy. He just wanted the people to elect a competent government, then step the hell out of the way until then next election and let their elected representatives do their jobs in the meantime. He believed that the will of the people in elections was huge, he just didn't trust it much beyond that, believing dealings and negotiation and compromise within the house to be something that the people could not and should not get involved with.
I was looking into the research around the musical. Still haven't listened to the whole thing, shockingly, as much as I adore it.
Also, I mean... So he indirectly profited from slaves and mostly paid lip service to abolition? Still puts him ahead of Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Hancock, Madison, Gwinnett, John Jay...
More of the Founding Fathers than not outright owned slaves. To even speak out for abolition, even in lip service, was progressive at the time.
The rest I won't comment on, mostly because it gets too long, but;
Right. It's such a wonderful thing, then, that this blog was about end states achieved when these people do all their pushing in the right direction.
The rest I'm declining to address, not because I disagree, but because your argument started with;
After this alone, I'm a bit tetchy, because everything after this has the implication looming over it you believe I'm making my argument from a position of compromised morality.
Which is not cool.
So I'm going to broadly address the rest of your points as such;
And ask you keep commenting restrained from here out, because while I value conflicting opinions, you have a tendency to leave huge wall-of-text essays in my comments section and it makes scrolling, if nothing else, a right bugger.
So let me preface this by saying that I can't really stand the SJW label and frequently get annoyed by SJW-ish things myself. But...
I think 3890971 makes a lot of good points. I didn't want to read that long-ass comment, but it's definitely the thing I've agreed with most in this discussion. And I think there are two competing forces that make it easy for people (probably on both sides) to fail to understand some of these points.
(1) On the SJW side, I have the very distinct impression that there's often more of a premium on disruption itself than on disruption for good purpose. There are lots of people—MrNumbers seems to suggest he's one himself, I certainly am one as well—who agree with a lot of the heart of SJW positions. Generally, I think it makes for bad policy to be blackballing your putative allies. Forming a coalition of like-minded people on an issue can be a very powerful tool. And while I'm sure there are plenty of people taking up the SJW mantle who understand that, I believe there are also plenty who take it up less out of philosophical or rhetorical calculation and more because they want to be angry about something. (I have great faith in humanity, but often not in faceless individuals; I'm pretty happy to assume that some significant portion of people who act like dicks do indeed act in bad faith.)
(2) On the anti-SJW side, I think there tends to be an overwhelming lack of recognition for the fact that young, educated progressives almost certainly aren't the intended target of SJW tactics. (Failing to recognize this can be pretty easy because, like I said above, I think a lot of people donning the mantle aren't operating in smart ways and fail to get this themselves, which leads to... well... the Steven Universe fandom.) Young, educated progressives are (sociologically and politically speaking) a fringe group. (This is why Bernie Sanders hasn't had a real shot at the Democratic nomination since early March.) The thing I think 3890971 is really getting right is that there's a very, very large segment of the population that's just not aware the issues SJW folks care about even exist. Most people don't pay that much attention, and they don't get constantly confronted with requests to check their privilege. But even if those people react badly to SJW tactics, there are good reasons for confronting them: social change doesn't happen when people are unaware of social issues. Before you go winning hearts and minds, you need to make people recognize that there's an important subject to care about. And most people are blissfully ignorant about the topics SJWs care about. Being abrasive doesn't win you friends, but it does win you attention—and there's a point in basically every social struggle where attention is worth more than friends.
Like I said at the beginning, I also tend to be annoyed by SJW-mantled folks. I think trying to change campus culture tends to be a really dumb thing to do, because you're restricting your attention to a group of people who are already more likely to be sympathetic to your issues and then you're treating them like shit. That's not winning attention in any meaningful way, it's just being obnoxious. The only people paying attention to what happens at universities are people who are already well tapped in to thick streams of information, by and large. Contrast that to Occupy Wall Street, which I think drew on a pretty similar population base (and was itself often annoying), but wound up being a huge event in the media and confronting a lot of people who would otherwise probably never pay attention long enough to learn there was a Wall Street problem. Worrying about Wall Street is now completely mainstream. (Yes, it was fairly mainstream before—but so is/was feminism, and even with Hillary Clinton running for president, how much do you hear anyone talking about that like it's an important concern?)
tl;dr 3890971 speaks wisdom and you should listen to him; but I think SJW's tend to be their own worst enemies, largely by also refusing to listen to 3890971.
(Yes, I know I wrote another long-ass comment. I'm hypergraphic. Fuck all y'all and go check your hypographic privilege at the door.)
3890971
Fuck, I just realized I never actually replied to this.
The leap here was: sure, some people might feel like they're not worth talking to indeed. But if your idea of educating people is going to a person, explaining your point in a rude way (remember that I'm exclusively talking about the rude people here, not saying that everybody who says this is rude) and then brushing off any reply with the "you're just mad" argument, then...
Well, what kind of public image do you think you'll get? You might be right, but the impression this gives is less "they make such a compelling point, they cut off the other person before they even talked", and more "this guy just walked in there, yelled into the mic, dropped it, then ran away".
It's not that you just utter a long list of expletives with no content behind them. It's that people will perceive you as somebody who utters a long list of expletives with no content behind them -- even if that couldn't be more different from what you're doing. And that's where the real problem lays. Sure, you want to force people to make a choice, but you also want people to choose right, not to judge by the cover.
3890873 I support the change in the $20. Know why?
Not because Jackson hurt a lot of Natives. He's an asshole for that, but that's not my primary objection.
It's because he ignored a Supreme Court Ruling. Andrew Jackson committed a crime. He was commanded, as per our checks and balances, by the highest court in the land, to do something. And he defied it. He did the opposite. He should have been impeached.
That's why I don't actually think this goes far enough. He doesn't deserve to be on our currency at all. He shat on the Constitution.
I'm not going to join this debate because I have little experience with the subjects involved. But I think MrNumbers is onto something treating Zootopia as an excellent storytelling vehicle for a progressive message, and I have a couple of quotes and links that maybe he will like.
"You don’t defeat ideas by criticizing them. You defeat them by outcompeting them." --Kazerad
"I've learned that people will [mostly] forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." --Maya Angelou
Nicky Case has an excellent essay on how logic will never be enough to persuade anyone about this stuff. Studies about the science of social change seem to show it works best when logic is accompanied by emotion and good character. SJWs have logic and emotion down, but they're not winning converts because they keep setting themselves up as antagonists. A little bit of compassion goes a long way.
Hells yes.
Also, I love that you bring this up:
This is actually a very real thing called Reactance. My wife did her dissertation work on anti-drug Public Service Announcements, and this is one of the top factors in why so many just Don't. Friggin. Work. Real stories, testimonials, allegorical stories, all of those have varying degrees of effectiveness. But "classic" PSAs, e.g. "this is your brain on drugs," do nothing but trigger reactance. Sad to say, but I think an awful lot of SJWs do the same.
3891180 So you're an SJW fuckboy. Okey.
Honestly?
I hope that the stupid people don't try and do anything that matters. Really, diverting them into wandering around being idiots is probably a fairly optimal outcome.
I disagree, actually.
As was once said:
I think the entire idea behind social justice is intrinsically flawed, and I think most of the problems with SJWs can ultimately be traced bcak to this fact. Social justice is an intrinsically dehumanizing philosophy as it discounts personal agency.
The problem with the social justice warrior - and what distinguishes them from other people, I think - is the fact that whenever something bad happens, they tend to blame it on FAVORITE ISSUE X.
45% of the people on Death Row are black (only 13% of the American population is black, for reference).
OMG the outrage! How racist!
Until you find out that 50% of the people who commit murder are black, and murder is the only crime you can be sentenced to death for.
The American suicide rate has been going up over the last few decades.
Clearly it is the capitalist system dehumanizing people! Socialism/anarchism forever!
Nevermind the fact that suicide rates in communist and formerly communist countries tended to be quite high. China and Russia both infamously have suicide problems, while Switzerland, a highly capitalistic country, has a fairly median suicide rate. Moreover, the US has always been capitalist, and if anything, we've become more socialist recently.
The Panama Papers don't list any prominent American politicians?
Clearly it must be a CIA plot against Russia, or Americans bribed the journalists to hide their misdeeds, or the Americans are just even better at hiding their stuff!
The idea that the US isn't very corrupt can't even occur to them. The US government has to be corrupt! All evidence to the contrary is just a fabrication. Wake up sheeple!
The list... goes on.
And this is, quite frankly, true of all fanatics. Reality is irrelevant. You cannot reason with them because they aren't behaving rationally. But they believe they're behaving rationally. After all, if reality was different, that would mean that they've been acting stupid! And facing up to reality would meet with social disapproval from their peer group, which would ostracize them for doubting the group line.
It isn't really confined to the SJWs - similar behavior can be seen on the right as well, global warming and "American society is failing because people turned their back on God!" being two obvious examples. And if you look at SJWs attacking and shunning people who disagree with them (even those who were formerly their friends/allies), and look at what happens to people who leave Scientology or the Mormon church, you can see some similarities there as well.
Sometimes even the issues overlap - think of the SJWs who want to ban Muslim headscarves to prevent the repression of women (because, you see, Muslim women don't actually choose to wear the headscarves, they're forced to by society! Even those who think they're choosing are doing so only because of the corrupt Islamic patriarchy), or the ones who want to ban "hate speech" so people can't say mean things about religious or racial groups.
Meanwhile, christofascist groups might want anti-blasphemy laws and to ban Muslim headscarves because they're dirty foreigners. Or the Israeli lobby, which views any criticism of Israel as being anti-semetic.
Many people have pointed to this as an example of the Horseshoe theory of politics, though I suspect the actual cause is that these people are all authoritarians, and therefore, despite their disagreement on other issues, their ideas of having society tell people how to act and behave are fundamentally similar, even if their motives and goals differ.
Meanwhile, others have made a game out of the similarities, where you take a concept from a website or article or screed written by someone on the far left or far right, remove the particular group they're ranting about (if any), and then challenge people to figure out who said it.
Once you recognize the SJW movement as being leftist authoritarians, it makes it a lot easier to understand them.
China and the Soviet Union were both very leftist, but no one sane would accuse them of being liberal.
3890971
Dr. Seuss wrote about the Sneeches back in 1953.
3891401
While I don't think arguing semantics really brings anything to the table -- this is the highest form of nitpicking, I'm pretty sure we can all agree on that -- this quote pissed me off a little, mostly for the last eight words. That's missing the point entirely, as there are types of justice out there.
Sure, everything sorta fits under the same umbrella that is the broad term of "justice", but you have stuff like social justice (the idea that every single person in society, no matter their gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, or any other distinction are seen as equally worthy), legal justice (that every person, no matter the rank, social situation, etc etc are equally bounded by the law), fiscal justice (that every person pays an amount of taxes equally proportional to the amount of money they have/earn/whatever, depending on the system), and so on. This is Law Theory 101. A member of the European Parliament shouldn't be missing this kind of point so hard -- that is obviously something made on purpose. I wonder what the context of that quote is, now. I'll have to look it up.
As per the rest of the post -- well, yeah. In Spain we have a saying that goes "the extremes touch themselves", which in English sounds extremely onanistic but it's more about how if you compare Francisco Franco and Joseph Stallin they're pretty fucking similar, even though they are in absolute opposite sides of the political spectrum.
That doesn't mean, however, that the stuff the SJW stand for -- at least nominally, i.e. what they say they stand for, not what they actually stand for -- is pretty neat. In the end, they're talking about how everybody should be equally worthy, which is a pretty sweet deal.
I mean, once you get past that you start dwelling into the other stuff. Is this society really oppressive against certain minorities? Is the system designed to screw over the ones who don't have the power? If that injustice exists, to which degree can we blame it on society and to which degree it's about the individual? Is there such a thing as privilege? How do we fix it? Can we fix it? Should it be fixed? Lots of things to ask ourselves. This whole deal is a complex thing, the details vary, and everybody has their own opinion.
But that's window dressing. In the end, social justice is about making sure that all humans are seen as humans, 'cause that's all we are. It might be necessary or unnecessary depending on your opinion -- and extremists fuck everything up no matter where they are -- but the nominal main point is, unarguably, one that everybody stands for.
So yeah, I'd say that the message or the ideals are right. The way the message is conveyed tends to be absolute bullshit, but the whole "let's all be humans"? Yeah, sign me up for that, yo.
3891318 ... For thinking that someone who violated the highest law in our land doesn't deserve to be honored on our currency?
What about that has anything to do with "social justice?" That's the regular kind of justice. What with judges and shit.
I don't think Nixon or Warren G. Harding should be on currency either. Oh look, they're not.
3891452
I think it is an excellent quote because social justice is not a type of justice, but a philosophy.
You yourself defined social justice as:
This is not a type of justice. In fact, it isn't justice at all, but philosophy. Moreover, it is a false one.
Not all people are equal.
Nor are all religions equal.
People who believe otherwise are objectively wrong.
Equality before the law is an important principle in pluralistic democracy. But it doesn't mean that people are equal in the sense of social justice.
If you have a history of violent crime, and you get charged with robbery *again*, and convicted *again*, then they can (and will!) hold your past record of criminal behavior against you and put you in jail for a longer time. They should. It is logical and fair.
If you murder someone, you'll go to jail (well, prison for murder) for a longer time than if you shoplift a candy bar, all other things being equal. And that is just.
There's no such thing as "social justice". In fact, the very idea is contradictory - justice is individual, not societal. In fact, the very idea of justice being societal is at odds with all people being equal before the law.
What SJWs stand for is identity politics and authoritarianism.
Being nice to them is stupid. The best thing to do is to utterly destroy them. Discredit their leadership, break the movement, destroy their political power, destroy their culture and community and eradicate it from this Earth.
Don't believe me? Look at the Republican party. They took in the disaffected white Southern Dixiecrats. They let the Tea Party folks rage - even encouraged them.
Now the party is full of insane, racist morons who claim anyone who contradicts them is a RINO and no one will listen when anyone asks them to think about things rationally, logically, or realistically.
Nipping radicalism in the bud is wise. You might think it is to your benefit to harness the radicals for your own ends, but holding on to the tail of a tiger is never a good idea when you can shoot it instead. Sure, it seems like a waste when the tiger is pointed the other way, but inevitably, it will turn on you.
3891401
Yeah, uh, what 3891452 said. TD, you know I love you, but that quote is one of the stupidest things I've read this month. It's arguing against the use of adjectives. It's analogous to saying, "Nuclear war is not a thing we should be worried about. Either it's the same as regular war, in which case we should just worry about regular war; or it's a completely different thing, and has no bearing on the concept of war." Basically, you're arguing against topic refinement, and implicitly arguing for loose semantic definitions that don't allow for meaningful distinctions between things other people think are distinct.
Anytime you find yourself arguing against the evolution of human language, you might want to reconsider what you're saying.
ETA: Actually, no, I take it back. My analogy is faulty. What the quote is actually saying (and this is just so phenomenally soft-headed it's hard for me to wrap my head around) is more akin to:
"Nuclear war is not a thing we should be worried about. Either it's the same as regular war, in which case we should just worry about regular war; or it's a completely different thing, and therefore it is peace."
3891401 I agree with basically all of this.
One small point: I'd like to note that traditional Islam is very sexist from a modern point of view; I'm sure we've all heard stories of Iranian women not being allowed outside without a full face covering and stuff like that. Of course, the US is not Iran, but there's nothing to stop a muslim man with such beliefs from forcing his wife into submission and then demanding that she wear her full-face burkha (burkha may not be the correct term, but you get my point), while preventing her from reaching out for help with threats and beatings.
Here in the UK, for instance, for some unfathomable reason we have actual sharia courts, which will listen to a woman asking for divorce because she's suffering domestic abuse and then tell her to please her husband better.
Of course, I'm not saying that all muslim women are oppressed and all muslim men are abusive - nothing of the sort. I'm just saying that this does exist.
3891691
This is going to sound absolutely horrible, and I apologize for it -- I'm not being an asshole, I'm explaining this the way it was explained to me, TD:
Your words are the stuff one says when one has absolutely no idea how law, politics, or equality works.
You're defining equality as "everybody is exactly the same", which is a pretty normal mistake -- especially because re-reading my point I didn't seem to explain it myself anyway -- but still a dangerous one. That's equality by the dictionary's definition, but that's not the legal or political definition.
Equality is defined as the situation in which, in front of identical situations, you use identical solutions. And in front of different situations, you use different solutions.
This is to say that a person who has been charged by murder once already, if found to have killed a second person, won't be judged like somebody who's never been labelled a criminal. However, two people who have the exact same criminal history should be judged the same way, if they commited the same crime.
Thus, this argument:
makes no sense. It's really hard to define justice, and so usually lawpeople tend to defend equality instead -- but, if pressed, we'll say that Justice (with a capital J) is the idea that everybody will get what they deserve. This ties into equality, and social justice (as defined in my previous post, and taking "equality" in the legal sense) because that means that everybody is worth the same, so everybody goes through the same stuff, as long as their situations are similar.
Now, to define the legal reaction to every different iteration of a personal situation -- that's a completely different cookie to chew. But this is not me arguing philosophy, this is me literally explaining law theory: Social Justice is a thing, and that thing is tied to equality as a legal concept.
As I said, I was talking nominal standpoints. If they try to use authoritarian methods in the name of achieving a more equal society, I'll stand behind the idea of reaching the utopia they're thriving for, but I'll loathe their methods (and such, I won't support them). You're mistaking endgoals and methods here, but those are different. Sure, the SJW might think that the end indeed justifies the means, but fuck that idea. My entire point so far, during this entire thread of comments, has been that I like what the SJW say they want. I just disagree with everything they do to get it.
Also:
I... I really don't think this is a place where we can argue this kind of thing, but I'm going to assume that you meant this entirely within the context of the argument (as in, legally speaking, because you understood "equality" in a more mathematical way while I was trying to use it with a legal meaning, thus causing some miscommunication here). But still, this kind of quote can really be taken out of context, so holy hell, man.
This is going to sound strawmanny or accusing or whatever, but -- again, this is lawyerspeak: be careful with this kind of statement. It's how systematic racism starts. Politics, law, and all that idiocy are a really rhetorical field, and it works by beingas precise and clear with your words as possible. You get one politician saying this once, and no matter the context, in five years you have people actively fighting for taking hte rights back from the black population and using it as a baseline for the legal work. Yikes.
But yeah anyway -- the French Revolution did a lot of things, and we owe a lot to Montesquieu. One of those things is the idea that all men are equal, no matter what; denying that idea, whatever the context, is an unintended attack against democracy itself. Which means that, painful as it is, the SJW have a hell of a point.
They just don't know how to fight for it, or they're just using it as an excuse to be angry or aggressive towards people. But in the end, what they stand for means diddly-squat, as you can't define your ideas with a mere opposition against somebody else.
So yeah. To reject authoritarism is noble. To deny equality is bringing back feudal lords.
3891727
The problem is that nuclear war is a type of war. Social justice isn't a type of justice. Look at Aragon's definition of it:
Is that really a form of justice?
Just because we use a word for something doesn't mean it is actually the same thing. Nuclear war is a type of war - specifically, a war using nuclear weapons A war of words between two writers is not a war, because war is "a state of armed conflict between societies."
Sort of like how no one would accuse the scientologists of being a bunch of scientists just because they use the word "science" in the name of their religion. Or Christian Scientists, who are against vaccination.
I'm suggesting that social justice - as the social justice types define it - is not actually a form of justice, but instead a radical worldview.
A lot of people have suggested that social justice, as it is presently formulated by the folks referred to as "social justice warriors" (who seem to have largely hijacked the term from the Christian Church at this point), is fundamentally unjust.
3891854
...Yes? It's... It's kind of, uh, the basis for every single democratic system out there. Also for all the justice systems out there.
Sure, that's social and I'm talking legal here, but they're correlated as hell, bro. Same principle, different applications -- the idea of "justice" is an umbrella term. Tied to equality and all (taking the term as a legal thing, as I already said in that message you probably missed 'cause we seemingly type at the same time or whatever. Stupid-ass notifications).
EDIT: Holy shit did this message go off-topic, seemingly. It's not, though; I'm still saying that SJW had bad PR, which is what Numbers' blog was all about. However, IMO, the message -- Social Justice itself -- is fine, as it's one of the cornerstones for modern civilization, yaddah yaddah.
3891854
I think we could productively argue about whether that definition represents a form of justice, simply because it may be off-topic in the sense that one could argue justice is a thing that gets done and that definition is an idealized state. I think the two things in the quote that make it sound so phenomenally dumb are (1) the generalized approach which suggests that all adjectives are fundamentally unimportant and (2) the explicit point from the quote that social justice is injustice. If social justice isn't a form of justice under the way I think that's a productive conversation, it gets you to the point of basically saying "Social justice isn't justice because apples aren't justice." The quote then takes that a step further and says, "Therefore apples are injustice."
For what it's worth, though, I do agree with the statement proposed about fundamental valuation not being tied to race, gender, intelligence, or whatever else. That's kind of a key point in my worldview. That some individuals may be more societally useful than others, I'm perfectly happy to accept—but philosophically for me that doesn't change their fundamental value as people. I am all for trying to achieve a world where everyone's human value is recognized, and where everyone is given an equal opportunity for success. Lots of people are not going to take those opportunities, and lots of people are going to fail when they try to take them. I'm absolutely fine with that. But I do feel pretty comfortable saying that I think a just world is a world in which each person's human value is acknowledged and respected. So for me, that gets close enough that I feel pretty comfortable calling social justice a subclassification of justice.
3891811
Yes, everyone can agree on this in theory. But in practice, that's not how SJWs use equality.
SJWs believe in equality of outcome.
According to SJW mindset, the fact that 45% of people on death row in the US are black is because of systematic racism.
In reality, the reason that 45% of people on death row in the US are black is because 50% of murderers in the US are black.
This is because of the SJW mindset that all groups are, secretly, the same in terms of everything. They're "equal". But this is wrong.
I fear that many of them believe, deep down inside, if groups aren't equal, that would justify discrimination.
But even if groups were unequal, that does not justify discrimination.
That's the difference between Zootopia and the SJW movement. Zootopia acknowledges that people are different, and that some people are disadvantaged (Judy being small/weak is repeatedly a problem for her throughout the movie), and it is still wrong to be a dick to them as a result. Judy is not secretly just as strong as all of the larger people; she's had to do things to compensate for her disadvantages, and she simply can't do some things that the larger cops can (like, for instance, safely subdue an angry panther by herself).
But she's still a good cop.
Trump is for keeping Mexican rapists outside of America, an idea that absolutely no one thinks is bad.
You might disagree with his methods, but you agree with his goal.
Do you really think Trump's goal is to keep Mexican rapists out of America?
What a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand is that the SJWs are not for social justice. If they were, then they wouldn't do things like dox transgendered teenagers and post pictures of them on the internet, or defend people who sleep with their employees before hiring them (because, gee, if a woman feels like she has to sleep with her boss-to-be to get hired, that's an obvious form of sexual harrassment/discrimintion and debatably rape). This is not behavior that you would expect from someone who is, in fact, an advocate for social justice.
Some of the more clever Republicans have pointed this out: how can people who claim that women never lie about rape or sexual assault defend Bill Clinton, who had women accuse him of rape and sexual assault? According to the Republicans, he is a criminal who got away with it because he's a Democrat.
The fact that this doesn't even occur to people is problematic, and indicates a deeply problematic mindset.
Many people don't recognize this as being the actual genesis of the whole Gamergate idiocy. Zoe Quinn's ex boyfriend who posted all that stuff about her sexual escapades wasn't doing it as a MRA advocate or anything of the sort. He was doing it because he was accusing Zoe Quinn of betraying the tenants of social justice, and giving examples of how she was an evil, oppressive jerk. You know, one of THEM.
He was a standard member of the social justice movement. He realized after his mistreatment that his ex-girlfriend was the SJW equivalent of a Republican who cheated on his wife with a gay prostitute.
What happened?
He got sold up the creek by most of his former comrades in arms. Why? Because the SJWs don't give a shit about social justice. If they did, he would have won that argument, and Zoe Quinn would have been kicked off the reservation, or at least put in the doghouse.
You can generally tell if a group actually cares about its stated morals by how it treats those who violate them. You can say what you want about the Republicans being assholes, but you do have to admit that when Republicans get caught in sex scandals, they usually burn for it. That suggests that the Republicans, for all their members betraying their fundamental principles, actually DO care about it as a group, even if individual members often do fall short.
When Donald Trump talks about building a wall, he's not just talkign about keeping out those Mexican Rapists. He's talking about protecting America from those evil Mexicans.
What are social justice warriors talking about when they talk about social justice? What do they really stand for?
They mostly seem to stand for being righteous. They feel that they are oppressed, or REPRESENT the oppressed, and therefore when they lash out with great vengeance and furious anger, they're doing the work of good. People outside the tribe are suspect. Those who question the tribe are suspect.
Most people who are genuinely interested in these subject matters don't have this insane, unhealthy siege mindset.
The problem is that the people who have been fighting for equality have WON socially in the US. Even racists won't admit to being racists anymore. A lot of the "White supremacist" groups compare themselves to the NAACP as if they are the same thing. The reason why the Republicans are super bitter about this is exactly that - if you hate gate people today, it is the same as being a racist. No one likes racists, and it is rapidly turning the same way for homophobes.
Even most racists don't like racists. It is instinctive.
The result is that the SJW mindset of being some terribly oppressed people is baseless and unhealthy. They cling to it because it is a tribal identity to them, and gives them the right to attack in their minds. Anything which contradicts their mentality is discarded. Some of them may really believe that they are fighting for social justice, but their ideas of what the world is actually like is decades out of date. And some of them pretty clearly are just out to hurt people and feel justified about it.
We don't tolerate intolerance societally anymore. Look at the reaction to Trump's open bigotry - even people like Ted Cruz, who are no angels, condemn him for it. And even Trump himself claims not to be a racist.
The Khemer Rouge killed intellectuals. They killed people with glasses.
The Chinese Revolution was extremely nasty to intellectuals as well.
Communism in general had a negative relationship with intellectuals - or at least, ones that didn't toe the party line.
Why? Radical egalitarianism.
The idea that all people are equal is a dangerous one because it is a lie. You cannot actually believe that all people are equal, because they're not. When people are confronted with the possibility that their deeply held belief is a lie, some of them react violently.
People are equal before the law. But they are not equal before reality.
Really, equality is similar to legal fictions - something we know isn't true, but which we pretend is true for the sake of the legal system because it makes things a lot better for society. If your religion says that people suffer because dead alien ghosts are clinging to their bodies, you have just as much freedom of religion as anyone else. That doesn't mean your religion is true, but we acknowledge that prosecuting people for believing blatantly false things is evil and wrong, because there are many cases in which reality is not so obvious. To protect the people who might be right or might be wrong, we must protect the people who ARE wrong, so long as they aren't doing things like trying to suck ghosts out of people with proton packs.
They aren't equal in reality. They believe in nonsense - sometimes, harmful nonsense. But the law cannot discriminate against them, because that would allow us to discriminate against people who believe true but unpopular things. Because who is to say what is true and what is false?
A lot of the reason that SJWs are upset is because they don't understand this. People aren't actually equal - there are real differences between people. But it is better for society if, as far as the law is concerned, we pretend that all men are indeed created equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights, because the alternative is much worse.
But if we start believing it, and trying to right wrongs that don't exist, you end up with a problem.
It is like a corporation - corporations are treated as people under our legal system. But they aren't actually people - they're legal persons. They're a fiction we create in order to protect the rights of REAL people. Corporations don't actually exist in real life. A corporation can't actually DO anything. A corporation can't speak - all "corporate speech" is some person speaking on behalf of a corporation.
A lot of people fundamentally don't understand this, and think that corporations are some sort of bizzare eldritch entity, and treat them like supervillains, when ultimately they're just made up of people.
mtholyoke.edu/~eaton22l/classweb/blackwater/images/blackwaterlogo.jpg
Even if some of them build their bases in swamps.
If you believe that all people are, in actuality, equal, and observe that all people are not equal, your conclusion is apt to be "Those dirty rich people/white people/men are stealing from us!"
You talked about the French Revolution, but they chopped off the heads of the old nobility. The bourgeois often suffered during and after communist revolutions.
I see shades of this every time I see people complaining about how the world is set against them, how the system is rigged, how rich people are stealing from them, ect.
Consider that there are some people who, somehow, have Trump and Sanders as their first two choices in this election. That suggests a deeply unhealthy mindset to me; the two have nothing in common politically... save, perhaps, rage at "the system".
3891910
I agree that equality is an important moral and legal principle.
I just think it is dangerous to believe that the world is, in fact, an innately egalitarian place. "All men are created equal" is a blatant lie. If someone is born dumb, deaf, and blind, with no arms and no legs and severe cognitive impairment. the idea that they were "created equal" to the average person - let alone one of those fortunates who hit the genetic jackpot - is a bad joke.
To me, it is a statement of what is right and just, not what is.
Then again, I'm an engineer. I see all men are created equal as a design challenge, and am strongly in favor of genetic engineering as a result, once we get all the kinks worked out.
3892114
"All men are created equal" has never had anything to do with physical or mental abilities, it is just the idea that all men, regardless of physical differences, or lineage, or whatever else, have certain natural rights, and hold equal rights under the law, nothing more.
3892389
Agreed.
3891083 "...that young, educated progressives ..." I'm sorry, but that's a contradiction in terms unless you are referring to a group other than the current three-letter acronym crowd who seems (censored)-bent on getting as much TV time as possible by doing things which even the Jackass show would refuse to air. I'll give you two out of three, but 'educated' is something they are not.
3890971 "...Why not? University sit-ins have a long history of accomplishing things. They don't always work; sometimes you only get like fifteen people and nobody gives a shit..." Yeah, but the 'things' you accomplish by having a sit-in are almost never what you expected or desired. They include being made a mockery of for demanding stupid things, having your members meekly go home after being told they will be arrested and expelled if they are still in the building at 5AM, or actually having them arrested. (and doesn't that look good when you are trying to get a security clearance for your six-figure job after college and you get asked that Alice's Restaurant question, "Have you ever been arrested?")
3890782 "....So be fucking polite, God dammit. Otherwise nobody will ever listen to you. They'll just write you off as background noise..."
Here, here! I second the opinion. If you look back to successful social justice movements, you will find the exception to the above in law-abiding individuals who peacefully stood up for what they believed, even if it meant getting arrested for breaking what they viewed as an injust law. Arrest me, arrest my brother, and arrest the ten people lined up behind me, but there's a thousand more waiting to take their place, and eventually we will triumph, and the law will change. In that case, an arrest is a badge of honor.
3892001 TD, on occasion, I disagree with you. This comment is not one of those occasions.
3892114 This one, however, I have a minor quibble with. "All men are created equal" is a statement of legal rights, not a measurement of physical attributes. From the time of 'creation' (which we mostly agree on, plus or minus nine months), a human being is regarded under the law as equal to other human beings. Killing a baby just out of the womb is treated legally much the same as killing a hundred-year-old spinster. It is a *starting* point of legal distinction from which "Equality under the law" extends. Tons of ink can be spilled from that point onward in definitions and distinctions, but that's where we start, and where I stop writing (because otherwise I'll ramble something fierce.)
3892630
Having the best people be in charge is intrinsically the best way to run things, as by definition it puts the most competent people in charge.
3892638
"I'm against a homogenized society, because I want the cream to rise."
- Robert Frost
3892001 Please stop mentioning that 50% quote as proof of anything. All it really proves is something is crazy wrong. 50% of murderers being black is a statistical anomaly that seems super racist. It might not be as direct as the cops only arrest black guys for murder, but something is clearly racist somewhere along the line for things to be that skewed. Why and how may be way more complex than, the man is keeping us down, but that is a very clear "that ain't right" sort of figure. Also the reasoning doesn't refute the point in any way. It just gives a figure that lots of the murders are black. Also it's not that great since one of the main points about systemic racism is about conviction rates based on color being worse. It boils down to saying, they're wrong becasue this one figure, which is in fact right and factual, proves it, but it can prove the opposite side's point just as well. There maybe be a good argument that uses this fact, but by itself it is no more definitive than the number of abortions done in the US. Yes it's useful info, but by itself it does not make a clear point or argument.
3896330
It isn't a statistical anomaly, and it isn't just the murder rate; over 50% of robberies are also committed by blacks. The problem is, these are probably the two most reliable crime statistics, because in murders, you end up with a dead person, and in robberies, you end up with an insurance claim (unless it was a drug dealer or other criminal who was robbed). They're real phenomena, and are probably the two least underreported crimes. And even amongst other crimes, blacks are greatly overrepresented relative to the general population - they commit approximately a third of violent crime nationally, and about 28% of all crime. These numbers are corroborated by the NCVS - the National Crime Victimization Survey, a survey of crime victims. And even still, it is thought that these crimes are underreported in minority communities due to distrust of the police. Most crime is committed on members of the same race - most whites are victimized by other whites, most blacks are victimized by other blacks. This means that if a victim population is less likely to report crimes to the police, it means the perpetrators are more likely to go free.
Indeed, this very phenomenon is why so-called "sanctuary cities" exist - the purpose is to make it so that illegal immigrants can report crime to the police without fear of being deported, because the alternative is underreporting of crimes against them, allowing more criminals who victimize illegal immigrants to go uncaptured. We don't want a bunch of criminals preying on illegal immigrants, so local police turn a blind eye to immigration offenses to encourage them to report crimes.
Some people like to claim it is systemic racism that makes it so that 40% of the prison population is black, but if you look at the underlying crime statistics, it is actually about what you'd expect. Murders are rarer than rapes, which are rarer than robberies, which are rarer than aggravated assaults, but roughly equal numbers of people are in prison for each of those offenses because murderers are put in jail for much longer than rapists, who are in jail for longer than robbers, who are in jail for longer than people who commit aggravated assault. As blacks are overrepresented in the first two categories relative to their overall crime rate, they are overrepresented in the prison population.
Moreover, people with criminal records get longer sentences because they didn't clean up their act after the first time, and blacks, due to committing disproportionately more crime, are also disproportionately more likely to have criminal records. As a result, blacks tend to get longer sentences than other groups, both because they on average commit worse crimes and because on average they have worse criminal records.
Studies which take these factors into account find that race is not a major independent variable - a black person and a white person with the same criminal history, committing the same offense, showing the same amount of repentance, will end up with very similar sentences on average. The cause for blacks having worse outcomes is that they fare worse in every factor which predicts longer sentences. But the longer sentences aren't because people are black, but because black people tend to have worse criminal records, cooperate less with authorities, and commit worse offenses on average.
European countries with more storks will tend to, on average, produce more babies, and regions with more nesting pairs of storks will have more babies delivered outside of hospitals.
Does that mean storks bring babies?
No. It is because larger countries have more storks and more population, and rural areas are more thinly populated, meaning that it is more likely that people there won't go to a hospital to have their baby.
It is the same phenomenon - blacks have worse outcomes from the judicial system, but it isn't because they're black. The other factors - past criminal behavior, cooperation with authorities, severity of offense - predict sentences for both blacks and whites, and members of other races for that matter. This is hardly surprising, because there are legal sentencing guidelines which are followed by judges on both the state and federal level.
3897137 You gave a lot of reasons why the justice system is in fact not rife with systematic racism, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist and isn't in various ways responsible. Honestly though it might be mostly past systematic rasism at this point, but I really don't want to debate the actual reasons for this sort of thing because I don't have the expertice to really know where to begin.
The real point is the 50% figure in no disproves anything by itself. It's true but by itself it's a meaningless fact. It doesn't prove lack of racism anymore than the stork population is proof of anything involving human birth rates. The truth is obviously far more complex and requires far more numbers than I even know how to look for. Like for comparison what's the murder rate in terms of economic situations. Also the post I'm replying to is much more clear in the idea being presented, simply because it doesn't leave off with a single figure that can be seen various ways. That's my point. That the 50% figure by itself is a failure. That almost any sentence from your reply makes more sense than that statistic by itself.
"Studies which take these factors into account find that race is not a major independent variable - a black person and a white person with the same criminal history, committing the same offense, showing the same amount of repentance, will end up with very similar sentences on average."
That's my vote personally. It has no figure to misinterpret, and actually makes what you're getting at far more clear. It's longer and is certainly easier to argue against than an actual fact, but it means something very clearly rather than just stating a figure and saying it means what you think it means without further explanation. Combining that sentence and the 50% statistic either right after or before is even better, but by itself, not good at all.
...perhaps I'm starting to resemble a broken record, but as someone who's been on both sides of this himself, I'd certainly like to know the author's post-Wholesome Rage opinion on it.
5648745
"lol".
It's been a long six years hasn't it?
5648813
Yep - and you at least seem to have grown and changed, so it would be interesting to see which parts of this you still see as wise and which... not.
(Oh, and congratulations on that growth, and on lasting!)