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Phobus

The Crusade Against Social Injustice

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I just don't get it.

Why is it, whenever something is deemed offensive, it seems that a load of white, middle-class men in the prime years of their lives feel the need to jump in against it? You know, the whole Tumblr thing.

Is it that they view their being offended as more valuable or important than the target demographics'? As of nothing will be done unless they ride on to save the day?

And since when was it an admirable trait to be highly judgemental, incredibly easily offended and have absolute intolerance for anything that doesn't fit your views on morality?

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There are times when one should speak up, and there are times when it's best just to let things slide. The latter seems to be ignored more often these days.

I know a lot of people who fit what you describe. In my experience, it's more of a communal thing. If they jump in and fight for social justice, they're showing their allegiance to a community, and are therefore a part of it, if only through solidarity. So basically it's a way to belong. They also get a feel-good buzz off of it.

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Patrol1985 said:

I'm oblivious to the tumblr thing. Can you share the story / link?

This scatter-gun bit of Googling should get you started:
http://fucknotumblrsjw.tumblr.com
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sjw
http://wtfsocialjustice.tumblr.com

@yukib1t: I have to admit, after I posted I did think "What if ie is just to belong to something?"


The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it seems. I mean, imagine a woman making a joke about how dumb or testosterone-driven men are, only for her friend to call her a misandrist - does that happen? Or an African American telling his African American mate that you're not allowed to call Caucasians "white", as they're people just like he is. Or a straight pride rally, or white history month, whilst I'm going for unlikely scenarios based around "equality".

I'm not trying to get into an "us against them" mentality, I just can't see how the SJW and "tolerance" approach is any less divisive than your garden-variety discrimination.

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Phobus said:

I just don't get it.

Why is it, whenever something is deemed offensive, it seems that a load of white, middle-class men in the prime years of their lives feel the need to jump in against it? You know, the whole Tumblr thing.

Is it that they view their being offended as more valuable or important than the target demographics'? As of nothing will be done unless they ride on to save the day?

And since when was it an admirable trait to be highly judgemental, incredibly easily offended and have absolute intolerance for anything that doesn't fit your views on morality?


White knighting

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I think the bigger hangup here is: why do you feel the need to ride along with these middle age males?

"Social justice crusaders" are merely paraphrasing things that they have read from legitimate sources. It's hopeless to try to argue against or defend them.

Myself I am a liberal socialist and I recognize the vapid wasteland that propagates among social media. It's misguided and ill-informed, but not always toward the particular political bias you might expect from your gut. It's a little more grotesque than that. Social media may be twisted and populist, but it hinges on sensationalism and predictable story arcs backed up by a narrative format and predefined character roles. It's up to modern norms to alter these formats toward something closer to the truth.

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I never said middle-aged - I said "in their prime years", which, to me, implies late teens through to in the middle of middle-aged. Likewise, it was actually you deciding that I'm a misogynist in that other thread, based on one observation, that made me think about this topic, TheCupboard. The line of thought was "If you feel a need to leap to the defense of all women when I talk about girls by calling me a misogynist, is that not just chauvinism? How does that give you the moral high ground, which is clearly what you're trying to establish with this?"

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Hmm, well in that other thread I was merely observing that you were calling one poster (who was probably a man) as having the feelings of a girl. As far as these things go, that was hardly a clear cut case of misogyny even though I called you as such, I was just thinking that gender should not define the boundaries in which one uses to compose one's thoughts. A "girly" attitude could be called "childish", "dramatic", "immature", "misinformed", "naive" , etc. The thing is there are naturally biological differences between the sexes and using the stereotyped charactistics of one gender to demean the other gender doesn't make sense to me.

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I clicked on the first link and it had this:

heartinakiln:

- I am not viewed as slutty or ‘loose’ for my sexual behavior.

- My sexual behavior is not immediately associated with hedonism, free love, etc.

- My sexual identity does not lead people to believe that I am joking or making things up.

- There has been a large body of creditable research/tumblr…


I... what is this?

Phobus said:

I mean, imagine a woman making a joke about how dumb or testosterone-driven men are, only for her friend to call her a misandrist - does that happen? Or an African American telling his African American mate that you're not allowed to call Caucasians "white", as they're people just like he is. Or a straight pride rally, or white history month, whilst I'm going for unlikely scenarios based around "equality".


I used to wonder about that myself but someone explained it pretty well to me. Basically you don't see white pride, heterosexual pride, male pride etc. since these are already the privileged groups. The one's that do express those pride-isms are minorities who at some point were oppressed. It's just a context thing. As a heterosexual it means nothing to you to say "I am heterosexual and proud" because you aren't at any risk of being assaulted or whatever; for the homosexual person the risk or social shame does exist however, so being 'proud' has meaning for them.

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Christian guilt and self-flagellation that brainwashed us into humbleness and masochistic acceptance of punishment for two millenia collide with high living standards and no real hardships to overcome nowaday. I guess when you're unable to accept your relatively carefree and happy life, because in your eyes only suffering (vagina) and struggle (coloured skin) validate your worth and morality, but you're too lazy or socially inept to go out there and fight injustice for real, you turn to tumblr and start preaching and damning like a Christian priest. The fangs of the Church are sunk deep into us.

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Phobus said:

I just don't get it.

Why is it, whenever something is deemed offensive, it seems that a load of white, middle-class men in the prime years of their lives feel the need to jump in against it? You know, the whole Tumblr thing.

Is it that they view their being offended as more valuable or important than the target demographics'? As of nothing will be done unless they ride on to save the day?

Because almost all armchair activists social justice warriors are themselves "privileged" idiots who do little more than spout a library of buzzwords to echo-chamber and generate controversy to keep in the spot-light of liberal media.

Let me guess, you read an article about yesterdays hot topic #CancelColbert?

And since when was it an admirable trait to be highly judgemental, incredibly easily offended and have absolute intolerance for anything that doesn't fit your views on morality?

That can be reversed.

dew said:

Christian guilt and self-flagellation that brainwashed us into humbleness and masochistic acceptance of punishment for two millenia collide with high living standards and no real hardships to overcome nowaday. I guess when you're unable to accept your relatively carefree and happy life, because in your eyes only suffering (vagina) and struggle (coloured skin) validate your worth and morality, but you're too lazy or socially inept to go out there and fight injustice for real, you turn to tumblr and start preaching and damning like a Christian priest. The fangs of the Church are sunk deep into us.

Most SJ nuts are fedora-tier atheists. I guess it's in our DNA.

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Technician said:

Because almost all armchair activists social justice warriors are themselves "privileged" idiots who do little more than spout a library of buzzwords to echo-chamber and generate controversy to keep in the spot-light of liberal media.

Let me guess, you read an article about yesterdays hot topic #CancelColbert?

Nope - I don't know what that is. I'm not on Twitter, so I tend to see this stuff well after the fact.

As for "that can be reversed" - I don't see your point.

@TheCupboard: I felt my statement in that thread got my point across clearly enough - it's what stereotypes are best for. If he was being specific with his problems we'd be better informed and possibly more likely to help. The fact that he has what is essentially a blog under a much more interesting title for debate was what prompted my disappointed reaction, rather than that I think his having emotions is girly. His approach to explaining his problem is exactly what one is subjected to when they have girls (not all women) on Facebook and they have a problem with somebody else they have on there. Frankly, I'm with him on wanting to be violent towards a malicious waster in his life - "Deck the cunt", says I, but I know that isn't helpful.

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Social justice is stupid.

There are a bunch of legitimate issues that need to be campaigned for, certainly. But when you start lumping them all together in a neat little package that you call social justice is when you start getting hopelessly lost up your own arse.

Because then it ceases to be separate issues that can be solved, and instead becomes merely a tool to prop yourself up as being oh-so progressive and right-thinking while everyone else is a narrow-minded reactionary fascist who should just die. It leads to the dumbest things, too.

While White American tumblrists are busy denouncing the oppressive Western rape culture, they tend to forget about how the issues they fight are faring outside of the awful oppressive White Western rape culture of awful oppression. Some would probably even defend things like Iraq's Jaafari Personal Status Law because "it's their culture" and "we cannot judge".

#check your privileges #die cis scum #kill all men

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Technician said:

Most SJ nuts are fedora-tier atheists. I guess it's in our DNA.

It's memetic instead of genetic, but it permeates our civilization so strongly and for so long that it hardly makes any difference. The noble sirs you mention neither live in a bubble (well, they do, but a different, unrelated one), nor they shed JC's influence once deciding there's no invisible father figure in the sky. Christianity helped sculp a big part of our value system, after all.

Maybe the most developed countries with a strong Protestantism footprint (of the Lutheranic kind) get it the worst. Instead of a Church watchdog that delivers moral rules from a position of authority (which one constantly tries to cheat in various ways), Protestants chastise and deprecate themselves for not being pure enough and failing God's love. Replace God with morality and all privileges checked at all times and suddenly fedoras.

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Tbh I'd rather deal with SJ fedora wearing weirdos than anything our ancestors had to deal with, monarchies, religious states, yada yada. At least here I can just not read Tumblr and ignore them.

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Phobus said:

And since when was it an admirable trait to be highly judgemental, incredibly easily offended and have absolute intolerance for anything that doesn't fit your views on morality?

If you ignore the "judgmental" and "easily offended" part and concentrate on "harmful behavior ought to be called out" then there's generally a sensible kernel to these ideas even if there's a lot of extremist interpretations that don't make sense.

What I mean is things like: sexist, racist, homophobic behavior and speech etc. As a society we've (most of us) decided that such things aren't good ideas. Few people still hold such ideas and those who do nowadays, try to cloak their meaning behind more creative language ("protecting the family" in place of "stamping out homosexuality", etc).

The problem is that these ideas haven't gone away. I'll give you an example: I recently discovered that I'm a sexist. Not consciously; I hate the idea that I'm prejudiced. But subconsciously I am. There's a really interesting test you can run on yourself to measure your unconscious biases (and I recommend you do it yourself, it's really informative). I'm not a sexist because I consciously choose to be one; I've been raised in a society that promotes those attitudes. Think about the kind of toys that girls and boys play with as children for example, or gender roles with professions that are considered to be "a man's job" or "a woman's job".

These biases do have real world effects on peoples' careers and lives. You only have to look at statistics of the average pay for men vs. women, black people vs. white people, etc. These are still problems and haven't gone away. We haven't "solved" racism, sexism or homophobia; I hope some day we will.

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An equal society is not a society where everyone gets equal results but has equal opportunity. It's not oppression for certain things to be considered say "male" or "female" nor is it sexist when 70-80% of people fit into those norms. Equality is saying that if someone has the ability and aptitude to do something because they feel like it then society should not judge them for not fitting into their "role".

Men and women are different, there is a very good reason why they're different, critical to the survival of the human race. They're not different enough that every woman should only do "womanly things" and every man should only do "manly things". But trying to pretend that men and women ON THE WHOLE aren't fundamentally different, you're wrong.

And it's important to understand these critical differences when addressing issues. A woman and a man earning different wages for doing the same job? Wrong. A woman not being allowed to work a shitty job just because it pays more? Wrong. A woman being denied a job because it's a "man's profession"? Wrong. Men being far more willing to take jobs with shittier hours, harder physical requirements, more remote locations, and more hostile working conditions because they place far more importance on pay above workplace happiness on the whole? Not wrong. Something like construction or mining being a "man's job" is not sexism.

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Phobus said:

I just don't get it.

Why is it, whenever something is deemed offensive, it seems that a load of white, middle-class men in the prime years of their lives feel the need to jump in against it? You know, the whole Tumblr thing.

Is it that they view their being offended as more valuable or important than the target demographics'? As of nothing will be done unless they ride on to save the day?

And since when was it an admirable trait to be highly judgemental, incredibly easily offended and have absolute intolerance for anything that doesn't fit your views on morality?


People who have uninteresting and mediocre lives feel better when they have a "cause" to rally for. It's also cool to be a rebel and rebel against something, no matter what it is.

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Tarnsman said:

An equal society is not a society where everyone gets equal results but has equal opportunity. It's not oppression for certain things to be considered say "male" or "female" nor is it sexist when 70-80% of people fit into those norms. Equality is saying that if someone has the ability and aptitude to do something because they feel like it then society should not judge them for not fitting into their "role".

Men and women are different, there is a very good reason why they're different, critical to the survival of the human race. They're not different enough that every woman should only do "womanly things" and every man should only do "manly things". But trying to pretend that men and women ON THE WHOLE aren't fundamentally different, you're wrong.

I think "fundamentally different" is an overstatement; a lot of the "differences" that are often assumed are actually socially constructed or based on societal stereotypes.

I agree that "equal opportunity" should be a goal, but it's just not that simple. The whole point of these unconscious biases is that they fundamentally shape how we perceive other people that might not necessarily match our conscious attitudes. In short, you can be a sexist without realising it, and it takes conscious awareness of that in order to overcome it.


And it's important to understand these critical differences when addressing issues. A woman and a man earning different wages for doing the same job? Wrong. A woman not being allowed to work a shitty job just because it pays more? Wrong. A woman being denied a job because it's a "man's profession"? Wrong. Men being far more willing to take jobs with shittier hours, harder physical requirements, more remote locations, and more hostile working conditions because they place far more importance on pay above workplace happiness on the whole? Not wrong. Something like construction or mining being a "man's job" is not sexism.

For the record, I'm pretty sure that women could work in construction or mining - these jobs (nowadays) aren't just "lifting heavy things around", not that women can't do that either. But I was talking more about jobs where there isn't a clear biological difference, but where gender roles exist purely because of stereotypes. For example, there's no reason a man can't be a nurse, though traditionally nurses are thought of as women.

I work in an industry (programming / software engineering) that suffers from such a bias, and I honestly think that a lot of it does come down to sexism. There are frequent prominent examples of sexist behavior that I constantly hear about - there's a long list of them here for example. Those are just the few incidents that are public, that people have actually identified or highlighted.

Incidents like these make women feel uncomfortable and unwelcome and drive them out of groups. It's tempting to think of this kind of issue as a "bad apple" issue: a few sexists spoiling everything, but what the unconscious bias research shows is that that isn't the case. The majority of people, including me, have sexist biases. I strongly believe that often, the people (men) doing this kind of thing don't realise they're acting in a sexist way, or the effect that their actions have. And in a group that's mostly men, most of the people witnessing it won't realise either.

I read a really great document ages ago called HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux which describes some of the issues that women face (written by women). It's very well written and I encourage reading it; even though it's targeted at a small group (Linux users), it's really just full of good advice that applies more generally as well.

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fraggle said:

These biases do have real world effects on peoples' careers and lives. You only have to look at statistics of the average pay for men vs. women

If only women statistically chose to pursue heavy labor, high-risk jobs instead of the medical and sociology fields.

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If we're talking "nerd" culture fields and the entertainment industry then sexism is very real and rampant.

But there are certain things where gender roles just naturally happen. If I put out a job add looking for factory works to work on a welding line I don't get a lot of female response to that. Just like when I need people to work shitty hours or go do stupid shit like drive halfway across the country, I don't get a lot of female volunteers. Sexism is saying because you're a man or a woman you have to conform to this norm and we're going to harass the shit out of you and make your life suck if you don't. Sexism is not, thinking of a dude when someone says "soldier" or thinking of a dude when someone says "police officer" or thinking of a woman when someone says "kindergarten teacher". Sexism is when you think it's wrong when you encounter someone in a field you normally associate with X and they don't conform to that norm. Like the "DO GIRLS PLAY VIDEOGAMES!?" crowd who then call all women who play videogames attention whores who are just vying for nerd attention or whatever nonsense.

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Are you suggesting that social sexual dimorphism may be intrinsic and not a social construct like race and genetics? That's just absurd, sir.

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fraggle said:

construction - these jobs (nowadays) aren't just "lifting heavy things around"

Eh, not really, construction is pretty much the same as it was 50-60 years ago. Still have to manually lug heavy shit around all the time. The only real difference is that we have 175k BTU jobsite heaters and "reliable" modern power tools. But that is kind of beside the point anyway.

While construction is viewed as something for men only I have seen a small handful of women on jobsites employed in many different trades.

Part of the problem in itself may be trepidation on the part of many women that might want to enter into these fields. Having to put up with the social environment construction jobsites create. Not being viewed as an equal and capable part of the crew but either a "bull dyke with something to prove" or an object of sexual interest is not exactly enticing, let alone conductive to job productivity.

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Tarnsman said:

But there are certain things where gender roles just naturally happen. If I put out a job add looking for factory works to work on a welding line I don't get a lot of female response to that. Just like when I need people to work shitty hours or go do stupid shit like drive halfway across the country, I don't get a lot of female volunteers.

You say "just naturally happen" but what do you really mean? Are women biologically preferenced to dislike welding? Or is it a social construct that welding is seen as "manly" (melting big lumps of metal) and women stay away from it because of that? Because the latter sounds a lot more plausible to me. Somehow I doubt we have a gene for welding, and I certainly don't think for a second that women are any less capable of performing that task than men are.

Sexism is saying because you're a man or a woman you have to conform to this norm and we're going to harass the shit out of you and make your life suck if you don't. Sexism is not, thinking of a dude when someone says "soldier" or thinking of a dude when someone says "police officer" or thinking of a woman when someone says "kindergarten teacher".

You place "sexism" in this very narrow definition; we can argue about definitions of words if you want but it doesn't seem like a very productive thing to be doing. Call it what you want, but our perceptions of what we believe are jobs that are available to us shape what jobs we'll go after.

Sexism is when you think it's wrong when you encounter someone in a field you normally associate with X and they don't conform to that norm. Like the "DO GIRLS PLAY VIDEOGAMES!?" crowd who then call all women who play videogames attention whores who are just vying for nerd attention or whatever nonsense.

Absolutely, but think about that situation in more depth:

  • Do you think those men believe "it's wrong for women to play video games" (referencing the first sentence in quote above)
  • Do you think those men happily self-identify as sexists - if not publicly, then privately, or to themselves?
  • When women can't make video game videos like those without being accused of being "[attention] whores", do you think that's somewhere they're going to want to stick around?

Quast said:

Eh, not really, construction is pretty much the same as it was 50-60 years ago. Still have to manually lug heavy shit around all the time. The only real difference is that we have 175k BTU jobsite heaters and "reliable" modern power tools. But that is kind of beside the point anyway.

Admittedly I don't know a whole lot about the construction industry. I was thinking along the lines that construction is a big industry that covers lots of things: operating cranes or machinery doesn't require physical strength for example. But the whole premise is predicated on the idea that "all women are weak and can't lift heavy objects" which is obviously false.


Part of the problem in itself may be trepidation on the part of many women that might want to enter into these fields. Having to put up with the social environment construction jobsites create. Not being viewed as an equal and capable part of the crew but either a "bull dyke with something to prove" or an object of sexual interest is not exactly enticing, let alone conductive to job productivity.

And that's exactly what I'm talking about. And while (stereotypes might lead me to think that) an office environment is more "civilised" than a construction site in that respect, I don't doubt that the same kind of thinking exists in male-dominated industries like the software industry.

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No Fraggle you're focusing on professions and not what those professions/jobs specifically involve. Women don't sign up for welding jobs because of the shitty working conditions and the strenuous labor, not because "welding is manly".

See here is the thing about humanity. If 99% of the species died off and we had 10 guys left but 10,000 women left, guess what? The species could repopulate pretty reasonably. If we had 10 women left and 10,000 guys? We'd be pretty fucked. Because women have a set child bearing capability, men do not. As a result the male is the "disposable" part of the species. As a result way back when nature did its little calculations and when "keeping the human race alive" came up it figured out that it was beneficial for the part of humanity that can die without a major impact on the species to be more willing to say "go fight a tiger for food" or in modern society "be more willing to do a shitty job in a shitty environment solely because of 'money'" where as the objectively more important to the continuous survival of the species sex, they'd be more concerned about environment and rational shit like that, or in modern society "I place far more importance on work place environment, location, benefits, and intangibles".

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Fraggle I work in the heritage sector which at most grades is female-dominated, probably to a similar percentage that software is male-dominated.

There are about ten women to every man where I work. It's a bit of a nightmare.

Naturally it's a sexist atmosphere - female sexism. It's pervasive and excluding - and they don't see it at all.

Marked imbalance of the sexes is bad news, whatever the formula, whatever the context.

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Tarnsman said:

See here is the thing about humanity. If 99% of the species died off and we had 10 guys left but 10,000 women left, guess what? The species could repopulate pretty reasonably.

One way or another you would have guaranteed inbreeding by the 2nd generation. So yeah.

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Tarnsman said:

No Fraggle you're focusing on professions and not what those professions/jobs specifically involve. Women don't sign up for welding jobs because of the shitty working conditions and the strenuous labor, not because "welding is manly".

If the job is so bad, why do men do it?


See here is the thing about humanity. If 99% of the species died off and we had 10 guys left but 10,000 women left, guess what? The species could repopulate pretty reasonably. If we had 10 women left and 10,000 guys? We'd be pretty fucked. Because women have a set child bearing capability, men do not. As a result the male is the "disposable" part of the species. As a result way back when nature did its little calculations and when "keeping the human race alive" came up it figured out that it was beneficial for the part of humanity that can die without a major impact on the species to be more willing to say "go fight a tiger for food" or in modern society "be more willing to do a shitty job in a shitty environment solely because of 'money'" where as the objectively more important to the continuous survival of the species sex, they'd be more concerned about environment and rational shit like that, or in modern society "I place far more importance on work place environment, location, benefits, and intangibles".

Okay, so maybe this was relevant when we were a hunter-gatherer species; why is it still relevant today? We don't have to fight tigers for food any more: in modern western countries, food is plentiful and we have things like advanced medicine that keep us safe. So why keep these gender roles?

I guess I just don't get the point you're making. It sounds like you're just using "biological differences" as a handwavey way to explain away gender divides; "oh, it's just 'biology', they don't want to work in those industries". Human beings are thinking conscious beings, we're not just slaves to our biology. The question is: if women can do most or all the same jobs as men, why don't they? It's an important question that deserves answering; I suspect the actual answer is very complicated, and "biological differences" seems like a shallow answer that doesn't do it justice.

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