I'll be honest with you. When I feel down, I often go to tumblr or some site about tumblr and laugh at bull***** that social justice warriors on that site do.
Don't get me wrong: I am not in principle against most of these people. Trans/gay rights? All for it. I don't care which gender you are or which sex you like to watch while pleasuring yourself. Feminism/racism? I'm with you guys. Yes, equality is a good thing. However, tumblr makes a laughing stock of every social issue by using bull***** terms like cishet, neurotypical, whitesplaining, personalized pronouns. People on tumblr make fun of illnesses by bull***** like self-diagnosing with every possible mental disease, bull***** like 'healthy at every size', ignoring all research that doesn't agree with them. They try to idealize ******* mental diseases like DID and schizophrenia with their 'headmates' bull*****, they marginalise people with PTSD and other similar disorders with their blatant misuse of trigger warnings.
I despise all of the people involved in bull***** like this, but as long as they stay contained in their little echo-chamber, I can treat it like a zoo, look at them, laugh and walk away shaking my head. I could ignore bull***** like Will Wheaton getting ***** because he said he thought spirit animals are cool or Patrick Rothfuss getting huge flak after saying he was kind of annoyed by the whole Jonathan Ross debalce around the Hugo Awards.
However, they seem to be leaking into real life as of a while ago. For example: the increasingly broadening definition of victim blaming. Look, I know that saying 'it was your fault, I mean, look at that shirt and those skirts' is bad. However, that doesn't mean that good advice like "don't drink anything you haven't mixed yourself" is suddenly victim blaming. On a similar note: 'telling men not to rape'. We have had a discussion about this and it is still offensive.
Cultural appropriation's definition has also been changed for the worse by tumblr. Instead of meaning 'taking something sacred from another culture and using it inappropriately', it now just seems to mean 'using anything from another culture'. This has actually been going on as far as school campuses, with stuff like pamphlets spreading this sort of misinformation, or , student groups splitting off because their branch does not believe in headmates and how many English and some American universities have signed a 'save space policies'. Furthermore: the academic world further seems to want to undermine itself with bogus majors like women's studies.
And then there's ***** like this, which I don't even know how to describe, to be honest. Or how about the time #Colbert was popular: Colbert got shat upon because of a ColbertReport twitter account commenting snidely on the "Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation", and even after Colbert pointed out it wasn't him saying this, people (Suey Park, among others) still wanted him to apologize. Or when a game maker is criticised for defending himself against rape accusations instead of talking about what consent is.
I just don't know if I should take this seriously at all. I feel I'm not in the shoes of people who called 'political correctness gone wild' a few years back. I feel like a shift is being made toward hypocritically inclusive hugbox of a society, and I really do not like this.
Vocally stupid people are a reality of the internet. It's a part of a thing we call Sturgeon's Law. It existed before the internet, it will be true as long as human beings exist. We just have to roll with it.
Did you see the stories about the teacher claiming that common cores reading standards were created to fight "white privilege", if he is on the level, now millions of young Americans will be denied a higher quality of education and essentially the ability to compete in a global economy so this boogeyman of "white privilege" can be slain.
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As humans, we have a tendency to cling to ideologies. Any positive set of beliefs can quickly turn malevolent once treated as ideology and not an honest intellectual or experiential pursuit of greater truth. Ideology does in entire economic systems and countries, causes religions to massacre thousands, turns human rights movements into authoritarian sects and makes fools out of humanity’s most brilliant minds. Einstein famously wasted the second half of his career trying to calculate a cosmological constant that didn’t exist because “God doesn’t play dice.”
Vocally stupid people are a reality of the internet. It's a part of a thing we call Sturgeon's Law. It existed before the internet, it will be true as long as human beings exist. We just have to roll with it.
But a few of my links show that it is starting to leak off the internet as well.
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We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.
As a half central american, half white American who grew up in a semi-urban city and spent a good chunk of his college time studying about Asia and currently working in Asia, I think the tumblr SJW crowd is the most pitiful thing to come from the internet in a really, really long time. They love to complain about the most banal ***** (microaggression!) and love to cry victim for things that happen because humans are humans, not from institutionalized racism or sexism or whatever. I think discussion about privilege is the worst out of everything and is not constructive nor applicable to a capitalist, free society in any possible way, and ignores more pressing issues (looking at first-world leisurely activities and trying to condemn them)
I've been on the internet for a long time and I'm just super cynical. I can barely pay attention to most news sources now, and ignore almost all types of Buzzfeed-esque clickbait. That's all I honestly think Tumblr activism is. Volatile and misguided analyses meant to collect as much disapproval (and therefore attention) as possible. It makes sense that it's a lot of young college people pushing it.
But a few of my links show that it is starting to leak off the internet as well.
It's not "starting to leak off the internet." Social Justice Warriors have been around long before the internet was. Indeed, this movement of political correctness goes back to the sixties and seventies at least.
I'm with Highroller on this one. This impulse has been around since at least the 1960s. Heck, if you really looked, you could probably find forerunners of it in the more religious arms of the Abolitionist movement going way back into the 19th Century. Their cause was absolutely just, of course, but there's no denying that some of the Abolitionists were - well - weirdos. If you're not familiar with that scene, imagine the self-righteous persnicketiness of modern fundamentalist Christianity dedicated to the cause of defying the existing social order of barbaric racial inequality. Seems kind of alien on the surface, right? A mash-up of the far right and the far left? But in addition to serving as a case study on the accidental and artificial nature of the "left" and "right" labels, it also makes a lot of sense when you consider it, and I submit that the psychology is very similar at its core to that of modern Social Justice Warriors. Our guys are just thumping a different Bible.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I agree with Highroller and Blinking Spirit on the origin question. The phenomenon of postmodern leftism has been festering on college campuses since long before the advent of these topic-based new media tools. (It's really a unique kind of disease, because those of us who oppose it also embrace the principle of intellectual freedom, which demands that we not chase them off, purge them, or dismiss them -- even as they actively pursue an agenda of purging, dismissal, and ostracism. But that is a topic for another time.)
However, these new media tools do bring something new to the table that enables certain kinds of idiocy (of which postmodern leftism is but one species) in a very powerful way.
While these sites aren't the origins of these people and ideas, they are nearly-perfect echo chambers where you can create a "safe space" that is guaranteed, through the topical self-selection enabled by the technology, to consist almost entirely of people who agree with the selected viewpoint.
Such an environment is the perfect breeding ground for postmodern leftism (or any similarly incoherent or detached worldview) because not only do you have a place where your ideas never meet with criticism or testing against reality, you have a ready-made lynch mob of thousands of self-selected sycophants ready to demonize opposition on command. You can motivate a bunch of people to catastrophic action without the inconvenient need for rational analysis, debate, or even rhetoric -- everyone in the audience is already convinced and the dissenting voices have self-selected themselves out of the topic.
Eliezer Yudkowsky calls this phenomenon the evaporative cooling of group beliefs -- in the context of his analogy, the reddits and tumblers and what not are like "ion traps" in an evaporative cooling setup -- they tend to collect the "coldest" (here, most cultlike) particles, encouraging the "warmer" (here, more skeptical) particles to flee the trap or never enter it in the first place.
As to the broader question of "should we be worried," I think the answer is yes, with minor qualifications. There are some societal trends that people of good conscience should find truly worrying -- much more worrying than people starting to adopt the mannerisms of tumblr caricatures. To name one, the frequency of efficacious ideological purges, as measured in this case by speakers being dismissed from major events at universities and conventions for ideological reasons having nothing to do with the content of their speeches (paywalled, sorry), has increased dramatically in recent years -- between 1987 and 2008 (that's 20 years) there were a total of 21 such purges, but between 2008 and 2013 (that's 5 years), there were 39. On the other hand, add a qualification: mainstream thought seems to finally be trending towards "okay, they've gone too far this time" and the tenor of responses, even in leftist media, basically amounts to "quit purging speakers." So the answer to the question of how worried we should be isn't entirely straightforward. The best I can say is that both sitting idly by and Chicken Little panic are both unacceptable, but society has become so polarized that it seems those are the only two options on the menu.
(Incidentally, I don't like the term "social justice warrior," insofar as most of the people to whom that label is applied seem instead to be antisocial, unjust cowards. I know it's meant to be sarcasm, but there is always the risk of someone taking it seriously and giving some people too much credit as a result. I prefer the term "postmodern leftist" as it usually correctly identifies the philosophical underpinnings of the questionable ideas.)
@combo player, I'm definitely one of those people that can't stand the hyperbole of political correctness. That does not mean I'm some secret homophobe or racist. I'm a middle-left individual that goes through life doing mostly the right things. I can't stand it when these college age kids ramble on and on about crap that they actually know very little about. Now that I'm older and own a successful business I've all the sudden become the "man". I'm now some "capitalist tyrant" because I have to manage a business and won't pay people to do nothing. I'm so sorry that I've worked really hard and made something really cool happen. I guess because I'm a white, male, 46yrs, and own a business I'm pure evil and have zero empathy for my fellow humans.
One day the tumblr crowd will grow up, get jobs, have kids and all the other associated responsibilities of adulthood. And when that happens they won't have time to be PC anymore. Then another generation of spoiled American teen/college kids will come along and take up the torch of Social Justice Warrior, and we get to be annoyed all over again.
The world has become more tolerant in my lifetime, and I expect that it will flow in this general direction. But you go around annoying and misjudging the people on your side, and pissing off the people whose minds your trying to influence you won't make much headway. What most of these PC kids need is an extended trip to a country that's totally ****ed
Such an environment is the perfect breeding ground for postmodern leftism (or any similarly incoherent or detached worldview) because not only do you have a place where your ideas never meet with criticism or testing against reality, you have a ready-made lynch mob of thousands of self-selected sycophants ready to demonize opposition on command. You can motivate a bunch of people to catastrophic action without the inconvenient need for rational analysis, debate, or even rhetoric -- everyone in the audience is already convinced and the dissenting voices have self-selected themselves out of the topic.
I agree with combo player on one point: a defining feature of the Tumblr SJW is their powerlessness. I'd combine his point and yours, though, and say that this powerlessness, too, is self-selected for. People with the motivation to actually go out and do something real about injustice go out and do it; people who don't want to get more than a browser tab away from their Netflix and Harry Potter fanfics go to Tumblr. And regardless of where this powerlessness comes from, the result is the same: they're emphatically not the types to perform "catastrophic action".
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Yanno, before it was Tumblr, it was LiveJournal. There's also Twitter, which is particularly bad, when other Asians say 'maybe the Washington Redskins thing isn't about you' and receive death threats in exchange.
Don't get me wrong: I am not in principle against most of these people. Trans/gay rights? All for it. I don't care which gender you are or which sex you like to watch while pleasuring yourself. Feminism/racism? I'm with you guys. Yes, equality is a good thing. However, tumblr makes a laughing stock of every social issue by using bull***** terms like cishet, neurotypical, whitesplaining, personalized pronouns.
I actually use 'whitesplain'. All variants thereof basically mean "I know more about your experiences than you do."
For instance, "That white girl on Tumblr whitesplained to me that I was insufficiently offended by white dudes in feathers. I was only offended because they were wearing unearned military honors. Man, did she set me straight."
People on tumblr make fun of illnesses by bull***** like self-diagnosing with every possible mental disease, bull***** like 'healthy at every size', ignoring all research that doesn't agree with them. They try to idealize ******* mental diseases like DID and schizophrenia with their 'headmates' bull*****, they marginalise people with PTSD and other similar disorders with their blatant misuse of trigger warnings.
Yanno, 'headmates' isn't really what schizophrenia's about, and DID isn't, well, real. That should say a lot.
But yeah, the real problem is, they don't get how PTSD works. Like, my great-grandfather, coming home from WWII, could never be around fireworks.
The worst one I heard on Tumblr was "I'm triggered, but I never experienced it personally." No, you weren't. PTSD is about association of things with traumatic *****.
I despise all of the people involved in bull***** like this, but as long as they stay contained in their little echo-chamber, I can treat it like a zoo, look at them, laugh and walk away shaking my head. I could ignore bull***** like Will Wheaton getting ***** because he said he thought spirit animals are cool or Patrick Rothfuss getting huge flak after saying he was kind of annoyed by the whole Jonathan Ross debalce around the Hugo Awards.
I don't so much mind 'spirit animals', so long as they say "This ***** isn't actually an Indian, just bull***** I read while in Sedona." every single time.
However, they seem to be leaking into real life as of a while ago. For example: the increasingly broadening definition of victim blaming. Look, I know that saying 'it was your fault, I mean, look at that shirt and those skirts' is bad. However, that doesn't mean that good advice like "don't drink anything you haven't mixed yourself" is suddenly victim blaming. On a similar note: 'telling men not to rape'. We have had a discussion about this and it is still offensive.
That's a strawman, you know. Originally, it was talking about consent as part of sex education.
Cultural appropriation's definition has also been changed for the worse by tumblr. Instead of meaning 'taking something sacred from another culture and using it inappropriately', it now just seems to mean 'using anything from another culture'. This has actually been going on as far as school campuses, with stuff like pamphlets spreading this sort of misinformation, or , student groups splitting off because their branch does not believe in headmates and how many English and some American universities have signed a 'save space policies'. Furthermore: the academic world further seems to want to undermine itself with bogus majors like women's studies.
I like how you think 'women's studies' was invented by Tumblr. Again, no wonder it's hard to find a good URL.
Those 'sexy costumes' are an issue, by the way. You don't think there's something inherently racist about having a sexual fetish for a particular ethnic background?
Yeah, Suey Park is kind of...out there. You'll note the word salad. And the death threats to Jeff Yang, Simon Moya Smith (who was using the "not a X" snowclone for two years before #NotYourAsianSidekick), and numerous other activists.
Fun story: She's now besties with Michelle Malkin.
I just don't know if I should take this seriously at all. I feel I'm not in the shoes of people who called 'political correctness gone wild' a few years back. I feel like a shift is being made toward hypocritically inclusive hugbox of a society, and I really do not like this.
Political correctness is just linguistic determinism. It's just how English majors get to feel relevant. (Fun fact: The term was a self-aware parody that originated on the Left, making fun of said English majors.)
What's interesting is how much of that is Tumblr. I mean, *****, Andrea Dworkin never said "All heterosexual sex is rape.", and she actually wanted to discuss prison rape and such.
Did you see the stories about the teacher claiming that common cores reading standards were created to fight "white privilege", if he is on the level, now millions of young Americans will be denied a higher quality of education and essentially the ability to compete in a global economy so this boogeyman of "white privilege" can be slain.
WTF are you talking about? Do you even know what 'common core' is? It's no different than any other standardized testing. You know, the type President Shrubbery (not too big, spends way too much) was so big on?
But a few of my links show that it is starting to leak off the internet as well.
It's not "starting to leak off the internet." Social Justice Warriors have been around long before the internet was. Indeed, this movement of political correctness goes back to the sixties and seventies at least.
Political correctness started as a joke, where on-the-ground leftists made fun of academic leftists. You may as well say "Incest porn began in Vaudeville. This one family _things I won't mention because I don't want an insta-ban_ and they were called...the Aristocrats!"
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Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
Technically? yes, because you favor one sex over the other in that case, to the point of not even including people of the opposite sex.
Now, is there anything wrong with that? no. personal preference is personal preference, and as long as it isn't something that is specifically illegal (i.e. denying a job or a raise based on it), then go ahead. I don't care who you mack with.
I think that the main issue is how "sexified" these costumes are (in the case of the females) and how... I don't even know how to describe some of the male costumes. I mean, they showed a man dressed in traditional Arabian Climate robes and said that he was dressing as a Terrorist, and then they take a costume that is supposed to be generically African Royalty (note, Generic.) and call it out for not respecting the culture of every single African Nation. As though you could do that with a single costume!
and on the subject of the female costumes: THEY SPECIFICALLY ADVERTISE THE SEX!
I do not believe any of these costumes are claiming accuracy, so making accusations of inaccuracy is kinda... unnecessary... because they never claimed accuracy in the first place. That's kinda like watching "The Producers" and saying that it doesn't accurately portray how a producer's life works. WELL THEY NEVER SAID THEY DID!!!!
I'm with Highroller on this one. This impulse has been around since at least the 1960s. Heck, if you really looked, you could probably find forerunners of it in the more religious arms of the Abolitionist movement going way back into the 19th Century. Their cause was absolutely just, of course, but there's no denying that some of the Abolitionists were - well - weirdos. If you're not familiar with that scene, imagine the self-righteous persnicketiness of modern fundamentalist Christianity dedicated to the cause of defying the existing social order of barbaric racial inequality. Seems kind of alien on the surface, right? A mash-up of the far right and the far left? But in addition to serving as a case study on the accidental and artificial nature of the "left" and "right" labels, it also makes a lot of sense when you consider it, and I submit that the psychology is very similar at its core to that of modern Social Justice Warriors. Our guys are just thumping a different Bible.
Alternatively, if you want a bunch of weirdos crusading for a cause that was certainly not absolutely just, look no further than the last century and the Temperance movement.
Those 'sexy costumes' are an issue, by the way. You don't think there's something inherently racist about having a sexual fetish for a particular ethnic background?
Did you see the stories about the teacher claiming that common cores reading standards were created to fight "white privilege", if he is on the level, now millions of young Americans will be denied a higher quality of education and essentially the ability to compete in a global economy so this boogeyman of "white privilege" can be slain.
I can't tell whether or not this post is meant to support Common Core. Please clarify.
I agree with combo player on one point: a defining feature of the Tumblr SJW is their powerlessness. I'd combine his point and yours, though, and say that this powerlessness, too, is self-selected for. People with the motivation to actually go out and do something real about injustice go out and do it; people who don't want to get more than a browser tab away from their Netflix and Harry Potter fanfics go to Tumblr. And regardless of where this powerlessness comes from, the result is the same: they're emphatically not the types to perform "catastrophic action".
Until they become grown-ups and the majority of the population in places share idiotic ideals and they vote for it.
Or someone chooses to capitalize on their beliefs.
Just because they generally do not actively pursue their beliefs and make nothing but sound-bytes doesn't mean that they're not dangerous. Look at what happened to the Mozilla CEO a while back. Or the public speakers that Crashing00 referred to.
What about the Washington Redskins?
I agree with almost everything Crashing00 wrote. These kinds of people have always existed. But they never quite had the ability to reach potential millions and find places where entirely like-minded individuals converge by the tens of thousands and do nothing but agree with each other.
It leads to a hardening of ideals because they never get it challenged, and so they come to actually believe that any opposing idea is dangerous and that they are absolutely right.
The internet allows radical thoughts to gain significantly more strength than ever before.
I agree with almost everything Crashing00 wrote. These kinds of people have always existed. But they never quite had the ability to reach potential millions and find places where entirely like-minded individuals converge by the tens of thousands and do nothing but agree with each other.
I agree with almost everything Crashing00 wrote. These kinds of people have always existed. But they never quite had the ability to reach potential millions and find places where entirely like-minded individuals converge by the tens of thousands and do nothing but agree with each other.
All ideology is powerless. Unless someone chooses to capitalize and act on it.
My point is that these people are on Tumblr for the exact reason that they have chosen not to.
And my point is that they still believe in what they believe in, and "all it would" (I realize that is a cheap thing to say here, because it would be quite difficult) take is someone who recognizes the value in these people and utilize them for their purpose.
Sort of like the Christian Right movement that "got" Reagan elected, but of more importance awakened Christian morality to actually become a genuine force in politics once more in the last 3 or so decades.
Tumblr is filled with bored and/or depressed teens who feel the alienation of current society as much as anyone else does. They're radicalised in a way but they lack the means to do something with it. That leaves only pursuing ideological purity and this has all ended up in basically super-liberalism. Their understanding of identity lacks solidarity and is entirely about what the individual feels like. This is obviously dangerous to organisations that have a more solid approach because it only causes infighting.
Yes, most of them lack the means to do something, but that doesn't mean that all of them do, or that when they grow up they'll not have these ideas and act on them.
That said, complaints about "Social Justice Warriors"* or "political correctness gone mad!" is something that I'm going to remain fully suspicious of. They're overwhelmingly from people who are super mad they can't use slurs or generally stalk and harass people for being women or gay.
You should be suspicious of anyone slagging off other people. However, there are also people saying this who have legitimate issues with this sort of behaviour.
I agree with Highroller and Blinking Spirit on the origin question. The phenomenon of postmodern leftism has been festering on college campuses since long before the advent of these topic-based new media tools. (It's really a unique kind of disease, because those of us who oppose it also embrace the principle of intellectual freedom, which demands that we not chase them off, purge them, or dismiss them -- even as they actively pursue an agenda of purging, dismissal, and ostracism. But that is a topic for another time.)
I actually use 'whitesplain'. All variants thereof basically mean "I know more about your experiences than you do."
For instance, "That white girl on Tumblr whitesplained to me that I was insufficiently offended by white dudes in feathers. I was only offended because they were wearing unearned military honors. Man, did she set me straight."
What I dislike about the term is that it is inherrently racist. As though people from other racist backgrounds can't do this sort of *****.
Yanno, 'headmates' isn't really what schizophrenia's about, and DID isn't, well, real. That should say a lot.
What do you mean DID isn't real?
But yeah, the real problem is, they don't get how PTSD works. Like, my great-grandfather, coming home from WWII, could never be around fireworks.
The worst one I heard on Tumblr was "I'm triggered, but I never experienced it personally." No, you weren't. PTSD is about association of things with traumatic *****.
Indeed. They seem to think 'being triggered' equals being slightly upset by something.
I don't so much mind 'spirit animals', so long as they say "This ***** isn't actually an Indian, just bull***** I read while in Sedona." every single time.
Why would they have to say that? There are a lot of cultures which contained spirit animals.
That's a strawman, you know. Originally, it was talking about consent as part of sex education.
I like how you think 'women's studies' was invented by Tumblr. Again, no wonder it's hard to find a good URL.
Where did you see me say that? You didn't, so why are you being intellectually dishonest by saing I think so?
Those 'sexy costumes' are an issue, by the way. You don't think there's something inherently racist about having a sexual fetish for a particular ethnic background?
Except that that's not a fetish, and it's not just ethnic costumes. Nearly every female costume is sexualised and I do agree that thsi is bull*****. I never said it was not.
[quote
Yeah, Suey Park is kind of...out there. You'll note the word salad. And the death threats to Jeff Yang, Simon Moya Smith (who was using the "not a X" snowclone for two years before #NotYourAsianSidekick), and numerous other activists.
Fun story: She's now besties with Michelle Malkin.[/quote]
Who?
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We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.
Yeah guys, let's pretend Tumblr has an effect on the world outside of its hojillion separate, disparate little worlds. It's a medium where anyone, of any age, can say whatever they want. Nobody of prominence respects the hivemind of Tumblr, but sometimes they do get it right. This is because Tumblr is literally a bunch of teens, pre-teens, and new adults who have found a platform where they can shout to the world their fluid and ever changing opinions about the world. Do none of you remember what it's like to be 13? How about 16? 19? I can guarantee the thoughts you had, the opinions you held were as dumb as what gets posted to Tumblr. The only advantage they have is Tumblr as a soap box, which frees them from persecution for their beliefs, no matter how silly or stupid.
And that's all. They have no effect on outside things, save when what they think meshes with the wider movements inhabiting the social justice spheres. But then it is just a splinter, and not the catalyst.
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“A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Yeah, Suey Park is kind of...out there. You'll note the word salad. And the death threats to Jeff Yang, Simon Moya Smith (who was using the "not a X" snowclone for two years before #NotYourAsianSidekick), and numerous other activists.
Fun story: She's now besties with Michelle Malkin.
Who?
One of Fox News's 'reporters'. Has said that Japanese internment camps weren't so bad.
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Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
Don't get me wrong: I am not in principle against most of these people. Trans/gay rights? All for it. I don't care which gender you are or which sex you like to watch while pleasuring yourself. Feminism/racism? I'm with you guys. Yes, equality is a good thing. However, tumblr makes a laughing stock of every social issue by using bull***** terms like cishet, neurotypical, whitesplaining, personalized pronouns. People on tumblr make fun of illnesses by bull***** like self-diagnosing with every possible mental disease, bull***** like 'healthy at every size', ignoring all research that doesn't agree with them. They try to idealize ******* mental diseases like DID and schizophrenia with their 'headmates' bull*****, they marginalise people with PTSD and other similar disorders with their blatant misuse of trigger warnings.
I despise all of the people involved in bull***** like this, but as long as they stay contained in their little echo-chamber, I can treat it like a zoo, look at them, laugh and walk away shaking my head. I could ignore bull***** like Will Wheaton getting ***** because he said he thought spirit animals are cool or Patrick Rothfuss getting huge flak after saying he was kind of annoyed by the whole Jonathan Ross debalce around the Hugo Awards.
However, they seem to be leaking into real life as of a while ago. For example: the increasingly broadening definition of victim blaming. Look, I know that saying 'it was your fault, I mean, look at that shirt and those skirts' is bad. However, that doesn't mean that good advice like "don't drink anything you haven't mixed yourself" is suddenly victim blaming. On a similar note: 'telling men not to rape'. We have had a discussion about this and it is still offensive.
Cultural appropriation's definition has also been changed for the worse by tumblr. Instead of meaning 'taking something sacred from another culture and using it inappropriately', it now just seems to mean 'using anything from another culture'. This has actually been going on as far as school campuses, with stuff like pamphlets spreading this sort of misinformation, or , student groups splitting off because their branch does not believe in headmates and how many English and some American universities have signed a 'save space policies'. Furthermore: the academic world further seems to want to undermine itself with bogus majors like women's studies.
And then there's ***** like this, which I don't even know how to describe, to be honest. Or how about the time #Colbert was popular: Colbert got shat upon because of a ColbertReport twitter account commenting snidely on the "Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation", and even after Colbert pointed out it wasn't him saying this, people (Suey Park, among others) still wanted him to apologize. Or when a game maker is criticised for defending himself against rape accusations instead of talking about what consent is.
I just don't know if I should take this seriously at all. I feel I'm not in the shoes of people who called 'political correctness gone wild' a few years back. I feel like a shift is being made toward hypocritically inclusive hugbox of a society, and I really do not like this.
It's also created backlash against them.
Vocally stupid people are a reality of the internet. It's a part of a thing we call Sturgeon's Law. It existed before the internet, it will be true as long as human beings exist. We just have to roll with it.
But a few of my links show that it is starting to leak off the internet as well.
I've been on the internet for a long time and I'm just super cynical. I can barely pay attention to most news sources now, and ignore almost all types of Buzzfeed-esque clickbait. That's all I honestly think Tumblr activism is. Volatile and misguided analyses meant to collect as much disapproval (and therefore attention) as possible. It makes sense that it's a lot of young college people pushing it.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
However, these new media tools do bring something new to the table that enables certain kinds of idiocy (of which postmodern leftism is but one species) in a very powerful way.
While these sites aren't the origins of these people and ideas, they are nearly-perfect echo chambers where you can create a "safe space" that is guaranteed, through the topical self-selection enabled by the technology, to consist almost entirely of people who agree with the selected viewpoint.
Such an environment is the perfect breeding ground for postmodern leftism (or any similarly incoherent or detached worldview) because not only do you have a place where your ideas never meet with criticism or testing against reality, you have a ready-made lynch mob of thousands of self-selected sycophants ready to demonize opposition on command. You can motivate a bunch of people to catastrophic action without the inconvenient need for rational analysis, debate, or even rhetoric -- everyone in the audience is already convinced and the dissenting voices have self-selected themselves out of the topic.
Eliezer Yudkowsky calls this phenomenon the evaporative cooling of group beliefs -- in the context of his analogy, the reddits and tumblers and what not are like "ion traps" in an evaporative cooling setup -- they tend to collect the "coldest" (here, most cultlike) particles, encouraging the "warmer" (here, more skeptical) particles to flee the trap or never enter it in the first place.
As to the broader question of "should we be worried," I think the answer is yes, with minor qualifications. There are some societal trends that people of good conscience should find truly worrying -- much more worrying than people starting to adopt the mannerisms of tumblr caricatures. To name one, the frequency of efficacious ideological purges, as measured in this case by speakers being dismissed from major events at universities and conventions for ideological reasons having nothing to do with the content of their speeches (paywalled, sorry), has increased dramatically in recent years -- between 1987 and 2008 (that's 20 years) there were a total of 21 such purges, but between 2008 and 2013 (that's 5 years), there were 39. On the other hand, add a qualification: mainstream thought seems to finally be trending towards "okay, they've gone too far this time" and the tenor of responses, even in leftist media, basically amounts to "quit purging speakers." So the answer to the question of how worried we should be isn't entirely straightforward. The best I can say is that both sitting idly by and Chicken Little panic are both unacceptable, but society has become so polarized that it seems those are the only two options on the menu.
(Incidentally, I don't like the term "social justice warrior," insofar as most of the people to whom that label is applied seem instead to be antisocial, unjust cowards. I know it's meant to be sarcasm, but there is always the risk of someone taking it seriously and giving some people too much credit as a result. I prefer the term "postmodern leftist" as it usually correctly identifies the philosophical underpinnings of the questionable ideas.)
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
One day the tumblr crowd will grow up, get jobs, have kids and all the other associated responsibilities of adulthood. And when that happens they won't have time to be PC anymore. Then another generation of spoiled American teen/college kids will come along and take up the torch of Social Justice Warrior, and we get to be annoyed all over again.
The world has become more tolerant in my lifetime, and I expect that it will flow in this general direction. But you go around annoying and misjudging the people on your side, and pissing off the people whose minds your trying to influence you won't make much headway. What most of these PC kids need is an extended trip to a country that's totally ****ed
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I actually use 'whitesplain'. All variants thereof basically mean "I know more about your experiences than you do."
For instance, "That white girl on Tumblr whitesplained to me that I was insufficiently offended by white dudes in feathers. I was only offended because they were wearing unearned military honors. Man, did she set me straight."
Yanno, 'headmates' isn't really what schizophrenia's about, and DID isn't, well, real. That should say a lot.
But yeah, the real problem is, they don't get how PTSD works. Like, my great-grandfather, coming home from WWII, could never be around fireworks.
The worst one I heard on Tumblr was "I'm triggered, but I never experienced it personally." No, you weren't. PTSD is about association of things with traumatic *****.
I don't so much mind 'spirit animals', so long as they say "This ***** isn't actually an Indian, just bull***** I read while in Sedona." every single time.
That's a strawman, you know. Originally, it was talking about consent as part of sex education.
I like how you think 'women's studies' was invented by Tumblr. Again, no wonder it's hard to find a good URL.
Those 'sexy costumes' are an issue, by the way. You don't think there's something inherently racist about having a sexual fetish for a particular ethnic background?
Yeah, Suey Park is kind of...out there. You'll note the word salad. And the death threats to Jeff Yang, Simon Moya Smith (who was using the "not a X" snowclone for two years before #NotYourAsianSidekick), and numerous other activists.
Fun story: She's now besties with Michelle Malkin.
Political correctness is just linguistic determinism. It's just how English majors get to feel relevant. (Fun fact: The term was a self-aware parody that originated on the Left, making fun of said English majors.)
What's interesting is how much of that is Tumblr. I mean, *****, Andrea Dworkin never said "All heterosexual sex is rape.", and she actually wanted to discuss prison rape and such.
WTF are you talking about? Do you even know what 'common core' is? It's no different than any other standardized testing. You know, the type President Shrubbery (not too big, spends way too much) was so big on?
Political correctness started as a joke, where on-the-ground leftists made fun of academic leftists. You may as well say "Incest porn began in Vaudeville. This one family _things I won't mention because I don't want an insta-ban_ and they were called...the Aristocrats!"
On phasing:
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Now, is there anything wrong with that? no. personal preference is personal preference, and as long as it isn't something that is specifically illegal (i.e. denying a job or a raise based on it), then go ahead. I don't care who you mack with.
I think that the main issue is how "sexified" these costumes are (in the case of the females) and how... I don't even know how to describe some of the male costumes. I mean, they showed a man dressed in traditional Arabian Climate robes and said that he was dressing as a Terrorist, and then they take a costume that is supposed to be generically African Royalty (note, Generic.) and call it out for not respecting the culture of every single African Nation. As though you could do that with a single costume!
and on the subject of the female costumes: THEY SPECIFICALLY ADVERTISE THE SEX!
I do not believe any of these costumes are claiming accuracy, so making accusations of inaccuracy is kinda... unnecessary... because they never claimed accuracy in the first place. That's kinda like watching "The Producers" and saying that it doesn't accurately portray how a producer's life works. WELL THEY NEVER SAID THEY DID!!!!
"normality is a paved road: it is comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow there."
-Vincent Van Gogh
things I hate:
1. lists.
b. inconsistencies.
V. incorrect math.
2. quotes in signatures
III: irony.
there are two kinds of people in the world: those who can make reasonable conclusions based on conjecture.
Of course not.
I can't tell whether or not this post is meant to support Common Core. Please clarify.
Until they become grown-ups and the majority of the population in places share idiotic ideals and they vote for it.
Or someone chooses to capitalize on their beliefs.
Just because they generally do not actively pursue their beliefs and make nothing but sound-bytes doesn't mean that they're not dangerous. Look at what happened to the Mozilla CEO a while back. Or the public speakers that Crashing00 referred to.
What about the Washington Redskins?
I agree with almost everything Crashing00 wrote. These kinds of people have always existed. But they never quite had the ability to reach potential millions and find places where entirely like-minded individuals converge by the tens of thousands and do nothing but agree with each other.
It leads to a hardening of ideals because they never get it challenged, and so they come to actually believe that any opposing idea is dangerous and that they are absolutely right.
The internet allows radical thoughts to gain significantly more strength than ever before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_riots
These kinds of people =/= people (generally) crushed by poverty and inequality and risen to rebellion by the leading of a couple natural born leaders.
Plus,
Sort of covers that... When you have a large group of like-minded people, you simply need a powerful man to lead them.
If anything what you posted puts a dent on B_S's
All ideology is powerless. Unless someone chooses to capitalize and act on it.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
And my point is that they still believe in what they believe in, and "all it would" (I realize that is a cheap thing to say here, because it would be quite difficult) take is someone who recognizes the value in these people and utilize them for their purpose.
Sort of like the Christian Right movement that "got" Reagan elected, but of more importance awakened Christian morality to actually become a genuine force in politics once more in the last 3 or so decades.
Yes, most of them lack the means to do something, but that doesn't mean that all of them do, or that when they grow up they'll not have these ideas and act on them.
You should be suspicious of anyone slagging off other people. However, there are also people saying this who have legitimate issues with this sort of behaviour.
Okay, I'll grant you guys this.
What I dislike about the term is that it is inherrently racist. As though people from other racist backgrounds can't do this sort of *****.
What do you mean DID isn't real?
Indeed. They seem to think 'being triggered' equals being slightly upset by something.
Why would they have to say that? There are a lot of cultures which contained spirit animals.
It's not a strawman if it actually is what they are saying.
Where did you see me say that? You didn't, so why are you being intellectually dishonest by saing I think so?
Except that that's not a fetish, and it's not just ethnic costumes. Nearly every female costume is sexualised and I do agree that thsi is bull*****. I never said it was not.
[quote
Yeah, Suey Park is kind of...out there. You'll note the word salad. And the death threats to Jeff Yang, Simon Moya Smith (who was using the "not a X" snowclone for two years before #NotYourAsianSidekick), and numerous other activists.
Fun story: She's now besties with Michelle Malkin.[/quote]
Who?
And that's all. They have no effect on outside things, save when what they think meshes with the wider movements inhabiting the social justice spheres. But then it is just a splinter, and not the catalyst.
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
You know what I meant, though.
Well, there's also 'mansplain' and 'straightsplain' and 'cissplain' if you need more.
There's a lot of debate among psychiatrists as to if multiple personalities are really a thing.
Indeed. The kit fox society is no more 'foxes' than the Queen is three lions.
But these New Age types don't get it.
It's a legitimate major.
One of Fox News's 'reporters'. Has said that Japanese internment camps weren't so bad.
On phasing: