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[Reelya]

If we're being honest with ourselves, the whole "sjw" thing is vastly over-exaggerated by people on the internet who have little else to do. The majority of feminists and other social justice campaigners in US colleges and elsewhere are pretty reasonable,

However, see J. Haidt's points. He acknowledges that most people are reasonable. And it's not the right who are the main source of the criticism. Sure, the right have reblogged it, but they're not the source.

If you look at the key points made by e.g. Jonothan Haidt of NYU and others they're a little different to how your describing it.

Haidt recounts a personal anecdote of a single student upending his life for a month in 2013 over a silly accusation (of which he was cleared), and afterwards many of his colleagues started to experience the same thing. This is what Haidt said was new and started in 2013/2014, and it's the behavior which he said spread rapidly from campus to campus via social media: sjw students started disrupting classes by saying they'd been micro-aggressed or triggered by innocuous words, texts or ideas. This has basically lead to a self-censorship by both professors and students because nobody wants to be dragged through the spanish inquisition. e.g. people make outlandish statements about ableism or similar in the classroom, and nobody debates it or points out the flaws in the argument, because you're as likely or not going to get a Title IX complaint for doing so (because the type of person who is prone to making outlandish sjw comments are the same type who are prone to claiming they've been "microaggressed" if anyone disagrees with them). So everyone decides it's not worth the effort to engage it. But if you never have your ideas challenged, then how can you know the arguments either for or against them?

This isn't just reducing academic rigour or freedom to express ideas, it's weakening social justice itself. A movement which only holds together by it's own internal logic and rejects the transgressions of external reality into their doctrine as "microaggressions" deserving of sanctions and mob mentality isn't a movement that can grow intellectually. It also hampers solving real social issues that threaten the very groups you're claiming to be helping. You need to be able to debate all the ideas related to a concept to get the best solution. The ideas coming out of Gender Studies programs are often kinda shit basically, they're an ideology and often over simplistic and not open to looking at multi-factor causes for problems, in favor of a universal doctrinal "cause". Having these ideas not be allowed to be debated in fact hurts the minorities they're professing to help.

Also you have stereotype threat. If you label one group as permanent victims then demand Daddy University to cater to all their victim-y needs. This is the message you're sending when you say that everyone is micro-aggressing against a specific group, label that group as helpless victims, and demand special campus speech/conduct codes to outlaws the (very minor) perceived slights that group faces. This is basically psychology. if you exaggerate how bad something is, it'll seem worse than it is. if you then potray that group as systemically oppressed, and they need special rules to make everything a "safe space" where they're never criticized or challenged, since they're so fragile, it's not helping them. It's likely to give them dependency issues.

[ChairmanPoo]

Oh, conservatives do it all the time, at least in Spain. Whenever it's convenient for them really. Then they decry it when it's convenient.

In my experience it has become a politics-neutral phenomenom. Parties of both signs have jumped onto the politically correct bandwagon and decry the other side about real or perceived violations.

[Loud Whispers]

ptw also the earth is flat and the american government secretly funded NASA

[Dorsidwarf]

Mafia confuses me enough when played in the mafia thread, do we need to start impromptu ISOs and post analysis in the politithreads too?

[Reelya]

When people start gaslighting, misrepresenting, and baiting etc etc, I think it is appropriate to call that behavior out rather than to carry on discussing the topic. If you do "business as usual" and debate in good faith, it doesn't work when the other person doesn't believe they are obligated to discuss the topic in good faith. e.g. when someone clearly misrepresents themselves "i never said X. You said X" when that's clearly not factual then the chance that it's a good faith discussion is near zero.

At that point you either let the other person "win" which means they succeeded in shutting down dialogue (which I'm guessing was the likely goal), or you keep discussing the topic calmly, which just clogs up the thread as they are going to be pouring over every post for things they can take out of context etc. Or finding very minor inconsistencies between the wording between separate posts and claim that you're contradicting yourself (double points if the topic of the two posts wasn't actually related), etc, etc. Which shuts down meaningful conversation in a different way.

Calling out what they are doing separates the tactics from the subject matter.

[Max™]

I hardly think they were pouring anything over your posts, but I do kinda wonder where they were going trying to make it sound like you were coming off as supporting some sort of conservative depiction of the sjw phenomenon?

Like, really? Reelya never struck me as remotely conservative, and as a liberal myself the frustration that comes from trying to share a tent with the sjw crowd is--dare I say it--triggering my aversion to trigger warnings and the use of vaguely defined wrongs to attack "your own" side. The scare quotes are there because they're not on my side beyond an aversion to the hatefully excessive conservative shit like the trumpcare nonsense.

[smjjames]

Huh? I wasnt trying to make it sound like Reelya was making it into some conservative phenomenon. Unless you meant alway, don't know where he was going with that line of argument.

Since in Europe, the spectrum is shifted, so some of our moderate liberals could be called conservative in Europe, which muddles it a little. In the US at least, it's largely a liberal phenomenon and even then, it's only a small subset of liberals.

And LW was just being LW there.

[Reelya]

smjames, none of those posts were aimed at you, but at drama on the previous page which has fizzled out.

Like, really? Reelya never struck me as remotely conservative, and as a liberal myself the frustration that comes from trying to share a tent with the sjw crowd is--dare I say it--triggering my aversion to trigger warnings and the use of vaguely defined wrongs to attack "your own" side. The scare quotes are there because they're not on my side beyond an aversion to the hatefully excessive conservative shit like the trumpcare nonsense.

Pretty much this myself. And I think one of the huge warning signs is when you see your own "side" start to use the same logic as creationists in debates. (In fact various radfem branches find themselves siding with the christian right on some morals issues).

The most ironic thing is tha rationalwiki, which used to be a good source for anti-creationist discussion got taken over by hardcore sjw's and now it's basically the sjw equivalent of conservapedia. Seriously all extremists end up with some awkward "Newspeak". you have Ayn Rand's very not objective "Objectivism" for hardline Libertarians, and now rationalwiki's irrational rationalism.

- as an example of rationalwiki's irrationalism, they either accept or reject the effects of pre-natal testosterone etc, depending on whether those effects fit with the social justice worldview. e.g. they attack the idea that sexual orientation is a social construct, and cite pre-natal hormones as the reason, but then they reject any innate gender identity traits. Because gender is a pure social construct. But not for trans people apparently. Because for trans people gender is biological.  Notice how in the "gender binary" article they hammer on how gender is socially constructed, and don't even mention any biological evidence, and in the transgender article they argue that gender is biological, and avoid any mention of gender being a social construct. Thus whatever rationalwiki is selling as it's worldview fails in the same ways that Objectivism fails, because it cannot synthesize an intellectually consistent framework in which phenomena happen.

[Max™]

Previous page and smmmjjmmmsjmes what?

Funny observation: I know it's "Ess Em Jay James" but I tend to read it as "smzzhames" where it's almost one syllable but not quite and kinda buzzes if you say it out loud because I know that he's secretly an insectoid from Thrullnox here to feast on our delicious babies!

[Sheb]

You're mixing up sexual orientation and gender identity there Reelya. While it's true that you have contradictions  generally due to different definitions of stuff like gender (like, is gender a social construct or an innate part of one's identity?), you can an internally coherent worldview where sexual orientation (who you attracted to) is biological. Likewise, you can think that the idea that there is two gender is a social construct, but that people fit in a bajillion gender for biological reason. It might not be right, but so far it's somewhat coherent.

[Reelya]

I'm not.

if you look at the gender binary page on rationalwiki it says it's 100% socially constructed.

Then if you look at the transgender page on rationalwiki it says it's 100% biologically determined.

That's apples and apples. The mention of sexual orientation was an aside just to give a broader picture of how they accept or reject biological basis for gender or sexual traits, more or less purely based on a pre-existing worldview.

[wierd]

This is just my two cents on the matter. It is hardly official, and likely not even that close to the factual core of things, since I have not invested the energy or time to be that rigorous about this. --More, I have invested time and energy in simply *AVOIDING* this issue, due to its corrosiveness.

That said-- Individuals of this mindset (which is what I will now use, to avoid using a trigger warning. These people are of a shared mindset, which I will now call "the mindset", or "this mindset.") appear to have difficulty divorcing emotion from reason, or from divorcing belief from fact. Reelya hits on this somewhat when mentioning that the mindset has analogs with religious thinking. 

As a result of this, the people who adhere to this mindset honestly do in fact believe that they are being slighted, and that the dismissals of their complaints are a grand conspiracy to keep them down. This is contrary to the factual situation, where the things they are complaining about are innocuous, and the dismissals are the best practice for genuine fairness and integrity. 

In this respect, it is very similar to the extreme religious right, where they honestly believe that the trend to remove religious iconography from courthouses is a grand satanic conspiracy against christians and christianity, when the actual factual situation is that the removals are there to reinforce the separation of religious faith based matters and decision making from secular government, to protect BOTH.

In this respect, the people of this mindset are to the liberal left, what religious fundies are to the conservative right.  If the left is not careful, they will end up with the same problem that the conservative right has-- that the group message and identity has been compromised by their respective group.

It is my opinion that reinforcing the need for genuine critical thinking, dispassionate examination of evidence, and exercise in recusal when one is too close to an issue is the solution to this problem.

Denial that there even *IS* a problem with purely emotional thinking, by both sides, is what lands us squarely in this mess.  When you enable and empower the mindset with direct application of power (such as these tribunals), it quickly becomes a witch hunt. Irony intended.

 

[Sheb]

I'm not.

if you look at the gender binary page on rationalwiki it says it's 100% socially constructed.

Then if you look at the transgender page on rationalwiki it says it's 100% biologically determined.

That's apples and apples. The mention of sexual orientation was an aside just to give a broader picture of how they accept or reject biological basis for gender or sexual traits, more or less purely based on a pre-existing worldview.

The gender binary page says that the idea of a gender binary (aka there are two genders and everyone fits in one of those) is a social construct. It doesn't say that the gender identity of a person is a social construct. Again, I'm not saying there are no holes ever, but the contradiction you're pointing here doesn't necessarily exist.

P.S. While looking on their Gender page, I love that they illustrate it with this picture:



Both source links aren't to the picture maker, but to blog post being angry that some white, heterosexual, cis guy dared make a good-looking version of a graphic that had been going around. I mean, they're still going to use his graphic (because looking at the link, the original version looked like crap), but they're also going to be calling for his boycott.

[wierd]

I'm not.

if you look at the gender binary page on rationalwiki it says it's 100% socially constructed.

Then if you look at the transgender page on rationalwiki it says it's 100% biologically determined.

That's apples and apples. The mention of sexual orientation was an aside just to give a broader picture of how they accept or reject biological basis for gender or sexual traits, more or less purely based on a pre-existing worldview.

The gender binary page says that the idea of a gender binary (aka there are two genders and everyone fits in one of those) is a social construct. It doesn't say that the gender identity of a person is a social construct. Again, I'm not saying there are no holes ever, but the contradiction you're pointing here doesn't necessarily exist.

P.S. While looking on their Gender page, I love that they illustrate it with this picture:



Both source links aren't to the picture maker, but to blog post being angry that some white, heterosexual, cis guy dared make a good-looking version of a graphic that had been going around. I mean, they're still going to use his graphic (because looking at the link, the original version looked like crap), but they're also going to be calling for his boycott.

Broken image is broken-- but I looked it up--

I AM OFF THE CHARTS! No metric for being non-sexual/asexual on that spectrum!! LOL!

Also, yes, LOL at the thinly veiled contempt there in his description.  Bonus points if the writer states they are against "othering."

[Sheb]

What? No, that's the bottom right part.

(Oh, and fixed, sorry for the bad link)