The problem of SJWs

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Your trying to argue against things that have never been said or even implied. I'm not sure why you're being so antagonistic here. You are also being rather rude and condescending. If you want a healthy conversation I suggest you change your approach.

Give an example.



Again, give an example. There was no part of my responses to you that was even remotely hostile. You're either misreading between the lines or misunderstanding the lines themselves.



Likewise, if you feel condescended towards, that's entirely on you.



If it's healthy conversation you seek, you'll address my points rather than constructing a false narrative based purely on your own inferences and objecting to the resultant "straw-tone".

I would be with you if SJW just referred to extremist hippies, especially the hypocritical ones, which I've been hating since I was old enough to know what they were (normal hippies are fine in my book). I'd be willing to discuss opinions and policies, but the term SJW is used to avoid that. It's used broadly to refer to anything liberal, so f**k it, the time is long gone when I would take anyone like that seriously.


Weaponized means activist. Nothing was ever changed without activists making people uncomfortable. But then again, every liberal activist is now an SJW.

Everyone who enjoys saying SJW is an as*hole that deserves to be ignored.

in my country, i am "white" and relatively "privileged", but i have actually been "victim" of some bizarre "microaggression" situations myself

the owner of the house himself didn't seem to understand that the only reason why i was in italy was because the local italian consulate here is useless and i wanted to get my status sorted out for once. no matter how many times i explained it, he kept assuming that the same situations that applied to refugees also applied to me. he's a guilt-ridden person, and "the brains" is a spoiled kid, but i have little doubt that they're both well-meaning. he was very generous and helpful (even if often misguided), and she really didn't seem to have anything against me

italians are typically xenophobic (except with people from "english-speaking first-world countries"), and it's pretty obvious. they make no effort to hide it. most are monolingual, and they seem to have difficulty understanding that if you still struggle with their language, it doesn't mean that you're dumb or lazy or disrespectful. it seems to me that, when in doubt in any situation, their default stance is condescension. but there's no point in taking it personally. they're usually xenophobic against italians from other regions too (for instance, the girl was sicilian, while the guy was tuscan, and i noticed that he ended up blaming her for misunderstandings in the house more often than was warranted). basically, what i noticed is that "tuscans hate immigrants, begrudgingly tolerate other italians, and love tourists"

but, well... it's their country. if you want to be italian, then you have to act like an italian, or show that you want to and just don't know how to yet, or else they take offense. it's very annoying, and not all cultures are like that, but i don't think it's unfair. they have an image of themselves as superior ("the birthplace of western civilization"), but they're insecure about it (because it's just history). so all you need to do is show that you're interested in their culture. i quickly learned that, whenever they're condescending, the best thing to do is respond with flattery. it instantly neutralizes the tension. and if i'm the foreign element there, then i think it's up to me to learn and practice how to neutralize that tension

i'm roughly 50% italian, 50% portuguese. from my appearance, everybody in italy assumed i was italian. when i was in finland, everybody i talked to was very friendly (there was even an instance when a random old lady started talking to me as if i spoke finnish. finns rarely talk to strangers at all, and i seriously doubt finns today are particularly friendly in general towards immigrants. they're serious about maintaining their culture, which has already survived centuries of swedish rule. and lately there has been an influx of practically "unintegratable" immigrants). my peruvian friend who lives in belgium definitely has faced xenophobia (she's a highly-qualified engineer and a very driven person, but was still accused of being lazy by insecure coworkers). her (flemish) husband says, matter-of-factly, "yeah, people here are like that. they're just grumpy. we're very localist. and anyone would assume you're european, but she's obviously not". chances are that they're just as grumpy and dismissive with french-belgians (who were historically oppressive against the flemish)

but then, when i was in canada... my then-girlfriend's mom (an upper-middle-class middle-aged woman, apparently a "white-guilt-ridden" type) asked me if i felt discriminated in europe, "because i could be mistaken for an arab". to me that was the most bizarre question in the world. it seemed out of the blue, and she seemed to expect that my answer would be yes. because of her excessive concern with race and discrimination, she saw a potential issue where there was none, and she didn't see how just raising the very question was odd. sometimes she seemed to believe she had the obligation to have some sort of compassion for me. rich people struggling to convince themselves that they're not rich, and that they're not evil for being richmiddle-class, with no intention to do anything about their materialistic values and lifestyle. i used to hate my family, but that experience made me thankful that my upbringing wasn't that twisted. apparently there have been 3 successful suicides in that block alone in the last ten years. and my ex herself is/was another chronically suicidal person. she was extremely conflicted about that environment she came from and the values attached to it

----

here are some of my thoughts on this kind of stuff, from an earlier thread:


thing is, everybody is racist and/or xenophobic and/or classist and/or sexist etc etc to some extent. there is absolutely no point in trying to exterminate those things altogether. it is never going to happen. it's part of our fundamental social instincts. when even tiny individual instances are politicized, it's effectively an invalidation of human nature. the result is inevitably the spread of generalized defensiveness and distrust, which causes (guess what? ) racism, xenophobia, etc etc

italians are obsessed with nationality. they will probably treat you differently if they perceive you as having a different nationality or regional cultural identity. americans are obsessed with race (to the point that it often doesn't seem to cross their mind that broad demographic groupings like "latino" and "asian" and "black" aren't universally-valid "races" and generally don't apply outside of the u.s.). they will probably treat you differently if they perceive you as a different race. people in my country are obsessed with social class. they will probably treat you differently if they perceive you as belonging to a different social class (i'm definitely not immune to it. it's embedded in my brain. and it will always be)

it can't be changed through indoctrination, only through upbringing. it takes generations for those things to change, and there's no way around it. if you advocate defensiveness as a good and righteous thing, all you do is exacerbate the problem. and the problem with self-righteous people is that they refuse to acknowledge that they have that fundamental human flaw. they believe that they're automatically defective if they're not perfect. they were raised to believe that if their feelings and instincts contradict their morals, then something is terribly wrong with them. they're constantly repressing themselves. "you should not have had that thought you just had". they feel it's unfair other people aren't doing the same

from wikipedia:

"we should raise more awareness of racial and gender issues". no, we should not. there's too much of it already. people won't change their minds because of someone aggressively telling them what they should think, they'll just become defensive about preconceived notions that they already had but weren't aware of until then. when every tiny everyday situation becomes politicized, life gets tense and taxing, and then people look for someone to blame for that stress. and they'll blame either someone or some group that they already didn't like, or whoever is pestering them to care about someone else's causes. and now this "social justice" stuff is being taught even in maths programs in my country, and it's mandatory. that is scary. and it's definitely imported from the u.s.

not even five years ago, you could ask anybody around here about politics and they would say "left, right, doesn't matter, they're all just glorified thieves". now everybody is talking about left and right as if those parties actually have some ideology, and even using words like "liberal" and "conservative", which until recently barely even existed here. when the president was impeached a few weeks ago, she said, "this is a coup d'état and it's an assault on democracy and equality. it's racist, homophobic, classist and sexist". the "coup" rhetoric was no surprise (and, granted, there's no doubt that she was judged for "political crimes", regardless if she did or did not commit any actual crimes), but those other remarks were completely out of context and out of the blue

she's white, straight, was never poor, and had already been reelected. nobody cared until now (and probably still doesn't care) that she's a woman. and all she did "for the poor" was ruin the economy with irresponsible and self-serving populist policies that caused massive unemployment, while billions of dollars were continuously funneled in huge graft schemes that she couldn't have been unaware of. but millions of people are buying into her party's rhetoric. "they're victims of the elite, and the elite is afraid of policies that favor the poor"

when i say i believe political correctness will be one of the pillars of the next wave of authoritarian governments, i'm not talking hypotheticals. i'm watching it unfold already. so far, in my country, i still think it's reversible, and there's no way to predict what's going to happen. people are getting angry and overpoliticized, but i don't see anyone panicking. but the risk is real. and if it doesn't happen this time, it can still happen later. in this atmosphere, all it takes for things to go downhill is astute opportunistic leadership

Last edited by anagram on 22 Sep 2016, 4:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Can we all try to avoid use of terms like "cretin"? Thanks.

Hippies are a dying breed and, as a counter-culture, don't seem to have achieved much beyond altering some perceptions. Though that's not to be sniffed at. SJWs aren't a counter-culture, however. They're the obnoxious, (self-styled) progressive cry-bullies that terrorise anyone they deem to represent evil - which is everyone who is not a SJW or whom is the wrong brand of SJW - all in the name of self-promotion and external validation rather than for the purpose of enacting positive change.



I'm not interested in how you perceive the term to be used by anyone who is not here to account for themselves. The pejorative has a widespread and common definition. Unless you're accusing me of using the phrase to avoid discussion of opinions (which is ridiculous, as I'm quite sure you're aware of my willingness to engage and challenge any views I disagree with) the above argument has no merit here.



The word liberal is broadly used to refer to anything naive or even socialist by some who fly a conservative flag. That doesn't prevent me from calling myself liberal. The same standard applies to those who do so as applies to someone misusing the word microaggression in order to silence someone else based solely on their race, gender or sexuality. I'm not posting here to represent anyone but myself, and I make the assumption that the same is true of everyone else.



Weaponised means weaponised. Had I intended to use the word "activist" (which contextually would make little sense) I would have done so.



On what basis?

Within the circles in which I swim, the term is typically preceded or followed by a deep sigh of discontent. That said, should someone derive pleasure simply from uttering "SJW", what does that tell you beyond the fact they have a weird fetish?



I'm actually quite partial to "cretin". It's phonologically complex for such a short word, and more satisfying to say than many of the more colourful insults.

I still don't follow your reasoning. And I don't understand your statement below. Please explain.

He thinks you shouldn't make assumptions about the intent of other people, and that he accurately summarized your positions in his other posts.

Can we just stipulate for the sake of argument that SJW is roughly translated as "overzealous leftwing activist", so we can stop derailing every thread in which the term appears? Ironically, that's the exact sort of thing SJWs like to complain about when it's being done to their conversations...

Unfortunately that does not shed any light on his reasoning, as I didn't make assumptions in this thread about the intent of others, and he did not actually accurately summarize my positions.

Then further discourse between us is unlikely to be profitable for at least one of us.

Zeal isn't a bad thing by itself though. It's the sociopath-style, Machiavellian behaviour that these people engage in that's the problem.

No.
SJWs don't really care about the subject. Overzealous leftwing activists do care.

Aye, the problem is zealotry rather than zeal.

I apologize for being white, for being Christian, for being straight, for being male, and for not having left-wing political views.

Apparently, this is what people want from me.

That's a good start. Now, admit that everything you own you actually stole from the Oppressed People of the World.