The problem of SJWs

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an easy parallel to imagine is "teaching black people not to steal". is there a statistical link between race and crime? yes. is race itself the cause of the crimes committed? definitely not. will anything good ever come out of teaching people not to do things they already know they're not supposed to do? definitely not. the only effective message will be "we, the educators, believe that you (unlike all the other people who this counseling isn't addressed to) are very likely to be a bad person, and therefore we are here to fix you". and the most likely reaction will be "what the...? screw that! you're not better than me!"

in this particular example, if you want black people not to be associated with crime, you don't associate them with crime. you remedy the things that make them statistically associated with it. you invest in their quality of life. better housing, better education, better infrastructure. but, eh... that sounds so complicated. and expensive, to boot. who wants to do all that, right? certainly not the government (be it "liberal" or "conservative"). and hey, look at that, we can just say every single problem is every single person's fault instead. problem solved! out with all this accountability stuff. specialized social structures and institutions with well-defined roles and responsibilities are for nerds

The classes referenced in the article that kamiyu linked to relate to an infamous story from 2014, when what can only be described as two modern-day puritans, Deanna Puccio and Allison Havey, elected to explain to a room full of 13 year old boys that they were inherently flawed due to their maleness.

It included the line that "a typical male teen hobby today is playing the latest Grand Theft Auto, where the goal is to have sex with a prostitute, then attack and kill her to get your money back". Which, for any GTA aficionados, is a clear indicator that these people are hilariously misinformed.

The boys were told that they were doomed to become misogynistic women-haters and abusers because they were all watching too much hardcore pornography - referring to them as Generation Porn from the outset - and that pornography is effectively the root of all societal problems.

"It's filtering down to different elements of our culture. Adverts, videos, games, films."

From here they go on to describe, in detail, sex attacks on teenage girls from the area the school is located in. There's no mention of whether they overtly stated that such attacks were an inevitable consequence of the boys alleged pornographic consumption habits, but the line between the two is most certainly being drawn.

Bizarrely, Havey also complains that teenagers aren't interested in having sex with each other because of the widespread availability of porn, suggests that this is a negative without actually explaining why.

"Friends of ours that have teenage girls of 17 or so say to me: something has changed in the past fiver years. Teenagers just aren't having sex in the same way. They don't go out on dates as they used to. It is easier to masturbate to online pornography.".

I find it bizarre that she can promote the idea that consumption of porn will cause teenagers to sexually assault one another whilst simultaneously holding the opinion that consumption of porn causes teenagers to be disinterested in sexual contact with others.

So yeah, I absolutely reject the suggestion that this qualifies as "anti-rape counselling".

Gotcha.

The twisted legacy of Susan Brownmiller.

But this doesn't mean no college or High School should ever try to reduce the risk of date rape by teaching young men and women about it.

Just as "I found an example of shockingly bad driving" doesn't seem like a good argument for banning driving, "there was a bad rape prevention class" doesn't seem like a good argument against the whole idea of such classes.

Telling young men that their gender is a defect is revolting. Lying about the nature of GTA is stupid. Lying about the effects of Porn is only to be expected, given the cultural context.

if you want to take direct educational measures to prevent transgressions, then the way to do it is by 1) explaining how to prevent it and report it and defend against it yourself in case it comes to it, and 2) simultaneously explaining what kinds of punishment actual perpetrators will face (combined with the visible implementation of a system where that's actually enforceable)

that way, the potential perpetrator will think twice before doing what they already know they're not supposed to (instead of thinking a hundred times of that exact thing that they already know they're not supposed to do, and probably questioning the moral reasoning behind it while at it), while the potential victim knows that they're not burdened with all the effective responsibility for the enforcement. and then people can just go on about their day instead of being paranoid or fixated on those things

Last edited by anagram on 05 Oct 2016, 4:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I do think special consideration should be given to the goal of greater diversity. If you already have a department full of men, why not?


I don't think white athletes are underrepresented in general.

Why?

already explained in detail

Since when is social justice a bad thing?


If you want to be less deliberately provocative about it, you could say the premise is that our society needs to overcome inherent racism in many areas. If you are white you don't experience the same degree of racism that blacks do.

The onus is on the individual policy maker to take measures to avoid both themselves and the people they're responsible for becoming victims of war. Let's not argue semantics at the cost of the point being made.



Insurance is about mitigating financial risk. In other words, it's reactive rather than proactive. You don't take out an insurance policy to prevent fires from happening, you take it out to reimburse in the event a fire occurs. Nor can this be excused on the basis of statistical patterns. That would be akin to putting 17 year old kids through the twelve steps because of a recent spike in the number of drunk drivers in their mid 20's.

My chief concern lies in protecting the rights and welfare of minors. Addressing children as "Generation Porn" and informing them that they're fundamentally flawed by nature of their sex (or indeed their skin colour) is, in my opinion, deeply inappropriate.



Indeed.



That's another matter entirely. My preference is for fact-based education, not ideology-based education.



Which wasn't an argument I made. I was directly objecting to the either deliberate or ignorant mislabelling of the events referenced in the article as "anti-rape counseling" by AspE. Of course, there's every chance we'd disagree on what constitutes a "good" rape prevention class, but that's by-the-by.



I couldn't agree more. Part of what separates a "Liberal" from a "SJW" is being capable of understanding that rather than twisting the narrative out of shape and sinking to literally any depth in order to justify doing precisely that which you've described as "revolting". Rather like the difference between "Conservative" and "<insert extremist slur>".

social fairness and social welfare are actually a great thing. but despite being an apparent synonym of those things, the very concept of social justice as it is already carries a connotation of revenge. it becomes more about making someone else suffer than about improving someone's own situation

Oh there we go. Well I guess women aren't underrepresented in the overall workplace, so who cares about STEM.

As for your question, it shouldn't be why not, it should be why. Because if I ever got turned down for something, lost out on something to an inferior person just because they didn't have a dick between their legs, or their skin was different to mine, or they were LGBTQ, I would raise more hell than I ever have in my life.

If you have an entirely male workforce because every man there was superior to every other man or woman who applied for that role, then that is exactly as it should be. And the same for if it was all anything else.

Could you look someone in the eye, and tell them that the only reason they weren't getting something was because of something entirely beyond their control?

Why? To what end? How is token diversity beneficial?



They are, especially financially, but I don't see a problem with that. The NBA and NFL (like all sports) operate as a meritocracy. The best players rise to the top, regardless of demographics. If that means a disproportionately high or low number of black sportsmen in the NBA, why would it matter?



The phrase I used was "social justice dogma". It's right there, in the post you quoted. I'm finding it hard not to assume bad faith considering how swiftly you turned it into a strawman.

Or is it your desire to redirect the conversation towards the concept of social justice itself? If so, my question is simple enough.

What, to you, is social justice?



What inherent racism? Point it out - by which I mean genuine cases of actual racism that require attention. Which aspects of society are inherently racist?



You have literally no idea how much racism someone has experienced by nature of the colour of their skin. The suggestion that you can make such distinctions, purely on the grounds of skin tone, is inescapably racist.



And it invariably results in worse outcomes for the party supposedly being advocated for (usually the poor).



This is apparently precisely what just happened to BBC presenter, Jon Holmes.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/ ... how-sacked

Last edited by adifferentname on 05 Oct 2016, 5:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

that's actually not a good argument at all. most everybody is better or worse at something than most everybody else because of something entirely beyond their control. it's the nature of things, and being taught that you can actually have control over any and all significant things in your life "if you apply yourself enough" is actually a serious issue. because then if you do apply yourself and things don't work out for you the way you expected, "it can only be someone else's fault" (while on the other hand others will be blaming and judging you for not applying yourself). in a competitive society, someone will always lose. always. for as long as that society is competitive (which, once it is competitive, is likely to be "forever". or, more precisely, until it collapses)

I don't really know what to do with this post. I think I need you to elaborate on what you're talking about.

there's a lot of pressure in "society" ("capitalist" society? "western" society? "american" society? "21st-century american" society? i don't know) for people to be the makers of their own destiny. there's a reason why "loser" is such a big term of abuse (though not [yet] in my language), and why people get so hung-up over it. it's because life is seen as a competition. and when life is a competition and you're taught either that your success is entirely up to you (which is utterly false) or that it's not up to you at all (also utterly false, obviously), then that's a big problem

and apparently large sections of "society" (again, i don't know for sure the scope of what "society" means here) are taught one extreme while other sections are taught the opposite extreme. and then they fight over it, while someone else profits from it. "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. fight over race and whatnot. or immigration. gender. whatever. doesn't matter. as long as you do not pay attention to the man behind the curtain. or woman, for that matter"

If you already enjoy some privilege and are at risk of loosing it, then you might not want things to be fair. I understand that, it's what founded the KKK.