Disclaimer: I'm still working on
learning how to embed links in text on blogspot. The typical ways to
do it don't seem to work. If you know a resource for that put it in
the comments. Thanks!
The Special Snowflakes of Tumblr (aka,
the neo-progressives/SJWs) are obsessed with power. How power is
described and understood is involved in every claim they make. As in
other religions, SJWs rely on power as a core belief, much in the
same way that Christians require the death and resurrection of Christ
to act as the lynchpin of the faith; without the Resurrection,
Christianity falls apart just like without the understanding of power
the religion of the Social Justice Warriors falls apart. What
precisely are the power claims of the religion of Tumblr?
How is power seen by the
neo-progressives? First, they believe that power is relational. In
this they reject traditional understandings of power being found
predominately in institutions of the state. Through the process of
socialization we see power traits unjustly institutionalized. This is
the origin of privilege – white privilege, male privilege, bicycle
privilege, straight privilege, fill-in-the-blank privilege to explain
whatever social norm is under attack at the moment. At the moment,
race and gender are considered the 'social constructs' that are
prized. Those who have these traits are somehow given privileged
positions in the social order, meaning that they are given power.
The typical white straight male in the West
What does this power look like? It can
range from otherwise innocuous things like white men and women not
being followed around a store while black men will be, or men being
assumed to be harder workers than women, straight people being more
trustworthy with children than gay men. Some assertions at least have
the appearance of having empirical evidence to support them but
others simply do not, which is where SJWs enter the realm of
religious belief statements. An example of this are the examples of
White Student Unions being allegedly opened on university campuses
despite the mountain of evidence that the Facebook groups started for
universities across the US at the same time were part of a massive
trolling campaign by at-best a handful of men. See the Snopes link
below (again still trying to figure out embedding). I could spend a
book compiling evidence of the power-claims of the SJWs that are pure
fantasy but I won't attempt to present a lot of it here. Perhaps I'll
do that in the future.
This is where we enter the realm of
Political Correctness. To be sure, some level of political
correctness is, well, correct. Use of racial slurs by anybody is
disgusting, as is other language designed to push people to the
margins of society by turning them into an other. My best example of
this is an anecdote: once upon a time, I worked in student government
at a large university in a medium sized US city. I did so for three
years and watched how each year the focus on identity politics came
to dominate both the internal operations of the student government as
well as much of its lobbying efforts both on campus and in the state
capital. One day, in my second year in that environment, some
coworkers of mine described certain things as 'crazy,' or 'cray cray'
and other ways of saying something is stupid. The resident staff
person who served as our Chief of Thought Police sent an email every
week to let us know what words and phrases were now banned from
discourse, including 'crazy,' 'lame,' 'dumb' and others because they
might hurt the feelings of someone.
Myself and several of my coworkers being told that using the word 'lame' was oppressive to the disabled.
Jonathan Chait wrote about this and the
danger it poses recently in the New Yorker. Again, the full link is
below (seriously, if you know how to embed these links let me know,
and yes I'm aware that my quote has a hotlink in it).
“Political correctness is a system
of thought that denies the legitimacy of political pluralism on
issues of race and gender. It manifests itself most prominently in
campus settings not because it’s a passing phase, like acne, but
because the academy is one of the few bastions of American life where
the p.c. Left can muster the strength to impose its political
hegemony upon others. The phenomenon also exists in other nonacademic
left-wing communities, many of them virtual ones centered on social
media, and its defenders include professional
left-wing intellectuals.”
The
claim the neo-progressives make regarding power is simple: the power
systems of universities and employers are not democratic in
themselves so the need to use democratic means to address power
disparities is not only irrelevant but also inappropriate. This view
is expressed in a convincing and terrifying way by Angus Johnson in
probably the most mainstream print media of the Social Justice Left:
Rolling Stone Magazine. Read the article below if you like.
Johnson's thesis is that there is no PC crisis on college campuses
and that use of non-democratic means of ousting professors,
university presidents, and silencing of dissenters is appropriate
because of power structures that favor white straight men.
These
conceptions of power demand that we reject the classic marketplace of
ideas that underscores democracy and pluralism. Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes offered the gold-standard definition of the
marketplace of ideas in a Supreme Court Case that he actually lost,
even though later his definition would become the judicial gold
standard for free speech. Holmes' definition: “The
best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted
in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground
upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate
is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life
is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our
salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While
that experiment is part of our system I think that we should be
eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of
opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless
they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful
and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required
to save the country.”
Pro-Tip: If you read 1984 as a how-to manual you should probably stay out of public service.
We've
seen the use of the 'heckler's veto' (the shouting down of unpopular
speech typically on campuses) used to silence those with 'privileged'
opinions and positions. I saw this first hand a few years ago when,
at my university, the College Republicans attempted to show an
anti-Islam documentary in the Multicultural Resource Center (funny
enough they were scheduled to present there by the administrative
people who oversee student leadership) but were shouted down by the
student Muslim groups and their Social Justice Warrior supporters.
Instead of permitting the video to be viewed and then debated the mob
descended and silenced the opposition on grounds of 'hate speech.'
This is an obvious example of the campus activists attempting to rig
the marketplace or even shut it down entirely by silencing those
deemed to be privileged instead of exposing their ideas to scrutiny.
The
ground for this behavior is complex and will have to wait for a
future post. Suffice it to say at this moment that the grounds are
themselves a rejection of democratic ideals, often excused by
claiming that universities and social media are not democratic
institutions and thus not subject to democratic methods, despite the
student governments of public and private institutions being
appointed in a democratic process and having the potential for real
input in university governance, if the activists use those
opportunities competently. Power is understood in traditionally
Marxist definitions and applied to systems that are said to oppress
people, despite the oppression either not existing or being far
overblown. It is especially funny that universities are the subject
of these claims when SJWs run the overwhelming majority of student
governments and academic SJWs are heavily involved in the setting of
university policies that lead to dissenting opinions on these topics
being silenced by the institution.
Links:
White Student Union Hoaxes:
http://www.snopes.com/2015/11/24/white-student-union-facebook-hoax/
Jonathan Chait,
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/can-we-take-political-correctness-seriously-now.html#
Angus Johnson, Rolling Stone:
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/theres-no-college-p-c-crisis-in-defense-of-student-protesters-20151217
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