Welcome to the Confessional

Welcome to the Confessional

For about 9 years of college, from my time at a community college through about half of my doctorate, I was a Social Justice Warrior. By standards of the SJWs I was pretty conservative but I still believed most of the things SJWs advocated for. When I disagreed I kept my mouth shut....for a while. Eventually my attitudes changed because of the authoritarian tendencies of SJWs that I couldn't ignore, including censorship and even advocacy for thought control. The final act that lead to regaining use of my reason was experiencing a real religious conversion, the topic and fruits of which are the subject of my other blog.

This blog is your guide to how the modern social justice movement has risen to prominence and lead to the corruption of pop culture, politics, economics and even everyday life for people in the West. My intention is post an article at least once each week, covering happenings in the world of social justice and universities (as well as the broader culture) in order to shed a light on what is really happening. I do not claim to have profound expertise but I do have a lot of experience working with these people and I understand how they think. Moreover, I understand the authoritarian tendencies of Social Justice Warriors even when they themselves do not.

Part of my background includes philosophy. Like any philosopher I like to define terms early. To that end, here are some common terms used by SJWs and the anti-SJW community. I'll add to the list as it becomes necessary:

Social Justice can be defined as the promotion of a more fair society by challenging existing unfairness and embracing diversity. Social Justice is said to exist when all people share a common human identity and, on the basis of that identity, all have a right to equitable treatment, support for human rights, and fair access to resources. For Social Justice Warriors, this term is understood very, very broadly, and is rooted in moral relativism. When moral relativism is linked with concepts of a common humanity, fairness and diversity the conditions are created that make challenging all but the most heinous of practices and claims to rights impossible.

Patriarchy is defined as norms, institutional arrangements, customs, beliefs and behaviors that are the product of and reinforce the subjugation of women by men. Commonly cited examples of patriarchy include the low representation of women in the Congress, the Catholic Church's refusal to ordain women, as well as demonstrable myths like the supposed 'wage gap,' 'rape culture,' and (in some cases) institutionalized forms of racism.

Institutional (fill-in-the-blank) is the application of a social ill or evil to a large scale that dominates society. Some forms of institutional injustice can be argued for with evidence, such as claims of institutional racism in the US prison system, while other claims use sketchy data at best. The purpose of claiming a social evil is an institutionalized problem is to first legitimize the problem as being worthy of political action, and second to paint as an other those who oppose doing anything about the problem – that is, to ascribe bigotry to those who disagree.

A glaring definition that I will spend a full blog post on is progressivism. I was recently asked why liberalism and progressivism were different, which I ignored. I'll address that soon, though maybe not in the next post. Suffice it to say for the time being that liberalism rests on individualism, leaving politicians like John F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan having much more in common with one another than their political loyalties might suggest. Progressivism is built on a group identity, with everything resting on collectivism. Again, I'll dive more into that in a future post.