> I think the present-day social justice movement does a pretty good job at pointing out problems that need fixing.
I agree here! Too much stuff is heinously broken, and breaking harder. And the very loud people who are usually against social justice are often very easy to be very angry about.
I'm compiling a list here of the Standard Twitter Social Justice people re their Lambdaconf sayings, and it really reads like a talking list of "let's start making certain kind of thought criminal". That's all well and good and so forth when you have Obviously Bad people. But once you've set that cat of thoughtcrime out..., when there's PRECEDENT for thoughtcrime, now it's subject to ABUSE, and bad actors, and... well.... the Soviets tried that?
Certain of our beliefs would have gotten us in SERIOUS trouble for advocating them 300 years ago. Social pariahs, outcasts, no job, maybe criminal charges ( for me: criminal charges in most of Europe, as someone in the radical reformation faith tradition ). But today: these are NORMAL. Or OKAY. What kind of thing could we shutting down TODAY that will be JUST AS VALUABLE in 300 years?
and I'm super super upset about this, because, well, this isn't a better world that I see folks arguing toward. It's a worse world, where "oppression olympics" starts to have significant consequences outside of the local activist group.
Parenthetical aside:
when I was a teenager, I loved being a username on the internet, talking with other usernames. our identity was our nerdiness. sex, gender, what you did to who when where and how really wasn't actually interesting to me, if it didn't involve a computer or my fandoms. or if you weren't being hurt and needed someone to talk to. kind of limited, I admit. I had caught a meme-virus I guess, a virus that got reflected in the "Cyberia" book by Rushkoff... totes worth reading btw... identity was mutable, was shiftable, was mediated by the computer which you controlled. You had arguments, but they weren't the deep level of ugly we see on twitter. (BTW: Gamergate? I think there were some decent thoughts from the 'Gators - I think I saw one or two glimpses, but it was buried so deep under the foaming rage and vileness... so ugly. )
I don't know. But I'm scared for the intellectual functioning of *my* society, the hacker one. It's possible a lot of the energy is coming out of teenagers, but a lot of the significant voices are people very much in the professional segment of their lives: the late 20s to 40s set. Most? of them seem to be, broadly, in agreement with the hard(er) left, from what I can recall over time. Which is also concerning, because I wish the hard left would move on from Soviet-era solutions (The group of students at WWU recently suggested, in effect, having a Kommissar watching speech). The anarchists are still mining Bakunin for ideas, for crying out loud (I was looking up anarchist child raising ideas). He's dead, Jim! Didn't the 70s produce any thinkers that are usable today? Ahem. Back to the professionals. It's pretty clear to me that the Twitter hate mob has pretty much driven the people who are opposed to doing bad things in the name of Social Justice underground on the Twitters. AFAIK, only this particular group of autistic lesbian types seems to be both intelligent and vocal about what's going on (I'm *sure* there are jackass sealions involved. So many jackasses).
Of *course*, with the Trumpism thing going on, the natural reaction of humans is to cringe and move away from anything that smells Trumpy... so it pushes a lot of energy towards the leftierish solutions in general. If the current solution is "ban badthought", then.... uhh... we gonna have a bad time in 5 years.
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Date: 2016-03-29 04:36 am (UTC)I agree here! Too much stuff is heinously broken, and breaking harder. And the very loud people who are usually against social justice are often very easy to be very angry about.
I'm compiling a list here of the Standard Twitter Social Justice people re their Lambdaconf sayings, and it really reads like a talking list of "let's start making certain kind of thought criminal". That's all well and good and so forth when you have Obviously Bad people. But once you've set that cat of thoughtcrime out..., when there's PRECEDENT for thoughtcrime, now it's subject to ABUSE, and bad actors, and... well.... the Soviets tried that?
Certain of our beliefs would have gotten us in SERIOUS trouble for advocating them 300 years ago. Social pariahs, outcasts, no job, maybe criminal charges ( for me: criminal charges in most of Europe, as someone in the radical reformation faith tradition ). But today: these are NORMAL. Or OKAY. What kind of thing could we shutting down TODAY that will be JUST AS VALUABLE in 300 years?
and I'm super super upset about this, because, well, this isn't a better world that I see folks arguing toward. It's a worse world, where "oppression olympics" starts to have significant consequences outside of the local activist group.
Parenthetical aside:
when I was a teenager, I loved being a username on the internet, talking with other usernames. our identity was our nerdiness. sex, gender, what you did to who when where and how really wasn't actually interesting to me, if it didn't involve a computer or my fandoms. or if you weren't being hurt and needed someone to talk to. kind of limited, I admit. I had caught a meme-virus I guess, a virus that got reflected in the "Cyberia" book by Rushkoff... totes worth reading btw... identity was mutable, was shiftable, was mediated by the computer which you controlled. You had arguments, but they weren't the deep level of ugly we see on twitter. (BTW: Gamergate? I think there were some decent thoughts from the 'Gators - I think I saw one or two glimpses, but it was buried so deep under the foaming rage and vileness... so ugly. )
I don't know. But I'm scared for the intellectual functioning of *my* society, the hacker one. It's possible a lot of the energy is coming out of teenagers, but a lot of the significant voices are people very much in the professional segment of their lives: the late 20s to 40s set. Most? of them seem to be, broadly, in agreement with the hard(er) left, from what I can recall over time. Which is also concerning, because I wish the hard left would move on from Soviet-era solutions (The group of students at WWU recently suggested, in effect, having a Kommissar watching speech). The anarchists are still mining Bakunin for ideas, for crying out loud (I was looking up anarchist child raising ideas). He's dead, Jim! Didn't the 70s produce any thinkers that are usable today? Ahem. Back to the professionals. It's pretty clear to me that the Twitter hate mob has pretty much driven the people who are opposed to doing bad things in the name of Social Justice underground on the Twitters. AFAIK, only this particular group of autistic lesbian types seems to be both intelligent and vocal about what's going on (I'm *sure* there are jackass sealions involved. So many jackasses).
Of *course*, with the Trumpism thing going on, the natural reaction of humans is to cringe and move away from anything that smells Trumpy... so it pushes a lot of energy towards the leftierish solutions in general. If the current solution is "ban badthought", then.... uhh... we gonna have a bad time in 5 years.