Racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice aren't cool, we all know this. What I want to discuss is when campaigning against them becomes prejudice itself and whether we have reached a point where social justice has become a joke.
Black power/white power
black lives matter/all lives matter
hollywood white washing
feminisism/feminazis
Just a few of the things that have been all over social media in the last few months and in many ways I think it's gone too far, the question is why do I feel that way? I'm not particularly sexist or racist. I see people as people as people for the most part. The thing is I read the articles and I read the comments on them and… GAH!
Anyway I'm beginning to think it's time to stop making a big deal of these things and let the dust settle. Society has come along leaps and bounds in my lifetime alone and much of the prejudice I see is what is well ingrained in people. Like casual racism which I think will die down in time, if we just let things settle. I fear the current trend will just cause more backlash and regardless of whether it is right or wrong it will still cause more division.
Anyway, so much can be said on this so… over to you.
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
isms and the need to campaign against them.
I just spent a couple of days with my brother who thinks of himself as a fair guy. He's a very hardworking, college-educated white guy. He figures if you work hard then you can get what you want, entirely dismissing the "college", "white", and "guy" parts.
We've discussed this for decades and neither of us has come close to swaying the other.
So, imo, posting rants on social media about isms might be helpful for venting purposes, and the rare, eloquently written post could sway some readers (I find strangers' opinions have more pull with my relatives than do the opinions of family members no matter how well documented), but in general I find it to be that much more noise.
Talk is cheap, whether spoken or written.
People are self-centered and narrow-minded on the internet. If they see a campaign to help one group that they aren't members of, then it's clearly a personal attack against them. And if you see someone taking up for a cause, well, that means they can't care about the cause that *you* care about more. People can care about only one thing at a time.
Clearly, there is a limit to rights, you can't hand them out all willy nilly. To give someone rights, obviously, you remove rights from someone else. (I'm being facetious, here. Saying so because you can't tell on the internet.)
Basically, social-media is just a *me me me* storm.
Just when I feel racism and sexism is getting better, it gets a whole lot worse again. :(
It's just something you have to keep an eye on- outside of SWJs and the crazy self styled anti PC brigade of fucktards like Clint Eastwood. Just not being a dick to people is the main guide.
One wierd way of being a dick though is "Kafkatrapping"- that's where you accuse someone of something and there's no way for them to defend themselves, they're guilty no matter what and the only thing they can do is apologise, admit guilt, and take the finish you set for them.
You see this happen WITHIN groups that are set up specifically as safe spaces for people who all support the same thing. Members of the group will use it in a mean and pathetic passive aggressive way to try and gain dominance over other members.
It's the Hollier Than Thou game basically.
I was in a group called The Liberal Free Thinkers and that happened so much that I quit for good. The more pathetic members of these groups get frustrated that they can't get their ideas heard in the normal community so instead they turn on members of their fellow supporters and try and gain dominance within the group by putting others down for thought crimes "I'm more feminist than you" "I'm more communist than you" etc.
I saw a beautiful example of this in a communist group the other day. The mod posted a humourous meme that poked fun at the stereotypes that communist supporters fall into as a way of being self deprecating, and got absolutely hammered by group members who took it seriously and claimed to be offended in a million different ways, all of them were Kafkatrapping the mod, proclaiming him guilty of doing a thing that offended them and demanding apologies, retractions, that he leave the group… and just the act of defending himself meant he was MORE guilty of the crimes he was accused of.
Just when I feel racism and sexism is getting better, it gets a whole lot worse again. :(
The question is why is it getting worse again? is it backlash to SJWs? is it because the people that are so minded have had enough of having political correctness rammed down their throats?
People like clint eastwood will be dead in the next decade (give or take) and many of the older generation who are more inherently sexist/racist will be gone before long, so what happens then? DO we (as a species) need to be constantly told not to be racist and sexist? Or maybe the changes in society will continue to see reductions in sexism and racism.
"political correctness" isn't a thing (outside of strange council ordinances in the UK), it's something people complain about because they feel constrained that they can't be as racist or sexist as they'd like to be :/
Racism and sexism get worse because things are getting better otherwise and it makes racist and sexist people feel threatened.
Like having Obama as president of the US met with an upsurge of a lot of anti black slurs.
ozoneocean wrote:
"political correctness" isn't a thing (outside of strange council ordinances in the UK. …
Like having Obama as president of the US met with an upsurge of a lot of anti black slurs.
PC has actually become enshrined in the regulations regarding the federal funding of education in the US. It is quite real and quite ridiculous at times.
Any criticism of the President is taken as racist and the Obamas ceaselessly beat the drums of racism. So Americans are becoming more aware of it. With a black family in the White House any remarks about race have become that much more noticed. They've always been there, they never went away. DWB is real. White privilege is real. There is no more seperate but equal but casual attitudes about various groups is still there. It's a day to day struggle to free oneself totally of such a mindset in a truly diverse environment. It's too easy to label it an -ism and rant and rave about it in social media, it's another to live within it everyday.
I disagree Bravo
I could Kafkatrap you right now ^_^
To whit:
You only think that because of your own residual racist attitudes. You feel threatened and constrained so you subscribe to the conspiracy theory of the PC mafia in order to externalise and explain away your insecurities and reaction to this changing world.
…Well, that's more complex than Kafkatrapping actually and probably helps to explain what's really happening-not because you're actively racist, it's more the unconscious, inbuilt attitudes you grew up with:
That is what PC is: Not a real boogyman, rather it's the fears of people who are scared of the idea… Like the way some people see "Satan" in all the things they disagree with- abortion, homosexuality, different religions, sexual pop-culture…
The regulations about federal funding of education being based on a certain "correct" view of diversity don't exist. The obtuse closed minded atmosphere on American College campuses doesn't exist. The biazzare speech codes that reek of Orwell newspeak are pure imagination.
It is not a boogeyman it is a phenomenon that has come to be called political correctness. It is real. In certain corners it is exaggerated out of all proportion but then there are always people who grab onto an hyperbole and make it their reality. It started well enough and became blown out of all proportion. And then along came folks who made that conflated boogeyman their reality. They made the exaggeration real and forced others into its straitjacket in the name of diversity. And a total lack of a sense of humor.
Just like seeing Satan in all things became the satanism scare of the 1980s and the myth of repressed memories led to the destruction of careers and families this boogeyman has created a reality that we all find ourselves in. It may not be real, but it has colored the perception of reality in a way that must be fought as if it was real.
Bravo- it's interpretation by the viewer.
Others don't see that as PC, they see it as normal practice in today's world, keeping up with the times, facilitating things for all people involved.
Some see accommodating women, black people, muslims etc as offensive and call it PC as a way of categorising it and demonising it.
The world has changed, it's just not all white Christian dudes at the top anymore, and this is how institutions and lauange adapt.
When we call it PC and get mad about it we're just putting ourselves on the wrong side of history.
You've never been a victim of it so of course it doesn't exist for you. Just the same that as a white male "driving while black" and the glass ceiling doesn'texist for me.
Denial is more than just a river in Africa.
I'll go back to trying to make the two sides see their common ground and Co exist in the here and now as opposed to insisting on a paradigm shift overnight.
I think you're seeing two phenomena at work, Genejoke:
First, is just typical mob dynamics being exacerbated by social media. The glib, superficial sense of community fostered by social media has turned us collectively into a mob culture, and mobs tend to be incapable of any kind of measured response. Any slight deviation is a grievous affront, and nothing short of the maximum punishment is sufficient. A teacher may have said something that could possibly be construed as tangentially insensitive to a minority group? Fire her! Immediately! And the only reason the mob demands her job is because they can't demand her head (as they have in the past. See: French Revolution… and yes, I know the French have had several but you know what I mean).
The other problem is that activist groups don't know how to die. The NAACP was a useful organization once, that did very important work. Today, they're sort of a joke that tries to grab headlines whenever they think they can find a racial angle on some otherwise unremarkable event. They no longer serve any useful purpose, and probably do more harm than good by engendering racial strife. The problem is that, once the organization no longer has a meaningful mission, its leaders aren't just going to surrender all the power and influence they've obtained and go back to being nobodies. They'll continue to find somebody, ANYBODY to sic their mob on. And so the witch hunt continues, and continues, and continues.
Even when the organization's activities are clearly destructive to the communities they're supposedly trying to help, they don't relent. That would probably be confusing if you believed that any of these groups actually care about their stated mission. They don't. All the leadership cares about is maintaining their position. The Black Lives Matter people don't care if more black men are being killed in the streets now because the police have to cut back patrols. They don't give a shit about black lives, or any lives other than maybe their own. As long as they can keep holding their rallies, and the donation dollars keep rolling in, they're happy. It's like a virus, whose only purpose is to continue existing and propagate.
Well said, El cid. The mob mentality comparison is spot on, and the description of activist groups and their refusal to die is close to what I was trying to get at. I guess it's like hammering a nail in, few people stop when the nail is hammered in enough, they always have to hit it a few more times just to be sure and risk damaging what they were fixing/making.
But who is the one to say when the fight is done? Look at the career of W,E,B. DeBuis for example and compare it to Martin Luther King Jr.
Ten years ago gay rights was all about civil unions and gay marriage was a foolish chimera that could endanger the whole movement. Today? You don't accept the most radical position as gospel and you're shouted down. There are no rules except don't dare offend the person with thinnest.skin. A reference to a black hole as a pit where money from a government budget disappear is suddenly a racist comment. Guidelines are proposed that someone can use the restroom of the gender they feel they identify as with no other criteria.
And don't suggest putting on the brakes to figure out where we are before going any further.
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